Suzanne shouldn’t care that he didn’t care. But she did. She thought he was…invested in her paintings and for him to be indifferent…that had been gut-wrenching.

She hadn’t looked when she’d chosen, just stormed into the walk-in closet where she was keeping them and grabbed the closest one. If he didn’t care, then she wasn’t going to, either. But she’d checked after and it had been Atlas.

The painting that had survived the great cottage flood safe on the high ground of the easel.

Her gut twisted thinking about the satisfaction that had unfurled through her veins as she’d admired him on that easel back when she’d been in the throes of her creative flush and anything had seemed possible. Each and every one of those five paintings had a memory attached to it; they meant something to her, and now there were just two. Suzanne couldn’t help but wonder how long it was going to take him to get them, too.

Not long the way they were going.

It made her not like him very much right now. Even though she knew she was lying in a bed of her own making.

“Don’t you think, darling?”

Suzanne suddenly realized her mother had been talking to her and she had no earthly idea what she’d said. “I’m sorry, I was miles away.”

“I said, it’s so wild and barren and still out here. I hope you get a chance to get some of this on canvas. I know you’re not an original artist, but a month is a long time to go without painting, darling. Don’t forget, it’s just like a muscle—it needs to be exercised, and you can’t get more inspirational than this. I’d hate you to regret wasting an opportunity.”

Oh, there were going to be plenty of things Suzanne regretted about her time here—but not painting the landscape was not one of them.

“Yeah,” she said, glancing out her window, as uninspired by the landscape today as she had been two weeks ago when she’d tried to capture it on canvas. “I might wait until the first snowfall.”

Grady’s intensely curious gaze was hot on her profile, but she ignored it, hoping valiantly that a blanket of white would be the shot in the arm her muse needed to paint what she’d come to Credence to paint. Snow was pretty damn inspiring.

Maybe not as much as Grady stripped to the waist in the mudroom, but she could at least set up a canvas again and see what happened, right?

“According to Bob’s hip, it should have snowed last night,” Albie said.

Simone laughed. “Ray said not, though. He said tomorrow. What do you think, Grady? Do ranchers have hunches about these kind of things?”