Page 18 of Flirting with Forever

An older man—a servant—with pale eyes, a shock of white hair, and a well-worn smock, opened the hallway 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. Tell 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 will explain the situation. You needn’t 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’m sure you understand,” Lely said carefully, “I do not charge by the hour. I charge by the commission.”

Cam rolled 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. “Naturally I have no objection to paying you. My wife’s portrait was eighteen six. I shall 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 small card as if he were removing offal. “You may settle the details of this arrangement with Stephen.” With a bow, he withdrew, followed, after an audible harrumph, by Sir David.

Cam peeked down the hall and, over Sir David’s head, spotted Lely disappearing into another doorway guarded by a well-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 pulled the phone down to look at it and saw “Call Failed.” She checked. No bars. No signal. No tether at all to the place she’d left. A chill 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 all. There must be a signal here. She held up the phone 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 spilling their skirts like satin waterfalls to the floor.

This must be the cache. And a cache it was. There was a pale pink gown with ermine trim, a crimson with jet beads, a Kelly green with lemon yellow 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 at each side and sturdy shoulders, critical for someone whose bra usually prayed for mercy.

It wasn’t till she removed it from its hanger that she saw the exquisite lining of embroidered peacock feathers in brightest cobalt, purple, and green thread. 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 laces, she felt an amazing transformation. She might not feel very confident, but damn if she didn’t look it. If she could just get back to the model room, perhaps she could reach Jeanne. Making a connection to the place she belonged seemed an essential first step in keeping herself from sinking into sheer, asphyxiating terror.

She pelted down the hall, 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 hallway 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 whistling silently. A Restoration master’s studio! For an art lover, this was heaven. She tiptoed forward, almost afraid it would disappear. She wanted to see the tints, the fabric, the workmanship on the canvases. She wanted to smell the turpentine. She wanted to feel the texture of the brushes. But most of all, 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 fill 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 hall, 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 college 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.