The little shove he gave me in return sent a warmth from where he touched me that spread over my neck and chest and down through my whole torso. How could I make that happen again?
We argued about that for a few minutes, talked favorite restaurants, best beaches in southern California, worst wrecks we’d witnessed on the freeways, weird stuff our families did for fun when we were kids, and even strayed into most embarrassing breakup stories.
Time flew. I hardly noticed we’d sat there half an hour or more. Aero’s jacket melded itself to my shoulders. His arm tugged me closer when he laughed at one of my lame jokes.
I took the next turn in our Random Questions game.
“Name three events in your life that made you who you are.”
“Oh, a deep one.” He rubbed his chin.
“Much like the waters atop which we float.”
He gave me a courtesy laugh, but he answered with more sobriety than I expected.
“A trip to Europe, taking the reins at the bank, and— this isn’t an event, it’s a person. Does that count?”
Sure. Rules schmules.
“My grandmother. She’s … ” He drummed his fingers on his leg a minute and then said, “One of a kind.” I still didn’t know what he meant by that, but then he changed tone. “I have one for you. If you had to relive a thirty-minute loop for the rest of eternity, what would it be?”
This one was climbing the charts.
My phone rang. The screen showed that it was Ryker. I put it on speaker. “Ryker. Are you and Phoebe all right?”
“Waterfalls are romantic, aren’t they?” He sniggered. “Just so you know, the waterfall is in the second half of the Swept Away ride. You’re taking full advantage of that, I hope.”
It took me a second to realize what he was saying, which was a reference to his earlier suggestion that Aero and I had just met and shouldn’t be kissing until the second half of the ride. Seriously? Ryker wanted us to kiss.
I have to say, it was an enormous pain in the neck to work for someone who always got what he wanted, no matter how much of an imposition it placed on someone else.
“Ryker, are you still on the ride?”
“Phoebe and I have been off for an hour. We hit three coasters. It was awesome.”
Aero’s eyes narrowed. “Is this ride broken?”
“Yes.” Ryker coughed. “And the only way to fix it is if you two take a selfie-video and send it to me.”
What did he mean? I took the phone back. “You mean you’re holding us hostage on this ride?”
No way. I shot a look at Aero, who seemed slightly amused. “We could walk,” I said. “Or swim.” I could slog my way out through the water. We had to be near the end. But I had that meeting with Grady Ingliss, and these shoes were definitely not sloggers.
“I’ll carry you.” Aero started to stand up, but the boat sloshed.
“No. Wait.” I held him down. His suit probably cost over a thousand bucks, it was that nice. “Ryker, be a good boy and let us off the ride.”
“Fine. No video. That’s crass, anyway. But don’t you get the concept? You can’t come out of Swept Away and not be kissing.” He whined this, in the voice of one of his sitcom characters. “I had this all set up. Jilly, be a sport. Aero, you don’t mind, do you? You’d kiss that girl.”
Heat surged up my neck to my cheeks. The dim of the tunnel hid the color, I was sure, but the temperature had to be radiating off my face like one of those timer lamps in hotel bathrooms.
“Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!” Chanting came through the speakerphone. It was a girl’s voice. I’d deal with Phoebe later. Making us go on amusement park rides was one thing, but insisting on physical contact? That was pushing things pretty far, even for Ryker.
Aero put a thumb over it. “Is this how it always is? He says jump, we say how high?”
I smirked. “Make it long jump, high jump, hurdles or pole vault, we leap.” I winced. This was ridiculous. Especially since I hated myself for wanting it so much. “He’s got us cornered.”
My eyes flicked to Aero’s.
“She’s wearing Goblets of Wine lip color. So kissable.” How did Ryker know that? What a weird kid.
The boat clunked against the panel that kept our gondola stopped in the darkness and soft spray of the waterfall.
“Shoot me one pic of your kiss, and I’ll lower the blockage. Otherwise, Phoebe has the authority to keep you there until closing time.” Sure she did. I rolled my eyes. But I also didn’t put it past Ryker to try and pull something like this.
I bit my lower lip. Smells of black licorice wafted up at me. A kiss from Aero— what kind of idiot would put up resistance against that?
Grady Ingliss awaited my painting to assess it. If we didn’t get out of here soon, I’d miss my one o’clock. The kiss would be for the painting’s sake, I rationalized.
“I’m not against it. But what does the lady think? It’s not fair to force her into something unseemly, Ryker.”
Whoa. He’d just stood up to Ryker’s demands. When had anyone ever done that? I blinked in awe.
Then again, maybe it was because Aero wasn’t into me and would rather lose his job than plant a smooch on me. Ouch. Rejection much? My pulse slowed a notch at the thought.
“Oh, she wants you, dude. Big time.”
Flames rose in my face. Could Ryker actually tell how much I was into Aero Jantzen? If a fifteen-year-old boy saw my hormones going all nutso, I was far too much of an open book and had better practice my game face a little more diligently. Otherwise, I’d lose my cachet as a lawyer.
Under his breath Aero said to me, “This is a little much, don’t you think? I mean, it’s not that I’m not insanely attracted to you, but if we’re going to have a business relationship, I’m not sure … ”
I stopped listening after he said insanely attracted and everything around me blurred— the chipped paints of the gondola, the sloshing of the water against the tunnel walls, the faint replaying of “Puppy Love,” the splashing of the waterfall a few yards behind us.
All I saw was Aero Jantzen’s lips moving, and all I felt was myself drawing near to his entrancing mouth by an irresistible force— one not named Ryker. My eyes fluttered shut, and his talking vibrated against my mouth for a second until he joined me in the kiss that started as mere pressure and soon morphed into desire.
It had been months, no— years, since I’d kissed someone like this. The tenderness, the emotion, the newness all fired in me, making my fingers tremble and my mind float off toward the surf twenty miles to the west of here, where it crashed, crashed, crashed on the waves.
Twenty million-neurons-fired later, I pulled back and looked into Aero Jantzen’s shocked but dazed blue eyes. From far away, I could hear Ryker and Phoebe’s applause, but all I could think was Aero, Aero, arrow-straight to my soul.
The boat bumped against the side wall. We were floating again: the boat literally and, me figuratively. Soaring, more like.
We emerged into the daylight, and I had to throw up a hand to guard my eyes from the California sunshine.
“Looking forward to working with you, Jilly,” Aero said, clearing his throat.
“Likewise.” I stood on unsteady legs, like some kind of newborn forest animal, and somehow exited the little boat and floated out to the BGG Mercedes, started it and aimed Myrtle for the freeway.
Who knows what autopilot engaged to accomplish my exit from the park and onto the freeway toward the San Fernando Valley because my every conscious thought was stuck on Aero Jantzen and his faith-restoring kiss.
Looking forward to working with you, Jilly, he’d said.
Jilly, Jilly, Jilly. From his mouth, my nickname sounded sweet and happy.
No one but Ryker called me Jilly, but now add Aero Jantzen, the banker-turned-talent agent. I still had no idea how that had come about, unless Ryker had come in to ask for some kind of loan or to start some creative project as a side business, like Aero had mentioned with the running shoes— ooh
, in which case, there would be legal documents for me to review, with Aero, and to be there while Ryker signed.
I sighed, tingles showering me head to toe as I realized there might be more than one opportunity to run into this drop-dead gorgeous banker again. Soon. But if it only entailed paperwork, I’d be in for a terrible fall. Much as I hated to admit it, after one little ride through Swept Away, hopes and dreams might already be involved.
CHAPTER THREE
I hung back as the authenticator examined the painting under a lighted magnifying glass the size of a dinner plate. Grady Ingliss’s studio was a gigantic mess, like most artists’ workplaces, but he was able to reach over to a bookshelf and instantly snag a book titled Mid-Twentieth-Century Painters in California without even looking up.
Organized chaos— I had to admire it. Grady himself personified the concept: shirt untucked, hairpiece askew, facts streaming from his mind in perfect order.
“What do you think, Mr. Ingliss?”
“I’m seeing these brush strokes here, at this right-to-left, downward angle. This indicates a left-handed artist. And here, do you see this? The folds in the fabric across her shoulder are very natural, reminiscent of the way he would paint the bark of the trees in his landscape scenes. Or here, see? Look at the fine detail around the eye.” He swung the arm of the lit magnifying glass over the top of the face and had me lean closer. “Do you see the eyelashes? Some of them are so finely done they had to be created with a brush made of a single hair.”
I looked closely, and he had to be right.
“Impressive.” But was it a Mars Yuber? “I’ve never seen anything of his besides the landscapes.”
Grady Ingliss plopped into his rolling desk chair and slid across the wood floor of his studio to a filing cabinet, from which he plucked a sheaf of papers not even in a file.
“Let’s see. Yes. It’s rumored that he created one, exactly one, portrait.”
How did Grady do that, pull out a tiny fact from the infinite minutiae? He had to be a warlock. He held out the paperwork for me to examine. Sure enough, there was a clipping from an issue of Art Now, a now-defunct magazine, dated in the late 1950s. A salient passage popped out at me. I read it aloud.
“Sources close to the mysterious Yuber have hinted that we can look for a female portrait to be completed sometime this fall. ‘He seems to have stumbled onto a muse,’ said one confidante on condition of anonymity. ‘Oil on canvas is all I will say.’ But whether the painting itself will come up for sale is another matter. Another anonymous source rejected the idea that the painting would even see the light of day, let alone the spotlight of a gallery, salon, or auction house. In fact, the artist was more likely to keep it for private enjoyment, it was stated.”
Huh. Maybe it was the lawyer in me that operated on a system of auto-doubt, but I wasn’t convinced either way.
“To me, the rumor points to a possible female portrait,” I said, “but there’s nothing to tie it to this painting per se.”
“Other than the signature.” Grady Ingliss tapped his temple. “And therein lies the mystery.”
He grabbed the article from my hand and shoved it back in the cabinet. Then, in two seconds he’d covered the distance to the far wall on his rolling chair and tugged out a stack of prints, none framed or matted, just mounted on a thick paper. I sidestepped a napping cat and came to see.
“These are numbered.” I pointed to the notation in the bottom left corner. “Six of fifty. Eighteen of twenty. Four of ten.” They were Mars Yubers, and all of dark forest on snow. Stark, detailed, wild, striking, kind of like my thirty-five dollar yard sale find.
“Let’s compare and contrast.” Ingliss’s rolling chair sailed over to the light table with the magnifying glass, and after twenty minutes of going back and forth between all the signatures, including the scrawl on the oil from Iron Maiden Man, Grady dropped his arms to the table. He tilted his head up and looked me in the eye, poised to pronounce a verdict.
I held my breath. With Grady’s simple yes, a million possible doors all flung open at once. With his no, my life became the static between stations on the dial of the old AM radio in my car.
“You, Miss Price, are the proud owner of a genuine Mars Yuber.”
Fireworks went off in my soul. I exploded to my feet and threw my arms around him in a hug. He hugged back tentatively, patting my back for a second and then pushing me away with a gentle nudge.
“I can’t believe it, Mr. Ingliss. This is unbelievable. It’s incredible. It’s unthinkable.”
“I’m sure a thesaurus would give you some other adjectives for it, but there’s more, Miss Price. You’re not just owner of any Mars Yuber. What you stumbled across this morning at an obscure yard sale in Pasadena is the lost Mars Yuber portrait.”
My throat closed, and I couldn’t breathe for a second. “The?”
“The.”
“What do you mean, lost? Was it stolen?”
“No. Not that anyone ever reported.” He pulled out some paper and threaded it through an old typewriter with all the accompanying clicks. “By lost I mean that after Yuber’s passing three years ago, many expected to find it in his estate. Those who knew him, I should say. However, it wasn’t there.”
“Maybe it went to an ungrateful child, or nephew or other heir, who sold it.” Like, for drug money, I could have said aloud but didn’t. I saw a lot of that in my job, even though I worked for the supposed cream of the American celebrity crop. “Kids never appreciate their parents’ hard work.”
“He never married. He had no heirs.”
The poor guy died alone, and he didn’t even end up having in his possession the incredibly unbelievably inconceivable portrait— or the woman it depicted. A pang hit my heart for him. Everyone, no matter how famous or talented or wealthy or successful, everyone needed someone to love. My work with that group of successful and talented people taught me that. No question, loneliness touched every echelon.
“What do I owe you?” I checked in my purse for cash, but I’d spent most of it on the painting and admission to Thrillsville. “Do you take a credit card?”
Grady Ingliss shook his head. “Nuh-uh. Getting to have my name on the authentication papers for this famous piece is payment enough. When you put it in a gallery— you will, of course, be loaning it to the LACMA or the Huntington for display, since thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of fans will want to see it— please just give me a little line of a credit, would you?”
“Of course!” I breathed. Grady’s name should have been Gratis today. Mine was Grateful. “I can’t thank you enough.” I shook his hand with both of mine, took the paperwork, which he’d typed on special vellum with his letterhead at the top I now saw, and picked up my portrait to go.
But a question stopped me. “Do you have any thoughts on what it might be worth?”
Grady’s eyebrows lifted. “More than my annual salary, by a factor of ten.”
How was I supposed to ask for specifics from that? Be crass, I guessed.
“So, a million?”
“More like five.” Grady lobbed the number like it was chump change into a dish on a nightstand. Maybe it was, in the art world, but in mine, five million dollars was champ change. “Don’t drop it on your way to the office. And if you’re insuring it, be sure to double that price, Miss Price.”
My face muscles went into petrifaction.
Until I realized what this meant.
I owned my very own gallery draw.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Well, you have to show it to me now.” Tyanne got off the treadmill on Monday morning the second she saw me walk into the BGG gym. “Surely you at least snapped a photo of it with your phone. Grady said it was real, after all?”
I hadn’t told her anything more about it since our initial phone call on Saturday when I asked for Grady Ingliss’s number.
She rubbed the sweat off her glowing brown skin and took a long swig from her water bottle.
“Don�
��t look so surprised. Yes, Grady and I are dating. No, it’s not serious yet. Yes, I wish it were.”
Holy cats. I never in a million years would have put the two of them together. Tyanne looked like Tyra Banks, only younger and with better letters after her name— J.D.— and Grady was … other than his mind, untidy.
“The dude is a freaking genius.” She dabbed the back of her neck with a towel. “I was sick of all the athletes and actors filing through here hitting on me with their film school aspirations and their empty bank accounts.”
As of yesterday, I happened to know Grady’s annual salary, so empty bank account wouldn’t describe him.
“He’s brilliant, all right. And yes, he said he believes it’s a real Mars Yuber.”
“But also that it’s unusual.” Tyanne jumped back on the treadmill, but she muted the television, at which another attorney briefly growled before taking a phone call. “I don’t mean to be all nosy about it, but Grady, while brainy, isn’t notorious for being discreet. He likes to tell me stuff, anyway. I assume he tells everyone things.”
That was a good assumption. Talkers talked, in my experience.
“I didn’t snap a picture. Sorry.” I’d wrapped it in gray-white paper I picked up at IKEA, making it look as much like a mass-produced knock-off of a bad-in-the-first-place piece of decorative art and stuffed it in the back of my Toyota, the one I wasn’t allowed to drive to meetings with BGG’s top clients. Now the Yuber chilled down in employee parking until nine when the banks opened and I would have a chance to call around and find one with a safety deposit box big enough to stash something of its size until I could figure out my next move.
I’d already called my insurance company. My premium on my renters’ insurance was going to more than quadruple now. I guess everything had a downside, even finding an insanely valuable lost portrait; but the upside far outshone the down.
Maybe Tyanne was the one to confide in about the upside’s shininess.
“Do you ever think about moving on?” I finished tying my shoe as I got ready to work out.
Mergers & Acquisitions Page 3
