At the Brink (6 page)

“Except for a couple of details,” I said. “First, as you well know, we work with a limited number of qualified investors, a very specific set, whose interests would surely be diluted by your expansive clientele. Second, I like my independence. I value my flexibility and these would be the first casualties of joining you.”

“Working with me isn’t so bad.” Ernest waved his manicured fingers in the air. “Ask any of these fine gentlemen sitting in this room. Perhaps we can add some additional profit to entice you.”

“It’s really not about money for me.”

“I know you’re a workaholic,” Ernest said. “We would keep you very busy doing some very interesting stuff.”

“You’re missing the point,” I said. “I don’t like to be told what to do and I don’t share my toys well.”

“You sound like a toddler.”

“I also bite when I get cranky.”

Everybody in the room laughed. I looked at my watch. I’d allotted an hour to this meeting and it had already lasted two. I tapped my fingers on the table.

“Surely there are others in your company that would see the benefit of this merger.” Ernest adjusted his silk tie. “Thomas, you’ve been at this for many years. What do you think?”

“It’s Josh’s call,” Thomas said. “All of us at Phoenix Prime will support his decision.”

“I tell you what,” Ernest said. “How about if I throw in some generous contributions to the Healing Warrior Development Fund, the Rubicon Project and the Houses for Heroes Program?”

Son of a bitch. As if the obscene offer wasn’t enough, now he was trying to bribe me with charity. I refused to sell out my investors. “The answer is no, Ernest.”

“But...”

I was done listening. Instead, I glanced at my phone, scrolling down my texts. My heartbeat tripped. There it was, a new text from Lily.

“Time to call it a day.” I ended the meeting, riling Ernest but managing a quick exit. I’d fended off one assault. Now it was time to launch a new offensive.

I clicked on Lily’s text as soon as I got into my private elevator. Her efforts brought another smile to my face. Was this her definition of outrageous? She stood in front of the same mirror again, but this time without her bra, shielding her nipples with one hand while taking the picture with the other. At the bottom of the picture she’d added one word.

Please.

I’ll admit that I found the picture provocative, but only because it was Lily. I’ll also admit to another hard-on, but that’s because I was in the grip of a major obsession. What should have been a simple requirement was turning out to be a monumental feat. That’s what I got for deviating from both my mission and my usual uncomplicated type. But the thought of giving up now was inconceivable.

It pays to be a winner.

With a muted chime, my private elevator doors slid open at the lower garage level to reveal my favorite sedan—a custom silver Audi S8—and my driver, Amman, holding open the passenger side door. I settled into the back seat, pulled up the last report I had from Riker and punched in the address into my cell’s GPS.

“Back Bay?” Amman said, buckling into the driver’s seat and starting the car.

“No,” I said. “Head to the North End.”

Twenty minutes later, we parked on a narrow street across from Vinnie’s Italian Diner. I asked Amman to wait and went inside. It was late and the dinner rush was over. The restaurant’s booths were empty and only a couple of locals lingered at the bar. I took off my jacket and, after loosening my tie, sat in one of the diner’s back booths.

The black giant who came to take my order was Vinnie himself, very different from the little Italian grandpa I’d expected.

“Yo, friend, what can I get you?” Vinnie spoke in a thick Cajun accent.

“You’re not from around here,” I said. “And I’m betting you’re not from Italy either.”

Vinnie’s cackles echoed in the small dining room.

“New Orleans,” he said. “Katrina sent me off. My daddy always said I should’ve learned to cook gumbo and jambalaya, but my mamma liked her pasta, so ya’ll got lucky.”

“Is Lily here?” I asked.

“Lily?” He gave me a second look. “She’s here, doing inventory in the back. Are you a friend of hers?”

“You could say that.”

The man scratched his head and gave me another, not-so-friendly look. “You ain’t wishing da lady harm, are you?”

“Of course not.”

Vinnie crossed his arms, casually flexing his powerful muscles. “’Cause I’m not above thrashing anybody wanting to harm her.”

“You don’t have the exclusive there,” I said. “I’d throw a few punches in that brawl.”

Vinnie nodded approvingly. “Why then, am I right thinking you’re not one of them friends of Martin Poe?”

“A hundred percent right.”

“Good,” he said. “’Cause if you were, I was gonna give you a good talkin’ to.”

“I’ve heard about him.”

“Oh, so you know,” Vinnie said. “People like Poe give women hardship and men a bad name. You’d think he’d appreciate a kind and pretty wife like he has. But no sir, he don’t. Every penny she makes, he spends. And she’s so nice. Hardworking too. He ought to be culled from the herd, if you get my drift.”

“Oh, I get your drift all right.”

He cocked a brow. “You know Lily’s a good girl, right?”

“I know.”

“You keep it that way, you hear me?”

“I hear you.”

I settled down to wait for Lily. The urgency buzzing in me was distracting, not to mention disturbing. I’d been type A all my life—but this? This was different. I had trouble differentiating between doing the right thing and doing what I wanted, between infatuation and obsession, fixation and compulsion. Was this a positive development or a catastrophic setback?

Lily dropped her pen when she saw me. “What are you doing here?”

“Relax.” I picked the pen off the floor and handed it back to her. “I just want dinner and some company if you can spare it.”

She gulped so loudly that I actually heard it.

“Not that kind of company,” I said. “Just talk, that’s all.”

For a moment, she didn’t know what to do. Dressed in her black waitress uniform, with her hair up in a messy bun and hardly any makeup on, she looked cute. She was attractive precisely because she didn’t know she was pretty. Her kind of beauty was rare, down to earth and unpretentious. It didn’t hurt that the black slacks cupped her ass nicely.

At last, she took a deep breath and looked down to her pad. “What will you have?”

“What do you recommend?”

“The linguini with clams is very good,” she said. “That is, if you like clams.”

“I love clams,” I said. “Do you?”

“I guess.” She blushed.

“Let’s have two of those.”

“Oh, no, I can’t. I’m working.”

“Vinnie,” I called out. “Lily here says she can’t have dinner because she’s working. What do you say to that?”

“I say you’re da last customer tonight and she needs some meat on them bones.”

“You heard him,” I said. “Let’s get dinner going.”

The food was a pleasant surprise. The sauce was crisp, the clams fresh and the pasta perfectly cooked. It turned out we were both hungrier than we thought. Lily fidgeted when she first started eating, but Vinnie’s Chianti helped her relax. I poured her another glass.

“Friend of Bill’s?” she asked when I took a sip of my water.

“Friend of my liver,” I said.

She gave a startled laugh, a joyful sound that infused me with an instant sense of accomplishment.

“So,” I said, riding on the high of her laughter. “When did you first become interested in art?”

“Word is I grabbed onto the brush on the day I was born.”

“Really?” I said, rolling a forkful of linguini. “How so?”

“It’s an old, boring family story.”

“I want to hear it.”

“The thing is,” she said, playing with her fork, “my father was a painter.”

“Leonard Boswell,” I said, “not just a painter, but a famous one.”

“I forgot.” She flashed me a flustered look. “Due diligence, eh?”

“Due diligence indeed,” I said. “Go on.”

“Okay, well, Mother used to tell the story. When I was born, my father was painting one of his famous works—
Churning Seas.
He locked himself in his studio and painted nonstop through the delivery. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but he was known for being, well, a little...temperamental?”

“I read something about that.”

Temperamental was putting it mildly. Leonard Boswell had been one of the most important painters of his generation. For all his talent, he’d indulged in a bottomless craving for alcohol and gambling, which is why—according to Riker’s report—at the time of his sudden death, when Lily was twelve, Leonard Boswell left his daughter and widow financially ruined.

Lily skipped all of that. “After the birth, my father wandered out of his studio. His beard had grown unruly. His eyes were dazed, but when he reached out to meet me, his baby daughter, he offered me his pinkie. Instead, I latched onto the paintbrush he still held in his hand. Ever since then, my mother says I’ve been hanging on to the brush.”

In my mind’s eye, I could see the wide-eyed, button-nosed, pink-faced baby that Lily must have been, wrestling the paintbrush from her bewildered father. The visual made me smile.

“Great story,” I said. “Did Leonard teach you to paint?”

“I spent hours doodling beside him,” she said. “He taught me the basics, but he was a master of
chiaroscuro
. He understood the relationship between light and darkness in ways I never will.”

“So,” I said. “When’s your next showing?”

She put her fork down and pushed the plate away. “Um, never?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t do showings.”

“Why not?”

“They require personal appearances.”

“And?”

“All those people make me sick.”

“But you went to the benefit the other night.”

“Only because Martin made me go,” she said. “I threw up before, during and after.”

“Jesus,” I said. “So if you don’t do showings, how do you sell your paintings?”

“I don’t,” she said. “The paintings I’ve sold have been word of mouth, friends and such.”

“That’s a slow way to fame.”

“I don’t want fame,” she said. “I just want to paint.”

I believed her. “What are you working on now?”

“Sketches mostly, nothing major. The community center where I teach asked me to donate a painting for their auction, but paint is expensive and I don’t have the time right now anyway.”

Her old phone rang, not the one I’d given her, but her battered, ancient one. She looked at the number and sighed.

“Who is it?” I said, refilling her glass.

“It’s Martin. He’s been calling every hour. He wants me to come home.”

“Will you?”

“I don’t have a choice.” She sipped on her wine. “Bree’s partner returns today.”

“Who’s Bree?” I pretended I didn’t know the woman’s address, social security number, credit report history, educational background and current place of business.

“Bree is my best friend since elementary school.”

“You met in elementary school?”

“She was the trouble maker,” Lily said, perking up. “I was the shy one. When my dad died, I grew even quieter. My teachers worried. And then one day, during recess, this chubby, bespectacled terror comes over to me and says, with this really funny nasal voice that she still has, ‘I heard your daddy died.’”

“She said it just like that?”

“That’s Bree for you.”

“What did you do?”

“I just kind of shrugged,” Lily said. “Then Bree pulls out this horrible homemade puppet from her backpack, striped with uneven black and yellow felt lines, with crooked buttons for eyes and huge fuzzy antennae.”

“Were you scared of it?”

“Scared? Are you kidding me? I loved it!” Her smile lit her face. “I thought it was the sweetest thing anyone had ever done for me. When I asked what the puppet’s name was, she giggled and said, ‘It’s a Lily Bee!’ Get it? Lily B.?”

Her laughter tickled me all the way to my groin. I could get used to that sound. I could get used to the sparkle in her eyes as well. It warmed my gut and automatically widened the smile on my face.

“She calls me Lily Bee and I came up with a name for her too, Bree Cheese, you know, like the Brie cheese?”

“Yeah, I know, the fancy cheese,” I said. “Why don’t you just move in with Bree?”

“She’s in a serious relationship,” Lily said. “I don’t want to intrude. As of tonight, I’m back where I pay the rent.”

“I’d be happy to put you up.”

Alarm flickered in her eyes.

“No obligations,” I said. “At least while you’re thinking about us.”

“No, thanks,” she said, long, nervous fingers playing with her napkin. “I don’t want your charity.” She flashed me a shy glance and looked away.

“What is it?” I said.

She hesitated then asked. “Why me? That ballroom was full of beautiful women. All of them wanted to be in your bed and you knew that. Why choose me?”

I couldn’t very well tell her about the jolts, or the flashbacks, or how I’d felt revived for the first time in a long time when I met her. I couldn’t tell her how much I appreciated what she’d done for Chavez either. I couldn’t tell her that my heart seized when I kissed her or that I got high just from breathing her scent. But I stuck close to the truth.

“You’re beautiful and desirable too.”

Her stare narrowed on my face. “Are you making fun of me?”

“No way,” I said. “Look, you made an impression on me. Okay? I want you, and I usually get what I want. You want me too, I can tell, even if you don’t want to recognize it. So here’s my take on it. Let’s work through this as quickly and efficiently as we can.”

Her gaze lingered on my face. I got the sense I’d disappointed her somehow.

“Do you want to tell me why you really came here tonight?”

It was an excellent question. “I thought maybe if we talked, you’d feel better about everything.”

“Is that all?”

Damn, her instincts were good. “I also want to talk to you about the picture.”

Her mouth furrowed into a little pout. “It won’t do either,” she said. “Am I right?”

“It’s not what we talked about.”