Rushing wasn’t an option. You rushed an artist, you got rotten art.

This was nothing like that. This was a wild frenzy in her blood. A jungle drum. A siren’s call. She had to paint. Now. No lazing, no coffee, no bagels. No waiting for the sun to rise enough to create the perfect light conditions. She just had to put paint on brush, thanking God she’d decided to prep some canvases last night as she’d set the cottage up to her liking.

The subject? Joshua Grady.

Except Suzanne couldn’t go there—she just couldn’t. He may be what her muse wanted Suzanne to paint, but her head and her heart did not. Could not. She’d come to Credence to tempt her muse with the kind of vastness she could see outside her windows. The faded wintery green of the grass in the field, the stark bare branches of the trees lining the drive, the lazy graze of animals, the arc of blue sky. The vista she’d been so enamored with yesterday as she’d slid out of Ethel.

She hadn’t come to paint a…rancher. She certainly hadn’t expected the whispers of a muse far more enamored with Grady than the starkly beautiful landscape. But she was the one in control here, damn it. She was in charge. And she would channel this sudden flush of creativity into bringing the landscape to life. Not Joshua Grady.

She would bend it to her will.

Because painting people—portraits—was difficult and, oddly, Suzanne felt like she had her training wheels on again. Sure, she’d copied portraits over the years, but that was easy—that was copying the artist’s color palette and brushstrokes, not painting the subject. Because painting another person, re-creating their presence and their personality and that special thing that made them an individual was a real skill. One she didn’t think she possessed anymore.

If she ever had.

One that required deep study of the subject. An intimacy that usually only grew from hours of sittings and close observation. She’d known Grady for less than a day. And just because he appeared to be imprinted on her retinas and her fevered nighttime imaginings were remarkably detailed didn’t mean she was capable of doing him justice on canvas.

So she was not going to paint him. She was going to go back to basics. She was going to stand in front of this window, and she was going to paint what she saw. Landscapes were far easier to portray, and she was going to paint the hell out of one—paint until her fingers bled.

Her hand poised above the large canvas, Suzanne stopped. It was quiet. Too damn quiet. She crossed to the CD player and flicked through the offerings. Mostly she listened to different styles of classical music because her work usually involved pieces from a few hundred years ago, and the power and passion of Mozart or Rachmaninoff fit the times and the emotion of the works. Today she chose Gregorian chants because there was a freeness to the rhythms that was very reflective of the openness of the scenery outside the window. There was also a meditative quality that seemed to fit the majesty and mood of the landscape.