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

“God, if you can just promise to sit between me and Stacy at dinner, that’l be holiday enough.”

He laughed. “I’m looking forward to it.”

“Me too.”

“Gotta run.”

“Yeah.” His conversations were often cut short by unexpected short waves of tears, and Cam had grown used to al owing it to pass without comment. “Love you. ’Bye.”

She clicked the phone and cursed the Fates for punishing such a great guy.

“Is he okay?” Jeanne asked.

Cam shrugged. “The same. It’l be a while, I guess.” She dropped her phone back in her clutch and checked to see if she stil had that half a Mounds bar left over from breakfast yesterday. Nope. Oh boy. Not a good sign. No wonder those Spanx were getting tighter. With a sigh, she dropped the bag on her desk.

She pushed the folders off her keyboard, where she found her smashed hot dog. Sighing, she tossed it in the wastebasket. Then she pushed aside her tubes of paint and the little, half-finished stil life of the stapler and pencil cup she’d work on when she wanted to be reminded that she’d once wanted to be a painter and cal ed up Amazon.

She hated to resort to mass-market research, but if she found something that offered a meaty tidbit, she could count on having the book in her hand by tomorrow. If she ordered it from the library, it might take weeks.

She typed “Anthony Van Dyck” into the search box and got two hundred forty-one results. Sighing, she began to page through. Most she’d seen before and either passed on or read. On the eighth page something caught her eye.

Inside the Artist’s Studio: A Glimpse into the Personal Lives of the Greatest European Painters of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Wel , that certainly had an interesting ring to it. Cam clicked to open it and read the description. There was no review from Publishers Weekly, which surprised her, since they were usual y al over that stuff, but the first reader review—the only reader review—

was eye-opening.

“Everything I wanted to know about my favorites. Reads like Jansen’s History of Art meets Sex and the City. Felt like I was there. Hot, hot, hot.” From a “Madame K” in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Well, well, well. This will definitely be worth the overnight delivery charge.

Cam clicked on the “Add to Shopping Cart” button. Her computer made a loud, angry buzz, like she’d given the wrong answer in Jeopardy! The screen didn’t change. The book wasn’t added to her cart.

Hm.

She tried again and got the same angry buzz. On the third try, Jeanne looked up.

“Something I can help you with there?”

“No.” Cam tried two more times with no change in outcome. She tried exiting the screen and returning. No luck. She tried another book site, but they didn’t have it listed. She went to the website of her local library and couldn’t find it there, either. She even tried the biggest used-book site she knew. No go.

Crap!

This book seemed like the answer to her prayers. She tapped her fingers. Wel , there was a “LOOK INSIDE!”

feature. With a little luck and a hel of a lot of patience, she might be able to find what she needed.

Cam ran her mouse over the cover of the book and the image of the book changed.

Now, that’s a little weird.

What had been a bland detail of a Rembrandt painting became a ful portrait of a red-haired woman in a gorgeous olive satin frock. Cam looked closer. If she didn’t know better she’d almost have to say the woman looked like, wel , her.

“Wow.”

“What?” Jeanne asked. “Nothing.”

Cam didn’t recognize the painting, which didn’t surprise her, though she certainly recognized the artist. It was a Peter Lely, a minor painter of the late-seventeenth century

—interestingly the successor to Van Dyck as royal portraitist—whom the professors in grad school had only touched on.

She had to admit, though, the painting—what she could see of it—was exquisite. Like Van Dyck, Lely had had a way of rendering fabric that made it practical y jump off the canvas. But there was something else about Lely that stuck in her head. What was it? Something that made him a bit out of the ordinary in the art world.

She went to the bookcase