Free While You Were Writing: Watkin's Pond, Book 2 by Virginia Nelson Page B

a random-looking creature that was complete cartoony crap and that she’d never be able to sell anywhere, she’d accomplished nothing since he’d left her shaking in reaction to his drunken temper tantrum.
    She should have been afraid of him. She’d stood and told herself that after he’d thrown the bottle, she should have been afraid of his violence, but nothing in her believed he’d hurt her, even in a whiskey-soaked rage. Instead, she’d wanted to go smack him. She’d literally shaken in her refusal to meet his fury with her own.
    Then he’d touched her and she’d ignited. She’d pushed back as hard as he pushed her and ended up telling him something she’d never told anyone.
    Maybe because he was behaving so badly, so inappropriately, he allowed her to confess what a truly horrible person she really was. How very awful she really was and how simply unfixable she was—driving her to help others who, comparatively, could actually enact change and fix the bits that were damaged in their hearts so they could learn to love and live again.
    Wishing the room he’d assigned for her studio had a door—and wondering for the umpteenth time why his childhood bedroom didn’t have a door to start with—she moved to the corner and lifted the sheet covering her recent work. While he’d been holed up in his office writing like a madman, she’d been on an equally creative bender in between avoiding the dark corners of her own mind and going cabin-fever crazy.
    His face, from a bunch of different angles. Driven to try to capture on paper the whiplash flashes of emotion that crossed his dark and brooding face, she’d done half a dozen pieces and hadn’t been pleased with any. Which was what drove her to the rabid squirrel piece, since the furry creature had been her only real companion while Radcliffe played hermit author locked in his room.
    Picking one out of the stack, she pitched the squirrel painting to lie in the heap of broken glass from his fit. If he could be a temperamental brute, she could be a moody artist. It seemed fair.
    Dipping her brush into the black paint, she deepened the lines around his mouth, the dark curling hair around his face, and then selected a cerulean blue for his eyes under the weight of his sooty lashes. With a smirk, she added red horns sticking out of the soft-looking hair she longed to touch. Stupid man. Stupid stubborn man.
    Looking at the demon version of Radcliffe, she added some neon yellow to his eyes and fangs to his damned kissable lips under that overgrowth of stubble.
    Making him into an evil painting didn’t satisfy the urges he’d left rolling through her body like waves of unrest nor did it answer the questions he’d created with his mentions of his mother.
    So the house full of dusty things piled up in true hoarder fashion were his mother’s, and he hadn’t dealt with them since he felt like they still weren’t his, though a five-year-old obituary told her his parent had been gone for quite some time. His comment about his divorce said the relationship with his mother caused the divorce…but how? And when he’d said he picked the woman who needed him, why had his mother needed him more than his bride?
    The answers weren’t in the house. Or rather, if they were, she’d have a hell of a time finding them in all the piles of stuff buried in dust like some living grave. The town was small, though, and her brother knew a lot of people. Perhaps it was time to be proactive about this project and find some answers. Tugging off her paint-spattered T-shirt, she stomped through the house and stopped by his door just to wiggle her bra-covered breasts at it. Stupid man.
    Not that he could see her act of rebellion while he holed up in there, probably sleeping off his drink, but somehow it made her feel satisfied to have had the last word in their exchange, so to speak.
    Speeding upstairs, since her boob shaking would be ruined if he opened the door and caught her, she jumped in