There was a long pause before his follow-up text buzzed her phone.
Don’t worry. I apologize for last night. I won’t try to overstep the boundaries again.
Strangely disappointed, Inez re-read his text.
But since we’re meeting at the fart museum and it is our first date, I expect you to wear something appropriate.
Inez rolled her eyes and mocked his words aloud. “He expects me to wear something appropriate.”
“Send him the dancing bird animation thingy,” Nana replied.
“You mean the emoticon?”
“Yeah, whatever it’s called. The one you said flips its middle finger up and down before spinning 360 degrees.”
Inez stared at her grandmother, recognizing the origin of her own bad attitude. She opted for teasing sass. Is a Hello Kitty T-shirt appropriate enough?
Inez couldn’t help it. It was in her genes. Awaiting his reply, Inez nervously twitching her foot and switching Luna to her other side. The last thing she needed was to meet Sven van der Meer at the fart museum with lopsided boobs.
There was a long pause, as though he was weighing her snarky response and all the possible ways he could assert his authority.
Finally, his text popped onto her screen and she read his words with his smooth Dutch accent in her head.
I trust you, Miss Sanchez. Just make sure you’re not wearing sneakers. See you at two.
Ugh. It felt like her phone had melted in her hands. She re-read the phrase again: I trust you. This time, the sound of his sturdy, masculine voice echoed in her mind, raising goose bumps on the nape of her neck. She started to perspire.
He trusted her. But did she trust him? Ambivalently, yes. She shifted her glance onto the kitchen clock. It was almost eleven, just enough time to grab a quick shower, change, and jump on the “L” to be downtown by two, but barely enough time to rummage through her closet and string together the sexiest outfit she could find. Weak, weak woman.
Chapter Ten
Inez rushed up the museum’s imposing granite staircase, flanked by two bronze lions. She was ten minutes late and completely winded from running all the way from the “L” station. At least she was wearing comfortable Ugg boots and her long black dress coat shielded her legs from the freezing downtown wind. She had settled on a simple black spandex long-sleeved shirt, a short pink A-line skirt and black knit tights. Probably more bohemian artsy than sophisticated chic, but she didn’t care. It was the fanciest thing she had worn in months. Besides, the last time she remembered wearing a skirt, she had been dancing tango with Enzo at a midnight milonga. And if she was truly on the rebound, it somehow seemed perversely appropriate to don the same thing that she used to wear to turn on her ex-boyfriend.
Inez sprinted to the ticket counter, paid the admission fee, and bounded towards the museum’s grand foyer where she spotted him, bathed in sunlight beneath the atrium’s glass skylight. His hair glinted with golden highlights and his artic blue dress shirt reflected the rays of sun like an immaculate sheet of ice. Patiently awaiting her arrival, he stared ahead, like one of foyer’s majestic Roman statues. He had one hand stuffed inside the pocket of his charcoal grey dress pants while balancing his weight against his silver-tipped black cane like a stern schoolmaster.
European men. They never could just wear jeans and a T-shirt. Never.
“Sven?” she called out.
He angled his head toward her voice as a muted smile spread across his face.
“Finally, you’ve come to my rescue.”
“I hardly doubt that you need to be rescued.”
He slipped his arm into the crook of her own and anchored himself against her body as if she couldn’t be more wrong.
“It took me nearly twenty minutes to navigate from the front entrance of the museum to this spot,” he confessed in her ear. “I generally don’t do well with unfamiliar open spaces, and I almost stopped to ask a young woman at the information counter to escort me here. But my pride got the best of me.”
“Because she was hot, right?”
He smirked and declined to confirm it. “Because I already have an attractive escort.”
His compliment made her heart race, but it was his steady gaze and the way that his strong, possessive hand snaked over her own that made her want to look away and pretend he didn’t affect her. She had her own pride to protect.
“So tell me, Miss Sanchez—assistant curator of nineteenth century European paintings—which part of the museum was it that we first met?”
They stood at the base of the grand foyer staircase, considering their choices: they could walk straight ahead to the Medieval History wing or head upstairs to the second floor with all the European paintings. Inez knew the Art Institute better than any other building in Chicago. She would often come here, after a failed job interview or during her lonely weekends after Enzo had left for Argentina, and find solace within the bright airy rooms decorated with the most priceless artistic masterpieces in the Western world.
“Well, I told Celeste that we met upstairs in the European paintings, but the truth is that we probably met right in there.” She nodded ahead of them. “In the Middle Ages corridor with all the daggers, swords, and body armor. You know, your typical weaponry for drawing blood and inflicting incurable wounds.”
“Then in that case,” Sven mused, “I think it’s best for my own personal safety that we stick to the script and head upstairs to the European paintings.”
“Probably. I wouldn’t want to scare you away. Not at least until our second date.”
“Don’t worry,” he lowered his chin to her ear. “I don’t scare easily.”
The confidence within his voice and the warmth of his breath against her cheek made her body tingle. He shifted ahead of her to climb the massive white marble staircase while pulling her by the hand behind him, as if his domineering ego refused to give her the lead.
When they reached the top of the second floor, Sven stopped and stared through the glass doors onto Caillebotte’s impressionist masterpiece, Paris Street, Rainy Day.
“Maybe it’s a good thing that we’re heading into the Impressionism wing,” he said. “I won’t feel so badly about only being able to see blurry brushstrokes.”
He popped open the glass door, allowing her to pass through it. She noted how his protective body hovered behind her and how much she tried not to enjoy it.
Within the quiet airy room surrounded by pristine white walls and soft lighting, she circled past all her favorite paintings by Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, and Degas—imprecisely-painted pastel scenes of country roads and flower girls and lively couples dancing in Parisian gardens. When she glanced back at Sven, she noticed he wasn’t looking at the paintings. He was focused on her.
“You’re not interested in any of these paintings?” she asked, unnerved by the intensity of his gaze directed at her.
“No, I am,” he replied. “But watching you enjoying them is much more interesting because I’ve seen them all so many times before. Many of them are on loan to the museum from my mother.”
“Ah, right. The great van der Meer empire.” She tried hard not to sound condescending, but she couldn’t help it. If she had even a sliver of his wealth, she would never have to leave Luna in the hands of babysitters again. “What was it like growing up as a kid in one of the wealthiest families in Chicago? Jewelry collections, priceless artifacts, original Monets and Renoir decorating the walls of all fifteen of your bathrooms?”
He arched his eyebrow. “It was completely normal, really. In Amsterdam, I was just a regular kid from a middle-class family. It wasn’t until my mother brought me back here for high school that I realized we had money and that the world cared about our wealth.”
“Yeah, your family is definitely a darling of the Tribune. I think I’ve read every article about your mother. She’s like the Mother Teresa of the priceless art world.”
“Yes, I learned a lot about her myself from those articles as well. She sent us
away to attend boarding school in Amsterdam, and I never really knew much about her philanthropy until I was a much older man.”
Inez stared at him. “You lived away from your own mother?”
“Of course,” he said with a nod and circled the salon like it was his own living room. “She wanted to make sure that Hans and I learned proper Dutch. But for herself, she swore she would never go back to Amsterdam. And she never has.”
“But why?” Inez asked, sensing that he was giving her a rare glimpse into his family.
“Because she escaped the city with her own mother during the Second World War when she was only a little girl. Her father stayed behind. He was the one who organized the delivery of their most valuable possessions out of Amsterdam during the Nazis invasion. The paintings and valuable artifacts escaped, but my grandfather did not. Waving from a train on her way to Paris was the last time my mother ever saw him.”
“Ugh.” A rock dropped into the pit of her stomach. “That’s probably the saddest thing I’ve heard in a very long time.”
They both fell silent and stared at Caillebotte’s masterpiece of pedestrians carrying umbrellas and walking down the cobbled streets of Paris, sixty years before two major World Wars would permanently scar the city and the lives of its inhabitants.
“It’s a common misconception that bad things don’t happen to wealthy people,” Sven added. “And sometimes, it’s made worse by the irony that money cannot solve every problem. It’s true that my mother owns priceless Renoir and Monet paintings. But in exchange, she lost her father forever.”
Inez turned away from him. “God, Sven. I thought this was supposed to be a date. You’re supposed to woo me, not make me bawl my eyes out.” She never expected to be reminded of her own loss of her father and it rattled her tough guarded exterior.
“Woo you?” he said inquisitively, snagging her hand. He drew her into his body, as if he wanted the chance to see her face. “Ah, I see. You mean if we were on a real date, you already would be planning to abandon me in the cafeteria?”
She resisted his embrace, her hand pressing against his chest. But it was hard not to notice the way his muscles flexed beneath his ice blue linen shirt. “Yeah, but not before I made you splurge on some chocolate pudding.”
Straining his unpatched eye, he gazed down on her. “Not vanilla?” he asked curiously.
She scrunched up her face. “God no, never. What fool picks vanilla over chocolate?”
He burst into laughter. “I do. Always.”
Inez’s cheeks tingled with a blush. She tried to pull away from him, but he refused to let her go.
“Come on, then…let’s go find a way to woo you with some chocolate pudding.”
Chapter Eleven
With his eyes closed, Sven sat in the garden chair, allowing the bright sun to warm his face and illuminate the darkness surrounding him. There was a gentle autumn breeze that rustled the leaves of the miniature dogwood trees lining the perimeter of the museum’s courtyard. Whatever expectation he had placed on his life, whatever goals or ambitions he had expected to accomplish and still intended to accomplish strangely meant nothing to him in that moment. Within the simplicity of the garden and the serenity of its natural beauty, he felt at ease with himself and the world around him—sensations of tranquility and satisfaction which had evaded him for months, maybe even years.
A surreal sense of peace, he thought, as he opened his unpatched eye and focused on her silence. She sat across from him at the white ornamental table while eating her chocolate pudding like it was the only thing she cared about in the world. Sipping his espresso, he noted how her black hair and black shirt framed her alluring lips and Caribbean beauty. He could rarely get a clear glimpse of her, but in that moment, he thought he had seen the full force of her beauty, glinting like a rock in a stream. He dared not disturb it, or else he risked losing the opportunity to simply admire its glimmer.
“You’re staring at me.”
Blunt and merciless, as always, he thought and lowered his eyes. But she was right, he had been staring at her. “I’m trying to figure out if you’re a simple woman or an extremely complicated one,” he finally confessed.
“Complicatedly simple.”
He nodded and smiled, accepting her typical straight-forward answer wrapped up inside a sarcastic riddle. “Yes, I’m starting to understand that.”
“I’m surprised you’re bothering to even think about me at all. I thought you already assessed my worth to the world as average.”
She said it playfully, but he flinched his jaw and fell silent. Hearing his own words thrown back at him pained him. But it was a fair punishment and one he was willing to accept.
“Well…I’m fairly certain that I was quite wrong.” He cleared his throat, offering his own version of an apology. “And so, it certainly makes me wonder what kind of a girl, who is so easily pleased with nothing more than chocolate pudding and a trip to the art museum, would pretend to be my girlfriend for five thousand dollars per day?”
He was fishing. She seemed to sense it.
“Whatever, Sven. Who doesn’t need five thousand dollars a day?”
“I’m not sure…perhaps only an extremely complicated woman.”
He was testing her, cautiously, carefully, waiting for her to push back and assert that it was none of his business. It wasn’t, but somehow the chocolate pudding and courtyard scenery put her less on the defensive.
“You do realize your hypothesis is completely misguided.”
He leaned forward against the edge of the cast iron table. “No, I didn’t. Please enlighten me.”
“There’s no such thing as a simple or complicated woman,” Inez confirmed. “There are only simple men who think that women are either simple or complicated. Really, we’re completely indecipherable—sometimes even to ourselves. Isn’t that exactly why women are the most beautiful wonderful mysterious creatures that men can’t get enough of?”
Amused, he gazed at her while finishing off his espresso and wagging his foot. “Yes. That is something on which we are fully in agreement.”
“So?” she prodded him, clearly intending to divert his attention from her. “The real question is what painfully boring Sven van der Meer event are you planning on dragging this indecipherable woman to tonight?”
“A reception in my honor,” he answered. “The Modern Architecture Society is bestowing upon me a ‘Genius Award’ for my work on The Spire.”
“Hmm,” she replied.
He fiddled with his espresso napkin, secretly enjoying how difficult it was to impress her.
“That sounds like another night of heels for me.”
“Most certainly.”
“And I suppose all your ‘friends’ are going to be there too, cheering you on.”
“Unfortunately, yes.” He nodded. “My brother and Eliot Watercross are not going to relent until I agree to travel with them to Shanghai at the end of the week, after the public opening of The Spire.”
Silence parted them. “I didn’t realize you would have to leave at the end of the week,” she said, lowering her spoon.
“Yes,” he confirmed without looking up at her. “They need me in Shanghai to convince the Chinese officials that they’re capable of designing and engineering the tallest towers in the world. The irony, of course, is that they’re likely not capable of designing and engineering them with me either.”
He touched his eyepatch and felt the seeping invasion of bitterness returning to his chest. “And even if I wanted to go in order to prevent them from usurping my name and reputation to claim my achievements as their own, there’s certainly no possibility of me traveling to a foreign country these days without assistance.”
He peered at her, conveying an unspoken message. He meant her. She slowly set her spoon down and stopped eating her pudding. He turned his espresso cup in its saucer in silence.
“How many water lilies were you able to see this morning?”
“Many less th
an yesterday morning.”
The streaming sunlight flickered as the sun passed behind a cloud before shadowing the garden completely.
“More than half of my net worth is tied up in my equity ownership of The Spire, and the rest is tied up in my architectural firm that’s half-owned by my brother—a brother who is willing to marry my ex-girlfriend and become business partners with the man who is trying to extort my participation in the Li Long project. And yet…” He stopped, letting his thoughts catch up with the sensation of warmth that glazed his cheek as the sun popped back into the clear blue sky. “I can honestly tell you that the only thing I am thinking about in this moment is how relaxed I feel, lounging here in the garden courtyard of the Art Institute, basking in the sunlight, enjoying my espresso, and sitting across from a very complicated woman who has been made extremely happy through the uncomplicated purchase of a cup of chocolate pudding.”
He settled his eyes on her, making it clear that he was not mocking her.
“It is really good chocolate pudding,” Inez offered quietly.
He nodded, containing his smile. “So you see…you are right, Miss Sanchez. It’s men who are the simple ones because we are so easily enchanted by beautiful mysterious women.”
Whatever connection had been uncovered between them last night circled back now. She had rejected his advances and he meant what he had texted her. He wouldn’t attempt to intentionally cross the boundaries of their relationship again. But it was hard to deny the inexplicable effect she had over him—how unguarded and uninhibited he felt in her presence, despite the fact that she challenged him at every turn. She was right, he finally concluded. She wasn’t simple or complicated. She was simply genuine and there was nothing else he needed to uncover about her, except perhaps the reason why she was willing to compromise her own authenticity for the sake of pretending to be his girlfriend.
* * * *
Ugh, she was falling for him. Well, maybe not him, exactly. But the romantic beauty and intimate atmosphere of the museum made her wonder if she would ever be able to stand on her own again. His casual posture and cavalier expressions had relaxed her in unexpected ways, and she tried hard not to enjoy the way the sunlight accentuated the golden highlights in his hair or the faint sheen of ice blue in his dress shirt. But it was his smooth accent and gentle voice that truly forced her to fight against the allures of his physical charm, especially every time her sassy remarks inspired his smile and dimpled his chin. She had succeeded, she thought, sadly finishing her chocolate pudding without having another alternative to distract her from the temptation of his seductive gaze. She had succeeded in resisting the connection between them all afternoon until the moment his apology confirmed that he had been wrong about her. She was not as “average” after all—far from it, and although Sven hadn’t been the first asshole to make that mistake, he had been the first asshole in a long time to openly admit she was the exact opposite.
Closer Page 11
