Flirting With Forever (31 page)

“Did you ever hear from that weird guy again?” Anastasia asked, tucking the sheet around her. Jacket had been stil so long she wondered if his heart had given out. Was it her fault orgasms required somewhere between twenty-four and thirty-eight minutes of hammering friction? She’d done it once in nineteen minutes, but that had been with a vibrator and the sex scene from
Wild Things,
and she could hardly ask Jacket to incorporate anything more into his already overloaded routine.

“Wh-what weird guy?”

Christ, he sounded like her eighty-three-year-old grandpa waking from a nap. “Rusty the repairman-slash-mil ionaire.”

“Ahhhhhh, no. Not real y.”

“Not real y?” Anastasia had wondered about the guy.

Despite the lowbrow togs, there had been something incredibly sexy about him, that capable, workingman sexy, the kind of guy that could pound you over the breakfast counter while he’s digging out the nail file that accidental y chewed up your garbage disposal—not that that had happened to Anastasia, of course, except that once, and then the guy had stil insisted on being paid, the Neanderthal. She had wondered what Rusty was doing with Cam. Cam was not exactly known for sexy boyfriends, a generalization that firmly included Jacket, whom Anastasia found to be too short to be good for anything except proving she could get whatever her sister had.

“Wel , his ‘associate’ was over the other day talking to Cam.”

“An associate? Plumbers have associates now?”

“He’s not a plumber. Apparently he’s a painter.”

“Real y?” Not that painters had associates, either, as far as she knew. Nonetheless, this was getting interesting.

“Yeah, come over here and look at this for a minute.”

Jacket dragged himself up to sitting with a groan and pul ed himself out of bed. She padded over beside him.

He picked his cel phone off the easel and opened the photo album icon.

Jesus, it looked like a Peter Lely!

“It’s supposed to be a Peter Lely,” Jacket said.

“No shit.” But what was infinitely more amazing was that it was a Peter Lely–style portrait of Cam. Or so it seemed to be. Anastasia grabbed the phone and expanded the image with her fingers as much as she could. The artist had captured his sitter in a timeless, ethereal glow and, typical of Lely, who had nothing of the realist about him, her face was idealized, as if the veil of imperfection had been lifted.

She could have been Cam, an Irish noble-woman or even Venus.

The woman wore an olive-gold dressing gown that hung off one shoulder, the folds of the fabric fal ing graceful y down her arms and across her lap. Her hair was loose, hanging in tousled waves over flawless, pale shoulders and a hint of bosom that disappeared into the gentle curve of the gown’s neckline. But it was the expression on her face that set it apart from the usual Lely. The woman’s eyes were crinkled in pleasure, as if he’d captured the moment after shared laughter. With its mix of formal and intimate, it was exactly like Lely.

“It looks like him, but I don’t know.”

“I saw it. Trust me. The overpainting, the glazing could have come straight out of Vermeer. The draping and use of light was remarkable. Hasn’t been anything like it in the last century except maybe Hopper.”

“Where did she get it?” Anastasia asked, but Jacket did not answer. He was staring at the painting, obviously distressed. “What is it?” she said.

“Look at it. He loves her.”

Anastasia looked again. Jacket was right. Taken as a whole, the painting was an ode, a paean, and if the woman did not love the painter in return, then she was on the verge of it. Her eyes glittered, her carriage was loose and open, like that of a woman who is letting herself go for the very first time.

“C’mon,” she said. “If it’s a Peter Lely, it can’t be Cam.”

Jacket moved the screen until the woman’s hand showed. “The ring,” he said. “It’s hers.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve seen her wearing it almost every day for the past four years. It was your mother’s.”

“Nothing personal, but I think you’re imagining things. In any case, though, if it is Cam, it’s not a Peter Lely.”

Anastasia frowned. “The technique … It just looks so much like a Peter Lely.”

Jacket snorted. “Maybe it is, just a different Peter Lely.

Did I tel you that this Rusty guy told me his real name was Peter Lely.”

“He
did
?”

“Yeah, that day he was here. I didn’t tel you?”

“No.”

“And what’s even weirder is what the guy who brought the painting here said.”

“Yeah?”

“Apparently he was trying to give it to Cam, and he said to her, ‘Sentiment aside, do you have any idea how much a Lely is worth in today’s market?’”

“He said that?”

“Yeah.”

“And what did Cam say?”

Jacket sighed. “‘Not enough to tempt me a second time.’

She didn’t want it. The guy left it next to the front door, which is when I took a snap of it. And it’s a good thing I did because it was gone an hour later.”

Wel , the answer to how much it would be worth, Anastasia knew, was more than a mil ion dol ars—that is, if it were a real, undiscovered Lely. The question now was, what the hel was it, and more important, what were Cam and the associate up to?

“So now Peter-slash-Rusty sits over in Aldo’s there across the street every afternoon.” He jerked his thumb toward Washington Road.

Anastasia peered down into the lighted streetscape.

Aldo’s coffee shop was directly across from the building.

“How do you know?”

“Wel , first the associate headed there, so, just to find out, I went down to look. And there they were. That’s how I figured out he was working with the guy. Then I started to check. He—Rusty, Peter, whatever his name is—is there every day. Just like clockwork. Jesus, I’d swear to God they were having an affair, but I don’t know how since I’m here al day and she’s at work.”

“Poor Jacket. Infidelity is such a trial.”

Jacket didn’t reply, and the look in his eyes, stil locked on the portrait, suggested he hadn’t heard.

“‘Not enough to tempt me a second time,’” he said. “That goddamn wel means there was a first.”

“Wow, you’re in early.”

Jeanne flipped on the overhead light. Her boss did not usual y make it to the museum before nine or nine thirty, but ever since she’d switched the Van Dyck book to a Lely book, it was like she’d been working off some sort of cross-century caffeinated rocket fuel, appearing in the office before the sun rose, shooting off emails in the middle of the night and general y being even more of a pain in the ass than usual. Of course, it didn’t help that the gala was tomorrow and the board meeting to decide the new director the day after that. Jeanne prayed Cam would be chosen.

That way Jeanne could ramp down to only helping run one of the biggest art museums between New York and Chicago instead of helping run the museum and serving as gopher on al this Lely crap.

Jeanne said, “Are we supposed to be reviewing the interpretive stuff ?” One of Cam’s jobs for the exhibition was ensuring every piece of art was properly notated and, whenever possible, put into context.

“Done.”

“And the insurance riders?”

“Done.”

“And the docent guide?”

“Reviewed and approved.”

“What about your Van Dyck? No promotion, you know, without that little two-point-one-mil ion-dol ar line item on your résumé.”

“It’s not
my
Van Dyck. And it’s in transit as we speak.”

Cam had been a powerhouse of efficiency for the last three weeks, clearing away mountains of museum work like a battalion of army tanks in order to preserve as much time as possible for her writing.

“So,” Cam said without looking up from the monitor. “Is this al we can find on him?”

Jeanne sighed. By “him,” of course, Cam meant “Lely.” It had been the only “him” in her life for the past few weeks. It was a wonder Jacket hadn’t given up on Cam and gone back to London. She dropped her bag on the floor and hung up her coat.

“Yes, you’re now official y the most knowledgeable person on Earth about a subject no one real y cares about. I believe there’s a special wing of the Star Trek Society that wil be honoring you soon.”

“No, I mean is this al ? Weren’t you getting in an article f r o m
Burlington Magazine
?” Cam was at her desk surrounded by a dozen open books. When she was real y engrossed in what she was writing, as she was now, the keyboard clicked like a Geiger counter, punctuated by cracks loud enough to make Jeanne jump when she hit ENTER at the end of a paragraph.

“I guess the mimeograph’s working kinda slow on their end. The article’s from 1932.”

“Christ!”

The look on Cam’s face reminded Jeanne she needed to pick up some bug spray on her way home. “Maybe you’d like to pul up a chapter on England on your magical little Amazon flying carpet and hop on over there yourself ?”

Cam shook her head in disgust and returned to typing.

“You know, you don’t actual y have to have the book done by the board meeting,” Jeanne said. “You only need a contract for it, which you already have.”

“This book is practical y writing itself.” Cam hit the ENTER

key so hard Jeanne wondered if the keyboard was going to flip in the air. “I am awash in heavenly inspiration. Meeting Peter Lely was just what I needed.”

“
Heavenly
is the word for it, al right. You’re like an angel.”

“
What
?” Cam grimaced fiercely in her admin’s direction.

“Heavenly,” Jeanne said louder. “I said you’re like one of our Father’s celestial seraphim.”

Cam grunted. She dug into the stack of books, holding two up with her elbow, and flipped the pages of a particularly large and musty-looking folio while attempting to keep the whole improbable Jenga tower from taking her little easel, the dead Christmas cactus and about sixteen Flair pens over the edge like a biblio-Mount Etna.

“Dammit!” she cried. “There’s just not enough information on Ursula.”

“Information? I thought we decided you were going to make this stuff up.”

“I-I—” A warm pink crawled across Cam’s cheeks. “I’m not going to make it al up. And there’s nothing official anywhere about his marital status. A good author, you know, checks at least some of the facts.”

“Yeah, but who cares whether some woman whose last name we don’t even know was married or wore a wedding band or liked apples? Apples? I mean, real y! Yesterday you had me spend an hour with a magnifying glass trying to tel if her hair was natural y curly or curled with a curling iron.”

They both turned to look at the book that held the plate of the demurely capped Ursula, which Cam had placed on an easel on the bookcase, right next to a sketch of the same woman, entitled “Lady Lely.” “I mean, c’mon,” Jeanne went on, “who’s going to care unless you’re—Oh my God! You’re jealous!”

“I am
not
jealous.”

“You told me nothing happened. I fel to my knees, praying something would happen, but you swore to me, nope, nothing happened.” Now it al made sense to Jeanne.

The book in which the sketch appeared—the sixteenth that had been ordered from various booksel ers around the globe—had arrived earlier in the week, and Cam, who flipped through it madly after the package landed on her desk, had sunk slowly into her chair when she’d come to that page and lapsed into a moody silence that lasted for the rest of the day.

It took two more seconds for Jeanne’s brain to catch up.

“Lady Lely,” she said. “It’s the title. That’s why you’re so upset. He didn’t tel you he was married.”

“I told you, nothing happened.”

“Nothing happened? You cal ed me, wearing nothing but a silk sheet and raving so hard about what fun it was to pose naked, I thought my phone was gonna catch fire. If you didn’t get laid after that, there’s nothing left for you except an IV and bed restraints. No wonder he came barreling back after you. The poor guy’s probably got an erection that reaches from here to the Battle of Trafalgar.”

“He didn’t come back for me. I told you that.”

“You have told me exactly nothing since you started revising the Van Dyck biography. You told me nothing when your publisher did an about-face on the book and suddenly it was about Lely instead of Van Dyck. ‘I miscalculated,’ you said. You told me nothing when I dropped not one but two big-as-life cross-century FedEx packages on your doorstep. You have done nothing but bitch, type, run up a tab at every book store between here and Tokyo and wrinkle your nose like you’re smel ing donkey poop—yes, just like that—since you got back, and now you’re tel ing me you didn’t sleep with him?”