Flirting With Forever (26 page)

“Oh, that. A detail. For a portrait.”

“You’re going back to portraits?”

“Wel , just one. The last, probably.”

“The last portrait of Jacket Sprague,” she said with an interested glint. “Now there’s something that sounds interesting. Who’s your model?”

“Wel , I don’t usual y work with models, but in this case—”

“How about me?”

“What?”

“Me. How about me?” She lifted herself onto the table and crossed her legs. Her hair was as straight and shiny as and crossed her legs. Her hair was as straight and shiny as a slice of onyx.

“I, uh …”

His cel phone buzzed. It was Cam. He held up a finger and stepped into the hal . “Where are you, dol ?”

“At a restaurant in Regent Square. With Mr. Bal . We just sat down.”

“Oh God. Not another fuzzy navel night.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not driving. What are you doing?”

“You know. Meeting with a potential buyer.”

“Cool. See you soon—wel , maybe not soon, exactly.”

He laughed. “Take your time.”

He walked back into the studio. Anastasia was naked, perched effortlessly on heels that seemed to be an extension of her body. The glossy black triangle below her waist looked like a smal , hibernating animal. She walked to the bed and lay on her stomach, her lovely tight ass flexing as she crossed her ankles above it. Her breasts, boyish and firm, were visible behind her bent arm.

She looked at him through long, thick lashes. “Perhaps we should start like this.”

“He’s here,” Jeanne said over the phone.

“Who’s here?” Cam held up a finger to Bal and excused herself from the restaurant’s booth.

“Peter Lely.”

Her chest made a vigorous thump. “What do you mean

‘here’?”

“I mean
here
. In the museum. Whatever you did on your way back from Shakespeare land, you forgot to lock the barn door, and now a very large, very oddly dressed cow is walking around the admin wing.”

“Holy cripes! Stop him!” She ran out the door for the privacy of the sidewalk.

“Honey, I’m doing everything I can. He’s in the men’s room now.”

“Hiding?”

“Changing.”

Cam’s stomach felt like the Boston Marathoners were running through it. “You’ve got to make him go back.”

“Tried it. The man’s got no interest in going back. He wants you.”

Oh Christ!
“I can’t.”

“According to him, you’ve got two choices. Either meet with him now or he comes back to the museum tomorrow to talk with ‘your master’ and goes from there to the

‘gentleman who prints your books.’”

When worlds col ide. Cam tried to speak but no words came.

“Where’s Jacket?” Jeanne demanded.

“Meeting with a potential buyer.”

“I’m stowing the guy at your place, then. Get your ass over there.”

Peter gazed down at the thick boots, the stiff, formfitting brown breeks and the odd tan shirt with half sleeves and its owner’s name sewn over the pocket. “Rusty,” he said again.

“I told you, he’s a maintenance man.” Jeanne turned the wheel of the horseless vehicle she cal ed a “car.” “He works with the boiler and pipes. That sort of thing.”

“In that line of work, such a name does not instil much confidence.”

“Look, you’re lucky he’s always had a thing for me.

Otherwise you’d be wearing Linda Armstrong’s spare pair of running shorts and a Rage Against the Machine T-shirt.”

Nothing after “Armstrong” had made the slightest sense, though it sounded as if the clothes he’d been given were better than what he might have had. He looked at them again. He had always taken great pride in his clothes and frequented the finest tailors in London. But despite the exquisite workmanship of the seams, everything else on the shirt and breeches seemed utilitarian and plain. There were no ribbons, no lace, no dash of color, no delicacy of design.

And the sharp, intricate teeth of the device holding his breeks closed were more than a little disconcerting. But he liked the boots. Sturdy and comfortable, they reminded him of his days as a lad in Westphalia, conquering the Soest hil s with his friends.

“How much longer?”

Jeanne gave him a look. “It’s rush hour.”

Peter marveled at the name given the stately pace at which they were proceeding. He could have covered the same ground on a horse in half the time. Nonetheless he took the opportunity to drink in his fil of the new world.

Peter had known the future would look different. Everyone in the Afterlife had the sort of general understanding of what existed one acquired from hearing reports by the Guild, but it was quite different to see it al laid out in such a frighteningly crowded and tal landscape. On one side of the river beside which Jeanne drove the houses were smal and close, sitting in row upon row along a rising hil , not unlike Cornhil or Hampstead Heath. But on the other side, the structures were almost magical—massive silver and glass things rising hundreds of feet in the air. He spotted a breathtaking building, right out of a storytel er’s imagination, al of shining blue glass, with pointed peaks and battlements around its towers. “Is that a castle?”

Jeanne laughed. “Wel , it was designed to look that way.

It’s the PPG Building. A glass company.”

The glaziers Peter had known were not so wel compensed, though Donovan, the glass merchant he frequented most, had raised his prices sometimes twice a year, so it was not beyond reckoning that by the twenty-first century they would have acquired great wealth.

“What about artists?” he asked. “Where do they live?”

“Depends how wel you do. Cam’s lives in a row house in Notting Hil .”

Cam’s artist. His heart sank. Campbel did have an artist fiancé. He had hoped, foolishly, that that part of her deception had been untrue. His hand went to his emerald, and he thought of Ursula. He did not want Ursula to be shamed by Campbel ’s book. Someday, at the end of Ursula’s new life, she would return to the Afterlife, and while he himself had no recol ection of the other lives he’d lived on Earth, he had heard of those who did.

His plan was to stop the book and return to 1673.

Charles would sign that writ if it was the last thing Peter accomplished. How foolish he’d been not to just hand Campbel over that night. ’Twould have been exactly what the minx deserved.

Oh, Ursula. In whatever life you’ve been reborn, I hope
you are happy.

Jeanne maneuvered the car into place in front of a smal er version of the buildings he had admired in the vicinity of the glass castle. There was a sign on the front that read 650 WASHINGTON ROAD.

She towed him toward the door at a run.

“Why are you hurrying?”

“I’m parked il egal y.” Through the door they went and on a wal at the end of the low-ceilinged entry hal she pressed a button, which promptly lit up.

Peter gestured toward the entrance. “Look. Someone is admiring your carriage.”

She turned and let out a surprisingly vivid oath. “She’s not admiring it. She’s going to write me a ticket.”

The door before them opened. Jeanne pul ed him inside the tiny room, inserted a key into a lock at the bottom of a row of numbered buttons and turned it. Then she jumped off, stopping the door, a sort of sideways portcul is, with an arm, while the door registered its unhappiness with loud bel s.

“Go up,” she instructed. “Her place is at the top. When you get there, remove the key and the door wil open. I’l be up as soon as I can.”

The doors closed. For an instant he looked for a way to ascend, then the floor jerked upward. His heart jumped to his throat, and he grabbed the narrow railing that ran the circumference of the space.

After a moment that seemed to last a lifetime, the room stopped. He dove for the key and turned it as the woman had said. The portcul is slid back, and the space before him had transformed from a tiny room to a high-ceilinged space lit from floor to ceiling with windows. The sun had set, and the view, past a dining table with high-backed chairs, was of a horizon sparkling with stars. A church sat high on a hil in the distance, and around it dozens and dozens of charming cottages were visible.

He thought of the view from his attic and of the moments he’d shared with Campbel Stratford there. She had captured his heart, joined him in his bed, then varnished it al with a veneer of lies. It had been a cruel punishment for his dormant heart. The nearly spent candle had fluttered weakly to life, then been pinched out and destroyed.

But that wasn’t why he was here, he reminded himself.

He had been a fool, but men do foolish things. The evening had served as a painful reminder that his place was not in his old life, but in a life that had yet to be chosen for him. He could not rest, however, in any life until he knew that Ursula would be protected.

He took a step. “Miss Stratford?” No answer. He heard music playing in the distance and wondered where the musicians were. It was a plaintive song, and a woman began to sing about how hard she’d try to show a man that he was her only dream. He’d never heard any song that sounded like this. The voice, haunting and low, sent a chil down his back.

The space was open and high, so different than any home in London. It was opulent, but in a spare, un-adorned way. The furniture was square and low, bookcases lined the room and an asymmetrical fireplace presided at the room’s far end.

He approached the closest bookcase, drawn by an array of portraits—or pictures, as he knew they were cal ed here.

There was one of a mother pinning a ribbon on a cherubic child. The child was Campbel Stratford. He would have recognized the red-gold hair anywhere, but the freckles and missing tooth added a young unexpected layer of charm. In the next picture she was an adult in a gal ery of some sort with other people her own age. They held pints of ale and were giving the artist exuberant smiles. The last picture was of her from behind, perched over a railing with a man’s arm around her, looking at Notre Dame on a sunny summer day.

Peter assessed the man—the position of his hand, the strength of his profile. He wore no wig and his light hair had been shaved very close, and though Peter could not see the man’s eyes wel , his affection for Campbel was clear.

This was the last thing he wished to see. He turned, and the work of art on the wal he now faced took his breath away.

It was a woman, half a woman, whose portrait was slashed diagonal y through the center, like the shield on a coat of arms. Above the dividing line, the woman was represented by an oil painting. Below the dividing line, clear cubes of varying sizes, holding pieces of fruit and other household objects, represented the rest of her.

Peter stared, amazed. An orange for a breast, a plum for her mons, an ancient lock on the finger of her left hand and a round metal circle with wavy, folded-in edges emblazoned with the words “Budweiser—King of Beers” for a nipple. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before, but the artist’s purpose was instantly clear, and he smiled. The artist’s mark, in the lower right-hand corner, was the outline of a knife and the letters
JKET.

Another bel rang, and he jumped. It rang, stopped, rang, stopped. The noise came from a smal multibuttoned object on a hal way table. After the third ring, he heard a click and Campbel Stratford’s distinctive contralto.

“Jeanne? Jeanne? Are you there? Pick up. Oh, Christ, I’l be there as fast as I can.”

The click sounded again, and the noise stopped. It pained him to be reminded that she’d masked her real voice with an English accent to deceive him.