Page 52 of Protecting Her Secrets

He shifts on his feet, looking uncomfortable. “I guess. No one besides me ever goes in there, so you’ll have to excuse the mess.”

“I’m a pretty messy person. It used to drive Walker insane. He said it’d take him two hours to get his apartment back to its original state after I came over. Imagine what he’ll say now that?—”

My words die on my tongue because this is so fucking cool. The room is glass but buried under snow. There’s an obvious drop in temperature, so much so I can see my breath. But right now, I don’t care because my eyes are too busy taking it all in.

Ridge is anartist. Walker already told me as much, but now that I’ve seen his work, I get it. Stacked against every available surface are finished paintings on canvases. He seems to favor scenic painting, but there are a few that lean toward portrait without a focus on the person because the background is so magnificent.

They’re abstract, but also not. It’s just color on canvas, but it’s as though your mind takes in what he gives you and then naturally adds details, completing the image. My favorite is just blue and green with little crackly lines of darker blue and lighter splotchy green. The color slowly fades to white in the center, and even though it’s conceptual, I immediately know his inspiration is what it would look like to stare up from under the ocean.

“Ridge, these are amazing.” I should ask to flip through the canvases, but I’m too far gone in my awe of him.

He clears his throat. “Thanks.”

“You did the paintings in Walker’s house and library, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Why keep them all down here? They should be hung on your walls—if you had walls, but still, you could figure out a way.”

“I need to be able to look at the world without being influenced by previous works.”

“Makes sense.” I shrug. “But why do you work down here where it’s freezing cold?”

“My blood flows when I create, and I get hot.” He allows me to explore for a few more minutes while I take in the canvas he’s currently working on, but eventually, he grows bored of it. “Ready?”

“Sure.”

Once back upstairs, I settle on his sofa. “Can we watch a movie or something?”

“I don’t own a TV.”

I don’t know why I didn’t notice until now, but the furniture is so sparse, there’s nowhere to hide a TV. “I’m sorry, what?”

“I don’t own a TV,” he says, much slower this time.

“What do you do all day?”

“I read, create art, or just sit with my own thoughts.” He takes a seat on the other side of the sofa, his gaze falling on the beautiful view out the windows.

“Sit with my own thoughts,” I repeat, drumming my fingers on my thighs. “I can do that.”

“It’s good for the body and soul.”

As it turns out, I can’t do that and minutes later, I shift to face him. “Do you have a deck of cards?”

Chapter Eighteen

Walker

With my headon a swivel and my ears perked, listening for the rumble of a motorcycle engine, I pull out the key to Skylar’s apartment.

“What the fuck?” Wilder spits out and I look up to see the door to her apartment is kicked in, barely hanging on its hinges. I rush to get inside, but Wilder stops me with a hand on my shoulder.

“Let me do a sweep first.”

“Yeah, okay.” The last thing I want to do is stand outside like a goddamn pussy, so I allow him to go in first but follow close behind.

A rock forms in my gut as I take in the ruin. She’ll be heartbroken when she learns everything she owns has been destroyed, either broken or defamed in some way. Her sofa is tagged with the word “whore” in red spray paint, her coffee table has been kicked in, leaving the planks of wood cracked, and the TV that had been mounted on the wall now hangs by cords, the screen cracked down the middle.

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