"Fuck!" I shouted as I tossed my paintbrush at the canvas. It left a smear of deep maroon across what had been a sea of blue.

I'd spent nearly two hours with Lillian on Friday night, and by the time we parted ways, we'd both been sated. Physically, at least. But the turmoil in my mind hadn't truly calmed. On the surface, I'd had some peace – enough to sleep – but when I woke up on Saturday and tried to sketch out a new picture to paint, the paper remained blank.

By evening, I'd resigned myself to failure. Again. I picked up a book on Monet and managed to lose myself for a few hours. Yesterday, I hadn't even bothered to try. I sat in the dark and shadowed living room, staring at a TV I didn't really see, and wondered how I'd lost the thing that had always been my safe haven.

I could still remember the first time I picked up a paintbrush. I was six years-old, and Mom and I had gone to a mission on Christmas Eve because we barely had enough money to keep the lights on, so presents had been out of the question. We hadn't even had a tree. We'd hung lights and ornaments on coat hangers, and pretended it was a game. But Mom had said she wanted me to have at least one gift, so she walked up to one of the women there and asked where the gifts were...for teenage girls. Because she had a daughter who was still at work, and she wanted to get gifts for both of us.

I'd watched my mom eagerly pick through the choices until she'd found a manicure set, complete with nail polish and fake nails. Then she glanced over at me, walked over to another table, grabbed the first thing she saw and shoved it at me. As we walked away, I remember wondering if I should have told the lady that I didn't have a sister. Then I'd looked down at the box my mom handed me, and it had been like everything else disappeared.

It had been an introductory art set. And not just simple watercolors that would've been appropriate for a child my age. It had watercolors, finger paints, and a couple tubes of more expensive water and oil based paints. There'd also been different brushes and sponges, a few sketching pencils, charcoal pencils, and even a palate knife. And the sculpting clay that even now I tried to forget.

It hadn't been until I was in my teens that I realized someone had spent a lot of money putting that box together. I even tried to find out, but I'd never been able to learn who had been responsible for saving my life.

Because that's what happened. As my mother had spent more and more time with her various boyfriends, I'd lost myself in the world of colors and textures. I didn't just love how the colors played off each other. I loved how different techniques could give the identical picture a completely new look and meaning.

When I'd been picked up by Child Protective Services after spending a month and a half by myself at the age of ten, painting had been my solace. When my mother had come with a man she'd introduced as my father, I'd expressed myself through art. When my father sent me to boarding school because he hadn't known how to handle having a child, painting had come with me. When he'd had a stroke in the middle of my senior year of high school and had lingered in the eight years that followed, art had been my salvation.

It was the one thing in my life I'd been able to count on. It had never abandoned me...until now.

"Son of a bitch," I muttered as I kicked at a crumpled paper towel. The still-wet paint on it left a smudge of green on my bare foot. I'd been trying to create something with the paper towel as a medium, but I'd lost the vision partway through, just like I had with everything else.

It had never been this hard. Not in this way. It was work, like all art, and anyone who said otherwise either didn't know what the hell they were talking about, or they'd never seen anyone who'd created anything of quality. I'd heard someone once compare art to exercise. No matter how much you loved it, and how much natural ability you had, it still needed blood, sweat, and tears if it was going to be any good.

But it had never been like this before.

Like I was reaching deep inside me for something that had always been there, and I'd come up empty. Even the desire to create was waning, and with its loss came the fear that it would never return. That I would lose this refuge.

I was thirty-three years-old and hadn't needed to worry about money from the moment Benjamin Gooding accepted me as his son. I was his only heir, so I'd been in control of his massive estate since his stroke. When he finally passed, I inherited it all, including a villa in the south of France, a share in a Napa Valley winery, a house in the Hamptons, and the family mansion on the Upper East Side, which was where I lived most of the time.

Even though it was far too large for just me, I kept it because I knew how important family had been to my father. We hadn't been close, and I'd been a handful, but he never made me feel like a burden, not even when I spent a couple years in boarding school. By the time I was sixteen, he turned half of the first floor into a studio for me, putting in massive windows to allow in as much natural light as possible. He also added a private entrance and private staircase to the third floor so that I could come and go as I pleased without worrying about disturbing him.

I scratched my head as I wandered over to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows. Maybe the problem was that I needed to get out of the city. I could go to the Hamptons for a while. I had a smaller studio there. Or maybe I needed to get away from the East Coast all together. My friends and I shared a house in Aspen that might be just what I needed. Mountains could give me a new perspective.

Except I knew the problem had nothing to do with where I was. It was me. I was off-balance, as if the axis of my world had somehow shifted without me knowing it and everything was off-kilter.

I'd read somewhere that a true explorer might use a compass, but that he also knew how to navigate using the stars. There were things that could throw off a compass's ability to find true north, but if a person studied the stars and their places in the sky, he could never really be lost.

And that's what it felt like, I realized. Like I'd spent my whole life using a compass to find direction and had never bothered to learn any other way, so when something had come along to mess with it, I wasn't able to regain my footing.

I needed to look to the stars.

The idea of constellations and planets whirled through my head, as if searching for some spark of life, of creativity, to give it form. It was right there, just out of my grasp, and I knew there was some essential part that hadn't quite clicked into place. A part that was necessary before I could see the big picture.

I was still musing over it when the sound of the doorbell interrupted my thoughts. I'd ordered lunch from my favorite restaurant and asked them to bring it to the private entrance, so I didn't bother looking to see who was there. The moment I opened the door, I wondered why the hell someone who looked like that was delivering my samosa and chicken tandoori.

She was just a couple inches over five feet tall and slender, with the sort of delicate features that immediately made me feel like someone should be protecting her rather than letting her wander around the city by herself. She wore a simple steel gray blouse and a plain black skirt that seemed way too fancy for such a mundane job. Her rich, sepia brown hair was pulled back from her face, with a couple escaping curls that I was far too tempted to twist around my finger just to see if it was as silky as it looked. Her eyes were an extraordinary light gray that reminded me of pure, pale ash that could almost be mistaken for snow.

Well, damn.