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

The senior staff was standing in the north gal ery, admiring Packard’s arrangement of the exhibition’s opening room. The theme was “Behold: Love Through the Eyes of the Artist.” What were the odds Packard would have put the Carnegie’s most important Lely, Louise de Penancoet, the Duchess of Portsmouth, right next to Jacket’s Lornacopia?

“Do you have a minute?” he asked.

Out of the corner of her eye, Cam caught Anastasia’s pinched face. “Sure,” she said gleeful y.

“Great. Everyone else, off to make our usual Carnegie magic. We’ve got a little over twenty-four hours before the gala. Let’s make everything perfect.” He clapped his hands and they dispersed.

Cam’s stomach began to churn. The look on Packard’s face did not exactly say promotion. He waited until the last of the staffers had drifted out.

“What’s up, boss?”

Packard’s brows knitted. Cam felt faint. Almost every dream she’d had about her future included running a museum, this museum. And absolutely no vision of her future had included reporting to her sister.

“You know the nominating committee met on Tuesday—”

“But the Lely book has sold! And the Van Dyck one? A complete misunderstanding. My publisher announced too soon. You know the artistic mind. Things hadn’t quite gel ed. And don’t forget the new gift. Two-point-one mil ion bucks. Right here in our hot little acquiring hands.”

“Cam, Cam, Cam.” Packard held up his palms. “You’re stil a candidate. The committee just has a few questions.”

“About what?”

Packard sighed. “Look, you know you’d be my choice.

But you know Adele Fitcher—”

Cam groaned. Fitcher was a conservative old biddy with a boatload of money—the worst sort of conservative old biddy.

“She doesn’t like your book.”

“Has she read it?” Cam asked.

“She’s read about it.”

“Cool. An uninformed backstabber. Hope she posts a review at Amazon, too.”

“You know most of the board members don’t mind. In fact, a number think it’s just the thing to inject some interest in the masters—sex ’em up a little. Let ’em think it was like backstage at a Mötley Crüe concert. Stretch the truth a little.”

Cam coughed. Packard and his similes.

“But Adele doesn’t like the sex. She thinks it cheapens our image and is tacky and unnecessary.”

“I can see why Mr. Fitcher happily dropped dead at age forty-nine.”

“Cam, her opinion carries a lot of weight.”

“Let me ask, did she happen to read about the two-point-one-mil ion-dol ar Van Dyck in Meddling Old Crank Quarterly as wel ?”

“Of course. The board is thril ed with your work on that.”

“But?”

“I’m not going to lie, Cam. There’s a chance you’re not going to get the job. Fitcher is lobbying hard for Anastasia, whom she cal s ‘accomplished and smart.’”

“Hey, you know who else was accomplished and smart?

Hitler. And he actual y read the books before he blacklisted them.”

“Cam …”

“What do I need to do?”

“Keep a low profile. Don’t mention the book when the board interviews you on Saturday. Don’t mention the book at al . And if someone asks you about either of them, try to give the impression that this one’s been misunderstand, that it’s going to be—you know—more turpentine, less diaphragm jel y.”

“So lie?”

Packard’s face lit up in relief. “Exactly.”

“Cripes.”

“Cam, al she wants to do is protect the Carnegie. We can’t have people thinking our staff members are running around with sex on the brain al day.”

Cam looked at the Duchess of Portsmouth’s dropping neckline and Lornacopia’s Bazooka bubble gum nipples.

“Nope, we couldn’t have that, sir.”

38

Peter took his first sip and let the hard work of the day slide off his shoulders. If the Guild wanted to make the Afterlife feel like a reward, they should forget the bocce bal and start serving up the cappuccino at Aldo’s instead. He hadn’t expected to like this twenty-first-century world, with its drab clothes, never-ending stream of roaring cars and inhabitants with a prodigious proclivity for talking loudly into their little communication boxes. In fact, given the destruction of his hopes with Cam and his subsequent anger with her over the book, he had ful y expected to hate it. But here at Aldo’s, amid the smel of roasted beans and cinnamon, the gentle hum of the steam machine and the scene of the high street at twilight framed in the wide front windows, he could almost forget the cares that had brought him low.

Without thinking, he flipped the thin leather-bound sketchbook lying open on the table to the back,