Flirting With Forever (41 page)

“Someone who loves your sister, a post you may want to consider at some point. You should be ashamed.”

And she was.

Cam walked down the hal , stunned. Could Peter have been involved in this? She didn’t want to believe it. But he came here to stop her. He’d admitted as much himself. And who was more likely to have had access to an old Van Dyck letter? How would she know? Had everything been a lie?

Calm down. You’re blowing this out of proportion.

“Whoa!”

Jacket caught her by the waist in an effort to keep them both from spinning off their feet.

“What’s up, babe?”

She turned her face away and burst into tears. “I’m not going to be the director.”

“Oh, Cam.” He took her in his arms and held her tight.

“Who needs that stuffy old job anyway? You’re too smart for this place.”

“But I wanted it,” she cried into his soft lapel, then shuddered under another wave of emotion.

“I know, I know.” He patted her head.

“And they’re going to give it to Anastasia.”

“Jesus, they’ve lost the plot, then. It’s the only way to explain it. You’re so much smarter than she is, so much more capable, so much more equipped to lead.”

“It’s not fair. Nothing is.”

“It’s not. It’s absolutely not. C’mon, let’s get you into your office.”

He took her by the hand and led her down the hal and through the door.

Cam hurried to the tissues and tried to mop her eyes and cheeks. No job, no book and no more Peter—that is, if she’d ever had him. She knew she’d be okay—she always was—but three blows at once was too much for even her, and a fresh round of tears began to fal .

“The painting,” she said, gazing out the window. “It’s not a Van Dyck. I mean, I’m sure it is, but Packard has a letter or a page of a diary or something, and it’s clearly Van Dyck’s handwriting, and it says the painting was done by one of the apprentices in his studio. So now I have to tel Bal , the poor guy, and I have to resign. I have to. It’s a huge embarrassment to the museum. And in any case,” she said, turning, “if Anastasia is going to be the new director, I don’t real y want—Oh God.”

Jacket had found a seat, and now he stared, dazed, at a dozen photos arranged around her desktop. The photos of the
Wednesday Afternoon
paintings. In his hand were the interview notes from Bal . She recognized his tight block printing.

“Jacket …”

If he heard, he didn’t acknowledge it. He ran a hand over his forehead, opened his mouth to speak, but whatever it was seemed to catch in his throat. She knew what it must look like.

“Jacket, I’m sorry. I meant to tel you.”

“‘The reporter,’” he read from the paper in his hand, “‘wil be most interested in the lover angle. The paintings reveal a relationship that goes far beyond the usual rhetoric of artist and subject, seemingly beyond that of artist and lover.

Was Stratford Lely’s lover or just his muse? Does this relationship have any connection to Stratford’s recently announced fictography of Restoration painter Peter Lely?

And why is Stratford intent on keeping the paintings a secret?’”

The letter dropped, and he touched the photos hesitantly, only at the edges, as if respecting some imaginary boundary.

“They’re good,” he said, honestly. “Very good.” Then he dropped his head in his hands.

“Jesus, Jacket. I am so sorry. I …” She hadn’t posed for the paintings, but she had been Peter’s lover. “I should have told you. Once you came back in my life, even if we weren’t official y a couple, I owed you that much, at least. I know this must hurt. And I know it’s going to be embarrassing. I’m sorry.”

He leaned back in the chair, rubbing his mouth with a fist, and gave a faint, amused chuckle. “I wish we had the chance to start over. God knows I haven’t made it easy for you.” He sighed and stood. “You don’t owe me an explanation, but I’m grateful for it, anyway. I don’t want to lose you from my life, Cam, and I hope someday we can figure out how to make it work for us.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Me too.”

He gazed down at his boots. “
Are
you lovers?”

Her cheeks warmed. “Yes.”

“Is he the one? I mean, are you going to move in with him?”

“He lives somewhere else, so no, I guess. This is”—
was
, she thought—“just for now.”

He gave her a gentle smile. “I’d better get down there.”

“I have this.” She pul ed the ring out of her pocket and held it out to him. He opened his hand, and she dropped it in, letting the chain fal into a heap beside it. He closed his fingers around hers for an instant, then pul ed his arm back and looked. “Keep it. It never belonged to me, not in that way. It’s what you designed. I’d like you to have it. Anyhow, it makes my tooth throb whenever it’s close.”

She laughed.

He handed it back to her, and she unhooked the clasp, slipped the ring off the chain and placed it on her finger.

“Thank you, Jacket.”

He reached out and pul ed her into a tight embrace. “I love you, Cam.”

“I love you, too.”

With a final squeeze, he shook himself loose. He started for the door, then stopped himself. “Do you need help with Bal ?”

She shook her head. “Nah. I’l be fine. What’s a couple She shook her head. “Nah. I’l be fine. What’s a couple mil ion between friends, right?”

He smiled. “Right. I’l see you downstairs, then.”

“Yep.”

When he reached the hal , he turned. “He’d better fucking deserve you.”

I hope.

Peter stumbled blindly out of Anastasia’s office, ashamed of the trouble he’d caused and furious at his impotence to rectify it.

No one—not the lowest brute—deserves what I’ve
wrought.

He’d devised the plan with the sangfroid of a spider, dictating the wording to Van Dyck and placing the letter in his pocket sketchbook before going to Mertons’s workshop. That he regretted the plan as blackguardly almost as soon as he’d begun it and changed his mind about going through with it before arriving on Cam’s doorstep carried no weight to him in the moral calculation now. If it hadn’t been in his sketchbook, Anastasia would not have had the opportunity to steal it that day at the coffee shop. His selfish maneuvering had deprived Cam of a future and her profession. Mertons had been right when he’d said traveling to his future was akin to yel ing “fire” in a crowded theater. He’d destroyed her happiness, and she didn’t even know the extent or the cause—that is, until he could tel her and beg her forgiveness.

He stopped, surprised in his distracted state to find himself at Cam’s door.

His breath caught. Jacket had Cam in his arms. It was not a lover’s embrace, but it was fil ed with an abiding affection, and Peter convinced himself to be glad. This, after al , was the man who would care for her when he was gone.

He pul ed himself away from the door.
One thing settled.

But there was more he needed to do for her. He turned and headed for the stairs.

Alone, Cam slumped against the desk and stared, unseeing, at the smal unfinished painting on her desk. The events of the day were threatening to overwhelm her, and the gala hadn’t even begun. Saying good-bye to Jacket had felt like a door had closed in her life with an abrupt slam.

She felt adrift, rudderless, uncertain of Peter or her future.

More than anything, she longed to see Peter, to find out what he knew about that letter and to be reassured that what she had jettisoned everything for stil existed.

She sensed a presence in the doorway and wheeled around expectantly.

But it was Mertons, who regarded her with curiosity.

“Good evening, Miss Stratford. Do you know where I might find Peter?”

There was an undercurrent there she didn’t like. Her time with Peter couldn’t be over after only a few hours. It would be too cruel. “No,” she lied. “I haven’t seen him. Why?”

But the effusive, deferential Mertons of a few days ago was gone. He entered her office as if she were not present and scanned each of her bookshelves in succession. He was a man on a mission, and Cam could guess what it was. She had to work hard not to look at her laptop.

“Something I can do for you?” she asked.

“Miss Stratford, I’m going to be honest with you. We know how you’re traveling.”

“You do?” She forced her eyes forward.

“Yes. We’ve fixed the time tube to a book.
Inside the
Artist’s Studio
.”

Cam felt a faint sweat rise on her scalp. “Real y?”

“We believe there’s a time tube linked to a book in Romania. But we’ve had that copy under observation for years, so we thought you were relying on some other method, some hole we hadn’t yet discovered. However, the most recent calculations show a very similar Brown coefficient. Obviously you have found a way to get a copy.”

“Yes, because I like to do al of my reading in Romanian.”

“This isn’t a laughing matter.”

“Do you see me laughing? I would think the Guild has bigger fish to fry.”

Mertons frowned.

She said, “It means having more important—”

“I know what it means, Miss Stratford. I was thinking about where else you might keep your books. I’ve been to your apartment.”

“I do a lot of research at Chuck E. Cheese’s as wel . I find the quiet helps me concentrate.”

He narrowed his eyes, obviously sensing a fakeout, but dutiful y wrote the name down in his notebook.

“I recommend the pizza,” she added. “Close your eyes.

You’l swear you’re in Naples.”

He flipped the pen over, clicked a button and it started to flicker, like a smal computer monitor. He ran it across the note he’d just taken. Then he held it up like a thermometer and read, “‘Cheese, Chuck E. Indoor playground-slash-restaurant designed for kid parties. Best known for humanlike rat mascot and terrifying animatronic theater performers. Issues own coinage. Key words: headache, noise, heartburn, juvenile ululation.’” He gave Cam a look.

“I didn’t say it was for everyone.”

He clicked the pen again and the display went dark.

“Miss Stratford, I’m about to lose my patience.”

“Hey, it’s not my job to assist you every time you decide to go on a fishing expedition. Yes, I know,” she said, realizing she was beginning to sound like a one-trick pony as far as metaphors were concerned, “we’re big on fish here.”

“Would you be interested to know that the Guild has final y decided to invoke the O’Janpa Convention? Yes, Peter is about to be jerked back like a bad dog on a very short leash.”