Chapter Four

Luke slammed the heel of his hand against his forehead. Shitgoddamnsonofabitch. He’d asked the fucking question. Now he’d have to listen to an answer he could never un-know. His chest heaved and he stared Stefan down, waiting for the words that would either damn him as a liar or condemn him as a forger. Either one would force Luke to choose between rebooting his career or destroying the man he’d once loved.

Stefan blinked. Blinked again, brows drawing together in a tight vee. “What?”

For some reason, maybe aftershocks from his Fiat-flashback or mortification that Stefan had witnessed his resultant freak-out, the bewildered affront on Stefan’s face kicked Luke into art investigator asshole mode. “Did you think you’d get away with the fake Arcolettis because he was a relative unknown? Because all his pieces except one are in private hands?”

“Who the hell is Arcoletti?”

Luke guffawed, sounding unpleasant even to himself. “Good one.”

“No. I mean it. Who’s Arcoletti?”

“Jeremiah Arcoletti. American realist painter. Disappeared in 1945 along with all thirteen canvases from his last collection.” Luke’s eyes popped wide. “Holy shit. That’s it, isn’t it? The lost collection.” He poked Stefan’s shoulders with stiff fingers, peripherally aware arguing in the middle of a dark mountain road was ridiculous and possibly suicidal, but he didn’t give a flying fuck. They’d finish this now. “Is that your plan? Recreate the lost collection out here in your little studio in the big woods?”

“Stop it.” Stefan batted Luke’s hand away, his gaze fixed on the ground, avoiding the question. Pleading the artistic Fifth. Last refuge of the guilty.

“Where’d you see his work? The museum in Amsterdam? Hell, in all those years of prancing around with Marius, you could have seen every fricking one of the privately held pieces. Marius had the connections for it. You could toss his name around to get access to the Gordon letters, too. Damn it.” He dropped his arms, suddenly spent. “The Stefan I knew would have cut off his hands before he’d counterfeit another artist’s work. What’s happened to you?”

“What hasn’t?” Stefan’s eyes were wide, his pupils huge in the combined light of headlights and flashlight. “But I swear. I’ve never heard of this Arcoletti.”

“No? Then tell me. What’s coming off your easel these days? Studies in Monochrome? The Picture of Oregon Gray?”

“I…I don’t know.”

The feeble disavowal flipped Luke’s asshole switch back on. “Don’t give me that shit. You don’t paint with your eyes closed.”

“No. I just…” Stefan’s voice was hoarse, and he clutched his flashlight to his belly, casting warped, inverted shadows across his face and distorting his features into a death’s-head mask. “I’ve been painting, but I don’t remember them. I’m not even sure how many there are.”

“Artistic amnesia? Bullshit. You must have seen them when you handed them over to Boardman.”

Stefan shook his head and pinched his eyes closed. “Thomas always loads them into his car. I never look. Not after…not when they’re finished.”

“Why? Guilt?”

“No. I was afraid…” Stefan wrapped his arms across his stomach, pointing the flashlight into the woods. His face was his own again, drawn and haunted.

“Afraid of getting caught?”

“Afraid of what I’d paint next,” he whispered.

Luke’s lips twisted. “Denial. It’s what’s for dinner. No wonder you’re so fricking thin.”

“Why is everything black and white for you, Luke? Let in some color, for Christ’s sake.” Stefan forked the fingers of one hand through his hair. “Even a little gray would be a change.”

Luke refused to allow the broken edge of Stefan’s voice to influence him. He’d let sentiment sway him once before and it had cold-cocked his career. “Right or wrong, Stef. It’s not that tough a choice.”

“Fine.” Stefan raised his head and met Luke’s gaze, his shoulders shifting as if bracing for a blow. “You’ve already made up your mind, as usual. Go ahead. Turn me in to the art police.”

Luke searched Stefan’s face for some flicker of remorse, some acknowledgement he accepted the enormity of his crime. Nothing. Only the droop of his lips and a telltale glitter in his eyes, hinting at unshed tears. But for what? Sorrow for his actions, or regret because he’d gotten caught? “Can you give me a reason not to?”

Stefan’s breath caught in what might have been a laugh if his face wasn’t so bleak. “Guess not.” He saluted Luke with a middle finger. “Enjoy your drive.”

Stefan turned and strode uphill, the beam of his flashlight bouncing from road to hillside, and Luke’s last trace of adrenaline drained away.

The lousy car sat perpendicular to the road, driver’s door ajar. If he was lucky, he’d manage to creep down the hill by midnight. He shut the damn door before the brainless chime of the key alarm drove him nuts. He sighed, deep and exhausted, and leaned his forehead against the car roof, the beaded rain icy against his heated skin.

“Shit.”

Stefan balled up his sweatshirt and slung it into the corner of the living room. He yanked open the liquor cabinet door and poured himself a hit of the good Scotch. After he knocked it back, he poured a second.

The burn in his belly had nothing to do with the liquor. Christ. Luke suspected him of forgery. Luke. The man who should know him better than anyone else in the world believed Stefan capable of the ultimate painterly crime. The Scotch threatened to reverse course and he hastily set the bottle and glass on the coffee table. He collapsed onto the leprous leather sofa, one arm across his eyes, the knuckles of his other hand pressed against his mouth.

When Luke had stormed out of their tiny Connecticut apartment, Stefan had expected him to walk back in at any minute, any hour, any day, gruff and sheepish as he always was after one of their Marius-induced arguments. When days turned into weeks, he’d gotten the nerve to call Luke’s family and discovered Luke had left for Europe. Indefinitely.

Only one thing had filled the gaping hole that losing Luke had torn in Stefan’s chest. He’d retreated into his studio for hours, without eating, without sleeping. Burned through dozens of canvases, an outpouring of his passion and despair as if he’d ripped the paint from his veins. When he’d emerged, exhausted and empty, Marius had been waiting and Stefan hadn’t had the strength to resist anymore.

Marius had loved him. That made everything worse, twisted the guilt-edged knife a little deeper. Because Stefan had been grateful to Marius, admired him, was fond of him, but had never loved him.

Stefan loved Luke. Always had, from the first moment their gaze had met in that life drawing class. Luke’s mouth had quirked in that lopsided smile of his, dimple creasing his cheek, and Stefan had realized being naked in front of this man was a huge problem and was getting huger by the second, judging by the titters of the first-year students in the front row. He’d pulled the drape over his lap, but not before Luke had grinned at him and covered his own lap with his giant sketch pad. Good thing the class had been life drawing and not oils, or the students would have used up the conservatory’s entire stock of cadmium red trying to capture Stefan’s full-body blush.

He sat up, propped his elbows on his knees, and stared at his hands. God, to paint again, as he had in those days. To recapture the joy that had welled up in him, intoxicating him with the glory of color and light and shape. That joy had dimmed when Luke disappeared, and snuffed out completely in the wreckage of Marius’s plane.

Stefan curled his fingers into claws, his claws into fists. Whatever he had to do to find it again, to connect his brain to his brush and his brush to his canvas, he’d do it. Anything.

He grabbed his glass, stood, and walked out the back door. After he fired up the generator, he cleared the last swallow of Scotch and entered the studio, eyes watering and throat burning. A wave of dizziness washed through him and he dropped the glass on the table, closing his eyes as the room tilted. Shit. Maybe he should have eaten something first.

But when he opened his eyes, his vision steadied. The room bloomed with that wonderful glow, the soft, diffuse northern light he’d never experienced anywhere but here. It filled the room and brightened the windows, as if it shone from outside the studio instead of inside, reflected against black glass.

The studio seemed to shift around him, caressing him, cocooning him like a favorite suit of clothes. The tubes of paint lined up on the rough-hewn worktable under the windows called him, each color a different note in the beloved siren song. They reeled him across the room and he giggled when he staggered from the effects of the alcohol.

Sweat prickled along his scalp, beaded on his forehead and upper lip. Too hot. He yanked his shirt off. Dropped it. Kicked it out of the way. Shucked off his jeans. Nothing between him and the canvas. As it should be.

He picked up a narrow sable brush and paced the perimeter of the studio, flicking the delicate point over his knuckles. Tracing a figure eight on the back of his hand. Stroking the inside of his wrist with the soft, dark kiss of a lover who would never betray him.

He was made for this. To spill his guts along with the color from his brush. Heat built in his belly, his chest, his temples. He didn’t want to paint. He needed it, lest that heat explode outward. Sizzle along his skin. Consume him, flesh and breath and bone.

He picked up his palette and scrabbled for a handful of paint tubes, the colors he wanted leaping to hand, acknowledging his mastery.

He stalked the easel, his vision focused, irising in, pinpointing the only thing that mattered. Contracting until, as he faced down the canvas, the room winked out.