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"Please, he's Xander and I'm Sebastian. And like most art brokers, he prefers to keep things understated. But I don't. Which is why you need to know I think your dragon is magnificent."
"Magnificent." She repeated the word as though she was more than a little surprised by his reaction to her art. She tipped her chin at the collection in the yard. "Most people call it junk."
Sebastian was impressed by how well she hid any sense of offense at the word junk. Still, he'd built his career on looking beneath the surface of people, and he could see that it did, in fact, hurt her. Maybe only a little, but he knew all too well how the small hurts could add up. Especially when it came to one's art and creative dreams.
Forcefully pushing away the thought of the dreams he'd given up so long ago, he told her, "I'm not most people. And I appreciate beauty when I see it."
"I'll take genius," she said with another smile. "I'll even let you get away with magnificent. But beauty?" She shook her head. "That's going a bit too far."
"No, it isn't. Take the elephant, for example. I'm amazed by the way the instruments fit the contours of the body, the legs, even the ears. How did you do it?"
"I used the bells from a couple of old sousaphones I found."
She said it as though it had been the easiest thing in the world, but he knew better. Knew just how hard it was to bring your vision to life. Knew, in fact, that it could be impossible to see that vision work out just right. But she'd done it not only with the elephant, but also with every other creature in her garden. And with an effortlessness that blew his mind.
"I suspect you're the only artist on the planet who can take the bell from a sousaphone and make it look as if an elephant's ears are flapping."
She tipped her head as if he'd just performed an astonishing feat. "Nobody's ever seen the intended effect before. I had to beat them into submission, of course--bend the rims, manipulate, and add to them, but that's exactly what I was going for. Flapping ears." She caressed the tubes forming the basic structure of the animal's haunches and he swore he could feel the heat of her touch all along his own muscles. "I used the tuning slides and the rest of the sousaphones back here. I've always thought musical instruments were like diamonds, that you should never throw them away."
He turned to find her startlingly green eyes on him again. The marks of the mask were starting to fade, leaving a beauty so pure, so fresh, it stunned him all over again. Even if her art hadn't blown his mind, Charlie herself was worth the price of admission to her backyard art museum.
"You found all this in junkyards?"
"And thrift shops. Parents make their kids join the school band, but after two years those kids hate it. And bye-bye trombone." She threw out her arm, and again he saw the play of muscles in her shoulders and along her throat. "I saw the sousaphone first. It looked like an elephant's ear--and suddenly I knew I needed to bring him to life." She spread her hands to encompass the structure made up of saxophones and horns, tubas and flutes, even drums. "It took me five years to find all the instruments."
"Five years?" She continued to surprise him. "For one project?"
"I worked on other pieces at the same time. And I also teach welding over at the junior college."
"It still shows a great deal of dedication to one vision." He understood that kind of dedication. At the age of eighteen, he and his four best friends, the Mavericks, had vowed to get out of the Chicago hellhole of a neighborhood they'd been born into and strike it big. They'd all made good on that pact. Clearly, Charlie Ballard had the same kind of single-minded vision.
"Five years of dedication to a piece of junk I can't even give away," she said with a smile. A smile content enough that he suddenly wondered if she'd ever really tried to find a buyer.
"Are you going to try selling it to me?"
"Do you want her?" Her eyes lit with humor as she nodded toward her small house on the other side of the acre. "I could use a new roof."
This time, he was the one laughing out loud. "Maybe one day I'll succumb to the need to take the elephant home with me, but today I'm not here for the elephant, the ram, the lion, the lizards, or the scorpions."
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"Scorpions?" She shook her head. "They're Zanti Misfits from The Outer Limits."
"You mean that sci-fi TV show from the nineties?"
"Not the remake," she said with obvious disgust. "The original."
He was hard-pressed to fight back his grin at just how much fun it was to talk with her. He couldn't remember the last time fun had factored into his relationship with a woman. Especially a lady he was senselessly attracted to. Not only was her art magnificent, but so was she. He wanted her with a sweet kick of desire low in his gut.
"Tell me more about these Misfits." Lord knew he'd felt like one when he was a kid, living with two alcoholics who often forgot they even had a son.
"They used to do TV marathons of The Outer Limits when I was a little kid," she explained. "They had the worst special effects, but the stories were great. 'The Zanti Misfits' was my favorite episode--all about expecting the unexpected. My dad had a big barrel of nuts, bolts, and screws in his workshop, and I was so inspired by the show I swear they seemed to build themselves. They were my very first sculptures, and every once in a while, even though I already have a zillion of them, I have to make another."
Suddenly, Sebastian realized there were Misfits creeping around everywhere. Small compared to the rest of her work, they were still fierce little creatures, their pruning-shear claws ready to snip the toes off trespassers.
"Is that how you get your ideas?" He wanted to plumb her creative depths, her mind. Hell, he wanted to delve into every single part of her. "You see something that inspires you and you just start building?"
"Sometimes," she mused, and he appreciated that all his questions didn't seem to bother her. "Or sometimes it's a place, like the church in San Francisco where you saw my dragon sculpture." The sun created a rainbow of reds in her hair. "A dragon was meant to sweep its tail over the path, barely missing Sunday parishioners. So I walked inside and asked if there was any interest in my building one for them."
