Page 42 of New Orleans Rush

“On the sweeter side. I have a thing for lemon drops. But it’s a bit early to break into the booze.”

He chuckled. “Your painting, I mean. You painted the lip of a glass.”

She stood beside him, both observing her work. “I also like Long Island Iced Tea and margaritas, but I didn’t paint those. And lemonade. The virgin kind. And some sodas.”

“Lemon drops. Virgin lemonade. Sodas. No ketchup.” He nodded while cataloguing her preferences. Her wood planks rested on his far wall. He walked toward them, paused, then walked farther back. “It changes completely, depending on the distance. The details get lost from afar, leaving just your profile. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“It’s not totally original,” she said, suddenly fidgety as he analyzed her work. “The technique’s been done before in lots of ways. It’s just my take on it—more personal, I guess.”

“And intricate. It must take ages to finish a piece. How do you put a price tag on it?”

She studied the squares, more of them empty than filled, and imagined the hours it would take to complete. More like weeks or months. She’d never considered her time as a commodity. Painting was life. It was oxygen. Selling a piece to someone seemed unthinkable. A notion she’d have to get over if she planned to earn a living with her craft. “I’ve never sold my work before. The idea of putting it out there for people to judge always freaks me out, and I guess I assumed I’d gain that confidence in art school.”

He faced her, fierceness in his penetrating gaze. “You are unbelievably talented. Some people will love your work, and others might dislike it—the same way we can’t please everyone with our performances. But that doesn’t change how brilliant you are.”

His compliment swirled through her in a fizzy rush. She tilted her head back to meet his eyes. “Thank you.”

The often stern lines of his brow softened. “How many pieces have you painted?”

“In this style, just this one. I didn’t start it until I moved into the theater. My recent paintings before this were awful.”

“Impossible.”

“No. Like, really bad. They were uninspired.”

He searched her face. “What changed?”

His need to know her meant more than he realized, as did their recent time together. So far, living with him, she’d witnessed firsthand the gentleman in her midst. He kept his apartment tidy, blessed her when she sneezed—a nervous tic she’d exhibited less of lately—opened doors and said please and thank you. He’d generally treated her with kindness. Everything she’d expect from a man who planned to date her. This roommate experiment was working in his favor, but this line of questioning chipped at the ugliness keeping them apart.

“I think being around your show and the theater invigorated me. What happened with my father drained my creativity. Something switched off for me after his betrayal.” After all of his gambling and lies. Every single time his problems had become hers she had shut down, her inspiration lost.

“Beatrice…” Huxley stepped closer. Their toes touched. The tiny contact sent tingles through her limbs and it was too much. He was still a poker player. For another fifteen days, he was off-limits.

Humming a random tune, she squeezed past him and sat on his couch, but some sort of wire framing poked into her backside. She shifted to a more comfortable spot and picked up his odd box. The small rectangle was black with gold-detailed sides—circles and triangles and filigree woven in symmetrical patterns. “Is there a genie in here?”

He joined her on the couch and stretched his long legs toward her. “It’s a puzzle box.”

“So it needs to be solved? To open it?”

“It does.”

She turned it in her hands. “It doesn’t look possible.”

“It’s designed to be challenging, not impossible. But I’ve been fiddling with it for nine years and still no luck.” He pulled the treasure from her grasp. Their fingers brushed this time, this contact zinging up her arms. She wondered if he felt every connection as acutely as she did. If he fell asleep, picturing her under her sheets, on the other side of their joined wall.

He caressed the box with his thumb. “It was my father’s. He left it to me in his will, along with the car and the theater.”

“God, that must have been overwhelming. Did it cause friction with your brothers?”

“Because I inherited most of his possessions?”

She nodded.

He rubbed a small scar on his pinky finger, a habit of his when thinking. “It added more strain to an already strained relationship with Xander and Pax, but not with Axel and Fox. They didn’t want the headache of the theater, and Dad was old-fashioned like that, handing things down to his eldest son. He also knew I’d be the one to keep it going and keep the family together. Or die trying.” Bitterness tainted his tone.

“But you have kept it alive. It’s getting busier every day, and you three are so close.”

“We are, but the past few years have been rough. Axel and Fox even came to me once suggesting I sell the place. So I started lying to them, not letting on how in the hole we were financially.”