Sculpting Grace: A Light Romance Novel (Art of Grace Book 2)

by Samantha Westlake

  Hit by that tidal wave of enthusiasm, I couldn't help but squeeze her back, grinning like an idiot. Even though Portia always made me feel a little sloppy whenever I stood or sat next to her, I knew just how much she worried about my happiness, how she cared so selflessly for me. I'd been buoyed by that affection and kindness ever since we first met, all the way back in elementary school, and I always did my best to reciprocate.

  After Portia finally released me from the hug so that I could get a fresh breath of air, I sat back on the stool, lifting my wineglass up to my lips for a sip. All around us, the tables were full of young people, just off of work and enjoying a glass or two of delicious alcohol before heading off to find dinner, return home, or hit the town for a night of partying.

  The wine bar, Vini, where we sat was located only a couple of blocks away from my own workplace - the Halesford Gallery, a small private art gallery that featured many local artists in a collective, cooperative setting. Created by my uncle, Preston Halesford, I'd been given the reins as manager, and essentially oversaw every aspect of the day-to-day business operations.

  When I'd first started at the gallery, I hadn't been thinking of the job as anything more than an immediate source of income. Fresh out of a disastrous marriage that crumbled before we even reached the second anniversary, I had felt like I was drowning, about to fold in on myself and just give up on life. My Uncle Preston won't admit it, but I still believe that he offered me the job as manager of his gallery less because he believed that I'd do a great job and more because he didn't want to see me become a reclusive hermit who adopted a dozen cats and locked herself in her apartment, eventually dying while surrounded by bags of kitty litter.

  Much to my own surprise, however, I turned out to have a bit of a knack for running an art gallery! I knew how to cater to someone's overinflated ego - which aptly described most artists, I soon learned. I even managed to recruit one of the most celebrated local artists in the area, Dean Benjamin de St. James, and convince him to let the Halesford Gallery be the exclusive carrier of his sculptures.

  In the last couple of months, sales at the gallery steadily climbed - which, since I worked largely on commission, put more money in my pocket! For the first time since my divorce, I was finally starting to feel financially comfortable again.

  But even better was my growing relationship with Carter.

  Carter James - the most successful commercial real estate agent in town, tall, warm, and so sexy with his slightly mussy brown hair and chocolate eyes that I often wanted to just rip off my clothes and leap on him! He purchased a large amount of art, relatively speaking, from the Halesford Gallery for staging the various properties that he bought, sold, and helped rent to business clients. I'd been warned from the very first day that part of my job included doing whatever it took to keep Carter James happy - and then, not two hours later, I tumbled into his arms.

  Literally. I tripped over a raised ledge in the floor because I'd been an idiot and wore stupid high heels for my very first day, and Carter James had his arms out to catch me.

  We flirted back and forth, although at the time I'd been still struggling with bringing my failed previous marriage to an end. Carter ended up lending a helping hand to resolve that particular issue, for which I was incredibly grateful. Still, we'd danced back and forth a bit before actually committing to each other. After getting out of a failed relationship, I wasn't quite ready to go diving into a new one. At a couple points, I was all but convinced that Carter was going to give up on me, write me off as too much effort to be worth his time.

  I had a lot of trouble opening up to him, as well. Finally, however, the dam broke; after consuming an entire bottle of wine, I sent dozens of texts to his phone, spilling out my feelings and panicking over his lack of a reply.

  I woke up the next morning, panicked - and when I arrived at work, I discovered that Carter hadn't actually received any of my messages! His phone ended up in a puddle of water the day before, and when he walked into the gallery, he pulled out and turned on his replacement...

  I cringed, certain that he'd run far, far away from me as soon as he saw my true craziness. I snatched his phone away and prepared to delete the messages - but then, realizing that I couldn't hide my true self forever, handed the phone back to him and waited for the inevitable rejection.

  Instead, Carter kissed me, more thoroughly and hungrier than any man I've ever known in my life.

  We ended up back in his gorgeous, perfect house, spending almost an entire day in bed, exploring every inch of each other's bodies. At one point, we even ordered pizza and ate it in bed together! I can assure you, nothing lets you know that a guy is comfortable with you than when he's willing to watch you eat pizza while naked - and still want to get busy afterwards.

  Since that first day of coming enthusiastically together, Carter and I backed off slightly, although I still got lost every now and then whenever I gazed into his eyes. We didn't spend every night together - but I was more likely to find him sleeping beside me than not.

  "Yes," I declared, once again lifting up my glass of wine, "everything in my life is finally workin out, going the way that I want."

  "So, it looks like you're proposing a toast," Carter commented, reaching for his own glass. He'd insisted on getting a beer, rather than wine. Fortunately, Vini also carried several local brews on tap, so he didn't have to try and make do with a Coors or some other light, see-through beer.

  "I am," I nodded. "Here's to things finally getting on track!"

  "Even if they took a while, and there were a few wrong turns and dead ends along the way!" Portia added with a laugh. My best friend's cheeks were already glowing from the wine she'd consumed so far, but her smile for me was filled with love and respect. Even if she insisted on teasing me about my mistakes, I knew that she'd always be in my corner, rooting for me, no matter the situation.

  "Even with the wrong turns," I allowed, nodding to her. "But now, I've got everything under control, for what feels like the first time! There's not going to be any more curveballs flying out of left field, fouling me and knocking me off my skates!"

  I saw Carter hide a laugh by snorting into his beer, and wondered if I'd somehow screwed up the sports metaphor. Admittedly, I wasn't on familiar territory - but right now, nothing could bring me down, could knock the smile off of my face.

  "So here's to a future that's finally free of craziness!" I finished, holding up my wineglass high.

  "Hear, hear!" Carter and Portia both cheered, lifting their own glasses and extending them to clink against my own.

  I took a long sip of the wine - I'd picked out a light, fruity white, something refreshing and tasty that wouldn't go straight to my head with tons of sugar. Portia always mocked my choice in wines, insisting that I'd move over to fuller-bodied reds when I "finally developed an adult palate," but I happily enjoyed my Pinot Grigios and Chardonnays.

  Ahh, perfect.

  I felt the foot brushing against my own beneath the table start to rub back and forth again, gently but insistently pushing against me. My smile grew a little wider as I looked up at Carter's eyes, and saw the slow-burning heat in them that had become a familiar sight. It looked like the two of us might not make it to dinner out at a restaurant after this, I thought as an appreciative little prickle spread out from the pit of my stomach, suffusing my limbs with an eager heat. When we finally got around to dinner, we'd already be naked.

  I had no objections, and I smiled back at Carter. I hadn't quite mastered that trick of showing my arousal in my eyes like he could pull off, but I pushed back against his foot, rubbing his leg with my own.

  I glanced down at my wine glass, wondering how quickly I could finish off the remainder. As I reached for it again, however, I heard my phone, tucked into my purse on the back of the chair, start to ring and buzz.

  Frowning, I pulled it out. "Oh, it's Uncle Preston!" I exclaimed. I looked up at Portia and Carter. "Er, can the two of you excuse me for a minute?"


  They nodded, and I quickly slipped outside, away from the noise and energy of the wine bar. "Yes?" I said, holding the phone up to my ear.

  "Ah, Rebecca! I'm so glad that I caught you!" My uncle's voice boomed out of the phone into my ear. No problems hearing him, that was for certain. "Listen, I'll get right to the point. I've got a new mission for you..."

  Chapter Two

  *

  My heart sank as I heard my Uncle Preston's declaration, felt it shatter the peace that I'd just been toasting, the quiet that I'd been so hoping to enjoy over the next few weeks.

  "A mission?" I repeated back, hoping that maybe he just wanted something easy. Maybe he needed me to rearrange the exhibits of local artists in the gallery, or bring him something to eat, or bail him out of jail! "Uncle Preston, I just finished getting the gallery in order! Now that we've got a new artist joining us, I really have my hands full-"

  "But that's precisely it!" he broke in, talking right over me. "Now that Dean is going to be joining our little group, I have the perfect idea on how to welcome him in, and get a bunch of publicity for ourselves at the same time!"

  I glanced up at the wine bar. Vini featured massive plate glass windows, mounted on tracks so that they could slide back on nights with good weather to let the cool evening breezes flow in and over the customers. Tonight, the windows were still drawn shut, but I could see in through them. Portia was telling some story to Carter, and she had my boyfriend chuckling as he nodded along.

  That, in there, was where I wanted to be. I didn't want to be thinking about work, not after all the stress that I'd been through in recent weeks. "Uncle Preston, could we maybe talk about this tomorrow?"

  "Ah, we're on the same wavelength," he exclaimed, and I frowned. That didn't match up with what my internal monologue had filled in for him.

  "What?"

  "Oh, I'm still developing this idea," he went on, as if this should have been obvious. "And there's lots to talk about, more than we can get into over the phone." For some reason, Uncle Preston seemed to believe that, if a conversation would take more than five minutes, it couldn't happen via a phone connection. I wasn't sure exactly what his reasoning entailed, whether he thought that the connection might break or if we just couldn't get gestures across when on the phone, but he always pushed for an in-person conversation. "So how about I come into the gallery tomorrow so that we can really have a discussion?"

  "Discussion of what? Uncle, you haven't given me any clue as to what your idea is," I said.

  "No time for that now. Just meet me at the gallery tomorrow when you open." Uncle Preston paused. "That assistant that I got you, she'll be around, won't she?"

  "Lizzie?" I filled in the name for him. "Yes, she's booked for tomorrow-"

  "Good, perfect! She can watch the front while we discuss how we'll pull this off. Oh Rebecca, this is going to be so great! You'll love putting this together."

  "Putting what together? Uncle Preston, you still haven't given me any sort of idea what-"

  I lowered the phone, not even bothering to finish my sentence. Halfway through, I'd heard the click of my uncle hanging up.

  I sighed, forcing myself to take a deep breath and then let it out slowly. I knew that Preston wasn't trying to be rude. In fact, if I told him that he'd hung up on me mid-sentence, he'd probably insist that he hadn't, that our conversation had ended and we'd even said our goodbyes to each other. Uncle Preston, unfortunately, tended to start moving the receiver away from his ear several seconds before he hung up, which meant that he missed my last sentence as I frantically tried to ask for clarification on his latest scheme.

  I considered calling him back, but I knew that he wouldn't divulge any more information before tomorrow morning. For now, all I could do was wait - and hope that he wasn't imagining anything too crazy.

  I headed back into Vini, reclaiming my seat. "...and then, when I opened the bathroom, there he was, holding his pants in his hands!" Portia finished as I walked back up to the table, and Carter threw his head back in laughter, his big hand slapping down on the table and making all of the wineglasses jump.

  "Good story?" I asked as I slid back onto my stool.

  "Just recounting our last holiday party, that's all," Portia replied. "So, what was that call? Good news? You're getting a raise for all your amazing work?"

  "I wish." I snorted. "Uncle Preston's got some sort of crazy new idea, something that he wants me to handle for him."

  "What's the idea?"

  "He wouldn't tell me over the phone. I'm supposed to meet him at the gallery tomorrow morning, and he'll tell me then." I sighed, picking up my wineglass and swirling the liquid inside. Suddenly, my appetite for the drink - along with my earlier good mood - had vanished. "I'm sure that it's going to be something wild, though."

  Both Portia and Carter fell silent, neither of them quite meeting my eye. I knew what they were both thinking; just a minute earlier, we'd been toasting how my life was finally starting to settle down. Now, not five minutes later, I had something new hanging over my head, some crazy new task.

  "Your life just seems to attract all sorts of excitement, doesn't it?" Portia finally remarked. "It's like you're a magnet, drawing in all sorts of adventures."

  "Adventures. Yeah, that's one way to put it," I said back to her. I threw back the rest of my wine, barely even tasting the liquid as it slid down my throat. "Or maybe I'm cursed, and I can't ever just relax and coast. Maybe I need to find an old gypsy woman and get her to break the spell on me."

  "You don't know what your uncle has in mind," Carter pointed out reasonably. "Maybe it's just something easy, something little."

  "I'd love if that was the case." I shook my head. "But there's this little voice in the back of my head that's insisting that it's going to be huge, and involved, and crazy, and impossible. And somehow, I'm going to end up running myself ragged to try and get it all done." I looked over at the row of taps that all dispensed wines, considering another glass. "But until tomorrow, I've got no way of knowing what I'm facing. I'm stuck in limbo."

  "Sounds like you could use a distraction," Carter offered.

  "Sure, if there's anything that can distract me-" I glanced up, and the rest of my sentence died on my tongue.

  His words had been casual, spoken in a soft and even tone - but the heat was back in Carter's eyes, and his expression nearly melted my undergarments into a puddle on the floor! He rose up off of his stool, sweeping my wineglass away from my unprotesting fingers, and I let him clear it. The force of his need for me, his hunger, hit me like a wrecking ball slamming into the side of a crumbling building.

  Portia, even sitting off to the side, caught a blast of that arousal. "Well, looks like I'll be heading off to go clean up my own apartment," she said quickly, swallowing her last sip of wine so that she could hold the glass out to Carter as well. "It's been fun, tonight!"

  Normally, most people would have let it go there. But because Portia was Portia, born without a filter between her mouth and brain, she gave me a bawdy wink. "Although if I'm any sort of judge, you two are going to be having a lot more fun tonight than me!"

  "Portia!" I snapped, even as I felt my cheeks blushing crimson. She wasn't wrong, of course, which just added to the heat coursing through my face. "Don't just yell it out there for everyone to hear!"

  "And speaking of having fun, what about you?" Carter joined in, speaking over my shoulder from behind me. His hands slid up and wrapped loosely around me as he spoke; the gesture seemed casual, but I had to stifle a gasp at the touch of his fingers against my sides. His skin practically burned through my clothes, and I felt his fingertips flex against me! I could tell that he was already thinking of what was still to come tonight.

  "What about me?" Portia asked, raising an eyebrow.

  "I mean, we need to find you a man, someone to come out with us on nights like this and round out our little group." Carter's fingers slid down along my side, running over the curve of my hip. I imagined that hand guidin
g me as he took me, as our bodies came together, and had to bite my lip to hold back a moan.

  Portia just shrugged. "I'm in no rush to find the right guy. At some point, he'll stumble into my life, and I'll have to give up my wild, exciting lifestyle and settle down, turn into an old fuddy-duddy like you two."

  "Portia, we're the same age!" I protested, outrage momentarily managing to hold its own against the growing tide of lust.

  She waved a hand at me, like this fact didn't really matter much. "Still. I've got plenty of fun options here. You two go get out of here, get into bed by nine PM like senior citizens."

  I opened my mouth to object again to this, but Carter beat me out, speaking before I had a chance. "You heard the lady's orders," he murmured to me. "Let's get you off to bed."

  When the words came from his mouth, I failed to even consider resisting. "Okay," I whispered, his hands hot on me as he pulled me out of my seat, out towards where his luxury sedan was parked next to my blue pickup, out towards my apartment, my bed...

  We somehow made it back to my apartment building without any accidents, Carter following behind me, his headlights a constant in my rear-view mirror. I parked and held the front door to my aging apartment building open for him to come in with me.

  "And hello to you, Salem," Carter said as I unlocked the front door to my little apartment, bending down to scratch at the ears of my cat as he paraded in between our legs. Salem's purr grew into a rumble like a tiny lawnmower as he circled around us, covering both of our outfits with a fine layer of black cat hair and blinking up at us with luminous green eyes.

  "He's only being nice to you because he's hungry," I pointed out to Carter, as the man bent down to rub the cat's back. Salem sank down to the floor and closed his eyes into slits, occasionally arching his back up so that Carter's fingers hit just the right spot.