Mr. Martin clenched his hands together. “I’ve never had such an experience. I asked the man what he thought he was doing. He said that they were his paintings and he could do any damn thing he wanted to with them.”
Mr. Martin leaned closer. “Alex, I would have stopped him, I swear I would have, but, well, they were his, and he was very…insistent about what he was doing. By his change in attitude I was beginning to fear what would happen if I were to interfere. So I didn’t. I had the money, after all—cash at that.”
Alex stood with his jaw hanging. He was overjoyed to have the money from the sale but at the same time he was incensed to hear that his work had been defaced.
“So he finished marking all over my work and then just took his ruined paintings and left?”
Mr. Martin scratched his jaw, his gaze turning aside. “No. He set them down and said that he wanted me to give them back to you. He said, ‘Give them back to Alexander Rahl. My treat.’”
Alex heaved a sigh. “Let me see them.”
Mr. Martin gestured to the paintings sitting against the wall in the corner of the office area. They were placed face-to-face, and no longer in frames.
When Alex lifted the first one and held it out in both hands he was struck speechless. In fat black letters sprawled diagonally across the painting it said FUCK YOU ASSHOLE.
The painting was covered with every other hateful, vile, vulgar name there was.
“Alex, I want them out of here.”
Alex stood, hands trembling, staring at his beautiful painting covered with ugly words.
“Do you hear me, Alex? I can’t have these in here. What if a customer should happen to see them? You have to take them with you. Right now. Get them out. I want them out of here. I want to forget all about this.”
Through his fury Alex could only nod. He knew that Mr. Martin didn’t fear a customer seeing them. Many of Mr. Martin’s artists routinely spoke like this in front of customers. The customers took the artist’s “colorful” speech as an indication of social sensitivity and artistic introspection. The more times an artist could drop the F bomb in a sentence the more visionary he became to them.
No, Mr. Martin was not offended by the words—he was used to hearing them in the gallery—he was frightened by the man who had written them, and by the context of those words: raw hatred.
Mr. Martin cleared his throat. “I’ve been giving the matter a great deal of thought, and I think it best if for now we don’t display any of your work.”
Alex looked up. “What?”
Mr. Martin gestured to the painting. “Well, look at it. This kind of man could get violent. He looked like he was ready to break my neck if I dared lift a finger to stop him.”
Alex’s first thought was that it was Bethany’s doing, but he dismissed the idea. He was pretty sure she didn’t have that kind of money to spend on a grudge.
“What did this guy look like? Describe him.”
“Well,” Mr. Martin said, taken aback a little by the heat in Alex’s tone, “he was tall, and good size—about like you. He was dressed casually but not expensively. Tan slacks, some kind of bland shirt, not tucked in. It was beige with a vertical blue stripe of some sort down the left side.”
Alex didn’t recognize the description.
He felt sick with anger. He ripped the canvas off the stretcher, then did the same with the other five. He only briefly saw the insults and obscene words desecrating the scenes of beauty. The range of profanity turned his stomach, not so much because of the words themselves, but because of the naked hate they conveyed.
They were just paintings of beauty. That’s all they were. Something to uplift people who looked at them, something to make people feel good about life and the world they lived in. To harbor hatred for beauty was one thing, but to go to great expense just to express that hate was quite another.
Alex realized that Mr. Martin was right. Such a man could easily become violent.
Alex hoped to meet him.
WITH THE ROLLED-UP RUINED CANVASES under one arm and the painting that he’d carefully wrapped in brown paper tucked under his other arm, Alex left Mr. Martin’s gallery without an argument. Despite how much he was fuming, there wasn’t any point in arguing. Mr. Martin was afraid.
Alex couldn’t really blame the man. Alone as he was most of the time, he was a sitting duck in the gallery. The stranger could come back at any time. What was Mr. Martin supposed to do? Alex couldn’t expect the gallery owner to have it in him to be able to handle an altercation that could become violent.
Conflicting emotions raged through Alex’s thoughts as he made his way out into the elegant halls. He was depressed, he was furious. He wanted to run home and lock himself away from a world where such people roamed free. He wanted to find the guy and shove the black markers down his throat.
When Alex looked up, the woman was standing not far off in front of him, watching him approach. He slowed to a stop.
She was in the same black dress, with the same green wrap draped over her shoulders. He thought that he saw wisps of vapor—a hint of steam or smoke—rising from her fall of blond hair and her shoulders, but as soon as he focused on it, it was gone.
As impossible as it seemed, she looked even better than he remembered.
“You come here often?” he asked.
Her gaze never left his as she slowly shook her head. “This is only my second time here.”
Something about the serious set of her features gave him pause. He knew that she wasn’t there to shop.
His grandfather’s old mantra, Trouble will find you, echoed through his mind.
“Are you all right, Alex?” she asked.
“Sure.” The sound of her voice made him all right. “You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”
A small smile softened her features as she glided a step closer. “I am Jax.”
Her name was as unusual as everything else about her. He could hardly believe that he was really seeing her again.
“I’d give anything to paint you, Jax,” he said under his breath to himself.
She smiled at his words, smiled in a way that accepted them as a compliment, but didn’t reveal her view of them or her willingness to be the subject of a painting.
He finally pulled his gaze away to check around, to see if anyone was close. “Did you hear the news on the TV?”
Her brow twitched. “News? No. What news?”
“You remember the other day when we first met out on the street? When that truck nearly ran us over.”
“The pirates, as you called them. I remember.”
“Well, later that same day those two cops who stopped the truck were found dead.”
She stared at him a moment. “Dead?”
He nodded. “The news said that both men had been found with their necks broken.”
The method of murder registered in her eyes. She let out a long sigh as she shook her head. “That’s terrible.”
Alex suddenly wished he hadn’t started the conversation with grim news. He gestured to a bench set in among a grouping of large round planters.
“Would you sit with me? I’d like to show you something.”
She