Artistic License

by Elle Pierson

  Antony Gale was walking briskly toward him, his taser back in his holster and a surveillance monitor clutched in one fist. He was a recent recruit from the Australian Air Force and couldn’t yet be persuaded to drop the “Sirs” when addressing the senior consultants. Mick thought it was only a matter of time before he forgot himself so far as to salute.

  “The police have identified the assailant as a William Darvie. New Zealand citizen; usually resides in Auckland. No clear motivation yet, but no weapon was found on his person. He was carrying nothing but the smoke grenade. We’ve made a sweep of the rooms, and all of the items are accounted for. None shows any obvious signs of interference.” Gale dropped the military formality long enough to shrug. “What do you think? Heavy-handed attempt at theft?”

  “Pretty woeful one, if so.” Mick shoved back his jacket and propped his fist against his hip as he surveyed the room again. The police had taken statements from all witnesses – all the ones who didn’t scare the shit out of people by threatening to expire in a heap of disturbingly soft skin. They had emptied the space of all but Ryland Curry personnel. More of the security team had arrived from the peripheral business interests, but Ryland himself had decided to obey sensible orders for once and remain out of the fray until they’d decoded the nature of the threat. An assassination attempt ten weeks earlier outside a London theatre had at last installed a bit of common sense in the man. “He wasn’t carrying, pulled the grenade in full view of five security consultants, and made no attempt to move toward any particular item.”

  “What was the point, then? Just to dick about and cause trouble?”

  “Been known to happen.” Mick’s arm clenched tighter against Sophy’s sketchbook. “Point scored, in that respect, and the outcome could have been even worse.”

  “That reminds me,” said Gale. “I asked Wilson to put through a call to the hospital and make sure the girl is okay. You took her down harder than a rugby scrum.” He managed a grin before his short-lived amusement faded. “Jesus, I thought she was going to croak right in front of me.”

  Mick ironed a slight flinch into professional distance.

  “The man with her, the lecturer, said that she’s a brittle asthmatic. The smoke obviously brought on an attack.”

  Seriously compounded by having the wind knocked out of her when you smashed her against the ground like an eggshell, you clumsy bastard.

  “There’s something not quite right here.” Calhoun joined them, his mouth set firmly beneath the iron-grey wisps of moustache. “It doesn’t smell like theft or petty vandalism to me. What the hell was the point?”

  Mick silently agreed. Instinct and experience were firing off needles of adrenalin and caution through his body.

  “And he was competent enough to override our cameras and the electrics in the hall for a good four minutes before detonating the device.”

  And wasn’t that a fact that burned like acid in their European-trained gullets.

  “Mick.” Sean Mitchell, his closest friend since the days of striped blazers and lingering corporal punishment at grammar school, shoved past Jennifer and Anya with uncharacteristic roughness and stopped a short distance away, a frown etching grooves into the clean lines of his face. “Wilson just rang the local medical centre to check on the woman who had the asthma attack.”

  “Is she all right?” Mick couldn’t hold back the interruption.

  “She’s doing much better, apparently, although they’re going to keep her hooked up to the mask for a while. But she can talk now, and the nurse said she’s been pretty agitated that a message get to the “man in the leather coat”.” Sean grinned briefly. “I will assume that she’s talking about you, my fashion-averse friend.”

  “A message for me?” Mick wasn’t sure what he was feeling at that moment. “What is it?”

  Sean was serious again.

  “She’s saying that she noticed Darvie earlier, outside the hotel, and he was with a red-haired woman with some kind of deformity of the ear. She claims that she saw the same woman in this room a few moments before Darvie detonated the grenade, and that she was hovering near the ceramics display.”

  Oh, Christ.

  Mick was already striding toward the central pedestal and the display of fiddly cups and saucers that were worth more than his car.

  They found the bomb three minutes later.

  Chapter Two

  A bomb.

  Sophy shivered and picked up the remote control, switching from the evening news to the entertainment channel. She tended to feel her brain cells curling at the edges like dying leaves after too many consecutive hours of reality TV, but there was something oddly comforting about watching other people’s crises when they revolved around men and makeup. Nobody tried to blow anyone up, for one thing.

  The incident had made the first five minutes of the news programming, trumped only by the breaking sex scandal surrounding a Member of Parliament. Presumably an actual explosion would have pushed the town to top billing. The police experts disabling a minimal-impact device with hours still left on the timer was obviously not the stuff of cinematic thrillers.

  The news anchor had stated, in tones Sophy considered inappropriately upbeat, that a second perpetrator had been arrested off-site, and it was believed that the artworks had been the target, with the bomb scheduled to detonate at a time when the display hall would be closed for the night. The display hall, however, was still located within a fully occupied hotel and likely had a constant security presence. Only the completely callous or moronic would assume that the explosion ran no human risk.

  She was glad that he – that they were all okay.

  As it happened, she had supplied the only casualty and the biggest drama for the reporters to seize upon like a bunch of hungry rat terriers. The footage of her gasping person being loaded into the ambulance, trailing medical tubes and fretful friends, had been played three times during the clip. The brunette with the perky voice and perkier boobs had managed to skip any dull details about smoke inhalation, and instead made it sound like she’d laid down and expired from sheer terror. And some utter wanker had given the Press her name, which naturally resulted in every person she had ever met texting to see if she was still alive. Her parents and Melissa had run interference with those who had come in person, letting in only Don and a couple of co-workers from the bar where she worked three nights a week.

  They hadn’t been able to keep out the police, who had stormed the medical centre while she was still hooked up to the nebuliser. They had requested a description of the red-haired woman at the exhibition, as detailed as she could manage, and had left with a charcoal sketch that the officer in charge, who looked about twelve, had pronounced “wicked good”. She supposed she ought to take these compliments where she found them.

  The on-call doctor’s insistence on keeping her in overnight had tipped a historically bad day over into complete nightmare territory. She couldn’t stand hospitals. Her aversion was not quite as strong as it was to, say, almost suffocating to death on national television, but it was up there.

  Sophy glanced up at the wall clock. Not quite half past six. The sun was still beaming brightly through the windows. It didn’t start to get dark until after nine these days, which was a nice change after the bleakness of the last winter. Food had been delivered promptly at five, shortly before her last visitor had departed, probably scared off by the sight of her main course. The menu card claimed it was quiche. That fact was yet to be verified. She picked up her fork and poked dubiously at it. It moved with a suspiciously gelatinous wiggle. She sighed, thinking of the leftover lasagne in the fridge at home. And the wine. There was wine in the fridge at home too.

  Crappy, crappy day.

  A single short knock on the door brought her head up with a jerk. Substantial arms, monstrous shoulders, and a definite shortage of neck filled the doorway. It really was a physique that would have the beefiest All Black crying with shame. Sophy’s heart began to behave in a very unrelia
ble manner in her chest.

  It was not a rush of instant, overwhelming lust.

  It was sheer horror.

  She wasn’t sure what it was about the man, but he reduced her from a shy person with manners and a brain to the walking personification of a blush. On her personal scale of social terror, he was more intimidating than the senior art lecturer, a man who drove most of his students to either drink or copious amounts of cake. And he ranked only marginally below the snotty shop assistants in Parisian boutiques, one of whom had once pinched the flesh of her hip and tsked after a fifteen-second acquaintance.

  To be fair, he was working a general demeanour of humourless, sleep-deprived assassin. And there was the culture shock of encountering a flesh-and-blood mountain of testosterone, when, frankly, she was more accustomed to the twig-like variety of male in skinny jeans and paint splatters.

  “Miss James?” Earlier that day, his voice had been her sole point of focus in a frightening spiral out of controlled consciousness. It was already achingly familiar. “May I come in for a moment?”

  Sophy managed to nod, even if she’d forgotten how to speak. She was suddenly intensely aware of the strands of sticky hair around her face, her reading glasses, the well-washed cotton gown that was blessedly closed down the back but also stamped all over with the words “Hospital Property”. As if anyone would be tempted to take one home. Sexy loungewear, it was not.

  He came fully into the room, hesitated awkwardly for a moment by the visitor’s chair and remained standing. The smell registered next. It wasn’t cologne, although she could detect a faint whiff of something yummy and expensive there. She couldn’t wear fragrances because they aggravated her asthma, so she tended to be jealously observant of other people’s scents. In this case, it wasn’t the man who was inciting her envy. It was the aroma coming from a paper bag clutched in his hand.

  The bastard had come into her room with Thai food when she was faced with the prospect of rubber quiche and a carton of Dora the Explorer yoghurt.

  With difficulty, she pulled her eyes away from the food as he began to speak, and managed not to drool on the quilt.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked abruptly. He sounded both genuinely concerned, and also as if he’d rather be getting a root canal or a colonoscopy than having to talk to her.

  His palpable discomfort actually eased her nerves.

  Social misfits unite.

  “I’m fine,” she said, and hoped that her voice conveyed reassurance and polite welcome. She suspected that her reluctance to play nicely was about as evident as his own. “It’s always pretty scary, but not a new experience, unfortunately. And you got help to me so quickly. I was hoping I would get the chance to thank you.” From a distance, in a nice card. “I should have had my inhaler in my pocket, but I just didn’t even think about it.”

  “It was my fault.” He moved his shoulders like he was shaking off a cramp. He had ditched the gorgeous but unseasonable leather jacket at some point, she noticed, and was now down to the Henley shirt with the sleeves pushed up. It was obscenely tight. A light scattering of hair dusted the corded muscles in his forearms.Not for the first time, she realised how disconcerting it was to see a person that…large outside of a comic book or a televised boxing ring. What would it be like to have that much physical presence, to never have to be intimidated by anybody?

  Awesome, probably.

  He was now offering a rather stilted apology for steamrolling her into the hall floor. She immediately, vehemently, shook her head. “No. Please. You were doing your job. I was – I don’t know what I was doing. I should be apologising for getting in your way.” She could feel the pink flush deepen in her cheeks. “Um, my reflexes aren’t always so hot.”

  He looked as if he was about to agree before tact belatedly caught up with him. One hand went up to his collar, turning a nod into an unconvincing neck rub.

  A genuine smile tugged at her mouth. “So, I’m sorry, Mr…” She trailed off, looking at him questioningly.

  He looked a bit taken aback for a moment – and, really, he should have come by earlier when the media had been pestering for an interview, because the sheer inanity of this conversation would already have put any eavesdroppers into a coma.

  “Hollister. Mick Hollister.”

  Mick put the bag of temptation on her bedside table, where it could silently mock her own feeble dinner, and extended a hand to her. As her fingers were enveloped by a cool, callused hold, she noticed the object tucked under his left arm. His gaze, fixed on her face with an unreadable expression, followed her line of sight. His left brow rose again in that familiar quirk. Releasing her, he neatly flipped the sketchbook from the curve of his elbow into his hand, and offered it without a word.

  Damn it. He’d looked at it.

  She felt the same awful rush of embarrassment that she’d experienced as a young teen, when she’d suffered some kind of brain aneurysm and written a fairly explicit love letter to a cute boy at the bus stop without even knowing his name. She hadn’t been so far gone as to actually give it to him, but putting it in her suitcase instead of the nearest rubbish bin had resulted in her mum finding it as soon as she’d gone home for the school holidays. Her mother had thought it adorable; Sophy had considered it the biggest invasion of privacy since the Watergate scandal. She felt similarly nauseous now. In this case, it was compounded by the fact that the privacy infringed upon was his, really, and she felt like she’d been caught with an eye to a peephole.

  She winced as she looked up at him, her fingers absently tracing the doodles and snatches of sketches on the cover. “I suppose I ought to apologise for this too.”

  Mick’s features were naturally severe, but she thought they softened slightly as he looked down at her. One shoulder lifted in a half-shrug. “I can’t say I’d be thrilled to see my face hanging in a gallery,” he said evenly, “but I can’t fault the skill behind the drawing. I think you got me in every unfortunate detail.”

  Unfortunate?

  After a lifetime of agonising over every second sentence before it left her mouth, to the point where she usually ended up saying nothing at all, Sophy chose that moment to speak without thinking. “I think your face is beautiful.”

  The statement was honest. Sincere.

  Totally mortifying.

  She wanted to drop through the floor.

  Mick’s expression was difficult to interpret, but the emotions involved didn’t come close to pleasure or gratitude. A slow suffusion of anger snuffed out a flashing hint of hurt and surprise. Sophy thought he looked a bit like a predator reluctantly intrigued by a harmless creature of prey, only to have it leap up and unexpectedly bite him on the nose.

  This was why she shouldn’t be let out to interact with the public.

  He clearly thought she was making fun of his looks. And she was a bit astonished by how very much it mattered that she had hurt him, however unintentionally.

  She didn’t even know him. She didn’t want to know him. She wanted him to take his horrible paper bag of deliciousness, and leave her alone to a cringing inner replay of this conversation.

  The silence stretched. She had to say something. Anything.

  “I wasn’t making fun,” she stammered. “I only draw people whose faces I find attractive.”

  Mick blinked.

  Okay, maybe don’t say that.

  “I mean – not attractive attractive. A-art-artistically attractive. I don’t – um – I mean…”

  Ooh. Worse.

  Fuck. She was stammering and babbling. She never babbled. Usually the worse her nerves, the quieter her voice became, until she ended up speaking at a level that could only be heard by people with elephantine ears and NASA-quality hearing aids. Melissa’s ex-boyfriend Dale had once joked that for the first month he and Sophy had hung out, he’d thought he was gradually going deaf.

  “I’m no good at this.”

  The miserable exclamation startled them both.

  Mick slowly hooked
a booted foot around the leg of the vacant chair and pulled it toward him. It creaked alarmingly as he sat down, obviously designed for the more softly-knitting-grandmother variety of visitor. He was back to that façade of blankness that made him look like a baddie in a Bond film, the ones who stood silent and square-jawed behind the master criminal and kept one hand on their gun. If he had a weapon, he at least kept it holstered. His hands draped casually between his knees, the fingers loosely interlocked, while he watched her with faintly curious grey eyes.

  “No good at what?” he asked finally.

  She pulled her gaze from his and flushed.

  “Talking to people,” she said, her voice stilted. “People I don’t know well. I’ve never been able to talk to strangers. I get nervous and I can’t think of what to say, and if I do speak, it’s never the right words.”

  Sophy. He doesn’t care. Be quiet immediately.

  She jumped when he reached toward her, but he tactfully ignored her nervous reaction and touched a fingertip to the sketchbook. “But you get people,” he said, and she looked up, confused. Mick’s voice was level and his expression serious, but a slight smile quirked the corner of his lips. There was a hint of what might, with a full-fledged grin, be a boy-band-cute dimple in the world’s least boyish face.

  Worse and worse.

  She had a weakness for men with dimples. If he produced a pair of glasses next, she was going to start finding him sexually attractive as well as a-art-artistically attractive, and things were already sufficiently awkward.

  “What?” she asked brilliantly.

  “I had a look at your other drawings. Sorry,” he added, not sounding remotely apologetic. “It’s obvious in every line that you understand what makes people tick. That might not be particularly comfortable from your subject’s perspective,” he went on dryly, “but on the whole it seems to me that empathy is more important than verbosity.”

  Sophy’s fingers went absently to her neck, and she twiddled a loose strand of hair as she stared at him, not knowing what to say. The conversation had gone from reluctant small talk to soul-searching depth in about thirty seconds. She’d had less intimate moments with her cognitive therapist.