Chapter 3 #2
The next room was filled with gorgeous mosaics.
Boats, sunsets, animals, famous landmarks all depicted with beautiful jewel-coloured bits of tile or glass.
The room sparkled and gleamed as the mosaics caught the sunshine streaming through the windows.
Every mosaic was displayed beautifully in here too, the perfect place to catch the sun.
They were all priced clearly as well, Katherine had done a superb job with her presentation, but again a quick look at the prices showed the average person wouldn’t be able to buy them, no matter how well the store was presented.
Flick moved to the next room which was where Rose did her paintings.
It was clear she had an exceptional talent, especially for different landscapes.
They were beautifully detailed, capturing the colours of nature so perfectly some of them could easily be mistaken for photos.
There were a few paintings of dogs too. But the cheapest painting she could find was over eight hundred pounds, while the others were well into the thousands.
She wandered back out into the hall. Apart from Luke’s studio space at the front of the house there were no other shops and there was still so much space that could be filled with other artists, two areas on this floor and a whole floor above them that was empty.
Maybe more artists selling different and unusual wares would attract more people to the studios.
She also wondered if reopening the café would be a viable option.
Her nan had told her she could do whatever she wanted in the six months, but opening a café and then leaving again once her nan came home might be an unwelcome burden for her nan.
Though if she could get someone to run that side of things then maybe her nan wouldn’t see it as a burden at all, especially if it was doing well.
Flick walked down the hall to Luke’s studio to find he was already there tweaking a life-size wooden carving of a great stag. The detail was incredible, the fine lines of fur, the velvet of the antlers, even the eyes looked real and alert.
‘This is beautiful.’
He looked up and smiled. ‘Thank you.’
‘You have a wonderful talent.’
‘It’s something I love doing, I get lost in this for hours.’
‘I totally get that. Do you always work here?’
‘Pretty much. Sometimes I work outside in the summer or if the weather’s nice, especially if I’m using a chainsaw or any other machinery.’
‘I’d imagine people would get a big kick out of seeing you use a chainsaw to carve your sculptures. That’s an attraction right there. The women especially would love it: rugged man using a chainsaw to carve wood, that’s got sex appeal written all over it.’
Luke burst out laughing. ‘I’ve never heard anyone say that about me before. I suppose you’d want me to be topless, wear a tight pair of jeans?’
‘What can I say, sex sells.’
Luke laughed and shook his head. ‘Apart from the very obvious health and safety problems with using a chainsaw while topless, well, I’m not sure if you noticed my body when you saw me naked, but there’s a definite lack of a six-pack to impress the women.’
‘You have a nice body, you might not have a six-pack but you have nice muscles.’
‘I’m not sure nice is the compliment you want it to be.’
‘Sometimes a man doesn’t have to be some Greek Adonis to be sexy or attractive, you could be doing something sexy like cuddling a baby or a puppy or carving some wood with a chainsaw.’
‘So the only way I could be sexy is by cuddling a puppy with one hand and chainsaw carving with the other.’
‘I didn’t mean that… I’m making it worse, aren’t I?’
‘A little bit.’
‘You have very attractive qualities.’
‘Qualities?’
‘You have nothing to be shy about, that’s all I’m saying.’ There was an awkward silence between them. ‘I don’t mean… that.’ She gestured to his crotch.
‘So I should be shy about my… tackle?’ Luke asked, a smile twitching on his lips.
‘Can we stop talking about your… manhood? I’d really prefer not to remember it.’
‘Why was it offensive? Hideous? Malformed?’
Flick laughed. ‘Will you stop?’
Luke held his hands up to show he was stopping.
This man made her smile so damn much. ‘You know, funny men are very attractive too.’
His eyebrows shot up at that. ‘I don’t think that’s true.’
‘Oh it is. We like to laugh.’
‘So while we’re making love, you’d like me to crack a few jokes?’
She stared at him her eyes wide.
He cleared his throat. ‘Hypothetically.’
‘Umm, I don’t think laughing during sex is necessarily a bad thing as long as we’re laughing with each other not at each other.’
Luke weighed it up. ‘I’ll give you that.’
‘But being around someone who makes you smile or laugh can only be a good thing. Last night, when you stood on the rooftop and pretended to fly with me, that made me laugh so much.’
‘You found that attractive?’
‘Honestly, yes. I couldn’t stop thinking about it last night and this morning.’
He stared at her and she looked at the stag for want of something to do, her cheeks flushing.
‘Anyway, can we get back on topic?’ she said. ‘Do you get many people coming up here to watch you work, you or the other artists?’
‘Not really, the odd tourist in the summer, the odd rambler caught in the rain.’
‘So we’re not even getting people through the doors to look at your goods.’
‘ My goods?’ Luke teased.
‘Stop,’ Flick laughed.
‘No, footfall is very low.’
She sighed and looked around his studio. ‘You haven’t got a lot of stock here.’
‘Most of my work is commission based. I do a few medium-sized table-top sculptures that I sell on Etsy or my website when time allows. My website has pictures of all my past sculptures so people can see my work there and see if I’m suitable for any commissions they might have in mind. ’
‘But if the odd tourist or rambler comes in here and there are no sculptures for them to look at, they can’t buy anything or see your work.’
‘That’s true. I guess I could print out some pictures and put them in a folder for people to look at. But I am leaving in a few weeks.’
She decided to bypass that; he couldn’t just do nothing for the next four weeks. ‘It would be better if you actually had stock on the shelves for people to pick up and touch.’
‘I’m not sure I have time to create surplus stock.’
‘It wouldn’t be surplus if people were buying it.’
‘No one comes up here to buy anything. If they do, they soon find out it’s too expensive.’
‘But if you were to do smaller sculptures, say the size of a large mug or pint glass, sell them for twenty or thirty pounds, you would get more sales.’
‘This level of detail on a pint-sized sculpture would still take several days and would be worth more than twenty pounds.’
‘You could not do this level of detail on the smaller sculptures.’
‘You mean, make them substandard?’
Flick sighed. She could understand his reasoning but if she couldn’t get the artists to try and help themselves then nothing would change.
And Luke’s reaction to her suggestion was a good indication of how the other artists would react when she called a meeting later this morning. She wasn’t looking forward to it.
Luke was just finishing shaping one of the stag’s antlers, his mind filled with Flick.
If she was going to ask the artists to produce smaller, substandard pieces of work, they were going to slaughter her.
He was pretty annoyed by it himself, except he knew it was coming from a good place, a need to save the studios.
If no one was selling anything they had to change.
He sighed. To be honest, she was just too damned likeable for him to be angry at her.
And it wasn’t just that she had no idea who he was, there was just something about her that he felt drawn to.
She was sunshine after months of rain. He wanted to wrap himself up in her warmth, bask in it, and he hadn’t felt like that for a long time.
He loved how she made him smile so much.
She was right when she’d said the night before that they shared a connection.
It was something that was rare and didn’t come along very often.
And it couldn’t have come at a more inconvenient time – he was leaving in a few weeks.
He couldn’t exactly change his plans, he’d bought a house, he’d paid the builders to start work on it the day after he’d got the keys.
He was excited about this new start. These feelings were just a blip.
The whole move had been incredibly stressful with one problem after another to solve.
It felt like, if there was such a thing as fate, it was conspiring against him getting his dream home in Scotland.
But now he had exchanged contracts, it finally felt like it was within his reach.
This was just another small problem to get past. So he would be professional, friendly and he’d do everything he could to help Flick save the studios and realise her dreams and then he could leave without looking back.
He ignored the voice in his head that said that was going to be harder than he thought.
Just then the front door opened and his friend Quinn walked in. He was sweaty and had clearly been for a run over the hills. Luke moved over to the sink and poured him a glass of water, then walked back to his friend and handed it to him.
‘Cheers mate,’ Quinn said, taking a long drink.
Luke had known Quinn for a few years now.
They’d both started off working at the craft market on the village green selling their wares.
Quinn was a metal worker and made sculptures or more recently monsters from household items like cutlery or tools.
They were cute and people loved them. Their tables always seemed to be next to each other in the market and they just hit it off.
Quinn was laid-back and made Luke laugh.
They’d go for a pint once or twice a month and put the world to rights.