by Metsy Hingle
She offered him a smile then. “I’ve never wanted to be a star, Peter. Only a working artist”
“And I’m giving you the chance to be that.”
“But not for the right reasons.” Aimee sighed as the shuttered expression came back into his eyes. “How can you offer to represent my work, to make me a star, as you say, when you don’t even believe in me or my work?”
“I don’t need to believe in your work, or even like it, to make you a star.”
“Maybe not. But that’s what I want. Someone who thinks I have talent. Someone who sees something special in my work…who is touched by it.”
“You mean someone like Jacques?” Peter asked, an edge in his voice.
“Yes. And Liza.”
“And Stephen Edmond?”
“Yes,” she said, meeting the coolness in his blue eyes. “Someone like Mr. Edmond.”
“You’ll be making a big mistake if you sign with him, Aimee. Stephen Edmond and his brother are rich little boys whose parents left them lots of money. They like to play at being art dealers. I’ve known too many artists who’ve signed that exclusivity agreement of theirs and been burned by it.”
“You’re demanding that I sign one.”
“Yeah. But the difference is that art is my livelihood, not a game. No matter what happens between the two of us, with me you won’t have to worry that I’ll cut the price on your paintings and force us both to take losses just to get even with you. I’ve seen Edmond nearly destroy an artist’s career by driving the prices down for revenge.”
Aimee could feel her fragile new confidence slip a notch at the image his words evoked. “At least he liked my work,” she said defensively. “He was interested in seeing more of my paintings.”
“Edmond was only interested in your paintings because he knows I’m interested in you.”
“That’s not true. He didn’t even know I was seeing you, let alone that you’d be here.”
Peter laughed. It was a short dry laugh, that held no humor. “Don’t be naive, Aimee. You know how small this city can be when it comes to the personal lives of the people who live in it. Hell, the French Quarter alone is like a small city within the city. You can bet everyone, including the mimes and musicians performing for nickels and dimes around Jackson Square, know you and I’ve been sleeping together.”
Aimee slapped him then, leaving the print of her hand along the side of his face.
Her palm stinging, she could feel tears prickling at the base of her throat as she watched Peter’s eyes grow stormy.
Refusing to be intimidated, she lifted up her chin. “Maybe everyone does know about us. I certainly haven’t tried to hide our affair from anyone,” she informed him. “But at least Stephen Edmond wanted to represent me because he liked my work…and not because I was sleeping with him.”
Five
“Aimee. Wait. I didn’t mean—”
But it was too late. She was already flouncing off, moving toward the front of the shop in response to the chimes on the door that announced the arrival of customers.
Damn, Peter swore, cursing his stupidity. What in the hell was wrong with him? If he had thought before he spoke, he would have realized she would react as she had.
But that was the problem. Lately, where Aimee was concerned, he had been reacting first and thinking only when it was much too late.
“Jeez,” he muttered, raking a hand through his hair. The day had started off bad—with the stupid nightmare again, followed by Aimee’s departure from his bed—and it had gone steadily downhill from there.
If he believed in bad luck, he would have sworn someone had put a gris-gris on him. Just as quickly as the idea surfaced, Peter scoffed at the notion, refusing to give credence to the local folklore. He had heard of the talisman, of course. It was nearly impossible to live in the city and not be acquainted with the fetish that supposedly brought ill luck to its victims. The evil piece, according to local superstition, had originated during the time of Marie Laveau, a woman of Haitian descent who was renowned in New Orleans as the voodoo queen. Even though the woman and her black magic had been dead for two centuries, the stories of her powers lived on, particularly in the city’s French Quarter, where she had lived and plied her trade.
Irritated, Peter shoved the foolishness aside. He paced back and forth while he waited for Aimee’s customers to leave, reminding himself that he didn’t believe in superstitions or in luck—good or bad. No, luck had nothing to do with the mess he found himself in.
The problem was him. For some reason, whenever he was with Aimee, he had a difficult time remembering to be logical and detached—especially when she looked at him out of those ghost-blue eyes.
While he would have liked to blame it on his hormones—because heaven knew he had never hungered for or enjoyed any woman more, in bed or out, than he did Aimee—it was more than that, he admitted. The truth was, she had gotten under his skin as no one ever had before—not even his ex-wife. And he wasn’t quite sure what to do about it.
He rubbed his jaw. It was still tender and warm from the sting of her slap. Hell, he thought, working his jaw. For a little thing, she certainly packed a punch. And judging by the way she was discreetly rubbing her palm along the skirt of that sarong thing she was wearing, she had hurt herself far more than she had hurt him.
Guilt, as thick as a summer haze and as oppressive as the humidity, settled over him, replacing all traces of the irritation he had felt at Aimee’s stubbornness.
Hell. He would have let her slug him again, if he’d thought it would wipe away that shock of pain he had glimpsed in her eyes before she got angry and smacked him.
Looking at the stiff line of her back as she showed the tourists a selection of feathered Mardi Gras masks, he doubted that a dozen clips to the chin would be enough to make up for hurting her. Or that there was much chance of her forgiving him anytime soon. He had screwed up royally this time.
Frustrated, Peter squeezed his eyes shut a moment. He could feel the beginnings of a headache building behind his eyes, and he rubbed the spot along the bridge of his nose, between his eyebrows. Opening his eyes, he considered his situation and the two problems facing him.
His business was growing nicely, and it was long past time to expand. Another site might work, but this was the one he wanted, even if Aimee did refuse to sell it.
To make life even more complicated, he also wanted Aimee. Of the two problems, wanting her was the more serious.
The businessman in him told him to cut his losses, walk away from Aimee and the scheme to get her building-now. He would be a fool to invest any more time in the plan. To do so would mean risking his money, Gallagher’s, and even himself by marrying her without the prenuptial agreement. Because she obviously wasn’t going to budge on that issue.
But there was another part of him, this new, stubborn side of him, that refused to listen to logic. And it was this new willful side of him that had him digging in his heels and refusing to leave.
Leaning against a wall, he followed Aimee’s movements with his eyes as she led the customers to a section of the store with framed prints of the French Quarter.
Peter sighed. For a man known for his keen negotiating skills and his tact when dealing with the moneyed patrons of the art world, he had exercised as much finesse in dealing with Aimee Lawrence as a bull in a china shop. Probably less so, he admitted.
Of course, the unexpected arrival of Stephen Edmond and the ever-attentive Jacques hadn’t helped matters. Peter frowned, annoyed more than he wanted to be by the two men’s attention to Aimee. But what disturbed him most was his reaction to it.
He had been jealous. Plain and simple. It was an emotion that ordinarily was foreign to him. Not even Leslie’s infidelity had stirred such feelings in him. He had been angry, even hurt, but he hadn’t been jealous.
Usually only a rare piece of art and the chance to acquire it fired his possessive urges. The last time he had been struck by that blinding need to claim
something as his, he had gone after the pair of Rubens. Of course, he was intelligent enough to recognize that his desire for the paintings stemmed from his own sense of guilt. The Rubenses had been his father’s quest—one he had had to abandon when Peter was forced to liquidate Gallagher’s because of his divorce.
It was the guilt that had made him search for the paintings. When he found one, he had purchased it and then locked it away in the gallery’s vault. There were those who would have said he had hidden it. Perhaps he had. He had only known that he had to keep the painting safe this time. It was as though, by hiding the painting he had lost, he could somehow hide from the fact that his father had valued it far more than he ever valued his son.
Whatever the reasons, guilt had nothing to do with the need inside him to bind Aimee to him. It didn’t explain the sick feeling he had had in his gut when she walked out of the apartment. It didn’t explain the hollow ache in his chest or the panic that had followed at the thought of her not coming back. It certainly didn’t explain the white-hot haze of emotion that had gripped him when he saw her with Jacques or heard Stephen Edmond offer to represent her work.
No. It had been jealousy that made him stake his claim to Aimee. It had been jealousy that made him break his own ironclad rules by offering to be her patron and to make her a star.
Glancing over at the paintings Stephen Edmond had been viewing, Peter allowed himself to study Aimee’s work for the first time. She had been right when she accused him of not even looking at her work. He hadn’t, he admitted. He hadn’t needed to. With the right backing and marketing, talent would be secondary.
He flicked his gaze over one of the abstracts. There was a raw and earthy quality to the paint strokes that he found appealing and oddly sensual. He moved on to the portrait of the woman. Stepping closer, Peter studied the painting and saw at once what Edmond had seen—what he had failed to see because of his stubbornness. She had somehow managed to capture the woman’s sensuality and emotion on canvas. He examined the woman’s face. She mocked him with the gentle lifting of her lips, the gleam of mischief in her eyes, and something more, something secret, elusive, yet disturbingly familiar.
They were Aimee’s eyes, he realized. Only the ones staring back at him from the portrait were brown instead of ghost-blue. But the expression was the same, the one he had seen on Aimee’s face many times.
The little minx, Peter thought. He felt a stirring in his loins, recognizing the look for what it was—the glow of a woman whose hungers had been sated. Aimee had painted the face of an ordinary woman, a woman who could have been anyone’s mother or sister or next-door neigh-bor…and who had just come from her lover’s arms.
With her paint and brush, Aimee had brought the woman to life. She had made her both vulnerable and strong. She had made her both saint and sinner. She had given the painting heart. She had given it soul.
He swung his gaze to the other abstract, studying the bold explosions and merging of colors. This piece, too, was evocative, caused a stirring in his lower body. He found it both appealing and disturbing at the same time.
He flipped over the price tag and smiled. He knew immediately that he could sell it for ten times the price she was asking. The businessman in him grew excited at the prospect of launching a new artist. He could make her the star she wanted to be, and Gallagher’s would reap the profits. That he would lose her and her sweetness to the glitter of stardom was a given.
The selfish side of him wanted to hold her back. The realistic, reasoning portion of his brain recognized that he couldn’t. He would sign her. If he didn’t, Stephen Edmond or someone else would. Because eventually someone else was going to recognize the promise in her work. Even Stephen Edmond, as unskilled as he was at differentiating good art from bad, had recognized something special in the paintings. William Edmond would sign her in a heartbeat—if for no other reason than to steal her from him.
No. He wouldn’t let that happen. Aimee was his. Emotion ripped through him again, with the fierceness of a hurricane. Peter forced himself to breathe slowly as the whitehot glaze of possessiveness heated his blood. The air in his lungs seemed to grow shallow. His breath hissed between his teeth as he thought of his Aimee with anyone else.
Let her go, Gallagher, the voice that evidently acted as his conscience whispered. Forget about the building. Forget about Aimee. Let her go. You’ll only hurt her.
He squashed the voice.
He would be damned if he would forget about the building. And he would be damned if he would let Aimee go. It was too late for that, Peter admitted. He wanted the building and he wanted Aimee. He fully intended to have them both.
But on his terms. He would offer her his patronage and make her a star. And when she was ready to move on, he would buy the building from her and she would go on to enjoy being the star she longed to be.
“Quit scowling at my paintings, Peter.” Aimee stepped between him and her work, as though to shield them from him. Her eyes flashing, she tipped up her chin. “Maybe you don’t like my paintings, but not everyone has your discerning taste. Some people actually like my work and are willing to pay for it. I won’t have you scaring off potential buyers.”
Stunned by the anger behind her words, Peter blinked. “What are you talking about?”
“One of those customers was interested in seeing this painting.” She pointed to the abstract he had been studying. “But she changed her mind and left when she saw you glaring at it.”
“I was not glaring at it,” he said, his teeth clenched as he struggled with the strong feelings still racing through him. “I was admiring it.”
“Sure you were.”
“I was.” At her wary expression, Peter reined in his emotions, regaining control. “I really was admiring your work. Edmond was right. You are good.”
“Thank you,” she said, but her voice remained as wary as her expression.
“I was a fool not to have recognized it before now.”
“How could you recognize it, when you’ve never looked at any of my work before?”
“A stupid decision on my part.” He walked over to Aimee and waited for her to move away. When she didn’t, he continued, “But then, it was never your work that I was interested in.”
She lifted her gaze to meet his. “And now?”
“Now I want them both—you and your paintings.”
Something flickered in her eyes, and then she dropped her gaze. Placing his finger beneath her chin, he forced her to look at him. “What do you want, Aimee?”
When she didn’t answer, Peter said, “You know what I think? I think you want to be a star. I’ve never known an artist yet who didn’t want to be one. I’m willing to make it happen for you. I meant what I said about Gallagher’s representing you. But I want exclusivity. Everything you create will belong to me—to Gallagher’s. No one but me will have the right to sell any of your work. Only me.”
Aimee pulled away from him. “And I meant what I said. I don’t want or need Gallagher’s to act as my patron.” Turning on her heel, she walked to the front of the shop.
Stifling a flash of irritation, Peter followed her, determined not to argue with her further. “Don’t be a fool, Aimee. You know this is what you want. I’m offering you the chance of a lifetime.”
She whipped around to face him. “You don’t have a clue as to what I want. And you can take your chance of a lifetime and your exclusivity clauses and stuff them.”
Peter sighed. “You’re still angry with me.”
“You’re darn right I’m still angry. How dare you patronize me with your offer of representation? You make me doubt myself as an artist, make me question whether I have any talent at all.”
“Aimee, I—”
“And then you insult me. You toss my love back in my face, make me feel like a harlot for giving myself to you.”
“I’m sorry. I never meant—”
“I’m not finished,” she continued, poking a finger into his chest.
Her cheeks were flushed a soft rose, and her pale eyes glittered like gems. God, she was beautiful, Peter thought.
“Then you have the audacity to insinuate the only reason another dealer could be even remotely interested in my work is because I’m sleeping with you.”
“I’m sorry about that, I never should—”
“And to top it off, you start talking about making me a ‘star’ and spouting off about exclusivity clauses on my work. Well, I’ve got news for you, Peter Gallagher.” She jabbed him in the chest again. “I don’t need you or Stephen Edmond or anybody else to sell my work.”
“I know you don’t. But I—”
“And as far as me being a star, if I do become one someday, it’ll be because I’m a darned good artist and not because you or some other dealer decided to market me as the new darling of the art world.”
“Are you finished?”
“Yes.”
She started to move away, but Peter caught her arm and gently, he turned her around to face him. “You’re right. You’re a fine artist, Aimee, and a very talented one. And while you may not need me, I need you.”
She took a deep breath and released it. “I hate it when you do that.”
“Do what?”
“Make it impossible for me to stay angry with you.”
The droop of her shoulders reminded him of a fierce storm whose winds had died out. He took advantage of the moment. “I’m sorry, Aimee.”
“I don’t want your apologies.” She swiped at her eyes.
“But I need to give them.” She didn’t respond, simply stood stiff and unyielding before him. “I’m sorry for hurting you earlier. I never meant to, and I never meant to cheapen our lovemaking,” he said softly. “My only excuse is that where you’re concerned, logic and common sense seem to elude me.
“Heaven knows, I’m not an emotional man-far from it. Anyone who knows me will attest to that. But for some reason, you can make me happier and angrier, make me feel more emotions, than I ever thought possible. I don’t like it. I don’t like strong feelings. I never have. I’ve never been prone to them before. And I don’t like the fact that you can make me lose control. But like it or not, you can and I do. That’s what happened earlier. I felt like I was losing you, and I struck out with words.words directed at my own stupidity. Only you got caught by them instead. I’m sorry, Aimee. So very sorry.”
