Flirting With Forever (34 page)

Cam felt the light on her lids but she pushed herself back into the cocoon of blankets, and specifical y into the pair of warm arms that had led her through a slow, heated dream this last hour. She braided her fingers in the fur skimming that taut bel y and took in the musky scent laced with turpentine, stil tingling from the foggy after-fever of exertion.

Deeply, deeply she sunk into those arms, that chest, her leg like an insistent vine, drawing him closer. She could feel the press of that impervious weight and felt the fire rise again, like a wicked, unquenchable flame, between her thighs.

She brought her mouth to his ear. “Again,” she whispered. “I want you to—”

“Cam?”

Her eyes snapped open, and a sharp heat fil ed her cheeks. Jesus, why in God’s name was she dreaming of Peter?

Jacket had cracked her door and was looking in. With a groan, she sat up and rubbed her eyes, hoping what had just transpired was not obvious on her face. “What?”

“Cal for you, babe. You left your phone in the dining room. It’s Bal .”

She looked at the clock. Ten thirty! Holy crap! She’d been up until three typing. Somehow the story of Peter Lely just flew off her fingers. And last night had been the seduction scene. Poor Ursula, she thought. Swept off her feet by the sweet-talking artist. Little did she know his ego would eventual y muscle her out of his bed.

Not that the scene had had anything to do with Cam’s own state of wantonness, she told herself firmly as she scrambled to her feet, wrapping the sheet around her. It was only what came of prolonged deprivation and spicy tuna rol s after ten o’clock.

She could feel Jacket’s eyes upon her as she passed.

“I can see sleeping in agrees with you,” he said.

She grinned. Ever since he’d kissed her the day before, it was like a whole new Jacket had come to live with her.

“Are we stil on for tonight?” he asked.

A late dinner after the gala. Bal and Packard announcing the gift of the Van Dyck. The debut of Jacket’s new work. The board to convene the next day to elect the new director. Everything was heady and effervescent, and even if she hadn’t gotten that bolt that would tel her this was the right decision, Cam had decided she would give Jacket the answer he wanted to hear. Who gets a bolt in these energy-conscious days anyhow, she thought. Al you real y need is that steady, consistent hybrid hum to know you’re on the right track.

She nodded, and her heart made a wavering skip. He would move from the studio into her room that night.

Cam picked up her phone. “Hey, what’s up, Mr. Bal ?”

“Cam! You fox! How did you keep this hidden from me?”

“Pardon?”

“Here I thought you’d keep your old friend up-to-date on whatever you found.”

“Mr. Bal , I’m not fol owing you.”

“Come by, my dear, and we’l celebrate together. Hurry, though. I think my buddy at
Artforum
tipped the press. This is going to be huge—mostly, I suppose, because it
is
huge.” He gave a hearty laugh and hung up.

She looked at the phone, confused.

“What’s going on?” Jacket asked. “The old guy sounded excited.”

“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.”

Cam pul ed into Bal ’s stately driveway and rol ed her Accord to a stop. There were several cars there, none of which appeared likely to belong to Bal , who favored Bentleys and long, low Italian sports cars. A man stood talking on his cel phone in the yard.

Curiosity increasing, Cam jerked her hand brake and opened the door. The man in the yard pul ed the phone from his ear as Cam walked by. He was a guy who did stories for
Pop City,
the online city magazine. He’d done an interview with her a while back when the book sold.

“Hey, it’s
The Girl with a Coral Earring,
” he said amiably.

“Oh, wait. It’s got a different name now, doesn’t it?”

She cringed a little. “Yes.
The Artist and the Angel of the
Street
.”

“I wish I read historical stuff.”

“Hey, I don’t need you to read it. I just need you to buy it.”

He laughed and pointed toward the former stable.

“Everyone’s around back.”

Everyone?

Everyone?

She nodded her thanks and cut through the English garden Bal and wife had designed to complement the Tudor house and made her way to the massive brick out-building that ran along the north edge of the property. Bal had replaced the wooden carriage doors with a deceptively secure set of sliding ones. Cam pressed the bel and waited while two roving cameras turned their steely eyes in her direction. She smiled, waved, and a moment later, Bal ’s voice crackled to life on the speaker.

“There you are, my dear. Come in.”

The bel box made an unobtrusive
click,
and the door gave way.

She could hear the buzz of voices atop the narrow set of stairs to Bal ’s office. Rather than interrupt, she stepped around the Klee and the Kel y he had leaning against the wal of the darkened entry hal and walked toward the huge, wel -lit gal ery-cum-warehouse.

The change in lighting made her gasp unexpectedly, but when her eyes adjusted she saw why. Every wal , every ledge, every nook held a stunning white painted canvas.

Not just white. There were occasional undulating waves of black line and flashes of orange, and the white was not just white but a silky, warm, soft white, like gardenia petals, that made her want to leap onto the canvas and rol in it. At first she thought the works were identical in execution, despite the fact some were rectangular, some were square and the sizes ranged from three-by-four or so to wel over ten-by-ten. But, no, each painting held a different piece of the puzzle, a different nuance of the artist’s message. In some the lines were curved, in others the lines were angular, and in stil others there was no line at al . Then there were the intriguing swatches of orange in two or three of the canvases that seemed intended to shock. And the sheer number of canvases! There had to be forty paintings here.

She was dimly aware of the opening of the security door behind her and the
Pop City
guy stepping in. He was stil on the phone, and while she was whol y focused on the work in front of her, her mind picked up enough bits and pieces to figure out he was working on a story here.

She took a step back to try to let the sense of the work come to her. She had been taken in by the enormity of the effort, then her observation had cut from detail to detail.

She wanted to clear her head to see the col ection as a whole.

She closed her eyes and opened them.

This time her gasp reflected a sensibility struck to its core. The paintings weren’t simply a col ection of variations on an abstract theme. In a gestalt of understanding that nearly knocked her off her feet, she saw the lines transformed into the rise of a hip, the sensual extension of an arm, the peak of a nipple, an eye, the lacing of fingers. It was a woman—or the semblance of one—stretched over many canvases, first in the act of love, a hand over her head, gazing, half lidded, in primal rapture at her lover, then, postcoitus, resting languidly, and final y, locked in her lover’s protective arms as she slept, peaceful and secure.

The room grew warm—hot, even—and her breath quickened. She could feel the heat of the desire, the plain, unspoken need, and afterward, the joy in closeness. This artist—clearly a man, but not just any man—knew what it was to possess and to be possessed, by sex, by love and by joy. Cam, who had seen many an untoward canvas, found herself almost uncomfortable to be witness to such unfettered emotion, and especial y to be sharing the experience with a reporter she hardly knew. It was like peeking into the bedroom of happily married close friends without

their

knowing—the

image

embarrassing,

pornographic, yet in some way immeasurably reassuring.

As a work of art, it was amazing—breathtaking in its scale and knee-shaking in the range of emotions it portrayed, from lust and desire to pleasured weariness to deep love. And everything sprang from no more than a few dozen expertly scribed lines. She thought of Wyeth’s Helga paintings, the last time she had seen such an affecting opus, and as she did, she heard Bal enter the room, talking. She pushed that aside momentarily, though, too engrossed in the thought of Wyeth’s paean to his neighbor, the Scandinavian Helga Testorf, whom he painted scores of times, standing and lying down, dressed and nude, over the course of fifteen years, keeping the paintings secret until he sprang the whole col ection on an amazed art world.

In fact, it was Helga’s Teutonic red hair that—

Cam froze. The flashes of orange were not just an artistic embel ishment. They were patches of hair—long waves fal ing graceful y over shoulders or shorter coarse patches slipping intimately between pale thighs. And in a single heart-stopping instant she realized the patches, al of them, were hers. The slightly lopsided mouth, the upturned nipples, the beauty marks on the neck and cheek.

Everything was hers, hers, hers.

“… amazing, isn’t it? Why didn’t you tel me, Cam? How long have you known? It’s such an eyeful. And from a complete unknown.”

Bal was talking to her, though she couldn’t begin to summon a response, so horrifying was this assault on her privacy. She wanted to run, but her legs felt like they were made of rubber. She wanted to cry out, but her tongue was paralyzed.

“He won’t sign it,” Bal went on blithely, “but at least he titled it. It’s cal ed
Wednesday Afternoons
.”

Suddenly she felt prickles on her neck and knew with complete certainty Peter was behind her, watching her reaction.

“As for more details,” Bal said, “I have nothing to contribute. That’s just what I was tel ing this reporter, here. I know he thinks it would be a huge story in the art world, but our friend is quite insistent that the identity of the woman—”

“How
dare
you!” Cam wheeled around and shoved Peter hard.

“—was not to be revealed.”

Bal ’s eyes widened, but not as much as the reporter’s.

The
Pop City
guy looked at Cam, then said into his phone,

“Put me through to Reuters.”

“What in God’s name are you doing?” Cam demanded.

Chaos had exploded in the gal ery. The reporter reeled his story into the phone at double speed, like he was afraid it might slip away, while Bal , who knew how much the directorship meant to her and the deleterious effect this story would have on her chances, essayed a series of urgent, low-toned and undoubtedly fruitless pleas as to why the story, or at least the revelation that the subject was Campbel Stratford, should be buried. Three art col ector types trooped in on the heels of Bal ’s wife, who could be heard saying, “… It’s absolutely the Mount Everest of public fornications.” They were fol owed by a server carrying a tray of coffee and pastries who cal ed, “Careful, Natasha, careful,” as she tried not to trip over the family dog, and Natasha herself, who in true Labrador fashion bounded among the humans with a mouth ful of plush woodpecker as if she were the only creature on Earth.

“Painting is what I was doing,” Peter said irritably. “It is my livelihood, you may recal .” He wore a suit the color of midnight, a pale blue shirt open at the neck and a meticulously groomed three-day growth of beard that brought to mind an older Clive Owen. His hair had been cut short, bringing out the curl, and the dog made a beeline for him as if he had a pork chop in his pocket. Dogs, she thought philosophical y, should be taught not to reward the wicked.