Seduced by Her Two Masters: The Wolf Masters book 3
Anne Wade is a sculptor who lives at Pine Corner. She hires the Hot Springs Transportation company to deliver her valuable bronze sculptures to a New York gallery. Cody Winton, a driver, and Carson Mellor, the Hot Springs attorney, who are both werewolf shape-shifters, go along with her in the big rig to guard the sculptures””and her.
But bronze is ninety percent copper, and robbers can easily melt such artworks down and make a lot of money from it. How can two men keep Anne and her sculptures safe on such a hazardous journey?
EXCERPT
Anne Wade looked around her studio with a sense of mingled joy and frustration. For almost two years a big New York gallery had been begging her to send them some large sculptures, promising her they’d make them into a special exhibition if she did. With the arrival of the Hot Springs Transportation Company in her home town, Pine Corner, she’d dusted off the illustrations she’d designed, and was working flat out to sculpt the pieces.
Bronx Montaine, the manager of the transportation company, had promised her that he’d clear a full week in his schedule to deliver her pieces to the gallery. The date they’d penciled in for the road trip was at the end of the month. More than three weeks away. She’d need two or even three full days to crate up her pieces, wrapping them carefully for the journey, and another day to fill in all the paperwork.
Which left her a little over two weeks to finish the sculptures.
Four of the pieces were finished, standing in her studio, and looking magnificent. Well, she thought they were magnificent. Who knew what the art critics would think?
The fifth piece was almost finished. It was at the stage where she liked to leave a work for a week or so and then look at it again critically before making any final changes to it.
The sixth was””hmm. Was what? Begun? In process? Stalled?
Yeah, stalled.
And she had this unfinished piece as well and no idea which direction she needed to take with it.
Although she worked in bronze, the copper was so expensive she cast the piece first in plaster and only poured the bronze after a buyer had chosen the piece. Well, usually. In this case the expense was all hers. The New York gallery wasn’t interested in a bunch of plaster models. They only wanted the bronze statues. Which was fine, except this one just didn’t want to come to life. And her time to think and let it develop in her head had been cut short.
Anne walked around her studio, running her hands over the finished sculptures. They were her best work. If the critics didn’t like them, well, too bad. She knew she couldn’t have done any better with them.
But damn, it was a hell of a lot of money to be riding on a single exhibition, even if it was in a top New York gallery.
Anne sat at her drawing desk. For the sixth sculpture she’d started with a man bending over a stream, but the man was turning into a tree. Parts of him were human, like his head, and parts of him weren’t. His legs had become the tree trunk and his feet the roots. On paper it worked. In plaster, not so much. Now she couldn’t decide whether he was a man or a tree. Her charcoal sketches looked really good. He was neither one nor the other, yet both. But how to turn her idea into a three-dimensional physical sculpture eluded her.
“Er, excuse me. Ma’am?”
Anne jumped up, turning swiftly as a voice spoke from the doorway behind her.
He was youngish, her age probably, with curly brown hair and hazel eyes. She narrowed her own eyes at him and assessed his build. He’d be perfect for her troublesome bronze. The local teenagers she hired to help her lift her pieces and do other odd jobs were much too young and gangling for her imagination, but someone older, with some hardened muscles and broader shoulders, would be ideal.
“Take off your shirt.”
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Berengaria Brown
http://berengariasblog.blogspot.com/
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