Selling Grace: A Light Romance Novel (Art of Grace Book 1) (5 page)

"So you fill both roles."

"And sometimes, I have a building owner come to me with an empty building just after a business owner has stopped by and requested a space!" Carter grinned as he spread his hands wide, and then brought them together. "All I need to do is connect the two of them, take my commission, and sit back and relax."

"So where does the art come in?" I asked.

Carter paused for a moment as we sat down at the cafe and picked up the menus that the waitress had deposited on the table in front of us. "Well, leasing out these buildings often requires some staging; I need to make the building look attractive. If it's a communal building with a bunch of different offices in it, for example, there needs to be some nice artwork hanging in the lobby so that clients have something to look at while they wait. It's also harder to convince tenants to move into some place that's bare-bones, with zero decoration."

I nodded. It made sense. My eyes traveled back to the menu, and I realized, as my stomach let out a little gurgle, that I actually felt quite hungry.

But then again, with Carter sitting across from me, maybe I should order a salad or something small, just enough to tide me over so that I wouldn't look like a total glutton as I stuffed myself. Making matters worse, Carter looked up at me over the menu. "What looks good?"

I shrugged. "I'm not sure yet," I lied, as my mind conjured up an image of a big hearty sandwich.

"Well, get whatever you want. My treat," he said, which didn't make my anxiety lessen at all. Now I needed to make sure not to pick out something expensive, either, or else it would seem like I was taking advantage of his generosity!

Eventually, arguing fiercely against my stomach, I picked out a salad with grilled chicken and some avocado. I conveyed my order to the waitress, trying to not sound grumpy. Meanwhile, Carter had no problem in ordering a nice big sandwich and fries for himself. I wondered if he'd mind if I stole a few of them off of his plate.

"So, you own a house?" Carter asked after taking a sip of his water, and my spirits plummeted.

"Uh, no, not exactly." How could I phrase this without adding in all sorts of ugly details about my past? "I used to, but I'm now in an apartment, actually not far from here." There. Hopefully that would change the topic without leading to more questions.

But Carter didn't appear quite ready to let it go. "What changed?"

"I got divorced," I said shortly, seeing no way around it.

Great. There it was, out there on its own like a fat, pregnant frog. I waited for Carter's whole attitude to change, for him to regard me as used and potentially already damaged goods.

Instead, he just nodded, as if he'd been half expecting this. "How long ago?"

"Six months," I said, feeling a little less distraught at the calmness of his tone. "Still picking myself up, if you know what I mean."

He nodded again. "It's hard. I haven't been through it myself, but I've helped friends with it. Why'd it happen?"

"Because the bastard cheated on me." What was I doing? Why was I spilling out all my secrets to this man that I barely knew, a man that I was supposed to maintain a professional working relationship with?

"And now?"

"And now, I think I'm going to take a break from men," I said, thinking about the plan that my best friend and I had discussed and decided upon after the divorce papers were signed. "Try and get my own life back first."

Carter smiled. "Sounds like a good idea."

Thankfully, our food arrived before I could reveal any more intimate and embarrassing details about my life, like how I got my first period in school. I dug into the salad, trying to keep my eyes off of the pastrami sandwich that the waitress set in front of Carter.

After we'd both taken our few bites, Carter, perhaps sensing that I didn't want to spend any more time discussing my failed marriage than I had to, wisely changed the subject. Instead, he chatted about some of the local businesses in the area, many of which existed in buildings that he'd managed or helped to buy or sell. To someone else, this might have come off as bragging, but I saw Carter's eyes light up when he talked about these businesses, and I realized that he really cared about them. For many of the smaller businesses, he named the owners as if he still kept up his personal connection with them.

"You really like our little city of Davis, don't you?" I asked, when he finally paused for breath.

With a slightly abashed grin, Carter reached up and ran a hand through his short hair, mussing it slightly. "It's obvious, isn't it?" he let on. "Yeah. I might not have grown up here, but I've been living in Davis for nearly a decade, now. It really is the kind of place that you just fall in love with, sometimes without even realizing it."

I tried not to wince a little at his mention of love, but he must have seen the pained expression flash across my face. "Sorry. Not that kind of love."

"No, it's okay," I defended myself. "So, um..."

I stalled, not sure how to ask if Carter was currently seeing anyone. How could I possibly raise the question without it coming across as hypocritical, especially when, just a few minutes earlier, I'd been talking about how I needed to spend some time on my own without a man in my life?"

Carter just smiled back at me. "At some point, I'm sure I'll find a woman who shares the same passion that I do," he said, and returned his attention back to the other half of his sandwich, pointedly not looking at how my cheeks flushed at the potential implication of his words.

As he'd promised, Carter tossed down his credit card on top of the check, holding up a hand at my half-hearted protests and my attempt to reach for my purse. "Maybe in exchange for this lunch, you'll give me a heads-up if any nice pieces come into the gallery, so that I can snatch them up before they get sold off to little old retired ladies," he teased me.

"Well, you'll have to give me your number, so I can give you a call," I replied, smiling back at him. And I only wanted his number for the purpose of selling him art, I added firmly in my head. I definitely didn't want to ask him out, maybe let him take me out for a couple of glasses of wine before seeing where the night went.

I suspected that, as a real estate, he probably had an amazing apartment of his own.

When the waitress brought back our receipt, Carter flipped it over and used the pen to scrawl some digits on the backside. "Here you go," he said, handing it over to me. "And that's my personal cell, too, so you don't need to worry about restricting your calls to business hours only."

That was flirting, wasn't it? I might be a bit rough and rusty at this, but I could still recognize flirting when someone hit me over the head with it! This handsome, sexy guy was really flirting with me!

Still, just to be sure, I glanced quickly over my shoulder. Nope, no wildly attractive woman standing behind me. I'd made that mistake before, when I saw Tommy Gallager waving at me in tenth grade, but it turned out that he'd been waving to Lisa Evanson, standing behind me. I hadn't been able to show my face for the whole rest of the day, and ended up convincing the nurse to let me go home with a sick note.

"You probably ought to be getting back to the gallery," Carter said, rising up from his chair. "Shall I walk you back?"

"Thanks," I said, wondering vaguely if this walk back was going to end with a kiss, like a couple teenagers walking back to the girl's front door after a first date.

Sadly, there was no kiss forthcoming from Carter when we arrived back at the front door to the Halesford gallery, although he was gallant enough to carry my shoes for me (I tried them at the restaurant, but my ankle immediately told me to leave them off).

"I'm sure I'll be crossing paths with you plenty more in the future, Becca," Carter said, giving me one last smile that melted my heart and sent sparks leaping up inside of me. The man would start a brush fire if he kept on smiling like that!

"Bye," I echoed softly, standing beside the door and watching for a minute as he walked away. Good lord, even through those dress pants, the man's ass looked amazing, sexy enough to make my fingers itch to reach out and grab it!

No! Bad Becca! Stay away from men, I reminded myself as I unlocked the front door and headed back into the art gallery to wait for a customer to show their face. You've sworn them off.

Still, I wondered how long I had to keep away from the male half of our species. I'd made it six months past the date of our divorce. Surely, that was enough time to be single, and now I could start thinking about dating again?

Chapter Six

*

"Only six months?? That's definitely not enough time to be single before trying to jump back into the dating pool again!"

I sighed as I looked across the high little table at my best friend, watching her shake her head firmly. "Oh, come on, Portia! Six months is plenty. I think I should get back into the dating game, even if it's just to dip a toe in. Won't it help me forget about Barry?"

Despite my wheedling, however, my best friend remained firm, her big dark eyes examining me closely. "A drunken one night stand where you don't even know the guy's name might help, but definitely not another relationship. Trust me on this, Becks. What's gotten into you?"

I sighed. "Nothing," I said, reaching for my glass of cheery pink-colored wine sitting in front of me. "Don't worry about it."

Across the little table from me in Vini, the wine bar that had become our de facto hangout spot after Portia got off of work, Portia kept her eyes narrowed at me. "Okay, something's definitely up, but I know that you're not going to tell me about it," she said.

"Portia, there's really nothing-"

"Why don't you tell me about your day," she interrupting, cutting off my denials. "This was your first day of running the art gallery, wasn't it? Was it exciting? Did you sell any pieces?"

"Exciting is definitely not the word that I'd choose to use," I said, shaking my head. "In fact, I think I'm going to need to take up reading during my down time there. Maybe I'll start with War and Peace."

"That boring?" Portia raised her eyebrows as she raised her glass of dark plum colored wine to her lips.

"I don't know how you can drink that stuff," I said, nodding towards her choice. At Vini, the wine bar in town, fancy machines automatically dispensed wine by the glass. The bar offered a selection of more than twenty different bottles to taste, spanning across a wide range of different varieties. This worked out well for both of us, since I tended to go for sweeter, lighter whites, and Portia instead picked out the dark and strong reds.

"It's got a lot of complex flavor," she answered, setting the glass back down and swirling it between two long, slender, elegant fingers. "It's not just a single note of sweetness, like the wines that you choose."

I stuck out my tongue at her to show her that her slights didn't bother me. I knew what I liked. And surprisingly, despite her snobbiness and the air of almost superior taste that she often wore around her shoulders like a cloak, I liked Portia.

We'd known each other since we were kids, back when the appropriate way to show that you liked a boy was to throw sand at him, and then run away screaming whenever he tried to talk to you. Even back then, however, there'd been something a bit different about Portia. While I was happy to run around with my hair all snarled up like a rat's nest, Portia always kept her long, nearly black hair falling down over her shoulders in smooth waves that the rest of the girls on the playground secretly envied. Even as a child, she always projected the idea that she had everything under control, that she knew how to move smoothly through life while the rest of us splashed and floundered.

In high school, she'd been the dark-haired seductress who kept half a dozen boys charmed around her little finger. I watched her with open-mouthed amazement as I made my own clumsy way through three or four boyfriends, most of the presumptive relationships falling apart and sputtering out after just a few months. I didn't know how Portia managed to keep so many men interested in her with what seemed like next to no effort on her part.

Perhaps in other circumstances, I would have become Portia's preferred target of ridicule. The two of us were so different, after all; I was shorter and stouter, my body growing out in curves while hers extended into long, graceful limbs. By our senior year, Portia looked like she'd just stepped off of the model's catwalk, while I appeared more like I ought to be dressed in black and operating the spotlights from the shadows.

But instead of teasing and attacking me, Portia apparently decided that I needed a good best friend, someone to help me avoid the worst of the potholes on my road of Life. She took on this mantle for herself, always doing her best to steer me clear of the next upcoming disaster.

To my surprise, I think Portia really enjoyed it, too. She often rolled her eyes at my antics, but I think that I helped her to live vicariously, that she got to enjoy activities she'd never consider for herself by listening to my breathless descriptions. After all, a confident, composed woman like Portia would never drunkenly wander over to a hot guy in a bar and brag about how she could almost nearly fit a pool ball in her mouth. Me, however? After a few big mugs of beer, it sounded like a hilarious idea!