Flirting With Forever by Gwyn Cready (new books to read TXT) 📕

outside my true place in time, I would be captive there forever. Cam, I know Ursula wouldn’t have wanted me to live our life over—to hold it in some bel jar, like a Bartholomew Day’s Fair curiosity, to gawk at, mesmerized, as Bonnard did. Our life had life, a life of its own that can never be again, though I loved it—loved it—when I lived it.”

“Oh, Peter.” She could barely breathe.

“I want to be with you. I want to paint you. I want to be your Alex Katz.”

She hugged him. “I’l be your Ada.”

Mertons appeared, scanning the air with his computer pen. “Peter,” he said, “something just happened. The variables went haywire.”

“I struck it,” Peter said. “The painting. I have struck my mark upon it.” He held up Cam’s hand and pointed to the ring. Instantly the sound of Bal ’s triumphant hoot reached their ears from the direction of Cam’s office fol owed by Anastasia’s happy “I told you. Curators make mistakes all the time. Look, that’s Lely’s mark. I’d recognize it anywhere.”

“You have no idea what you’ve done,” Mertons cried.

“I don’t,” Peter said. “But I’m wil ing to find out.”

60

“ ’Tis good of you to do this.” Peter laid in some vermil ion and watched it spark in the light. The early morning sun flooding in from Washington Road cast a beautiful pink-gold gleam on his canvas.

Cam shifted on Peter’s long brocade couch, stil giddy from the night before, tilting her head toward the window as Peter had directed, but also to see the fat, gleaming emerald on her finger. “Wel , when Mertons agreed to sneak the painting of Nel out of your Covent Garden studio for a night, impact on the tangent arcs aside, I could hardly say no.”

“That was a bril iant idea. With the painting in hand, Charles wil sign the edict and Ursula wil get my name. I can’t tel you how much that means to me.”

“I’m glad you told me. I wish I had known before.”

“I just hope Stephen doesn’t notice the painting’s absence. Mertons says he’l have it back to London tomorrow and on its way to Charles the next.”

“That Mertons … He’s an enigma.”

“I think I’ve decided he’s a romantic at heart. Besides, he told me the Guild was in such disarray when he broke the news last night—had to roust the chairman out of his bed at midnight—he probably could have reversed the outcome of the Thirty Years’ War and no one would have noticed.”

“Do you think Nel wil mind?”

“I doubt it. Her nakedness has been wel admired over the years, and there have been, shal we say, countless monuments erected to it. One naked painting more or less wil not be missed by our Miss Gwyn.”

Cam laughed and then shivered, remembering the monument that had been erected to her last night in Peter’s warm, dark bed. She stil didn’t know if Anastasia was going to get the executive directorship, and it didn’t matter.

She’d told Packard last night her resignation stood, and Bal immediately offered her twice the salary to curate his stuff. “My own museum,” he’d said to her dreamily. “I’m seeing ‘The Bal Col ection’ in big lights. Tasteful, but big.”

“Can I get a peek?” she said, and Peter obliged by turning the easel. What had been Barbara Vil iers and then Nel was now Cam, the reddish brunette waves interwoven with orange and gold, the nose made just a touch more retroussé, and the gray eyes streaked with blue. It was amazing what could be altered with a few masterful touches of paint.

“But if you’re only changing the face,” she said, “I don’t understand why you needed me naked under here.” She gazed down at the black dressing gown she held tightly around her.

Spots of color appeared on his cheeks. “Hmm, aye, that’s a fair question. Wel , when Charles asked for a painting of you in a, um, mythological setting in exchange for signing the marriage edict, he was quite clear he wanted everything to be as