She turned, eyebrows high. “For yourself?”
“No.”
“For me?”Yes.
“For the house,” I replied, because admitting the truth felt like a mistake. “You complained my older paintings were out of order and not bright enough.”
“I didn’t complain.” She argued, biting back a smile. “I critiqued.”
“Same thing.”
“Absolutely not!” she shook her head firmly. “One is rude, and the other is educational. There is a huge difference.”
“And I’m supposed to enjoy being educated?”
She shot me a look. “Someone has to do it, and I seem to be the only person who isn’t afraid of you to do it.”
I almost smiled at that retort.
Her attention returned to the painting, a bold impressionistic piece, bright enough to warm the room. Suddenly, I understood what she had meant about the other paintings in the house. This one was starkly different. She reached out but didn’t touch it, hovering her fingers above the canvas with a reverence most people reserved for living things.
“You can move them,” I said.
She blinked. “Move what?”
“The paintings. Both the old ones and the new ones. Doesn’t matter. You can arrange them however you wish.”
Her lips parted in surprise. “You’re letting me rearrange your house?”
“First of all, it’s our house,” I corrected. “And you can move things around. This is not a museum.”
Her expression changed at my words, but she quickly adjusted it.
“And yet you have a freaking Monet in the hallway!”
“I have told this to you before, Ilana. I get paintings because I can afford them.”
She groaned under her breath. “You infuriate me.”
“I know.”
She turned sharply, ready to argue, but froze when she saw my expression. I wasn’t teasing anymore, but simply watching her. It was something else to watch the way the color seemed to transform her, making her forget to be afraid. It truly changed her entire personality.
“Do you paint?” I asked instinctively, realizing there was still so much I did not know about her.
My wife.
Her eyelashes fluttered, caught off guard. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“I… I don’t know why you’d ask me that.”
“Because you look at art like someone who makes it.”
A flush crept up her throat, warm and soft and utterly unguarded. She scrambled for composure, lifting her chin.
“I used to,” she admitted. “A little. Not professionally.”
