Spirit Bound - Christine Feehan [169]
She wouldn’t go back to darkness. Stefan might have been a fraud, but he had shown her the way out of the dark. She could do this—survive without him. There were millions of women who fell in love with the wrong men and they lived happy, productive lives. She just had to make up her mind that she would be one of them. Her track record was perhaps going to go down as one of the worst in history, but she wasn’t going to let a Russian agent destroy her.
The temptation to call her sisters and cry on their shoulders was huge, but she resisted. She didn’t want to face Rikki right now, and Rikki would be hurt if she wasn’t included in the circle of support. But damn it all, Levi had betrayed her. He had to have known what his brother was really up to. They’d counted on her compassion, her loyalty, so ingrained in her that she would never consider betraying either of them to anyone. They’d played her so perfectly—and did that mean Levi was playing Rikki?
She brushed a hand over her face. She could barely breathe in her beloved studio. She turned on the music system to flood the silence with soft music, needing distraction. She just had to work and she had plenty of it, enough to keep her up half the night. And if that wasn’t enough, she could always invent more—after all, she was a pro at finding things to do in the middle of the night.
She glanced out the double French doors into the night. There were no stars tonight, only a heavy, fog, turning her gardens to vague wet shadows. She wandered across the room, drawn by the misty gray veil. It was one of the things she loved most about living on the coast. When she saw the fog creep in over the surrounding forest, the atmosphere always reminded her of a gothic novel.
“Get to work,” she admonished aloud and shut off the alarm so she could open her French doors.
Technically, she didn’t need the fresh air—she wasn’t painting—but her lungs felt tight and the lump in her throat refused to dissolve. She wouldn’t acknowledge that she wanted to scream and throw things, to weep until there were no tears left in the world. She loved him. Loved him with everything she was. How could she have been so deceived?
She stood in the doorway, staring into her garden, the mist on her face, in her eyes, dripping silver tears into her heart until she was so weighed down with sorrow she had to turn back to her work or succumb to the numbing cold—and she wouldn’t go back there. Not ever again. Not for a man.
She’d been so stupid falling for a man like Jean-Claude. All the signs were there, she just had been too naive to read them. So many people deferred to him, stepped out of his way, or froze when he came into a room. She’d thought him so commanding of respect, she hadn’t paused to consider it had been fear everyone felt. She found him attractive and engaging, although very intimidating with his supreme confidence, so of course everyone around her had to have felt the same.
Resolutely she squared her shoulders and walked back inside to look over the artwork. Most of the paintings were seascapes. It was impossible for an artist to live in Sea Haven and not want to capture the beauty of the ocean in her most tempestuous moods. There were a few pictures of old buildings and one of the bluffs with a long broken fence, worn with age and weather, which was a personal favorite.
She looked at the paintings with a prejudiced eye. The wild sea always frustrated her a little bit. She never felt she actually captured the mood of it in the way she wanted. Grays and blues and swirling purples never quite gave the full effect of an angry sea, moody and temperamental. There was one with the mist veiling the trees so that the forest looked like a great army, shrouded in mystery, hidden in the vague, shadowy interior.
Pressing her lips together tightly,