by Elle Pierson
Artistic License
Elle Pierson
Amazon Edition
Copyright 2013 © by Lucy Parker. All rights reserved.
Published by Lucy Parker Fiction.
Reproduction of this work in whole or part in any manner, except for the purposes of a review, is expressly prohibited.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, living or deceased, is entirely coincidental.
Chapter One
Picasso would have loved his face. It was all brutal planes: the long blade of nose, the sharp jut of bone in cheek and jaw, the thin slashes of brows and lips. No angle of which sympathised with another, as if he’d been at the end of the line when features were assembled and forced to scramble together what was left. Sophy had never in her life seen a walking, breathing human quite so like a Cubist painting.
His face was wonderful.
Her fingers paused against her sketchbook, midway through the dimpled curve of a baby’s thigh and the contrasting sharpness of his mother’s pink-painted nails. She turned slowly to a new page, absently transferred the charcoal smudges from the side of her palm to the skirt of her dress, and began to draw again. It was a geometry exercise. An acute angle as upper lip was overtaken by nose, an obtuse angle where oddly perfect ear merged into razored jawbone. She had always been disastrous at maths.
She drew from memory for some minutes, resisting the urge to look up. She wanted to look. She wanted to stare, actually. His own cool gaze had briefly scanned her, clearly weighing her potential for making trouble. He’d moved on with equally rapid dismissal.
It had still been enough to make her blush and duck her head, her standard response when encountering strangers for the first time. It didn’t matter whether they were muscled mountains of security guards in leather jackets or skinny, freckle-faced checkout boys at the supermarket. It was always an effort to make eye contact, at least until she’d known the person long enough to have a few conversations, share a joke or two, add them on Facebook, see them without their makeup.
Usually, she forced herself to raise her head and be polite. Impossible in this instance. It was the response of a child playing hide-and-seek, or a cat behind a curtain. If I can’t see him, he can’t see me.
She might be a total lost cause socially, but her survival instincts were functioning fine. She was pretty damn sure that the man with the beautiful face and intimidating body would not be happy to see himself reproduced in smudgy charcoal.
She had been sketching attractive people since she was eight. It had filled in time at bus stops, in waiting rooms, and during the lunch hour at school, when it was most problematic to be shy and alone. It never stopped feeling a bit voyeuristic. She kept her sketchbooks private as a matter of principle. She’d never taken one on campus and primed marble and chisel without the permission of her model. Folders of random sheets of paper, napkins, and turned-over receipts were stacked in her bedroom. Each one captured a moment of laughter, of frustration or affection, of creases of smiles and tongues tucked between teeth in intense concentration. Those sketches were the only diary record of her life.
The fact that it was a life lived largely through observation of other people didn’t particularly bother her.
A stiletto heel scraped against the polished parquet, and a muffled curse made Sophy look up. A well-preserved blonde in a six hundred dollar jacket had leaned too close to a Burne Jones canvas in the Pre-Raphaelite section. She’d lost her footing, stumbling against the velvet partition. The incident drew the full attention of another pair of eyes, shrewd and dark – brown? Grey? He wasn’t close enough for details.
The colour was artistically irrelevant for a sketch.
She still wanted to know.
Taking advantage of his preoccupation elsewhere, she narrowed her focus to his mouth, where the dark pebbling of stubble edged softer pink skin and dipped into a deeply cleft chin. Her fingers moved swiftly. She had no idea how long it had been before her gaze drifted upward and met a direct, rather irate stare. There was an almost palpable sense of collision, and she inwardly shrank.
Oops.
The man’s left brow inched higher as his eyes flickered from her burning cheeks to the pad and pencil clutched in her whitened knuckles. He scowled. Sophy immediately laid her arm across the work in a ridiculous protective gesture, which did nothing except broadcast her guilt and ruin the sleeve of her favourite vintage cardigan.
He moved his own arm, a thick bicep flexed under buttery soft leather, and she literally almost ducked. She got as far as a flinch and a quivery knee.
What did she think he was going to do? Pistol-whip her? He was more likely to kick her out of the building with understandable annoyance.
In front of hundreds of strangers, a handful of journalists, fellow art students, and her favourite tutor.
She might prefer the pistol-whipping.
A second guard made a timely entrance, a snazzy black device clutched in his hand, and began to speak to his colleague in rapid sentences. She let out a quick breath, grateful for the reprieve. Their body language was tense. She cast a quick glance about the room, wondering if she ought to be concerned. There was no obvious sign of fire, impending theft or other interesting catastrophe.
The exhibition was growing increasingly crowded as people wandered in after lunch, but the rooms weren’t quite as busy as she might have expected. The William Ryland art collection was one of the most valuable and eclectic in the world. The British magnate had inherited from a wealthy father about forty years ago, and then increased his holdings with the ruthlessness of a safari lion on the hunt. It was by far the most prestigious exhibition that had ever come to New Zealand, and it was a huge coup for the South Island that it had bypassed an affronted Auckland and Wellington for a small resort town like Queenstown.
The Ryland Curry Corporation owned several of the biggest hotels in town, including the five-star building in which she sat. Ryland had arrived at his property in state the week before, accompanied by millions of dollars’ worth of paintings and sculptures, a manicured wife, and a cluster of black-clad consultants from his global security firm. The publicity had been immense. But it had been open for six days now, and today had to compete with a cloudless sky and the opening of the summer festival. When she had passed the lakefront on her way to class this morning, winter-pale tourists had already been flocking to the water and the wine stalls.
She had avoided the glitz and mayhem of the opening night, and come alone to the exhibition on the second evening. Her cousin and flatmate, Melissa, had flatly blocked all attempts to remove her from the couch for company. Sophy tended to enjoy museums and galleries more on her own anyway, preferring to take her time without persistent watch-checking and impatient breath huffing down her neck.
Today’s visit was for school. Her classmates from the Central Otago branch of the Dunedin Art School were scattered about the room, cuddling up to the barriers, peering and chatting, and pulling pencils and paper from security-approved clear plastic bags. And looking totally bereft at the forced separation from their cell phones and iPads. Don Holland, their tutor, was gazing at a Rossetti portrait in exactly the way another man might look at a centrefold. Sophy couldn’t decide if that was endearing or a bit disturbing.
The redhead at his side clearly thought the latter, as she cast him a suspicious look and sidled away. Sophy, recognising her by her embroidered bag from an earlier encounter outside the hotel, noticed that she was missing part of an ear under all that glorious bright hair. One lobe was stretched out with a silver disc the size of a two-dollar coin, which always made her cringe a little, but the other drooped in two long flaps as if the second disc had been torn out, which made her physically shudder. As
a rule, she liked body jewellery. She’d had her own lobes pierced – and then left well alone – as soon as her mother had given the go-ahead after her twelfth birthday. She’d added the small diamond stud in her nose without parental approval on her eighteenth. She was less keen on piercings so large that a person could hang their umbrella from the hole.
She watched as the woman paused in front of the pedestal that held a collection of early twentieth-century ceramics. A gorgeous Clarice Cliff Deco vase gleamed crimson and gold under the glass, and Sophy’s favourite piece, the sinuous little Susie Cooper teapot, looked…different.
She frowned and unconsciously got to her feet. The colours looked matte and dull. Half an hour ago, they had been glittering like lake water in the sunshine. The very impressive, very costly lighting system had gone out. The display rooms were windowless but open at one end to the sun-flooded foyer, so it wasn’t immediately obvious that the power seemed to have failed.
For the sake of her large friend with the prizewinning scowl, she hoped the breakdown didn’t include the security system. Every person in the room might seize the chance to bolt with a Constable.
Although Mr. Intimidating could probably tackle the situation single-handedly, without so much as creasing the line of his jacket. He looked depressingly efficient.
His colleagues now numbered four. There was a very pretty blonde woman, and three other men, who were all well-built and uniformly handsome in a banal way. They were distinguishable only by slight changes in hair colour and thickness of muscle. The man with the fascinating face was the only one not wearing a suit, having instead opted for the leather jacket, dark pants, and a Henley shirt that was a good two sizes too small. The others looked like escapees from a Tom Ford runway. He looked like Henchman Number Two in an action flick. And they all looked, in an entirely stoic and professional way, as if it was the point in that film when smart people beat a hasty retreat before the shots and sirens started.
Sophy folded her sketchbook under her arm and looked for Don, who had abandoned his painted pin-up and her pomegranates. He didn’t seem to be in the British section any longer. She couldn’t see any of her classmates either, so she moved toward the partition that screened off the American art.
A piercing glance snagged on her movement. She met that dark stare again for three long seconds. Her breath hitched. The slight rattle sounded way too much like an asthmatic wheeze. That would be an all-time low in a history of mortifying social disasters. Having a full-on asthma attack because a man looked her up and down for a concealed balaclava or crowbar.
Apparently there were good reasons why she had spent a lot of time alone with a book during her school days.
In her peripheral vision, Sophy saw a vaguely familiar man in a wool blazer withdrawing his hand from his front pocket. His fingers were gripped around a metallic tube.
The next few minutes seemed both bewilderingly rapid and oddly frozen, as if time had halted in its tracks while mouths and limbs flung into a frenzy of motion. One of the security guards, a baby-faced man with high cheekbones and sandy-brown hair, shouted something and grabbed for his holster. The blonde barked into her phone, someone cried out in confusion, and the man in leather lunged forward in a movement of sheer brute strength.
Sophy had always had doubts about her reflexes. For good reason, it turned out. For some ungodly reason, instead of freezing to the spot or leaping away from the nutjob with a gun, like a reasonable woman, she took a step toward him.
The manoeuvre brought her directly into the path of the bulky guard. It was very much a case of irresistible force meeting entirely moveable object. He hit her like the side of a truck as he passed, knocking her to the ground. Her sketchbook slithered across the floor, and her breath rushed out of her lungs like steam escaping a kettle. A sharp crack preceded gusts of billowing white smoke that enveloped the room in a blinding fog.
Her instincts screamed, “Fire!” and encouraged immediate panic. The dregs of her rational mind heard the sound of the explosive and tried to push forward the words “smoke grenade”. Logic was hampered by the sheer terror of being unable to see or breathe while chaos reigned about her. Somebody jostled her, fell over her, stepped on her hand. Voices shouted, ranging from childish sobs to masculine shouts to deeper sounds of authority.
Breathe.
Oh God, she couldn’t breathe.
A whooshing mechanical thrum shook the floor, and slowly, thankfully, the smoke began to dissipate as industrial ventilators chugged into action, the power apparently restored. The first thing she saw through a bluish haze of anxiety was her unintentional assailant down on the floor in a squat, his knee pressed into the back of a wool blazer, his large hands snapping cuffs around tethered wrists. He swung free and rose, jerking the other man to his feet and shoving him in the direction of the blonde woman. Sophy couldn’t hear his words over the horrified hub and hum.
Her short nails were clawing at the wooden floor. She barely jumped when hands seized her from behind in a gentle hold and began to tug her upright. She looked up into the concerned blue eyes of the sandy-haired guard. He was speaking, asking her – something. Her chest was working frantically, and she could hear her heartbeat thumping in her ears. It was a moment before she realised that a familiar short squeak was coming from her throat, as if the cavities of her lungs, empty of air, were rubbing together in protest.
Oh no, of all the times –
Another presence at her side, another voice, and this time she heard the deep tones.
“Is she winded?” Those sharply-hewn features, more familiar than they ought to be from ten minutes of illicit ogling, appeared in her line of sight. Her vision was starting to leak into haze at the edges as if a filter had been applied in Photoshop. “Miss?” He sounded roughly impatient. “Are you all right? I’m sorry. I didn’t have time to dodge around you.”
“Jesus,” said the younger guard suddenly, his grip tightening on her shoulder. “Her fingers are turning blue.”
The man in the leather jacket glanced at her hands and let loose with a creative stream of profanity that would have quite impressed her at any other time.
“Ambulance,” he snapped over his shoulder. “Now.”
Sophy could have cried with frustration and annoyance at herself, if imminent unconsciousness didn’t seem a more likely outcome. She never left the house without an inhaler, but it was securely tucked into her shoulder bag, currently in the care of the hotel receptionists. It hadn’t occurred to her that she would need it inside the exhibition. Her asthma attacks were intermittent, usually severe when they struck, and were almost always brought on by exercise. She hadn’t planned to jog from exhibit to exhibit or do push-ups as she admired the William Morris prints. Strangely, she hadn’t anticipated that a conservatively dressed lunatic would let loose with a smoke grenade.
Unable to reach her bag or pull enough breath to ask for it, her inhaler took on the dual importance of a floatation device to a drowning man and a security blanket to a frightened child. She didn’t have it, and her growing panic exacerbated her struggle for air. Her grasping fingers seized on to firm flesh and muscle, and squeezed tight. She was shaking his thick wrist from side to side in her distress. After a brief hesitation, his free hand came down against the side of her neck, and his head ducked to meet her flickering, unfocused stare.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said, the words calmly reassuring. “The ambulance is on its way and will be here in a few minutes. You’re going to be all right.”
She couldn’t pull in enough air to inflate the lungs of a mouse. That type of comment usually made her want to kick the well-meaning onlooker in the balls. For once, she was surprisingly comforted. Her panic eased a little, enough that she was able to hold his gaze for another six minutes and regulate her breaths to tiny, even gasps until the cavalry arrived with a distant clash of sirens.
His eyes were the darkest grey.
She was teetering into semi-consciousness when black
leather was replaced by the reflective safety gear of the paramedics. A recurring thought circled through her mind and then faded out like a banner news headline scrolling across a TV screen.
Tell him. She had to tell him…
Too late. He was gone after a last squeeze of her hand. The appalled faces of Don and her classmate Lisa were hovering above the stretcher. She had the vague impression of police officers, and the flash of light from a digital camera.
“The woman…” she tried, but the words disappeared into the vacuum of the nebuliser mask.
The girl had the reflexes of a suicidal tortoise and some serious art chops. She had captured his ugly mug with a stick of charcoal – and the worst attempt at covert surveillance he had witnessed since his days of pubescent Army training. Mick grimaced and gently closed the sketchbook, his careful handling entirely out of respect for her work. He didn’t think much of her choice of subject.
It seemed almost inevitable that his gaze would snag on Jennifer at that moment, standing near the doorway with Anya for a debrief with Robert Calhoun, the head of hotel security. Both women intercepted his look. Anya had the decency to blush and find considerable interest in the buttons of Calhoun’s jacket, but Jennifer merely tossed her blonde ponytail and continued to rattle on.
Mick shrugged off the residual anger with an effort and returned his attention to the task at hand. He tucked the sketchbook under his arm, intending to leave it at reception for the little sneak with the smudged fingers and terrified eyes. Her name was scrawled on the cover in an appealing, loopy script: Sophy James.
He suspected it would be some time before he lost the memory of those eyes fastened on his with an intensity of need that rivalled her grip on his wrist, of watching her fight for each breath during ten of the longest goddamn minutes of his life.
“Sir. Hollister.”
