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

—dark, wavy hair, warm brown eyes and rugged profile.

“Either is fine.” Cam needed to sit. Lely’s house. In Covent Garden. A moment ago she’d been at her desk with mustard on her shoe in Pittsburgh. She looked at her foot.

No mustard. Not even a shoe. Holy crap. She was in another time with a Restoration-era painter! It was almost too much to integrate. “I-I … Can I have a seat?”

Kate ushered her to a chair. “Quick, ladies. She’s il .”

The women circled her. One offered a glass of water. Cam gulped it.

Kate removed Cam’s headdress and petted her forehead. “You’re not warm. Did you get a bad eel? The cook here is wonderful, but you never know with eel.”

Bad eel? Maybe a bad hot dog. Cam shook her head, which was already shaking.

“Are you with child?”

Cam choked. “No—heavens, no.”

Kate turned to her friends. “I think we should cal Peter.”

“No!” For some reason, the thought of facing Peter Lely terrified Cam. There was something about coming face-to-face with someone from her university art history book that scared her. “I-I’l be fine. I just … need a dress.”

Another woman clapped excitedly. “A dress! Is Peter doing you in a dress?”

Whatever reply Cam was forming stuck in her throat like a wine bottle cork. “Doing me?” Then it struck her. Painting.

The woman meant painting! “Yes.”

“Are you standing in for Nel ? If so, you won’t need a dress.”

Cam was definitely not standing in for Nel , then. “No. I’m on my own. And in a dress. Definitely.”

“And how did Peter say to look? Like a goddess? A shepherdess? A lady? A whore?”

“Er, not that last. A lady, I think.”

Kate turned to the woman with the kitten. “Mary, find something in the trunk. Several new ones came in last week. Something dark, I think, to set off that hair.”

Cam’s hair, her one source of physical vanity, was long, curly and bright copper.

“Peter keeps dresses on hand?” she asked.

“You never know how he’l want us to look. And many ladies prefer a new gown when they pose. It’s one of the reasons they come here. Peter encourages women to become something new when they sit for him. He cal s it

‘putting on a second skin.’”

Cam remembered Peter’s particular penchant for skin.

She hoped the gowns had bodices. Her mind searched for possible

explanations

for

her

appearance.

She

remembered having dreams where she became aware she was dreaming, but she also recal ed that that realization usual y made her wake up. This felt nothing like a dream, nor was her obvious awareness of the incongruity having any impact on her state of wakefulness.

The phone booped. The sound of a text. She made a show of peeking inside her bag, as if to root for rouge or cheek lard or whatever they cal ed it here.

“Is the puppy asleep?”

Cam halted for an instant, then found the phone and made a show of patting it gently while stil keeping it out of sight. “Good little boy,” she said in a baby voice. “Yep,” she added to Kate, “sleeping.” The text was from Jeanne.

“WHERE DID U GO?!!!!” Cam flung her hand back like she’d been burned.

Kate’s brows knitted. “He nips.”

“Typical man.”

Jeanne didn’t know where she was. A bad sign. A very bad sign. Cam felt terror beginning to tighten around her chest. She needed to move, to act, to do something. She jumped to her feet. “I’m going for a walk.”

“Outside?” Kate eyed the drop cloth.

“Bathroom—er, privy?”

Kate pointed to the closet/hal way Cam had just left. “To the right. Down the hal . Left at the statue of Mercury. First door on the right. Ring the bel when you finish.”

Cam fled, jogging through the maze of hal ways and past Mercury, who not only towered over a curved staircase leading to a downstairs entry hal but was unquestionably a Bernini, which nearly caused her to fal down the steps.

A Bernini. Jeez. Lely was wealthy. There was no doubt of that. She whipped out her phone and hustled into the first door on the right. Then she froze. She wasn’t in a privy. She was in a smal alcove adjoining a much larger room in which two men’s voices could be heard. One was Lely’s.

“Sir David,” Lely said with impatience,“ ’Tis not a matter of an unfinished portrait. ’Tis a matter of a woman seated in my waiting room who desires to be painted.”

Lely spoke in a courtly bass, and Cam decided the undercurrent she’d heard