Sweet, sweet Jesus, her muse was riding the kind of high people usually took drugs to achieve.

Suzanne crossed to the easel, putting up a brand-new five-foot canvas. Joshua Grady deserved a life-size canvas. Impatiently, she organized paints in the kind of frenzy that hampered productivity rather than enhancing it, but eventually she was ready to go. She just needed music.

Country music. It could be nothing else. Which was a problem because Suzanne St. Michelle did not own any country. Thankfully, the internet behaved, and she found a public playlist dedicated to country rock and she turned it up, the music amplified through her Bluetooth speaker. The roar of an opening guitar riff filled the cottage with a dirty kind of earthiness that reminded her exactly of Grady, and as a band called Rascal Flatts belted out about life being a highway, she made her first brushstroke against the canvas.

Suzanne didn’t put away her brushes until one in the morning. She hit stop on the music, and it cut out as abruptly as it had started, leaving her alone in the stark silence of a rural Colorado night. She couldn’t believe she’d painted all day. Suzanne had always just put her brush down as soon as the light faded and stopped for the day, easily separating from her work.

Even these past three days with her creativity running amok, she’d been able to stop.

She never got this way. Like a real artist. She knew people who did—her mother always sculpted obsessively when she was working on a piece—and she had friends who talked about the phenomenon, but she’d never experienced it firsthand.

Until today. Today she’d been possessed.

Her eyes were gritty, she was thirsty and hungry—she’d only eaten some Oreos dunked in milk all day—and she desperately needed to pee. Her jeans and knit top were streaked with paint, as were her hands and her hair and no doubt also her face. And now that the fervor had ebbed, she became aware of the chill inside the cottage, having not turned on the heating.

Her feet were sore, her legs ached, her temple throbbed, and there was a mild cramp in her wrist and an annoying twinge in her lower back. She was cold and hungry and aching. Put succinctly, she was abso-freaking-lutely wrecked. The kind of deep-down weary that invaded her bone marrow.

But she was exhilarated.

Her pulse was flying, and she was breathing hard as her gaze roamed over the canvas, over her first original work since college more than a decade ago. Her hands trembled a little at the thought. She’d done it. She’d really done it.

And it wasn’t flat or lifeless. Joshua Grady glowered from the large canvas in all his glory, his eyes blazing with the same intensity of the day they’d met when he’d accused her of plotting to trap him into marriage.

Or whatever ridiculousness had been in his mind at the time.

The way she’d captured that look, that flare of hell no in his expression, sang to her. It was as if she was back outside with him, watching it happen all over again, and she shivered.