The Con Artist by Kitty Thomas

Author:Kitty Thomas [Thomas, Kitty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Burlesque Press
Published: 2016-01-16T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Saskia’s hand was cramping by the time they’d finished painting for the day. She lay back on the chaise while Quill straightened the space. It didn’t matter how much they’d worked; he wasn’t willing to let the studio turn into her own personal hurricane.

“Stay here,” he said when all the tubes of paint were closed and put away and the brushes had been cleaned.

She was only too happy to comply. They’d taken a brief break for lunch and another for dinner, but both had been hurried. No words had passed between them in the dining room as they’d eaten. There had been no time for anything fancy for lunch. Just sandwiches. One of the servants had somehow gotten him to sit still long enough for roasted chicken when dinnertime came but only because it was done and ready to put on the table when he reached the dining room.

There was an intensity about Quill while he was in this art zone. Saskia had never seen anything like it. Once they’d started sketching and painting, sex wasn’t a thing that existed for him.

There was no innuendo, no inappropriate touches. It was as if everything that had happened before in the gallery had been a mere mirage. She was sure if she asked him about it, he’d tell her she was crazy, that it had never happened.

How could he flip a switch and compartmentalize all of that? As much as he liked his kink, art came first. If she wanted to be jealous of something, it should be the art. The art was his first love, and Saskia would never unseat her.

When Saskia stood behind a canvas with a brush in hand, she was just his student. All he cared about were the colors, the brush strokes, and bleeding her soul out with carefully mixed pigments for the consumption of the masses. Or that was the hope, anyway—that the masses would consume.

Nothing could sway his focus from trying to teach her to somehow translate all the things pent up inside her onto canvas.

She’d had no idea what she would paint until she started. Saskia closed her eyes, remembering what Quill had said in the studio.

“You don’t decide what to paint. The subject picks you. What’s inside you? What are you consumed with?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know. Put it on the canvas.”

She hesitated.

“I need to sketch it first.”

“I don’t care what you need to do. Do it. Stop holding back. You have so much promise. It’s all there in your portfolio, you have to stop painting what you think the world wants to see and start painting what you actually have to say. No one in this world gives a shit about your hollow fakery. Least of all, me.”

She’d been so intimidated by his technique. She knew even beginning painters could learn to paint wet-on-wet, and she could do it if someone held her hand step-by-step and gave her something specific to paint and walked her through it. But she just couldn’t see a painting that way.

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