Flirting With Forever (8 page)

A Bernini. Jeez
. Lely was wealthy. There was no doubt of that. She whipped out her phone and hustled into the first door on the right. Then she froze. She wasn’t in a privy. She was in a smal alcove adjoining a much larger room in which two men’s voices could be heard. One was Lely’s.

“Sir David,” Lely said with impatience,“ ’Tis not a matter of an unfinished portrait. ’Tis a matter of a woman seated in my waiting room who desires to be painted.”

Lely spoke in a courtly bass, and Cam decided the undercurrent she’d heard there was Teutonic—a preciseness that gave his words quiet resonance.

She flattened herself against the wal and immediately regretted the movement, which she saw reflected on wal -

to-wal mirrors across the room. But the mirrors also gave her a view of the men’s backs. The men didn’t move, however, except for Sir David, who shifted under Lely’s obvious displeasure like a child reprimanded by a teacher.

She tightened the canvas she had wrapped around her and slowed her breathing.

Lely’s clothes were as finely cut as his companion’s, Cam noted with interest, with white silk stockings, low velvet shoes and a gleaming expanse of charcoal breeches adorned with crimson ribbon that showed beneath his long frockcoat. As confused and frightened as she was, Cam couldn’t help but feel a smal thril at seeing a painter like Lely in the flesh. Too often when studying long-dead painters students were left feeling a distance that didn’t occur with more contemporary artists. Yet here he was—a handsome, living, breathing and obviously irritated man.

Beyond the double doors, she could also hear the sounds of industry—voices engaged in conversation, the random movement of feet, the squeak of a chair on wooden floor, the sounds of cloth being torn. Lely’s studio was a hive of activity, and this room was the quiet eye of a wel -

oiled and hardworking storm. Al of it, she thought distractedly, her authorial mind turning even as her practical mind was struggling to keep afloat, would paint an exceptional scene in a book.

“My relationship with Miss Quinn is at an end,” Sir David said, “a fact of which Miss Quinn has been informed. This appointment should have been canceled weeks ago—”

“But wasn’t.”

Sir David shifted. “Aye, I apologize for that. My secretary has been il and—”

An older man—a servant—with pale eyes, a shock of white hair and a wel -worn smock, opened the hal way door and looked in. Cam held her breath. The man bowed to Sir David but spoke directly to Peter. “Miss Quinn has been moved to the Red Room, sir.”

“Thank you, Stephen.”

The servant bowed and exited.

Sir David cleared his throat. “I mean to do my duty. Tel her to go to this address.” He handed Peter a card. “She knows it. It is a place where I conduct my business affairs.

Desire her to come in a quarter of an hour. My secretary wil explain the situation. You need not be further discommoded.”

Peter placed the card on a nearby table with a snap that made Cam straighten. “The portrait, then, is canceled?”

“Yes,” Sir David said with a rush of relief. He turned as if an exit were imminent, but Peter readjusted his stance, facing the nobleman head-on, which made his companion shrink.

“As I am sure you understand,” Lely said careful y, “I do not charge by the hour. I charge by the commission.”

Cam rol ed her eyes. Shelter, food, water, air, adoration.

Only one thing ranked higher in an artist’s pyramid of needs and that was cold, hard cash.

Sir David straightened his cuff. “Natural y I have no objection to paying you. My wife’s portrait was eighteen six.

I shal offer you half that for Miss Quinn?”

Lely’s lip rose perceptibly, and for an instant Cam wondered if he intended to bloody the man’s nose.

“Keep your money, sir,” he said with manufactured bonhomie. “I shouldn’t be able to live with myself were I to treat a treasured acquaintance so abominably.”

Sir David blinked, wondering with understandable justification if he had just been insulted.

Lely returned the smal card as if he were removing offal.

“You may settle the details of this arrangement with Stephen.” With a bow, he withdrew, fol owed, after an audible
harrumph
by Sir David.

Cam peeked down the hal and, over Sir David’s head, spotted Lely disappearing into another doorway guarded by a wel -fortified desk. Like painters in her time, painters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often had a secretary or assistant to negotiate arrangements for a commission, freeing the painter to concentrate on his work.

That desk reminded Cam a patron would have to be very rich or very determined to score face-to-face time with that god among men, the artist. She found herself making a mental note to include this in the Van Dyck bio.

She lifted her phone, got into Favorites and pressed the button for Jeanne. She held the phone to her ear, waiting for the silence to turn to a ring. One beat. Two beats. Three beats. Exasperated, she pul ed the phone down to look at it and saw “Cal Failed.” She checked. No bars. No signal.

No tether at al to the place she’d left. A chil went through her.

Then she remembered Jeanne’s text.
Wait a second …

She typed out a quick “U THERE?” and hit SEND. The green sending bar didn’t budge. No service meant no service for texts, either. But how could that be? She’d gotten the text from Jeanne, after al . There must be a signal there. She held up the phone like the man in the Verizon ads and began to retrace her steps. What she saw when she turned, however, made her stop.

There, in front of her, was a wardrobe stuffed with gorgeous gowns spil ing their skirts like satin waterfal s to the floor.

This must be the cache. And a cache it was. There was a pale pink with ermine trim, a crimson with jet beads, a Kel y green with lemon yel ow panels in the skirt and a dozen others. Cam reached for the plainest she could find in case someone here would recognize it—a gray moiré silk that slipped like water through her hands. It also had the benefit of a looser bodice that tightened with laces as each side and sturdy shoulders, critical for someone whose bra usual y prayed for mercy.

It wasn’t til she removed it from its hanger that she saw the exquisite embroidered lining upon which peacock feathers in brightest cobalt, purple and green thread appeared to float on air. What sort of a man furnished a woman a dress like this? The sort of man who liked to share the private knowledge of what was hidden beyond view with his sitter.

The dress fit her perfectly. In fact, it took her breath away.

The silk cupped her breasts like a lover’s hands, and when she tightened the thick, luxurious fabric with the laces, she felt an amazing transformation. She might not feel confident, but damn if she didn’t look it. If she could just get back to the model room, perhaps she could reach Jeanne, and then what would happen she didn’t know, but making that connection to the place she belonged seemed an absolutely essential first step in keeping herself from sinking into sheer, asphyxiating terror.

She pelted down the hal , past Mercury and through a group of several surprised young men in smocks who had to be apprentices, and found herself once again in the hal way with the buckets. She grabbed the first doorknob and ran in, phone held high.

But she had chosen the wrong door. Here was Lely’s empty studio, laid out before her like a treasure—

workbench, paints, stacked canvases and an easel.

She found herself exhaling slowly. For a lover of art, this was heaven! A Restoration master’s studio! She tiptoed forward, almost afraid it would disappear if she approached. She wanted to see the tints, the fabric, the workmanship on the canvases. She wanted to smel the turpentine. She wanted to feel the texture of the brushes.

But most of al , she realized, she wanted to see Lely paint.

He wasn’t Van Dyck, but there were only thirty years separating them at their peaks. Techniques wouldn’t have changed much. And, in any case, he would have stories of Van Dyck. They’d been alive at the same time for a number of years, and she’d never met an artist who didn’t enjoy dishing about a rival.

She leaned forward and sniffed, letting the rich, distinctive scents of a painter’s craft fil her head. This was a part of Jacket she loved. There were certainly parts she didn’t love—parts that had hurt her deeply—but this, the gritty world of artistic creation, was definitely in the plus column.

She didn’t know how she’d gotten to this strange world, and she was desperate to get back, but the researcher in her couldn’t help but hope she’d have a chance to see the painter in action. She ran a hand over the silky brushes, fat and thin, that extended from a pot on the workbench. The researcher might hope, but the aesthete—that being who, like her sister, had been nurtured by her art historian father to find the divine in every artistic endeavor—knew with absolute certainty she would never pass up the chance to see the act of creation in process.

A noise made her turn, but it was just another apprentice, trotting hurriedly by the door. Reluctantly she exited and took her bearings. When she spotted more buckets and a ladder, she hurried farther down the hal , only this door was closed.

She reached for the knob, but just as her hand gripped the cool, polished brass a voice behind her made her jump.

“
Madam
. These rooms are off-limits. May I show you the way to the waiting room?”

Cam wondered how hard it would be to pretend she didn’t speak English. Her col ege roommate, Natalie, had been Puerto Rican, and Cam had picked up a few key phrases.
“Qué?”
She jerked the knob but her effort went unrewarded. The door was locked.

“Madam, please!”

She turned. A tal , extraordinarily reedy bald man with an armful of papers gazed at her sternly. She slipped the phone unobtrusively into her bag.
“Qué?”

“Kay?” he repeated blankly and looked at a paper in his hand.

“Qué. Qué?” Oh, the hell with it.
“My name is Kay, er, Katie Holmes.” She dipped a curtsy. Her English accent ranked somewhere above Madonna’s but below Renée Zel weger’s. The man frowned and began a slow, careful review. Realizing with a horrified start she had no shoes, she thrust her shoulders back, and the man’s eyes screeched to a halt at her neckline. Different ages, different clothes, same hormonal magic.

His face relaxed into a slightly less concerned smile. “I presume you wish to see Mr. Lely, aye?”

“Ye—Er, aye.”

“About a painting?”

“Aye.”

“That is possible, of course, only with an appointment.”

He scanned the paper in his hand. “I don’t see a Katie Holmes here. You do have an appointment, I presume?”

Cam shifted. Run or lie? Running would likely get her removed from the premises. She fingered the phone in her pocket. She had to stay, one way or another. “I, wel … It’s complicated.”

Peter brushed by the desk usual y occupied by his clerk, Stephen, and let his office door shut behind him. After a quick look to ensure it had closed, he went to the storage room and lowered the window to its original position. He damned his luck at running into that blackguard, Sir David.

Even entering by way of the servants’ door had forced him to take a hel of a chance of running into Mertons.

Charles’s entourage had been at his club in Maiden Lane, but not Charles himself, and it had taken Peter more than three-quarters of an hour to track down the king in the Berkeley Square dressing room of the Honorable Genevieve Longchamps, though how much longer that title would apply given the king’s obvious intentions he could only guess.

He slipped a hand in his waistcoat and touched the letter, more valuable than gold. He believed the king would keep his word and sign it. He had to believe it. Charles had his faults, to be sure, but for the most part he was a man of honor in business, and he had always treated Peter relatively fairly—as fairly as a monarch could treat anyone

—though he had certainly extracted his pound of flesh in the years since their first meeting thirty years ago, Charles the wide-eyed, ten-year-old son of the king and Peter the scrape-farthing Dutchman with the striking palette of colors.

Six years hence, Peter knew, Charles would bestow a knighthood on him. Charles would say it was for a lifetime of contribution to English art, though Peter knew it had been as much to lift his friend’s spirits. But the gesture would fail, and Peter would be dead within the year, col apsing at his easel and final y earning the peace for which he had so longed. Or so he had thought until he found death, at least the part of death spent in the Afterlife, had not erased any of his memories.