“Sometimes. Some private collectors just want a reproduction to display as a talking point or a brag piece or to just be up close and personal with a revered piece of art even if it is a fake. But oftentimes it’s because they have the originals and want to protect them, have a substitute while the priceless piece stays under lock and key. The same goes for galleries and museums.”

“So it’s not illegal?”

“It’s illegal if I paint the Mona Lisa and sign it Leonardo da Vinci and sell it to a person pretending it’s a da Vinci original. That’s fraud. If they know they’re getting a reproduction, it’s perfectly legal.”

“And lucrative.”

She smiled again. “Very.”

Grady was fascinated despite himself. He didn’t want to find her fascinating, this woman who was here for one month and had manipulated him into helping her deceive her parents—even if it was for a good cause. But he did.

“Do you like it? Your job.”

“I do,” she said, but her smile dimmed. “Or at least I did, anyway.”

He frowned. “Not anymore?”

“I’ve been feeling more and more creatively…stymied.”

Her forehead furrowed into lines, her eyes clouded with uncertainty, her teeth dug into her lower lip. Her eyes—her face—were so damn expressive, and Grady was captivated. “And that means what?”

“I don’t know my own…style. I’ve been mimicking other people’s for such a long time, I don’t know what kind of painter I am. I used to always paint my own stuff, when I was first starting out. But it was…never good enough—”

“Says who?” Grady may have disliked the fact that his face stared back at him from her canvases, but she could clearly paint. To a guy who couldn’t even draw a stick figure, her paintings seemed pretty damn good.

“A lot of people,” she said with a quick dismissive shake of her head. “And they were right. You could give me a bowl of fruit or an eastern Colorado landscape and tell me to paint what I see, and I can reproduce it faithfully. But there’s never any…life to it.”

Grady’s face screwed into a puzzled expression. “Does a bowl of fruit have life?”