As Drake stood in the thick copse of trees, he had only his memory with which to capture the image of the woman on the cliffs. His visual memory had always been borderline photographic, yet despite his ability to remember fine details that most people never even saw, he still wished she were sitting in his studio now so that he could stare, learn, discover.
His brain skidded to a halt. What the hell was he thinking?
Drake didn’t paint women. Ever. It was his one hard-and-fast rule. Oils and acrylics, pastels and watercolor—he was open to it all. But he had never brought a woman into his studio, and he never planned to.
Besides, even if he didn’t have a hard line about painting women, he shouldn’t be thinking about work right now. He should be concentrating on making sure this woman didn’t decide to leap from the rocks during her crying jag.
At first her grief had rivaled the storm. But the storm within her seemed finally to be subsiding, calming by degrees. As if she controlled the weather, the wind that had been whipping the ocean and the forest into a frenzy just moments earlier suddenly died away, the storm clouds parting to reveal blue sky—and a stream of sunlight that landed on the woman like a spotlight.
When she lifted her head from her knees and turned to face the sun so that he could finally see her profile, Drake’s heart stilled in his chest—stopping as surely as it might if a knife stabbed it, or a bullet pierced it.
He needed to paint her.
*
Rosa Bouchard—not Rosalind, no matter how much her mother insisted on using her legal name because it sounded “classier”—hadn’t cried in years. Not since her father had passed away when she was ten and she’d lost one of the most important, loving people in her life.
But today she couldn’t stop.
There was so much water around her already—waves crashing, salt water spraying up onto the clifftop to soak her shoes, her clothes, her skin. What was a little more salty liquid to add to it? Especially when her tears were barely a drop in the bucket compared to the huge, wide ocean in front of her.
It was almost a relief to let the tears flow through her so hard and fast that she couldn’t concentrate on anything else. Rosa didn’t want to think right now. Didn’t want to have to make any big decisions. Didn’t want to keep remembering what had happened. Not just the horrible pictures, but all the awful comments from strangers that had followed. And, worst of all, the things that the people who were supposed to care about her most had said.
Unfortunately, nothing could stop her mother’s voice from playing on repeat inside Rosa’s head: “That horrible man who hid those cameras in your hotel room and took those pictures of you won’t stand a chance against our lawyers. They’ll nail him to the wall for sneaking and selling those pictures. But you shouldn’t feel bad about what people are seeing, honey. Your body isn’t anything they haven’t seen before. Why don’t we let the lawyers go after him while we look on the bright side—we’ve gained over a million followers on every single social platform in just a matter of hours!”
In the end, that was what had cracked Rosa’s heart in two—realizing that her body had been nothing more than a trade for a few million new social media followers for her family’s brand. That her pride, her privacy, her utter lack of consent to the nude photos were simply a good way to increase their worth to advertisers who wanted the Bouchards’ endorsements for their makeup and fashion lines.
As a new wave of misery rose within her, Rosa could feel the rips and tears clawing at her heart. The ocean crashing on the rocks swallowed up the sound of her tears, but instead of continuing to be glad for the cover, anger suddenly flooded her.
She was so tired of being muted. So damned sick of always being told what to say and how to say it by the cable network’s publicity team.
A roar of fury was rising in her throat when she was jolted by a sudden flood of unexpected warmth. Lifting her face from where she’d had it buried on her knees, she was shocked to realize that the gray clouds had parted and a beam of sunshine was coming through.
Shining straight on her.
For one blissful moment, both her brain and her heart cleared so that she could appreciate the sound of the waves crashing and feel the warmth of the sun on her wet face and arms.
But the moment passed way too soon, and when it did, everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours came crashing right back.
Rosa hadn’t thought about where she was going that morning. She hadn’t awakened at four a.m. and had her bags packed with a clear destination in her GPS. She’d simply had to get out. Had to get away from everyone and everything that was hurting her. So she’d snuck out of the house to her car. Not one of the fancy ones the car companies gave them to drive for the free publicity, but the old car she’d bought with the money she’d saved up from babysitting in the years before reality TV made her life completely unreal.