His Acquisition (5 page)

“Yeah,” I said. “I'll get right on that.”

“Take a long bath and just try to be a little less surly than
you usually are,” she advised me. “I think Anton was wanting to do some
business with Ward at some point in the future.”

“Oh no,” I groaned.

“You don't have to put out or anything like that,” she said.
“Just don't... you know.” She gave me a little smile.

Don't try to shock him or scare him off,
is what she was
saying. Well, shit. There went my escape plan.

She pinned me with pleading eyes until I finally gave in.
“Fine!” I said. “I'll try to be an adult.”

“Thank you, Sadie. And try to have fun. I worry about you. This
job seems to be stressing you out.”

What? That was totally not true. I was, if anything, bored, and
I opened my mouth to tell her so, but just then a heavy
thump
came from
above us and Felicia looked up.

“Oh,” she said. “It sounds like Anton might have gotten out of
his restraints. Can you see yourse—?”

“Yes!”
I snapped. Of course they were in the middle of
some weird sex thing. Of
course.
“I will see myself out, please don't
bother yourself on my account.”

“Well, who else will?” Felicia asked, giving me a grin.

Ouch,
I thought. Felicia and I have known each other for
years. We're best friends. We can say shit like that to each other. But
sometimes, I wonder if we really
should.

It was time for me to go in any case. Felicia crossed the room
and hugged me and I tried not to think about how naked she was under her robe,
and then she
skipped
out of the kitchen and up the stairs. I sighed,
drained the last of my coffee, and let myself out of the house.

Outside, the cold slap of damp wind smacked me full in the face.
It was February, and I'd been over a year on the job with Felicia as my boss.
Pulling a cigarette from my coat pocket, I stuck it in my mouth, lit it, and took
a long drag, willing the nicotine to cut through the hangover fog. This had to
be my eight thousandth cigarette since starting this job as Felicia's personal
assistant, and I was beginning to feel it. The cold rattled my bones and the
smoke burned my lungs.

Maybe Felicia was right. Maybe I
was
stressed out. Maybe
I should just try to enjoy my afternoon posing for a rich crazy guy, smiling
and laughing and pretending I wasn't a surly failed artist spending her time
organizing the lives of the rich and famous.

And maybe I should scoop my eyes out with a melon baller.
I
sucked my cigarette down as fast as I could and threw it on the ground before
stomping off toward the subway station to go home and get ready. If I was going
to keep up a facade, I might as well put some effort into it.

Chapter Three

At precisely four o'clock I arrived at Malcolm Ward's mansion as
ready as I would ever be: primped, powdered, and wishing I were high. The house
sat on a corner uptown where all the better people lived. It was a tall, red
brick building with a polygonal tower and a peaked roof. The majority of the
house stretched out behind the narrow facade, dotted with stained glass windows
and iron railings and jutting gables, a classic example of the American Queen
Anne style. It made me feel grubby and cheap, even though I'd put on a pair of
expensive designer jeans and a thick sweater and taken an extra long bath at
Felicia's behest.

Intellectually I knew my clothes were top-of-the-line, and
Felicia and I had both had our hair done by one of the finer hairdressers in
the city, but I'd been a starving artist for years, using cheap shampoo and
getting all my clothes at
real
thrift stores, the ones that smell like
mothballs, not the trendy ones in the cutesy artsy areas of Manhattan, and that
sort of life is hard to shake off. I'd never, ever felt weird and out of place
when I was poor. I wore my poverty like a badge of honor, flaunting it in front
of the people in suits with “real” jobs who infested the city like roaches. There
had been kind of an honor in it, even though most of the time it sucked. Now
that I was expected to wear nice clothes and be polite, I felt poor and grubby
without even having the nominal honor of actually being poor and grubby.
Standing in front of Malcolm Ward's magnificent house, I felt it even more
acutely than ever.

It put me in a foul mood.

I rang the doorbell. Once. Twice. Then I started compulsively
pushing it, trying to force my bad mood out through my fingertip. I fell into
sort of a trance.
Push, push, push...

Abruptly the door opened, startling me, and I stepped back.

Malcolm Ward stood there, looking... well, magnificent. Also
exhausted. Huge dark circles were smudged under his beautiful eyes, and his
hair stuck out at odd angles, as though he had been running his hands through
it. He also wore a plain white t-shirt and pajama bottoms. His feet were bare,
and he held a huge black monster of a camera in his hand.

Now I felt
over
dressed.

“Uh,” I said. “Weren't you expecting me?” Had I steeled myself
for nothing?

“Oh yes, of course, come in, come in.” He paused, letting his
gaze sweep over me. I must have been getting used to it because this time I
only felt a small, illicit shiver at the intimate touch of his gaze. “Good,
good,” he murmured. “Come in.” And he stepped aside.

I slipped through the door and entered...

...a hoarder house.

Okay, maybe not that bad, but my god. I'd never seen so much
stuff
in one place that wasn't on television with a professional psychologist
staring into the abyss as the owner of said stuff waxed rhapsodic about the
cat-hair collection they were going to felt into dolls some day when they got
around to it.

Every surface was crowded with curios and knick-knacks, some of
them extremely valuable and some of them utterly worthless. Just the table in
the foyer was a wealth of treasure and junk. Right next to what I recognized as
an extremely valuable sculpture—probably done by a student of Rodin—was an
antique tin Pepsi advertisement, proclaiming the drink to be refreshing and
healthful, streaked with rust. Next to that was an old pocket watch, studded
either with diamonds or rhinestones, though it was impossible to tell, and the
chain holding it disappeared into a collection of moth-eaten Madame Alexander
dolls.

My brain tried to shut down at the sheer volume of input. The
walls were covered in framed photographs, prints, mirrors and paintings,
organized seemingly only by their size and whether or not they would fit into
current available space. Beneath the riot of color, the wall was white, and
when I forced myself to look down, I saw the floor—between Persian-style
rugs—was a simple blond wood. The house had a color scheme ideal for refinement
and sophistication, but instead it was utterly buried under a ragtag collection
of
things.

He
is
crazy,
I thought to myself. Only a crazy
person would think this was acceptable. This was not the house of an artist,
but the house of someone who grabbed everything they could think of that might
have value and held onto it for some deep, psychological reason. No wonder he
hadn't cared about the vase. He probably just grabbed it off a random table
before running out the door in the morning.

“Um,” I said.

Malcolm Ward was oblivious to my sudden tension. “This way, this
way.” He gestured to me to follow him. Taking a deep breath, I did so. He led
me to the stairs, just down the short entryway, and we started climbing up to
the upper floors. I caught a glimpse of the living room through a pair of
french doors and it looked just as cluttered as the foyer. What had I gotten
myself into?

The walls of the stairwell were also lined with photographs and
paintings, but as we passed the second floor, they tapered off in intensity,
until we finally reached the top floor. Here the walls were bare. Clean, white.
Sane.

I licked my lips as he led me out of the claustrophobic
stairwell and into the room beyond.

My mouth twisted as I took it in.

It was a huge room. Just enormous. It wasn't quite the length of
the house, but it was close. And it had been set up as a photography studio.

Okay.

To my surprise, I found I relaxed a bit now that I was in a
studio. I've never really had one of my own, but a creative space is powerful,
and I was reassured simply by the trappings of someone sincere and interested
in his work. With a sigh, I shed my coat and purse and moved aside while
Malcolm strode to his lights and began to fiddle with them.

After about five minutes, I realized he had no idea what the
hell he was doing.

What was going on here?

“Do you need some help?” I asked him without thinking. It came
out sharp and kind of snide, and immediately I remembered Felicia's admonition
to be less of a surly jackass.
Oh well, already screwed the pooch on that
one, I guess.

“Oh yes, if you could. I've never worked with these before.”

I sighed and walked toward him. “Then what are you doing with
them? I thought you were an amateur photographer.”

“Amateur artist,” he said. “And I figured that if I was going to
do photography I might as well have a studio.”

“A studio you've never used?”

He shrugged at me as I arrived by his side. He smelled the same
as he did last night, but it was a riper scent now, as though he had been
sweating slightly. The smell, rather than repulsing me, did weird things to my
thoughts. I couldn't help but wonder what his sweat would taste like, if it
would bead on his brow and run down his face as he strained and worked,
doing...
something.

Swallowing hard, I reached up to adjust the light for him. “This
isn't that hard,” I said after a moment. “Are you just pretending to never have
used this to get me to come over here?”

“No, of course not. It was installed just this morning.”

I paused, processing this. “Excuse me?” I said at last. “You had
this studio installed...
this morning?”

“Yes. I did.”

Taking a deep breath, I tried to control my irritation. “So you
aren't
an amateur photographer?”

He laughed, a rich, deep sound, as he leaned around me to see
what I was doing with the various knobs on the back of the light. The heat of
his body rolled into mine. “Of course I am. I'm a very
new
amateur.”

Don't think about how close he is,
I commanded myself.
“So you draw, then?”

“Not yet.”

“Paint? Sculpt?”

“Nope. Not yet.”

“So last night, when you told me you were an amateur artist, you
were lying.” My voice was flat and angry. I hate being lied to.

I heard him breathe in sharply, and he moved back slightly. “No,
I didn't lie,” he said. “The moment I saw you from across the room, I decided I
wanted to be an artist so I could capture you in whatever way I could. I have
decided to become a brilliant and tortured artist, inspired by you.”

I am not falling for this. I am
not.

“Really,” I said flatly. “You just decided to be brilliant and
tortured?”

“Yes. I am going to be a madman in touch with the pulse of the universe
through my art, and you are my inspiration.”

My lips thinned down into a line. “Yeah, well, I guess it's easy
to be a starving artist when you have billions of dollars.”

“Only one point four billion,” he said. “There are far more
cells in the human body than I have dollars. It's all relative if you think
about it.”

Only a rich shithead would say something like that. Anger rose
in me, and I whirled around, meaning to confront him. But the sight of him
stopped me in my tracks.

He was looking down at me, his expression open and curious, as
if he really
didn't
understand why what he had just said had infuriated
me. In the bright light of the studio, his beauty shone, probably far better
than my paltry looks ever would. His clear skin, tinged with the hint of a tan,
glowed with health and vigor, and the sandy locks of his hair spilled over his
forehead in golden waves. The brown of his eyes startled me, deep and intense,
with hidden depths, like well-polished cherrywood, and his mouth, full and soft,
quirked at my dumb, wide-eyed staring.

I couldn't help the sudden picking up of the pace of my heart in
my chest. He was near, too near to me, but even though this room had to be over
a thousand square feet, I couldn't move an inch. I
wouldn't
give an inch.
I absolutely could not let this guy know how much he affected me.

The shadow of his beard, now almost two-day's growth, stubbled
his cheeks, and I found myself aching to run my own face over his skin, to feel
the rough evidence of his masculinity on my smooth, feminine jaw. It was an
impulse I was almost entirely unaccustomed to. Deep, raw. Primal. An animal
attraction I hadn't felt since the heady days of doing E at raves in college.
And I was one hundred percent sober right now, feeling everything, feeling it
all,
and it was entirely in response to Malcolm Ward's proximity.

It scared me.

That alone gave me the strength to step away. Otherwise I might
have leaned in and kissed him right then and there.

God, what a tragedy that would have been.

Ward seemed to realize that I was uncomfortable, and he stepped
back as well. The lights were warm lights rather than traditional hot lights,
but I was still feeling too heated. The brightness gave me a headache, and I
retreated, stepping away from the set up.

“That's a really lame line,” I told him. “Wanting to become an
artist for me, I mean.”

He tilted his head. “It is the truth,” he said simply.

I didn't know what to say to that. I crossed my arms in front of
me and cast about for something to talk about other than my inspiring beauty,
which was a lie. Clearly a lie. I had a mirror. I knew quite well it was a lie.
Why then couldn't I get my heart to stop racing?