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

gazing at the letter from Van Dyck he had placed there. It would be easy to stop her with this, far easier than this feverish painting that had kept him up night after night. And yet he could not bring himself to use it. Was it the ease with which that disreputable deed would be done or the disreputableness itself that stopped him? Mertons had seen his desperation that day in the time lab, but Mertons did not know Peter had found Van Dyck in the Afterlife earlier that day, before he’d come to the lab, in order to arm himself with the tool he would need in case everything else failed.

A child’s laughter made Peter look up. A lad of two or three, clinging to his mother’s leg, had reacted to a jumping dog outside the window. Peter looked at the boy’s wide blue eyes and blond cowlick and felt the same pang he always did. The boy looked at Peter, and Peter smiled.

Immediately the boy stuck a thumb in his mouth and hid his face.

Peter flipped the sketchbook to the page on which he’d been working and looked at his hands. Speckled with white and black paint, the flesh of his knuckles seemed to be growing looser every year. They were the hands of his father. He shook his head, thinking of the man in his army uniform looming over the entry hal in their home. How Peter had enjoyed being lifted in the air and swung in a circle as if he weighed no more than a bag of rags, then being brought tight against his father’s chest, feeling that rough wool against his cheek and struggling for breath.

“Bunny.”

The boy had appeared at Peter’s side and was looking at the latest sketch. Peter had been drawing as he waited for his cappuccino, thinking of the hil s of Westphalia.

“A hare, actual y,” Peter said, smiling, and the boy’s eyes went to Peter’s head, which had been shorn of its weighty locks at Mertons’s insistence, leaving only an inch or two of dark waves. “No, no. Not a hair on your head. A hare is a very large rabbit, with muscles and teeth.” He puffed himself up like a Viking about to attack. “Not nearly as nice as a bunny. What’s your favorite animal?”

The boy’s eyes darted anxiously to his mother, who was talking with an acquaintance in line. He put his finger in his mouth. “Tiger.”

“May I draw one for you?”

The boy chewed for a second, then nodded.

Peter bent over his pad. “Do you like them fierce or gentle?”

The lad’s eyes lit. “Fierce.”

“Ah, a brave one, are we?” Peter quickly sketched a tiger in the middle of a pounce, claws out, teeth bared and body forming a powerful arch.

“Shoes,” the boy said.

“On a tiger?”

He nodded, certain. Peter shrugged and added lace-tied shoes like the boy’s to the tiger’s back feet.

A woman’s voice said, “My goodness, you should rent yourself out to parties.”

Peter jumped to his feet, ful y expecting to greet the lad’s mother, but instead found himself eye to eye with the thin, dark-haired woman who had been Jacket’s model. He hadn’t seen her arrive and wondered how long she’d been in the shop.

“Good afternoon.” He bowed.

“Evening, real y, at this point.” She tilted her head toward the darkening streetscape outside. In her hand was a cup similar to his own, and she sipped it abstractedly, keeping her feline eyes on him. And then it struck him. How could he have missed the resemblance to Cam?

He tore the page out of his book and handed it to the boy, who took it and ran to his mother.

“Peter, right?” the woman said.

He nodded warily. “Yes.”

“I don’t think we were ever formal y introduced. I’m Anastasia.” She gave him a smile as breathtaking and elegantly formed as a horse taking a fence on the fields of Hampton.

Peter took her hand and shook it. “How odd. Cam has a sister named Anastasia.”

The smile caught like a shoe in a stile and nearly unseated its rider. Mertons had been working his information sources nearly as hard as Peter had been working the canvas this last week.

She dropped onto the chair beside him, curled a leg beneath her and gave him a friendly, self-effacing shrug.

“Shit happens.”

He sat down. “Indeed.”

“I like you better in these clothes,” she said. The smile returned.

Peter was wearing what Mertons cal ed dungarees, but Peter had been watching the men each day on his walk between the studio space