I'm Not Charlotte Lucas(72)

I smiled. I couldn’t help it. Who wouldn’t be affected by praise from a hot guy? I definitely wasn’t immune. “Well, it’s not for sale.”

“Darn. It was worth asking, at least.” He pulled me in and rubbed my worries away, his large hands running up and down my back. He leaned back a little and looked me in the eye. “I particularly like that rainy scene with the umbrella. It made me think of Vera.”

“Rainy scene?” I hadn’t painted a rainy—wait, was he looking through my old paintings too? I released Liam, passing him to go into the studio. My breath caught when I stepped into the room, and I jolted to a stop. All the canvases were flipped over, staring at me with their judgmental paintings, as though they’d been betrayed by my negligence.

There was no way Liam had time to do this while I changed out of my work clothes.

Beth. It had to be. She’d probably looked through all my old paintings sometime today while I was at work. I wanted to shut my eyes or leave the room, but I couldn’t do either. I was assaulted with over fifty paintings from my high school and college years, when I’d painted so often that I couldn’t seem to get the canvases fast enough and ran out of paint constantly. I had been on a first-name basis with Jan from the craft store, until I stopped showing up late at night with an urgent need for burnt-sienna or topaz-colored paint.

I wondered if Jan still worked there and if she wondered what became of me.

“You have some serious talent,” Liam said, coming up to stand behind me.

Unease filtered into my stomach. I’d been praised before, and all it did was raise my opinion of myself to an unhealthy degree. I never forgave my high school art teacher, Mr. Kirkham, for setting me up for so much failure—and I didn’t want to repeat that history right now with my boyfriend.

I tried to sound carefree, but I could tell I just sounded stressed. “Okay, okay, you don’t have to butter me up. I’ll kiss you even if you hate my art.”

He stepped around me, his eyebrows drawing together. “What are you talking about? I’m not trying to butter you up, I mean it—”

I lifted a hand and tried to stop him. “No, you don’t, and it’s fine. I accepted my lack of talent a long time ago.”

He opened his mouth to speak but then shook his head. He still looked as confused as ever, but I didn’t feel like enlightening him right now.

“Should we watch The Office?” I asked, trying to cover up my raw nerves with a bright smile. The look on his face proved he wasn’t buying it.

“I’m still really confused. If that’s not talent,” he said, gesturing to my rainy scene with the couple kissing behind an umbrella, Bellmead town square’s gazebo behind them, “then what do you constitute as talent?”

Sighing, I rested my hands on my waist. “My paintings aren’t technical,” I explained. “I don’t have the theory of painting down. I just like to paint what I feel and don’t have a grasp on proportions or color theory or any of that. I mean, I learned it all in college, but it never really stuck with me.”

He was silent, his eyes squinting. “So what?”

“So they’re just paintings. They aren’t good enough to sell or anywhere near professional enough for a gallery. They’re just nice paintings.”

“I guess I’m lost, because I don’t really understand why you’d have to follow color theory or proportions to appreciate these.” He crossed the room and lifted a canvas colored in every shade of blue and turquoise, depicting a stormy sea with an old-fashioned ship sailing through the tumultuous waves. “This is incredible. And I don’t have to have an art degree to appreciate it.”

I stared at him. He seemed so genuine, but he really didn’t get it. “Listen, we should just agree to disagree. I’m not saying these things from insecurity; I’m stating facts. I’ve done the art scene, I’ve petitioned galleries, and I have the rejections to back me up here.” He opened his mouth to speak, but I lifted my hand, stopping him. “I don’t want to argue, but I think I know more about these things than you do.”

He closed his mouth, his expression turning hard. “I can’t walk away from this conversation and allow you to think that your paintings aren’t good enough. So what if galleries turned you down? Art is subjective. How do you know you just haven’t found the right one yet?”

I scoffed. Yeah, art is subjective. I’d heard that a million times in my life, and it still didn’t take the sting away. Negative opinions about the pieces of creativity that held my soul were still hard to swallow, regardless of how subjective they were.

“If you’re about to give me a pep talk about not giving up, I’ll shove you out that window.” I laughed, but it was free of mirth. “Do you think quitting painting was easy? It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

He stepped closer. “Then why’d you quit?”

I shrugged. “Because I’m not cut out for it.”

“Says who?”

“My professors, Bellmead’s gallery owners—Jacob Thompson, the famous Sonoma County painter that came to my school to teach an intensive on impressionism and explained that I just wasn’t getting it quite right.”

“They’re all full of crap. All of them.”