Page 52 of Here Comes Trouble
But even worse was the realisation that he didn’t care about her at all; he’d been using her.
* * *
Xander somehow managed to deal with his agent’s jovial banter and answer his questions about details for the exhibition while Jess’s declaration that she loved him whirled like a tornado around his head.
He’d been thrilled to find her standing there at his door, and seeing her again had rammed home to him just how much he’d missed her company. But her announcement had thrown him for six.
Even though she’d clearly let it slip by accident he could tell from the look in her eyes that she meant it.
And it scared the crap out of him.
For the first time in his life he had no idea how to deal with a situation. Usually, he’d just blow a woman off if she suddenly announced she was in love with him, but he didn’t want to do that with Jess. She meant more to him than that.
He just wasn’t sure how much more.
They needed to talk about this, that was for damn sure.
After finally getting rid of Paul, he walked back into the studio to find Jess standing in front of the final painting he’d been working on for the exhibition. His first instinct was to stride over there and pull the tarp back down and yell at her for peeking, until he saw the look of bewildered disbelief on her face.
‘You painted me naked?’ She sounded so shocked, so hurt, it stopped him in his tracks. He approached her with his hands held out in a placatory gesture, as a dark, disturbing burn wove through his chest and pooled in his belly. ‘I had this idea about your spirit breaking free from the confines of your body – like a sexual awakening – when I was with you, and I had to get it on canvas. I haven’t been this excited about a painting in a very long time.’
She stared at him, aghast. ‘You thought it would be okay when you knew how much I hated showing my body? I haven’t exactly been coy about that Xander, but you thought you’d go ahead a do it anyway without me knowing about it?’
A cold shiver tickled down his spine. ‘I thought maybe you’d got past the worry about how you look naked.’
‘You thought you’d fixed me?’ she interrupted. ‘That after you’d given me a few orgasms I’d suddenly love my body enough to have you expose it for all the world to see?’ Her voice was shaking now. ‘It was meant to be just for you, Xander. I never would have let you seduce me if I thought you were going to do something like this. You exploited my trust.’
‘Jess, you’re overreacting. You can’t see your face. No one will know it’s you.’
‘That’s not the point. I’ll know! And it’s not going to be that hard to figure out if people read my article about you.’
She threw her hands up in despair.
‘Do you have any idea how humiliated I feel right now? I trusted you. I thought you were a good person – a bit of an ego-maniac, but a good guy at heart. But this was only ever about the art wasn’t it Xander? For your own benefit. For your career.’
Frustration twisted his guts. ‘You want me to pull the picture from the exhibition? It’s the best thing I’ve done in years, Jess. You inspired it. You should be proud.’
‘Proud!’ She spat the word out. ‘Proud for everyone to know I was just another of your groupies that you slept with to get what you wanted, then tossed aside?’
She put her head in her hands. ‘How could I have thought you could love me back in the way I need you to?’ she muttered through her fingers. ‘I thought perhaps you understood me, that our time together meant something, but apparently I was wrong.’
Lifting her head, she looked at him straight in the eye, her expression filled with pain. ‘This was never about me, Xander, was it? It was always about you and your art.’
He couldn’t answer. He couldn’t even get his response to that straight in his head. He hadn’t been looking for a relationship and this thing with Jess had just come out of the blue and now his creativity seemed to be peaking he was afraid to let anything get in the way of it. Thinking about someone else right now would take precious mental energy away from his work and he couldn’t afford to let anything damage his muse again. Not even Jess.
He needed to prove to the world he was back – bigger, badder and stronger than ever. He’d won against the disabling inertia that had held him hostage for so long. He could prove his earlier talent hadn’t been a fluke and stick two fingers up at all those naysayers.
To not let his father have been right about him.
Jess stared at him angrily for a beat longer, waiting in vain for him to pull himself together enough to answer her. When he failed to open his mouth, she turned on her heel and walked out, slamming the door of the studio hard behind her.
He slumped into a chair, unable to process all the thoughts raging through his brain. He wanted her to be pleased and proud of his pictures, to tell him what good work he’d done, but instead she’d been more concerned about how she looked in them.
A disabling indolence kept him in his chair and he sat, staring into space as the silence echoed in his head.
* * *
Over the next few days he began to hate looking at his last painting of her, the initial joy of creating it marred by the pain and distress he’d caused.
