Free Platinum (Facets of Passion) by Jeffe Kennedy Page B

idiot ruined my best fine oil brush to pinstripe a Mustang. Pissed me off no end.”
    She could just picture him, in all his artistic intensity, trying to explain to a garage monkey why you couldn’t use a mink brush in auto paint. She giggled and Steel gave her a sour look. “Yeah, laugh. It wasn’t funny at the time.”
    “I’m sorry.” She tried to compose her face.
    “I just wanted to be in a place where people understood art. Things are happening for me—I want to do it right. Those guys have good hearts—they just come from a different world, you know?”
    “I do know.” But did she, really? It was hard to imagine his coming up, compared to hers.
    Silence fell between them, straining with their differences. Except that the art had altered his life and moved him into a path that crossed with hers. Like a comet blasting through her quiet life, scorching hot and, likely, just as quickly gone.
    “How did you start sculpting?”
    “Truth?”
    She nodded.
    “Well, I guess you haven’t run yet. Schools and camps for troubled boys.” He flashed that wicked grin at her, but something melancholy ran beneath it. “I won’t lie to you, Althea. I got into plenty of trouble. Too much mad in me and nothing to use it on. A social worker put a brush in my hand and told me to paint it out.”
    He sighed and tipped his head back again, staring up at the lights. “She might have saved me. Then a shop teacher taught me arc-welding and it all came together. I see my friends—like Badger, who owns this place—they didn’t have that… hunger to pull them through the shit, you know?”
    “I envy you that, actually.”
    He looked at her. “Really? You have the gallery. It’s clear you love the place.”
    “I do, but…” She swished her shoulders in the water, feeling restless. This wasn’t something she talked about. “It lets me enjoy art, but it’s not the same as being the artist. It’s more like sitting in the audience, applauding.”
    She shouldn’t have said that much. He clearly caught the tremor in her voice and now studied her with that discerning eye that seemed to lay her open.
    “I know you have the vision and the sensibility—what got in the way?”
    And there he cut to the heart of it. What got in the way ?
    She shrugged, trying to keep it light. “Not all of us have the talent to make our visions real. My stuff is…uninspired.”
    “Who told you that?”
    “Pretty much everyone!” She tried to laugh it into a joke. All those teachers, the juries, her own mother. The same look on their faces. That sympathetic regret, the comforting phrases that somehow were worse than the dismissals by more brusque people. “But they didn’t need to. I could see it for myself.”
    “I’m sure you practiced like crazy, knowing you.”
    Oh, she had. All those hours with the watercolors, until her eyes burned and refused to focus, until she entirely lost the vision in the swarming headaches. Until her mother gently begged her to stop, to turn her ambitions to something close to it. Something she had talent for. Only she was failing at the gallery too.
    “Some people are kings, some are kingmakers.” She smiled at him, consciously willing away the tears that threatened. “And I think I’m cooked.”
    “Had enough, have you?”
    Somehow she knew he wasn’t talking about the hot tub.
    “Hang on.” He levered himself out of the tub, water sheeting down his strong body, black hair running dark rivers over the defined muscles. In a moment he was back with a couple of towels. He held one open for her. “Milady.”
    She climbed out and he wrapped the towel around her like a blanket. Stepping away, he used his to vigorously dry himself, brisk and full of fierce energy.
    “Where did these come from?”
    He grinned at her. “Saddlebags.”
    Of course. She’d seen him pull the portfolio out of the black leather cases strapped to the bike that first day. He pulled on his jeans and she scrambled to catch