The Paris Trip: A feel-good, laugh-out-loud romantic comedy

CHAPTER EIGHT

Leo was close to losing his famous cool. He checked his phone. Two o’clock in the morning. A paintbrush clamped between his teeth, he turned back to the canvas in frustration. Rapidly, he scanned the figure he’d sketched out in pencil, ready for painting, and experienced a burst of fury that he can barely control.

It was wrong. All wrong. He couldn’t get it right. No matter how hard he tried.

‘Damn it to hell!’ he yelled at the canvas, and then stood with his head bowed for a moment, breathing harshly.

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.’

‘You don’t need to apologise. Not to me.’ Liselle sounded surprised. ‘You’re an artist, Leo. Of course you feel passion, and of course you must express it. That passion is part of who you are and I welcome it.’ She turned, heading towards him. He shifted backwards automatically, but she kept coming. He backed all the way up against the wall of the studio, until he couldn’t retreat any further. She placed a hand on his chest, her big eyes gazing into his. ‘You’re painting again. That is all I care about. It’s… miraculous.’

‘Hardly. I can’t seem to get it right,’ he muttered.

‘You will,’ she said simply. ‘I have faith in you.’

His lip curled. ‘Fine talking. I wish you’d lend me some of that faith. Because I have none left.’

‘Willingly,’ she whispered.

Alarm bells rang in his head at that look in her eyes. He looked down at the hand on his chest.

‘Listen to me, Liselle… I’m not interested. How many times do I have to tell you?’ Leo inhaled sharply, struggling to push away the inner demons that had been crowding him for hours. This was Liselle… Beautiful, wild, unpredictable Liselle. He needed to pick his words with care. ‘You being my manager, that works. We’re a good team. But we can’t go back to how things once were between us.’ He tried to make her see sense. ‘I’m no good for you. I don’t love you. This thing… It’s toxic.’

‘Only because you won’t let me in. You need someone, Leo. You can’t do this alone. Why not let it be me?’ She stretched on tiptoe to kiss him and he grabbed hold of her shoulders, holding her back as gently as he could. Her eyes flashed with anger. ‘Let me go!’

‘Not if you plan to kiss me.’

‘You can’t possibly prefer that English idiot to me. She’s barely female.’

‘Don’t be offensive,’ he growled.

‘Have you seen her figure? If she even has one under those mannish clothes she wears.’ She shuddered.

‘Those are Bernadette’s clothes. Of course they don’t fit her very well. Bernadette has a much larger physique.’

Liselle stared. ‘Why on earth is she wearing your sister’s clothes?’

‘She lost her luggage. I asked Bernadette to lend her something.’ He grimaced, aware that his sister’s spite towards their guest had extended to lending her the drabbest, least appealing clothes she could unearth from her drawers.

‘Oh, well… If the little fool can’t even keep hold of a suitcase… Leo, darling, you can’t be serious about wanting to paint her.’

‘Watch me.’

Her lips tightened. ‘I love that you’re painting again. It’s so exciting… But why ask her to sit for you? What quality can she bring to your canvas? Dullness? Ordinariness? A sensible little librarian type who looks like she’s never even had a lover.’ She paused in her tirade, her gaze devouring him with sudden fury. ‘Is that what you like about her? Her innocence?’ She took a step back at last, her hands dropping away, a knowing look on her face as she finished softly, ‘I can do innocence if you like. We can role-play. There doesn’t have to be all this drama between us.’

Leo’s gaze narrowed on her face. ‘I thought we’d agreed that you’d only be my manager from now on. I thought we were over this.’ He was perplexed and more than a little irritated. ‘What’s changed?’

She pouted. ‘Oh yes, I’ve been so happy, trailing about in your shadow, waiting for you to start painting again, so I can make some money as your manager and sell your work.’

‘I’m sorry if I’ve had a dry patch lately… ‘

‘Dry?’ Her laughter was cruel. ‘Any drier and it would be the Sahara.’

His jaw hardened but he said nothing. She was merely baiting him, trying to drag emotion into the argument, so she could unbalance his calm.

When he stayed silent, she went on unsteadily, ‘But that was before she turned up. Quite out of the blue, wasn’t it? And all that business about getting knocked down in the street… I don’t believe a word of it. You must’ve known her before yesterday. None of this makes sense otherwise. A complete stranger, walking in here, turning your life upside down, inspiring you to start painting again with one look from her very boring eyes?’

When he failed to answer this clearly rhetorical question, Liselle shook back her long Titian hair, a curtain of shimmering flame. ‘No, I don’t believe it! You were lying. She is lying. But I tell you this, Leo, she will hurt you. Because she doesn’t understand you.’ She tapped her chest, her chin thrust proudly in the air. ‘I, Liselle, understand you. I will always put you and your art first. Now, leave this little English thing and come back to me.’

‘Liselle, please,’ he began wearily, his head throbbing from lack of sleep and possibly the start of a migraine, but she interrupted him with a violent gesture.

‘No, I am done talking. It is time for you to paint. So I have come to you.’

Her eyes fixed on his, Liselle unfastened the belt of her dressing gown, exposing her nude body beneath.

As he caught his breath in protest, she shrugged the green silk from her shoulders and stepped away from it, standing naked in the middle of his studio, straight-backed and defiant.

‘Paint me, Leo,’ she ordered him. ‘You know you want to.’

‘Put that back on,’ he rapped out, averting his gaze. ‘I told you, I’m not interested.’

She came towards him, smiling sweetly, her eyes shining with mischief and excitement.

‘But Leo, look at me… No, look at my body. Not my face. Don’t you want to paint this?’ Her voice dropped, low and husky. ‘Don’t you desire this?’

‘Now you’re just embarrassing yourself,’ he said coldly, knowing the words were cruel but needing to shock her out of this madness. ‘And me.’

Her confidence faltered at last. The big eyes searched his face and her smile became fixed. ‘You… You don’t mean that, my darling.’

‘Oh, don’t I?’ Leo bent to retrieve her dressing gown and was just straightening, the green silk bunched in his fist, when he caught a blur of movement out of the corner of his eye, and staggered backwards, arm raised to shield himself. Liselle had launched herself at him, fingers stretched wide, swiping at his cheek as though hoping to shred his skin with her painted talons.

He grabbed for her wrists but missed, and they tumbled together onto the floor, mere inches from his fallen canvas.

‘Dammit, Liselle,’ he growled, lying on his back and struggling to hold her at bay, her dressing gown somehow tangled between their bodies. She was almost demented, her bare breasts bouncing in his face, strong thighs gripping his middle…

A sudden noise alerted him to the horrifying realisation that they were not alone anymore.

A voice exclaimed in English, and he stared over Liselle’s shoulder at the door to the studio, which had creaked open.

Maeve stood frozen on the threshold, dressed in another of Bernadette’s shapeless garments. Her face was blank with shock, her gaze fixed on the two of them wrestling on the floor – and Liselle’s nudity.

He swore under his breath.

Turning her head, Liselle gave a wild burst of laughter. ‘Oh dear,’ she said in English, her tone mocking. ‘Oh dear, oh dear. Poor Maeve.’

Maeve did not even seem to have heard her. Her gaze was fixed on his face. He saw vulnerability there, and hurt accusation. A shudder seemed to run through her. Then she turned and fled.

‘Get off me, Liselle, for God’s sake,’ he snapped and lifted her off him while she was still cackling. This time Liselle didn’t resist but lay on her back on the studio floor, limp with laughter, while he scrambled back to his feet.

‘Here.’ Leo chucked at the silk dressing gown over her. ‘Cover yourself up and get back to bed. We can talk about this later.’

Without waiting for a response, he strode after Maeve.

She was nowhere to be seen. He stood a moment in indecision, unsure whether he should chase her back to her bedroom, or whether that would make matters worse.

In his mind’s eye, he was replaying what had just happened… Liselle pitching herself at him, stark naked and vicious as a polecat, his struggles to dislodge her as gently as he could, and Maeve’s horrified expression as she opened the door.

He ran a furious hand through his hair, wishing he felt fresher and hadn’t spent all night slaving pointlessly over that ruined canvas…

Maybe then he might have spotted earlier what Liselle intended when she turned up at the studio door at such an early hour. Because he saw now that the whole thing had been engineered by his former lover, an incident designed to embarrass and warn off Maeve before she could sit for him. Liselle had known when Maeve was due to arrive at the studio, after all. She’d always been on the cold and calculating side, but this was extreme even by her depraved standards.

By contrast, Maeve was an innocent, not part of the unholy circus that revolved around their artistic community, especially in certain areas of Paris. That lack of sophistication was precisely what had transfixed him and made his growing urge to paint her irresistible, despite not having put paint to canvas in years…

He took a few determined steps towards the stairs leading up to the attic rooms, and then forced himself to stop. Perhaps this was not the best moment to talk to Maeve about what she’d seen. Besides, he felt odd and off-balance. And not just through lost sleep.

What was this sinking feeling, so heavy in the pit of his stomach?

Shame.

His breath caught in his throat. Was he… Could he be ashamed of himself?

The realisation struck him like a blow and he turned on his heel, swearing ferociously as he headed to his own bedroom instead, deciding to sleep it off.

What the hell? He’d never felt like this before. Shame simply wasn’t in his range of emotions. And it hadn’t even been his fault, but Liselle’s.

Though if you had cut Liselle loose years ago, it wouldn’t have happened.

That sharp little voice in his head left him angry with himself. Because it was true. He could have insisted that Liselle return to the South of France and never see him again. But she’d proved too useful as a manager, always there by his side, always devoted to his cause, and if she had sometimes read more into his approving smiles than was really there, he had ignored those danger signs and let the situation slide.

This was the result.

Now Maeve would refuse to sit for him, no doubt disgusted by what she’d just witnessed in the studio. Perhaps she even thought he had done it deliberately, hoping she might join in the orgy…

He gave a dry bark of laughter, mostly aimed at himself. If only she knew… He had barely looked at a woman in years, and not just in artistic terms.

Still, what did it matter if the Englishwoman refused to sit for him? He could still paint Maeve from memory, though he knew it would never be as good as having her there in person, to see how her skin responded to light, and to capture her essence.

No, it didn’t really matter.

Except that he didn’t want Maeve to think badly of him, he realised with a jolt. A woman he had only just met.

What was that about?