Page 89 of Flirting with Forever

“Of course. The board is thrilled with your work on that.”

“But?”

“I’m not going to lie, Cam. There’s a chance you’re not going to get the job. Fitcher is lobbying hard for Anastasia, whom she calls ‘accomplished and smart.’”

“Hey, you know who else was accomplished and smart? Hitler. And he actually read the books before he blacklisted them.”

“Cam…”

“What do I need to do?”

“Keep a low profile. Don’t mention the book when the board interviews you on Saturday. Don’t mention the book at all. And if someone asks you about either of them, try to give the impression that this one’s been misunderstood, that it’s going to be—you know—more turpentine, less diaphragm jelly.”

“So lie?”

Packard’s face lit up in relief. “Exactly.”

“Cripes.”

“Cam, all she wants to do is protect the Carnegie. We can’t have people thinking our staff members are running around all day with sex on the brain.”

Cam looked at the Duchess of Portsmouth’s dropping neckline and Lornacopia’s Bazooka bubble gum nipples. “Nope, we couldn’t have that, sir.”

Thirty-eight

Peter took his first sip and let the hard work of the day slide off his shoulders. If the Guild wanted to make the Afterlife feel like a reward, they should forget the bocce ball and start serving up the cappuccino from Orbis instead. He hadn’t expected to like this twenty-first-century world, with its drab clothes, never-ending stream of roaring cars, and inhabitants with a prodigious proclivity for talking loudly into their little communication boxes. In fact, given the destruction of his hopes regarding Cam and his subsequent anger over the book, he had fully expected to hate it. But here at Orbis, amid the smell of roasted beans and cinnamon, the gentle hum of the steam machine, and the scene of the high street at twilight framed in the wide front windows, he could almost forget the cares that had brought him low.

Without thinking, he flipped the thin leather-bound sketchbook lying open on the table to the back, gazing at the letter from Van Dyck he had placed there for safekeeping. It would be easy to stop her with this, far easier than this feverish painting that had kept him up night after night these past weeks. And yet he couldn’t bring himself to use it. Was it the ease with which that disreputable deed would be done or the disreputableness itself that stopped him? Mertons had seen his desperation that day in the time lab, but Mertons didn’t know Peter had found Van Dyck in the Afterlife before he’d come to the lab, in order to arm himself with the tool he would need in case everything else failed.

A child’s laughter made Peter look up. A lad of two or three, clinging to his mother’s leg, was reacting to a jumping dog outside the window. Peter looked at the boy’s wide blue eyes and blond cowlick and felt the same pang he always did. The boy looked at Peter, and Peter smiled. Immediately the boy stuck a thumb in his mouth and hid his face.

Peter flipped the sketchbook to the page on which he’d been working and looked at his hands. Speckled with white and black paint, the flesh of his knuckles seemed to be growing looser every year. They were the hands of his father. He shook his head, thinking of the man in his army coat looming over the entry hall in their home. How Peter had enjoyed being lifted in the air and swung in a circle as if he weighed no more than a bag of rags, then being brought tight against his father’s chest, feeling that rough wool against his cheek and struggling for breath.

“Bunny.”

The boy had appeared at Peter’s side and was looking at the latest sketch. Peter had been drawing as he waited for his cappuccino, thinking of the hills of Westphalia.

“A hare, actually,” Peter said, smiling, and the boy’s eyes went to Peter’s head, which had been shorn of its weighty locks at Mertons’s insistence, leaving only an inch or two of dark waves. “No, no. Not a hair on your head. A hare is a very large rabbit, with muscles and teeth.” He puffed himself up like a Viking about to attack. “Not nearly as nice as a bunny. What’s your favorite animal?”

The boy’s eyes darted anxiously to his mother, who was talking with an acquaintance in line. He put his finger in his mouth. “Tiger.”

“May I draw one for you?”

The boy chewed for a second, then nodded.

Peter bent over his pad. “Do you like them fierce or gentle?”

The lad’s eyes lit. “Fierce.”

“Ah, a brave one, are you?” Peter quickly sketched a tiger in the middle of a pounce, claws out, teeth bared, and body forming a powerful arch.

“Shoes,” the boy said.

“On a tiger?”

The lad nodded. Peter shrugged and added lace-tied shoes like the boy’s to the tiger’s back feet.

A woman’s voice said, “My goodness, you should rent yourself out to parties.”