Alex nodded slowly. “I see.” He paused, his gaze sweeping over her. “And let me guess. Your artistic endeavors are a little different from hers?”
“You could say that.” She gave him a crooked smile, even though her mother’s scathing contempt for her work still burned. Stillhurt. “Twee watercolors, she called them. Distinctly uninspired and amateurish.”
“Ouch.”
Lucy shrugged. “She was probably right.”
“You can’t say that.”
“Neither can you, since you haven’t seen them.”
He stretched his legs out, resting one arm along the back of the sofa, his fingers only inches from her shoulder. “Still, I think I like the sound of them, at least compared to whatever it is your mother does.” He arched an eyebrow, waiting, and Lucy managed a smile.
“She started out sculpting breasts. Huge, lumpy ones.”
Alex winced and a little giggle escaped her. She was gladsomeonewasn’t taking her mother’s art seriously. “What has she moved on to, then?” he asked.
“Oh, well. Um . . . the male anatomy.”
“I think I definitely prefer the watercolors.”
“Even if you haven’t seen them?”
“Even so. What are they of, exactly?”
“I do nature scenes. Wildflowers, mostly.” The antithesis of what her mother did, essentially, although whether she’d set out to be her mother’s opposite, artistically anyway, Lucy didn’t know.
“They definitely sound like more my kind of thing.” He held her gaze then, or perhaps she held his; and suddenly she was intensely aware that the arm he’d stretched out along the back ofthe sofa was quite close to her. If she leaned back and tilted her head to one side, his fingers would brush her hair, maybe even her cheek.
She had no intention of doing that, of course.
Just thinking about it. Quite a lot.
“So what happened to make you leave Boston?” Alex asked. He broke their locked gazes, shifting in his seat, the second’s worth of intensity now sliding into awkwardness. “If you don’t mind me asking?”
Amazingly, she didn’t mind. She’d wanted to keep it secret, or at least separate from her life in Hartley-by-the-Sea, but she felt Alex might understand, maybe even sympathize, which was an incredible thought, considering a week ago she’d thought he was an ass.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Alex continued when Lucy hadn’t said anything. “It’s not really my business. . . .”
“It’s going to sound kind of lame,” Lucy said. “Or maybe ridiculous. I don’t know.”
“Now I really am curious.”
“I was working as a barista in this gallery café, like I told you before. It was just a way to pay the bills and get a toe into the art world.”
“Didn’t your mother give you a toe in?” Alex asked, and Lucy made a face. “That was part of the problem.” She felt a familiar tightness in her chest. It had been over a month since this had happened and yet it still hurt to remember. “I didn’t want to succeed because of who my mother was,” she explained. “Is. I wanted to do it on my own. So I worked at the café and spent every spare waking minute working on getting a portfolio together, something I could show galleries.” She took another breath, let it out slowly. In the distance she heard a burst of staccato laughter from the television. It sounded like gunfire.
“And did you get a portfolio together?” Alex asked after a moment.
“Yes, and the gallery where I worked agreed to show it. My boss said he thought I had promise. But it turned out he’d only agreed so my mother would come to his gallery. She had—has—that kind of pull. I told him she would come because, well, she’s my mom. I thought she would come for me.”
“She didn’t come,” Alex stated flatly.
Lucy let out a laugh. “That would have been bad enough, I suppose, although I think I could have handled it. I hope I could have. But she did more—or less, depending on how you look at it. She wrote an editorial about it—about me—in the Boston newspaper.”
“What?” Alex lurched upright, and even in her remembered misery Lucy smiled to see him look so indignant on her behalf. “What about, exactly?”
“It was titled ‘Why I Refuse to Give My Daughter a Free Ride’ and it was all about how genuinely terrible my work was and how she couldn’t support it simply because I was related to her by blood. How endorsing such”—she made her hands into clawlike quotation marks—“tedious mediocritywould compromise her artistic integrity, and encourage other, similar would-be hacks to pick up a paintbrush.” She practically had the whole, awful editorial memorized, which was pretty sad in itself.
