Flirting with Forever

by Gwyn Cready

  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.

  “Madam, please!”

  She turned. A tall, extraordinarily reedy bald man with an armful of papers gazed at her sternly. She slipped the phone unobtrusively into her bag. “Qué?”

  “Kay?” he repeated blankly and looked at a paper in his hand.

  “Qué. Qué?” Oh, the hell with it. “My name is Kay, er, Katie Holmes.” She dipped a curtsy. Her English accent was amateurish at best. The man frowned and began a slow, careful review. Realizing with a horrified start she had no shoes, she thrust her shoulders back, and the man’s eyes screeched to a halt at her neckline. Different ages, different clothes—same hormonal magic.

  His face relaxed into a slightly less concerned smile. “I presume you wish to see Mr. Lely, aye?”

  “Ye—er, aye.”

  “About a painting?”

  “Aye.”

  “That is possible, of course, only with an appointment.” He scanned the paper in his hand. “I don’t see a Katie Holmes here. You do have an appointment, I presume?”

  Cam shifted. Run or lie? Running would likely get her removed from the premises. She fingered the phone in her pocket. She had to stay, one way or another. “I, well…It’s complicated.”

  Seven

  Peter brushed by the desk usually occupied by his clerk, Stephen, and let his office door shut behind him. After a quick look to ensure no one was about, he went to the storage room and lowered the window to its original position. He damned his luck at running into that blackguard, Sir David. He’d entered by way of the servants’ door, but even then he’d taken a chance of running into Mertons, who would have been beside himself by now if he’d figured out Peter had left the building.

  Charles’s royal entourage had been at Charles’s club in Maiden Lane, but not Charles himself, and it had taken Peter more than three-quarters of an hour to track down the king in the Berkeley Square dressing room of the Honorable Genevieve Longchamps, though how much longer Genevieve’s title would apply given the king’s obvious intentions he could only guess.

  Peter slipped a hand in his waistcoat and touched the letter, more valuable than gold. He believed the king would keep his word and sign it. He had to believe it. Charles had his faults, to be sure, but for the most part he was a man of honor in business, and he had always treated Peter fairly—as fairly as a monarch could treat anyone—though he had certainly extracted his pound of flesh in the years since their first meeting thirty years ago, Charles the wide-eyed, ten-year-old son of the king and Peter the scrape-farthing Dutchman with the striking palette of colors.

  Six years from now, Peter knew, Charles would bestow a knighthood on him. Charles would say it was for a lifetime of contribution to English art, though Peter knew it had been as much to lift his spirits. But the gesture would fail, and Peter would be dead within the year, collapsing at his easel and finally earning the peace for which he had so longed. Or so he had thought, until he found that death, at least the part of death spent in the Afterlife, had not erased any of his memories.

  How long would Ursula’s death haunt him?

  A double tap at the door roused him from his thoughts. Stephen. Peter felt disloyal for returning here, like a spy, into the lives of his friends and the people who worked for him, with no admission of his prescient knowledge of his future as well as theirs. Mertons, however, had insisted Peter tell no one, and so no one had been told.

  “Come,” Peter said.

  Stephen, as upright as a bishop, but with the broad, good-natured face of a tavern owner, ducked in and began to gather the stray dishes from breakfast.

  “Miss Quinn?” Peter asked as he took his seat.

  “Attended to.”

  “Good. And Sir David?”

  “Gone.”

  “Which reminds me.” He caught Stephen’s eye and let the corner of his mouth rise. “The king has taken a new fancy.”

  A look of horror came over Stephen’s face. “We cannot begin the painting over. Not again. First Nell, then Barbara Villiers, then Nell again, and now someone else? The paint on the face has been scraped down so many times the canvas is getting to look like my gran’s lacework underneath.”

  “I think we are safe with Nell for now,” Peter said. “We should endeavor to finish it this week, however. With that delivered, the king’s only choice will be a new commission.” So long as the king maintains his royal prerogative with the women of the court, Peter thought, I shall always have work. “How are the mezzotints today?”

  “Good, good. Except for Collins with the broken finger, we’ve been producing at a prodigious rate. Nothing to worry about there.”

  Peter felt the pause. “But?”

  “Might I observe the new apprentice, the tall one with no hair, is not going to make much of an artist.”

  He meant Mertons. Peter snorted. “He’s my cousin. From my mother’s first marriage. I’m afraid it was this or transportation to the New World.”

  “Ah. Well, perhaps a stint stretching canvas would be more to his liking.”

  “Excellent notion.”

  Stephen started out but paused at the door. “Peter,” he said, taking a deep breath, “I have taken the liberty of placing one or two very handsome widows into your diary this week, and I thought perhaps—”

  “No,” Peter said with a choking rush of sorrow. “It has been but a year.”

  “Nearly two, Peter. Nearly two. And one of the widows has twice been kind enough to—”

  “Enough,” Peter said. It had been two years in Stephen’s memory, but for Peter, who had already endured the rest of his life here and more beyond, it had been eight. Eight long years, and even now his heart felt as lifeless and ill-prepared for the intimacy of another person as a stone.

  “You mope,” Stephen said. “You brood. You bury yourself in your work. Ursula would not have wanted this. There. I’ve said her name. I’m tired of tiptoeing around as if she never existed. We all are. Peter,” he said more softly, “she was my friend too. I know she wouldn’t have wanted this. You know what she would’ve said. She would have damned you for your foolishness.”

  Peter smiled in spite of himself. “Aye, I can hear her now.”

  Stephen’s eyes twinkled. “A fair temper, that one. I could tell the day I first laid eyes on her, the first day she came in to model.”

  “’Twas the coloring. The red hair.”

 
“The coloring, the eyes, the way she refused to lower her shoulder.”

  An obscure sentimental joy came into Peter as he remembered the scene, as clear in his head as if the years gone by were no more than a snap of his fingers. “God help us, she was a terrible model—stubborn, short-tempered, easily bored.”

  “But so, so beautiful on canvas.”

  “Indeed.” Peter’s eyes started to smart, and he turned away.

  Stephen sighed. “I have said enough. More than enough, I expect.”

  Far more. Peter felt the familiar wave of grief.

  “I have finished tomorrow’s schedule,” Stephen said, deftly changing the subject. “Might I observe your trade is as strong as ever?”

  Peter grunted. At this point in his career, his schedule had always been full, not that the schedule had mattered to him. He’d always taken the commissions he desired, worked until he was done, and let Stephen handle the patrons whose appointments had been delayed or canceled. All that mattered to him now was appeasing the king until he signed the document that would issue an edict of marriage between a long-dead woman and the man who had loved her.

  Stephen, evidently sensing his master’s wish to be alone, made his exit bow. Peter held up a hand.

  “I know your intentions are good, my friend,” he said. “But I…I cannot. Not yet. Do not ask it.” He cursed Mertons and the Guild for the torture he was reliving.

  Stephen bowed again, added a long-empty wineglass to the collection of dishes in his hand, and went out.

  Eight

  Cam fidgeted on the hard bench. She’d been marched to the waiting room by the man, who was now describing the process patrons must follow to secure a place on Lely’s schedule. She was waiting for a pause into which she could reasonably insert a request to use the privy, cover for another try at the models’ room, when the door behind the secretary’s desk opened. It wasn’t Lely, but the man in the smock who had reported on Miss Quinn’s disposition earlier. The man looked at her and nearly fumbled the tray of dishes and glasses he was carrying.

  “Mary, Mother of God,” he uttered.

  “Stephen, any word on Peter?” the reedy man said. “I checked every place you suggested. No sign.”

  Stephen pointed wordlessly at the doorway behind him, though his gaze never left her face. He looked as if he’d seen a ghost. Actually he looked as if he’d seen a ghost standing between Amelia Earhart and Jimmy Hoffa, holding the lead to a unicorn.

  Stephen’s colleague rushed toward Lely’s door, clapped the list under Stephen’s arm as he passed, and disappeared into the office.

  “I think,” Stephen said firmly to Cam, “you will have to leave.”

  Nine

  “But I haven’t seen Peter Lely yet,” Peter heard a voice in the waiting room declare.

  Despite the explosion of Mertons into his office like a misfired mortar, he smiled. The woman had an odd, eager lilt to her words that reminded him of his countrymen when they first grew conversant in English. He knew only too well what it was like to be a stranger in a new place. He wondered if perhaps she was Dutch or had a Dutch parent.

  “Where have you been?” Mertons’s gaze went straight to the now closed storage room door.

  Peter kept his eyes from following Mertons’s. “I do apologize. I was napping.”

  “What is your name?”

  Poor Stephen was checking the woman against the list, and Peter found himself listening for the reply, partly because he thought it might give him a further clue to her origin, and partly because he had always favored contraltos.

  “It’s there,” she said. “On the list.”

  “Peter?”

  “Pardon?” Mertons had said something, though Peter had not the faintest idea what.

  “I said I checked your room. You were not napping there. I checked everywhere.”

  “On this list?” Stephen said, surprised. “I made most of it myself. Where is your name?”

  “I was in the wardrobe,” Peter replied impatiently. He wished Mertons would stop talking so he could hear.

  “The wardrobe?”

  “Oh, dear,” the woman said. “I can barely read your writing.”

  “Lady Humphries,” Stephen began, evidently reading off the patrons on the list, and with a spark of delight, Peter realized she was shopping for a name. “Miss Mary Tallyrand, daughter of Lord Tallyrand. Henrietta, wife of Mr. George Palmer. A widow, Mrs. Eu-jeanne Eu-jen Eugenie Post—”

  “Mrs. Eugenie Kay Post. That,” she said firmly, “is I.”

  “The wardrobe, Peter? Really?”

  Peter stood, unable to stifle his curiosity. “It is dark, it is cool, and at least until now,” he said, drifting toward the door, “no one has thought to look for me there.” He thought if he took a spot three-quarters of the way across the room and tilted his head just far enough…

  Mertons blew out a long exhale. “I-I know you don’t enjoy being here, Peter, but we’ve talked about this. You must realize your absence could have been disastrous. If the writer had arrived while you—”

  “Bugger the writer, Mertons. Mrs. Eugenie Kay Post has arrived, and I intend to enjoy this little performance—”

  Then Peter saw her, and a searing pain cut his heart. Sorrow, betrayal, fear, and, above all, a burning anger flared like a gunpowder charge, sucking the air from his lungs. She was beautiful, with ringlets of sun-polished copper, eyes as crystal blue as the Zuider Zee, shoulders as proud as a sultan, and a fine, high bosom. And beautiful she should be, for she was almost the dead spit of Ursula. He knew she must have been picked by Stephen like an apple in Eden to tempt him.

  Well, damn Stephen and his detestable machinations. Damn his handsome widows. He wondered if she were a widow at all. He wouldn’t put it past his meddling friend to have hired an agreeable whore so long as she had the right face and hair.

  Peter retreated a step but it was too late. The woman spotted him and smiled tentatively.

  His head started to buzz. He felt manipulated, his fastidiousness made to look ridiculous. He would be forced to talk to this woman as Stephen looked on. Peter’s cheeks flushed and sweat broke out on his forehead. He wished to run or to curse—something, anything to master this upsetting tumult of emotion.

  Stephen looked as if he’d prefer to be hanged, and if Peter had had easy access to a rope, he would have accommodated him.

  “Peter,” Stephen said stiffly, “may I introduce Mrs. Eugenie Kay Post. Mrs. Post, this is Peter Lely, court painter to His Majesty King Charles. I was just explaining to Mrs. Post that you are—”

  “I need only a moment of your time, Mr. Lely,” the woman said, interrupting. She extended an arm the color of glazed bisque. “I wish to discuss a commission for a landscape. My time in London is limited.”

  “I imagined as much,” Peter said coolly, but his words emerged through a mouth so dry they lost their resonance, heightening his embarrassment. He kissed her hand quickly, then released it as his own started to quake. He hated that she had this effect on him. To have felt so little in the way of attraction for so long and then to feel this…It was too much. “My clerk has failed in his duty. Desire him to explain the complexities of my diary. I am a very busy man. I suggest you take your custom elsewhere. Good day.”

  Ten

  And this, Cam thought, is why we need men like Jake Ryan. She felt like she’d been slapped. She’d been sized up and dismissed. She’d known men like this before—hell, she’d had men like this before. They were generally self-involved windbags who felt the size of their wallet, talent, Mercedes, or dick made up for a lack of courtesy.

  She watched Lely stride down the hall, shoulders back, head high, emperor of all he surveyed. Grrrr. She’d had enough of that in her life. Had had it up to here. First her father, then her sister, then Jacket. Someday, someone would get a piece of her mind. But at least
her dismissal meant that longed-for opportunity had arrived.

  “Privy,” she barked to a startled Stephen and slipped away.

  She turned the corner, heading straight for the models’ room. Take my custom elsewhere, is it? She’d like to tell him what he could do with his freakin’ custom. She flew past Mercury, past the stairway, past the studio—

  She screeched to a halt. Peter was in there, rifling a drawer in the bench, his back imperiously straight. She looked at the models’ door, closed but surely penetrable, then back at the studio.

  The hell with it. This guy needed his ass kicked.

  * * *

  Mrs. Post burst into his studio like a savage, shoving the door aside with a bang, but Peter, who heard her in the hall, ignored the theatrics. He gave her a cool glance, damning his heart for its inexplicable rise, and returned to the mixing of cobalt and oil.

  “I’ve come for a commission,” she said.

  “My diary is full.”

  “Is this how you treat your patrons? I’d heard you were rude. I didn’t realize you were also a fool.”

  Peter stiffened. Only one other person in his adult life had ever dared speak to him in such a manner. Ursula had had a viper’s tongue when she chose, and an angel’s mouth. How she’d liked to put that mouth to use when their arguments had ended. He looked at his visitor’s full, wide lips and found himself unexpectedly wondering if she’d resemble Ursula in that way as well.

  “I apologize if I’ve offended you.” He bowed briskly and reached for the bowl.

  She didn’t move.

  “Is there something more, Mrs. Post?”

  “Aye. You’re a total shit.”

  Peter jerked upright, unable to believe his ears, and Stephen, who had just reached the doorway, stopped dead in his tracks.

  “Madam—” Stephen began.

  “Leave us.” Peter held up a hand and turned the full power of his gaze on the woman. He was a large man, and his glare made the blue fire in her eyes rise, just as it had in Ursula. Stephen wheeled in a half circle and disappeared.