Page 25 of The Paris Trip

He glanced at the bottle of cognac he’d brought up with him from supper.

But he never drank when he was painting.

He’d almost forgotten that private rule of his, it had been so long since he’d spent any time painting…

No, he wouldn’t drink. That would only make things worse.

At last, he felt his breathing settle and calm return to his mind. Calm and logic.

‘It’s wrong, but it can be salvaged.’ He took a piece of erasing putty and set to work tidying the figure’s outline and face. ‘There… and there… and here.’ He resketched the lines, this time more loosely, his hand more fluid, leaving plenty of room for the paint to interpret his vision.

Once he was ready, Leo removed the paintbrush from between his teeth and began painting. First, a pale wash of colour. Then, once that had almost dried, he came back with a palette of mixed paints and a narrow brush, and began tentatively to paint.

He had chosen watercolours after an initial flirtation with oils… Oils would be too bold and definitive for something he saw as vague and dreamlike.

Too dreamlike, perhaps. As he worked, he saw it was nothing like the painting he’d originally envisaged. It was a poor shadow. Yet it was all he had. And at least he was painting again.

For the past few years, he had not been able to stand in front of a canvas and just paint. It had been hard enough coming into the studio and looking at the empty easel and the scarcity of canvases stacked against the wall, where once there might’ve been dozens waiting to be sold or touched up and completed.

At least he had a paintbrush in his hands tonight and some idea of where he might be going, rather than none. And a canvas taking shape under his brushstrokes rather than a blank space.

Hours later, he sighed and took two or three steps back to see what he had achieved, and cried out again in fury. The colours were wrong, the lines were clumsy, it was a mess.

‘No, no, no, no, no…’ Driven to despair by his frustration, he kicked out at the easel, and the canvas went spinning across the floor.

Leo tossed aside the paintbrush and strode away, grasping his hair in his hands and battling an urge to throw himself off the balcony.

A soft knock at the door made him stiffen and turn, wondering how much noise he’d been making. He glanced at the shutters, drawn back to keep the room cool, the window ajar. It was still dark outside, but long past the middle of the night. Almost dawn, perhaps.

What time had he told Maeve to come for her first session?

Six o’clock.

He lunged for his phone and checked the time, bleary eyed.

Five-thirty in the morning.

It couldn’t be her yet, surely? Unless she had changed her mind about getting up so early.

But if it wasn’t Maeve, this visit meant he had been making such a racket, he had actually woken someone. Possibly his grandmother.

Guiltily, he stumbled to the door, unlocked it and flung it open to reveal… Liselle.

His glamorous ex was wearing her favourite green silk dressing gown, knotted at the waist, her long hair fanning down over her shoulders, the colour of a sunset. Her feet were bare, her pale-skinned cleavage plunging between high breasts that pressed against the silk in a seductive manner. As always, she smelt of perfume and feminine allure. Her large dramatic eyes surveyed him almost hungrily.

She came pacing barefoot into the room and he recoiled, not wanting her to touch him.

‘What… What are you doing here, Liselle?’ he demanded thickly, and ran a hand across his face. God, he was tired. Dropping with fatigue. What had he been thinking to stay up all night like this? Especially before his very first session with Maeve…

Madness, pure madness. He was thirty-one, not twenty-one. But he had felt like a man possessed when he came up to the studio. It had been so long since he’d felt the urge to paint anything. He had come up here at, what, eleven o’clock, midnight last night? And with this wild vision in his head…

But it hadn’t worked out.

His vision had fallen apart even as he tried to paint it, to make it real.

Liselle stood over the fallen canvas, and then turned back to him, sympathy in her beautiful face. ‘I had to come,’ she told him. ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt your work. I didn’t even realise you were working. I heard shouting, you see.’

‘I’m sorry if I woke you.’

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