Forbidden Stranger (The Protector) by Megan Hart

Author:Megan Hart [Hart, Megan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2018-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Nina had woken early again, although if she’d suffered nightmares they’d faded on their own before she opened her eyes. The house was not dark but still quiet, everyone else sleeping, when she got up and dressed. She wasn’t thinking much about it, but she went to the attic and the easel with its brushes and paints. Turned half toward the window, so the light of dawn filtered over the blank canvas, Nina set everything up and stood, waiting for . . .

Inspiration?

She took a brush and held it at arm’s length, squinting down the brush end. Like she knew what in the universe she was doing. She chuckled at herself, shaking her head, then decided to simply start.

“Here we go,” she muttered.

The first few strokes of paint on the canvas felt wrong. The brush, unwieldy in her hesitant hand. The paint, too thick in globs, no delicate way to lay its path in anything resembling a picture. That was the problem, wasn’t it? She didn’t know what she wanted to paint in the first place. Nina didn’t know anything about art or painting techniques, or if she ever had, no muscle memory was kicking in to show her what to do. She could call to mind a few famous artists from history, but nothing about Dali’s surreal landscapes or Warhol’s cultural pieces seemed right to her. Fenwick had done some amazing work with watercolors, but Nina had only these tubes of paint and couldn’t begin to compare to that modern artist’s skills anyway.

The sun had risen higher, sending more pearly light into the window. From here she could see the ocean and a hint of the cliffs. Since Ewan had helped her face her fears about the stone staircase, Nina had been thinking about the cliffs a lot. She still hadn’t dared approach them.

But she could paint them.

Looking out the window, she tried to recreate what she saw. Her clumsy hands steadied. A picture took shape of slanted ceilings, a view through a window. Except it wasn’t the sea or cliffs that slowly took shape on the canvas, it was a forest of dark green trees and mountains in the distance.

She worked on it for a few hours before her rumbling stomach alerted her to the passing of time. Stepping back from the canvas, Nina laughed again at herself. A creak on the staircase behind her made her sigh and shake her head. Ewan, she thought. Well, she wasn’t going to be too embarrassed about the painting.

“I never claimed to be an artist,” she said before he made a sound.

He paused at the top of the stairs with his hand on the half wall before moving all the way into the office. “And yet you almost finished an entire painting. How did it make you feel?”

“Better,” she admitted with a rueful grin. “I wouldn’t have believed it, but I guess you were right. Thank you.”

“May I?” Ewan gestured toward the canvas.

Nina stepped aside so he could look at it.

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