Remi was diabolical enough to thoroughly ignore the man in his own house. She absolutely could have done the watercolor at the cottage. But just because she was forgetting about him didn’t mean he should enjoy the same luxury.

Which was also why she’d ordered the big jerk a new snowmobile. A fancy one with a heated seat and handlebars, balance control, and a crapload of other high tech features that his ancient, now deceased sled had lacked.

He’d think of her every time he rode it. Which would make him feel like crap, and that made her feel pretty damn good.

With a dramatic sweep of sap green that bled and swirled into the purple, she decided that she’d be okay with earning “the one that got away” status. Thinking about him moping around, regretting his callus rejections made her cheerful enough to nudge the volume higher on Macklemore, just in case he had managed to distract himself from the fact that she was under his roof.

Her phone vibrated on the table next to her. The name on the screen had her groaning and turning off the music. “What do you want?”

“Hello to you, too. Are you PMS-ing or something?” Rajesh asked. “Most of my clients love talking to me.”

“I doubt that. What’s up?” she asked, transferring fat drops of water to the center of the amorphous blobs of color on the paper. Video tutorial be damned.

“Got a rando who reached out and asked if your Harvest Moon is for sale.”

She opened her mouth to say “hell no,” then shut it again. Fresh out of art school, surviving on $1 cheeseburgers and cereal straight from the box, and desperately homesick, she’d been feeling particularly low after another gallery curator had said her work in landscapes and still life was “pedestrian” and “boardwalk quality.”

She’d lugged her portfolio back to her tiny apartment, opened a cheap bottle of wine, and painted to the Neil Young tune. It was the song she’d managed to talk Brick into slow dancing to at Kimber’s wedding. Every time she heard it, she was instantly transported back to that dance floor on the lush green lawn of the Grand Hotel. Back into Brick’s strong arms encased in a dress shirt. His broad palms warming the skin on her back. The dizzying rush of champagne on an empty stomach. The sparkle of stars in the night sky high above them.

It was also the night he’d arrested her. But that was another story.

Her Harvest Moon piece was an elementary attempt on a tiny canvas. Her craft had grown by leaps and bounds since that painting. To anyone else, it was practically worthless. Professionally, the amateur attempt to capture music in color was embarrassing. But to her, the painting meant Brick. So she’d kept it close.

“How’d they even know about it?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Something about seeing it in the background of some interview photoshoot you did a hundred years ago. It’s just sitting there on your nightstand catching dust.”