Cover & Excerpt Reveal
Nothing gives art fraud investigator Luke Morganstern a bigger rush than busting forgers, the low-life criminals who dare victimize true artists. But when his latest job sends him to a remote cabin in the Oregon Coast Range, he’s stunned to discover the alleged forger is his former lover, Stefan Cobbe, the most gifted painter Luke has ever known.Stefan, left homeless and destitute after the death of his wealthy partner, doesn’t exactly deny the forgery -- he claims he doesn’t remember, an excuse Luke can’t accept.
But Luke’s elderly client suggests Stefan may be telling the truth and presents another possibility – a dark presence in the woods, a supernatural fury simmering for decades. Luke must face down his fear of the uncanny – and admit his feelings for Stefan – if either of them is to survive.
 | Genre: Paranormal Romance |
Excerpt, Bonus & More
Purchase links: Amazon Kobo iTunes B&NExcerpt:
Luke slammed the heel of his hand against his forehead. Shitgoddamnsonofabitch. He'd asked the fucking question. Now he'd have to listen to an answer he could never un-know. His chest heaved and he stared Stefan down, waiting for the words that would either damn him as a liar or condemn him as a forger. Either one would force Luke to choose between rebooting his career or destroying the man he’d once loved.
Stefan blinked. Blinked again, brows drawing together in a tight vee. "What?"
For some reason, maybe aftershocks from his Fiat-flashback or mortification that Stefan had witnessed his resultant freak-out, the bewildered affront on Stefan's face kicked Luke into art investigator asshole mode. "Did you think you'd get away with the fake Arcolettis because he was a relative unknown? Because all his pieces except one are in private hands?"
"Who the hell is Arcoletti?"
Luke guffawed, sounding unpleasant even to himself. "Good one."
"No. I mean it. Who's Arcoletti?"
"Jeremiah Arcoletti. American realist painter. Disappeared in 1945 along with all thirteen canvases from his last collection.” Luke's eyes popped wide. "Holy shit. That’s it, isn’t it? The lost collection." He poked Stefan's shoulders with stiff fingers, peripherally aware arguing in the middle of a dark mountain road was ridiculous and possibly suicidal, but he didn't give a flying fuck. They'd finish this now. "Is that your plan? Recreate the lost collection out here in your little studio in the big woods?"
"Stop it." Stefan batted Luke's hand away, his gaze fixed on the ground, avoiding the question. Pleading the artistic Fifth. Last refuge of the guilty.
"Where'd you see his work? The museum in Amsterdam? Hell, in all those years of prancing around with Marius, you could have seen every fricking one of the privately held pieces. Marius had the connections for it. You could toss his name around to get access to the Gordon letters too. Damn it." He dropped his arms, suddenly spent. "The Stefan I knew would have cut off his hands before he'd counterfeit another artist's work. What's happened to you?"
"What hasn't?" Stefan's eyes were wide, his pupils huge in the combined light of headlights and flashlight. "But I swear. I've never heard of this Arcoletti."
"No? Then tell me. What's coming off your easel these days? Studies in Monochrome? The Picture of Oregon Gray?”
"I…I don't know."
The feeble disavowal flipped Luke's asshole switch back on. "Don't give me that shit. You don't paint with your eyes closed."
"No. I just…" Stefan's voice was hoarse, and he clutched his flashlight to his belly, casting warped, inverted shadows across his face and distorting his features into a death's-head mask. "I've been painting, but I don't remember them. I'm not even sure how many there are."
"Artistic amnesia? Bullshit. You must have seen them when you handed them over to Boardman."
Stefan shook his head and pinched his eyes closed. "Thomas always loaded them into his car. I never looked. Not after…not when they were finished."
"Why? Guilt?"
"No. I was afraid…" Stefan wrapped his arms across his stomach, pointing the flashlight into the woods, and his face was his own again, drawn and haunted.
"Afraid of getting caught?"
"Afraid of what I'd paint next," he whispered.
Luke’s lips twisted. "Denial. It's what's for dinner. No wonder you're so fricking thin."
"Why is everything black and white for you, Luke? Let in some color, for Christ’s sake." Stefan forked the fingers of one hand through his hair. "Even a little gray would be a change."
Luke refused to allow the broken edge of Stefan's voice to influence him. He’d let sentiment sway him once before and it had cold-cocked his career. "Right or wrong, Stef. It's not that tough a choice."
"Fine." Stefan raised his head and met Luke's gaze, his shoulders shifting as if bracing for a blow. "You’ve already made up your mind, as usual. Go ahead. Turn me in to the art police."
Luke searched Stefan's face for some flicker of remorse, some acknowledgement he accepted the enormity of his crime. Nothing. Only the droop of his lips and a telltale glitter in his eyes, hinting at unshed tears. "Can you give me a reason not to?"
Stefan's breath caught in what might have been a laugh if his face weren't so bleak. "Guess not." He saluted Luke with a middle finger. "Enjoy your drive."
Stefan strode uphill, the beam of his flashlight bouncing from road to hillside, and Luke's last trace of adrenaline drained away. He sighed, deep and exhausted.
The lousy car sat perpendicular to the road, driver's door ajar. If he was lucky, he'd manage to creep down the hill by midnight. He shut the damn door before the brainless chime of the key alarm drove him nuts and leaned his forehead against the car roof, the beaded rain icy against his heated skin.
"Shit."
~~~~~~
Author Special Bonus:
It’s only natural, then, that when he was a senior at the local arts magnet high school, he and his friends decided to make a horror movie. Their script involved a too-good-to-be-true free vacation at a B & B that turned out to be the lair of cannibals. The location for the creepy isolated hotel?
Our house.
I didn’t know whether to be insulted or flattered.
True, the very remoteness of our out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere house can be alarming. We live on a six-mile-long, partially paved road, with no feeder streets – you can only enter from one end or the other. Our house, screened from the road by a stand of shaggy Douglas firs, sits at the back of a grove of ancient, gnarled walnut trees that have almost forgotten how to leaf out, and the blackberry brambles looming on either side of the bumpy driveway rival Sleeping Beauty’s daunting thorn hedge.
To my husband, this set-up is a dream come true. For him, our virtual fortress on the hill is the perfect sanctuary, a retreat where he never has to see a neighbor if he doesn’t want to. But for our extrovert daughter, who gets freaked out by the least hint of the weird, it’s a nightmare in the making. She avoids being home alone like she’d avoid Nick’s favorite disaster, and if for some reason she can’t, she turns on every light in the house. Every. Stinking. One.
Nick, pragmatic opportunist that he is, was perfectly willing to exploit the creep factor for his film, even though he’s just as quick to embrace the seclusion when he’s feeling anti-social.
My two heroes in Northern Light have a similar love/hate relationship with rural isolation.
For desperate painter Stefan, the remote cabin in the Oregon Coast Range, off the grid and hugged by the forest, is a refuge. There, away from the stress of his financial difficulties and the reminders of his personal failures, he finally has a chance to reconnect with his artistic vision and start to rebuild his shattered life.
But the solitude that Stefan finds so comforting nearly sends Luke, my art investigator, running for…well, not the hills. He hates those damn hills. For Luke, who once endured a disabling traumatic event in the mountains, safety is a well-populated sea-level community, where he can see the horizon whenever he looks out his window, and know that he’s not trapped.
So how about you? City dweller or country cousin? Hustle and bustle or peace and quiet? Or are you like Nick, who’ll take which ever one suits his mood at the moment?
~~~~~~
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