His head followed, and he could almost make out…
“Oh,” she muttered, and then snapped up from the chair, regretfully pushing the robe back into place. Her busy hands were back at his jaw, twisting, her brown eyes all business, studying him again.
“Sorry,” he said, wondering what she would think if he pulled her down to the bed for a momentary intermission. A break to stir her creative juices…maybe.
She shook her head. “The look in your eyes. It’s wrong. Can we put the sadness back?”
He looked at her in surprise. “Excuse me?”
“I’ve got you half-sad, but I’m not quite finished with it, and you look, well—” the nervousness was back in her face “—not sad.”
“I’m very sorry, but you make me…completely not sad,” he said.
That brought her out of her reverie.
“Really?” She looked at him, a pleased smile stretched across her face.
“Really.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t worry about the sad look. Maybe I could draw you like this,” she muttered, looking lower, and then faltering for a second.
Daniel felt his patience coming to an unrepentant, crashing halt, and he was a patient guy, but this was flat-ass weird. “You want the sad back? Keep staring at me like that and stay about four feet away. That’s sad.”
“Wow,” she breathed.
“‘Wow’ was not the word I would use,” Daniel said, fighting the urge to cover himself. Dammit, some things couldn’t be helped, and he wasn’t going to apologize for it.
Her mouth pulled into another smile, equally pleased as before, but a little bit wicked, and she slid the robe off her shoulders and climbed on top of him. He showed her exactly how “not sad” he felt.
THEY DID EVENTUALLY make it outside. The late-summer sun burned down on her fair skin, the air was sticky, the sand hot, and the water looked too cool to ignore. Daniel was a good swimmer, not as good as she was—she, who had been the breaststroke champion at St. Ignatius, until Mrs. Crawford, the evil school nurse, had told her that swimming made her body look too much like a boy’s.
Thank you, Mrs. Crawford.
But Daniel didn’t seem to care. He caught her a few times, pulling her under the surface, touching her in ways that told her that he liked her body fine.
Take that, Mrs. Crawford.
Although one thing Catherine did notice was that he was never overt, never committing too much, always watching the lawyers next door with a careful eye. Daniel and Catherine appeared to be two swimmers in the sea, not two lovers lingering on the beach, but she decided that it wasn’t going to bother her. After all, she wasn’t the demonstrative type, either.
As the afternoon sun moved low they came out of the water. Daniel told her more about himself. He talked about his job at the accounting firm, about his brother’s bar. He asked her questions about where she worked, and this time Catherine was the careful one. Normally she loved to talk about Montefiore’s, but with all the talk in the back hallways of the auction house, she needed to be extra careful. So she told him she was gainfully employed at an art gallery in Soho where she did appraisals.
Catherine was always cautious.
Daniel listened, asking her polite questions about the business, and she gave her carefully constructed, socially acceptable tales of the canvas, and he didn’t seem to notice.
She avoided checking her watch, but eventually the sun started dipping lower in the horizon, and she knew it was close to time. Not wanting him to bring it up first, she glanced pointedly at her watch…once—but it was enough.
He met her eyes, and the loneliness returned. Odysseus was back on his travels. “I should get packed.”
Catherine sighed, then stood, dusting off the remains of the sand from her legs. “I’ll call you a taxi.”
“That’d be good,” he said, in a voice best described as emotionless.
This was it. That awkward moment when nothing more is going to come about, but everyone is expected to be adult. Catherine was supposed to pretend she hadn’t given her body to a man who was virtually a stranger, yet she’d never felt a stronger connection with a stranger, never felt a stronger connection with a non-stranger, either, for that matter.
Not many men understood a woman like Catherine. She’d spent so much of her life staring at art, studying art and drawing art. She lived in a quiet, inanimate world and at some point, the world became her, and she became the world. And actually, Catherine was happy in that quiet, inanimate world.
Daniel, with his lonely eyes. She’d thought this man understood her, but with every second that passed she felt him putting distance between them. Yes, she wanted to see him again, but she wasn’t going to ask, and put herself out there. This was one weekend only. A limited engagement.
Daniel followed her into the house and headed for the bedroom where his things were. The unused bedroom.
After Catherine called the cab, she stood over the kitchen counter. Her hands gripped the cool granite. Some part of her didn’t want this to end, but what choice did she have? Eventually, she spotted a bottle of water, helpful for his train ride back to the city, and her genetically propagated social skills came to the rescue.
With the travel refreshment in hand, she went to the bedroom. He didn’t notice her at first because he was engrossed in something entirely new and different—the heavy gold band sitting on top of his duffel bag.
A wedding ring.
Okay, that explained it. Catherine ignored the shooting pains radiating up from her gut to somewhere near her heart. She did hand him the bottle of water. In times of crisis, always best to remember one’s social skills.
She tried to not look at the small circle of gold. However, like the Mona Lisa, it drew your eye like a magnet.
A wedding ring.
Not quite what she had imagined.
“It’s not what you think,” he said, easily reading her mind. Catherine didn’t have the patience to hear excuses, not when she suddenly understood why he hadn’t cared if she talked much.
Catherine Montefiore, walking vagina. That was her.
“Don’t say anything. It’s better that way. I’ll think more highly of you if you don’t try and wangle your way out of this.”
Soullessly, he stared at her, and again she felt it, that complete isolation of his, but now it made more sense. It took a cold man to do what he did.
He nodded curtly. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I should have told you up front.”
“You should have,” she replied tightly. Thankfully, she heard a car horn. “What amazing timing. Taxi’s here.”
He donned his ring, slung the duffel over his shoulder and gave her one last look. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but I liked being with you. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt like that. It felt good. You should know that.”
Catherine fisted her hands behind her back, her mouth scrunched together. She didn’t want to yell. Not yet. Not until he was gone. What an easy mark. For that she hated herself nearly as much as she hated him.
“You’re right. I don’t want to hear that,” she told him, waiting until he walked out the door and left.
After she heard the rev of the taxi pulling away, Catherine went to take a shower. A long shower because right then she needed nothing more than to get clean.
Sadly, she knew the shower wasn’t going to help.
5
ON MONDAY DANIEL went back to work at the accounting firm that he’d worked for for the past thirteen years. The Manhattan office of the Big Six firm had once been a bustling, lively place. That changed after 9/11. The office had moved to midtown, before eventually relocating back downtown where it belonged. Daniel was a partner now, but he didn’t like the management aspect of accounting. He had found his niche in the accounting world—audits—and that was where he stayed.
The day creaked by slowly. He finished his report on the Hudson Electronics audit, took care of some tax documents, cleared out his in-box
, but his conscience wasn’t in a good place. His wedding ring was firmly back on his finger, and his life was firmly back where he’d left it on Friday.
Except for the dream last night.
He hadn’t been expecting that. That 2:00 a.m. wake-up call when he could feel Catherine next to him, when he could hear her soft voice whispering in his ear. Daniel had woken up with the sheets damp, and his usual raging hard-on, but this time it wasn’t Michelle he was reaching for.
He hadn’t planned on seeing Catherine again. He purposefully hadn’t asked for a phone number because he knew his mind was in no condition to do anything resembling normal.
Still, he hated the aftertaste in his mouth. The taste of accusations unsaid, and the cold, flat look that she leveled him with as he left. This from a woman who didn’t do cold or flat well. But she had learned fast.
Yes, it would be easier if Catherine thought he had cheated on his wife. She was better off without him. But Daniel never cheated. Ever. He had been the best husband he could be.
So what did he expect to tell her?
Oh, yeah, maybe we could go out. Maybe we could sleep together because I really enjoyed that part, but I loved my wife desperately and I don’t think I could ever replace her in my heart, and oh, you wouldn’t mind if I used you, would you?
Daniel exhaled and turned back to the tidy world of accounting. There everything came together in the end, debits and credits balanced, for every liability, there was an equal and opposite asset and emotions didn’t screw with you at all. He willed himself to concentrate on the numbers, and that self-deception was working nicely until Gabe called him.
“I need your help tomorrow night.”
“No,” he answered, his eyes burning from lack of sleep, and staring at too much nothing on the screen.
“I haven’t asked.”
“I’m tired.”
“Long weekend?” asked Gabe, heavy innuendo in his voice.
“No,” Daniel lied automatically. This weekend was a secret that was going with him to the grave.
“I heard you met somebody.”
So much for secrets. Weren’t lawyers supposed to know how to keep their mouth shut? “We live in New York. If you analyze the population per capita, I have a higher chance of getting hit by lightning than of not meeting somebody.”
Gabe laughed, but knew when to quit. “Never mind. I need you to come into the bar tomorrow and work with the new bartender. He’s a little slow.”
“I’m not a bartender. I’m an accountant. You do it.”
“I can’t. I’m working on the construction.”
“Don’t we pay construction people to do that?”
“There’s another issue with the building permit. Some official lady-type came in today, saying that we’ve been designated a historical building.”
“It sorta is,” Daniel reminded him.
It had been over a year ago when Gabe had bought the space next door to Prime, his goal to restore the old speakeasy to its original size and grandeur. Since then, the problems hadn’t stopped. Each time they got one problem solved, a new one popped up. First it was the liquor license, which delayed the building permit, which caused a hiccup in the financing. Then, the steam tunnels running underneath the sidewalk had failed an inspection, and while the repairs were being made, the space sat idle for months. In the spring, the city sent them a bill for nearly six figures of back taxes. It was a computer error, thank God, but now this. Daniel sighed, mainly to make Gabe feel better.
“I don’t want my bar to be a freaking historical building on an architectural tour. All I want is to get Prime back to the way it was in the day. Twelve months I’ve been fighting this. It’s like it’s cursed. When they gave me the permit in May, I thought it was over. And now I have a wall that’s half torn down, a canvas tarp that’s trying to cover the hole and somebody’s going to catch on to the situation really quick. I’d like to finish this, Daniel. Soon. I’d like to at least finish the demolition on the wall before it starts leaking blood, or they find Jimmy Hoffa’s body buried underneath it and it’s designated a crime scene.”
“What about Sean?” he asked. For Daniel, bartending was the worst sort of torture. He didn’t have Gabe or Sean’s easy gift for conversation.
“Sean’s got a date.”
“Tell him to cancel it.”
“With the chairman of the city planning department’s secretary? She’s going to find out what’s up with the historical designation.”
“What about Cain?” he asked, getting desperate.
“What do you think? He’s only part-time. Otherwise he’s out fighting fires, Daniel. Don’t you think you can spend a night working the place and teaching someone how to bartend?”
Daniel groaned, seeing the hard truth in front of him. He was going to have to bartend. Worse yet, he was going to have to work with some knucklehead who didn’t know a whiskey from a water and probably thought all women should be called “baby.”
“I’ll do it.” Now that it was starting to sink in how much his brothers were worrying about him, Daniel wasn’t about to let them down. Not anymore.
But that didn’t mean he had to like it.
MONTEFIORE Auction House was located at the south edge of Morningside Heights in a squat five-story building that had housed as many art treasures as the Louvre, the Hermitage and MoMA combined, or at least that’s what Catherine’s grandfather had told her since she was six. Ten years later, when she was an intern there, Catherine realized that perhaps Grandpa might have overexaggerated, but it didn’t matter. For her, the storerooms of Montefiore’s were as magical as any circus, as spiritual as any cathedral, as addictive as any red velvet cupcake. Well, almost.
Within these boxes and meticulously cataloged crates were the lives, secrets, histories and loves of the world’s greatest artists. Men and women whose creations were destined to live forever. She envied them their ability to make the canvas tremble, their sure-handed mastery of color and light, the precisely rendered details that seemed to flow effortlessly. Two hundred, three hundred, four hundred years later, all that was left of their life was the work itself.
That was a legacy.
Unfortunately Catherine didn’t have her mother’s eye for Western contemporary art, nor her grandfather’s passion for thirteenth-century Japanese funeral vases, but that didn’t stop her from working to develop something that hadn’t been passed on in her genes.
For the previous thirteen years, she had learned the business side, studied art history and poured herself into this place. Everything had been okay until she realized that her grandfather had expectations of her outside of the art. At the receptions, she was supposed to be animated, lively. She, who didn’t have a vivacious bone in her body. At first, she tried, but then, somewhere along the line, she stopped trying, and accepted who she was, and realized that she couldn’t be who her grandfather wanted her to be. She was at peace, but sometimes it hurt.
When the genuine Charles II longcase clock in the lobby chimed nine times, the phones began to ring, and didn’t stop until the switchboard operator hit the kill button and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. During the day there were calls from consignors, buyers, art dealers, private appraisers, antique dealers and the relatives who needed a quick appraisal of their parents’ artwork that they’d found in the attic.
Maybe Catherine didn’t have her grandfather’s talent with the public, but she was capable, calm, and had quieted more than her share of anxious consignors.
Today, she preferred the stress to dwelling on the events of the weekend.
Married.
Catherine had slept with a married man. Bastard. It was one of those cardinal rules that was so cardinal, she’d never even contemplated the idea that she’d break it.
And why did it have to be so right? Wasn’t infidelity sex supposed to, by its very nature, be sordid and tawdry, not reverent and world-stirring?
Thankfully, the phone rang, and Catherine spent the n
ext hour listening to the Duchess of Marbury’s tirade on how her Louis XIV omolu-mounted center table—circa 1685, lest Catherine forget that important detail—had been undervalued at auction. By the time the Duchess had finished, Catherine was ready to forgo art for something less irritable. Like coffee.
Sybil and Brittany met her in the break room. The Monday-morning coffee break was a well-established tradition between the three friends. Although, Catherine wasn’t exactly looking forward to it, not after the past couple of days she’d had, but they’d know something was wrong if she didn’t show, and married-sex wasn’t a crime she was going to confess to. Ever.
“How was the beach?” asked Sybil, pouring her a cup of coffee. “We looked for you on Sunday, but I figured you had chickened out of brunch, and it was, like, so bad you did, because Carol Markowitz was all over Paul Connelly—the slut. I was, like, dying to drag her sorry reputation over the coals, but alas, I was solo, and there was nobody I could whisper catty things to. Men just don’t seem to get it. Completely spoiled my good time, I want you to know.”
Catherine faked a casual smile. “I wanted some quality downtime. I started this great book. Seemed a waste not to finish it while I had the opportunity.”
“Oh. I was hoping it’d be more exciting,” said Sybil, who was impatiently waiting for Mr. Right to sweep her off her feet.
“Sorry.” Then Catherine noticed Brittany idly staring at the row of auction catalog covers on the wall. When Brittany dodged eye contact, it meant only one thing. Brittany had fallen off the Michael-wagon.
Sybil, never shy, immediately started in. “You saw Michael, didn’t you?”
Brittany shrugged one slim shoulder. With black leggings, a black T-shirt, and black thick-rimmed glasses, she could have stepped right out of an art house poetry reading.
Michael was her sometime boyfriend, and full-time jerk, whom Catherine and Sybil had been trying to wean her off of.
“No big deal,” answered Brittany, which meant they’d had sex.
Sybil heaved a sigh, tossing back her long fall of auburn hair. “He’s never going to respect you if you don’t respect yourself. Did he at least call you for a date first?”
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