Free A Taste of Heaven (Billionaires' Secrets Book 3) by Jennifer Lewis Page B

little.”
    “What did you paint?”
    “Landscapes, flowers, that kind of thing. Nothing at all serious or important.”
    “In whose opinion? One of your not-so-nice ex-husbands?” She swallowed. “Well, yes. Tarrant always said I should paint, though. He offered to set up a studio for me in our house.”
    “But?” He cocked his head.
    “I was too busy.” She shrugged. “Being his wife was a fulltime job.”
    “All the ladies’ lunches, the pedicure appointments, the charity fund-raising meetings, the gala evenings.” His voice trailed off.
    Sam flushed. He’d reduced her whole busy life to a dismissive sentence. She lifted her chin. “Exactly.”
    “Now that you’re alone, you could make the time.” “Maybe I don’t want to.” She fiddled with her ring.
    “Afraid to see what might pop out of your imagination with no one to tell you what to do?”
    “I’m not sure I even have an imagination anymore.”
    “Of course you do.” Louis narrowed his eyes. “It’s just been lying dormant, letting ideas and fantasies and dreams stockpile in there, waiting for the moment you choose to set them free.”
    Sam frowned. Her mind felt as blank and lusterless as an unprimed canvas. Something she never could have imagined when she was a teenager with a million dreams. “I don’t think so.”
    Undeterred, Louis leaned forward, a gleam in his eyes. “If you could paint something right now, anything, what would it be?”
    The warm glow of the last rays of sunset picked out the smooth, strong planes of his face, molding them like a fine statue. How magnificent he’d look standing there, nude, with those coppery rays chiseling the sturdy musculature of his body.
    Uh-oh. Her imagination appeared to be working after all.
    “Come on. Anything.”
    “The sunset, maybe,” she said, hesitant, afraid to meet the pull of his gaze.
    “Then let’s go look at it.” He rose to his feet and stepped toward her, then stopped, as if he’d just remembered that invisible glass wall between them. Sam’s skin tingled once again at the absence of natural contact.
    He pushed open a door in the wall, and the room flooded with light like thick golden honey. “There’s a deck out here. Come on.”
    Squinting against the sudden brightness, Sam followed him outside. The entire bayou was aflame with gold and copper. Rich dark reds and purples hung in the trees, the water shimmered and glimmered as its black depths reflected the last rays of sun with diamond brightness.
    “I challenge you to find anything more beautiful than that in the whole world.” Louis gazed out at the jeweled waterscape before them.
    “It’s magical.”
    He turned to her, and a laugh escaped. “It is magic, and it’s going to work its magic on you. The old voodoo everyone talks about. It’s going to flood your imagination with beauty until it overflows and you just can’t keep it locked up anymore.” Sam tried to suppress a giggle, but it came out anyway. She imagined attacking her dull life with a brush loaded with bright golden-yellow paint.
    Not that she’d know where to begin.
    “I couldn’t paint this. I don’t have the skills. I always wanted to take a class, but somehow it just never happened.”
    “So start tomorrow.”
    “I can’t.”
    “Why not?”
    “For one thing, I’m too old.”
    Louis snorted. “Unless you’ve had some really fine plastic surgery, I wouldn’t put you a day over thirty.”
    A flash of vain pride swelled inside her, and she cursed herself for it. “I’m thirty-one.”
    “See? You’re practically a kid.”
    “I’m not. I’m a widow with a large charitable trust to manage. It’s an important responsibility.”
    “And I admire you for taking it on, but trust me, there is absolutely enough time, both in your day and in the rest of your life, for you to paint.”
    “What if I stink at it?”
    “That kind of thinking keeps people glued to their TVs watching other people live while they wonder what real