Page 19 of Flirting with Forever

“Madam, please!”

She turned. A tall, extraordinarily reedy bald man with an armful of papers gazed at her sternly. She slipped the phone unobtrusively into her bag. “Qué?”

“Kay?” he repeated blankly and looked at a paper in his hand.

“Qué. Qué?” Oh, the hell with it. “My name is Kay, er, Katie Holmes.” She dipped a curtsy. Her English accent was amateurish at best. The man frowned and began a slow, careful review. Realizing with a horrified start she had no shoes, she thrust her shoulders back, and the man’s eyes screeched to a halt at her neckline. Different ages, different clothes—same hormonal magic.

His face relaxed into a slightly less concerned smile. “I presume you wish to see Mr. Lely, aye?”

“Ye—er, aye.”

“About a painting?”

“Aye.”

“That is possible, of course, only with an appointment.” He scanned the paper in his hand. “I don’t see a Katie Holmes here. You do have an appointment, I presume?”

Cam shifted. Run or lie? Running would likely get her removed from the premises. She fingered the phone in her pocket. She had to stay, one way or another. “I, well…It’s complicated.”

Seven

Peter brushed by the desk usually occupied by his clerk, Stephen, and let his office door shut behind him. After a quick look to ensure no one was about, he went to the storage room and lowered the window to its original position. He damned his luck at running into that blackguard, Sir David. He’d entered by way of the servants’ door, but even then he’d taken a chance of running into Mertons, who would have been beside himself by now if he’d figured out Peter had left the building.

Charles’s royal entourage had been at Charles’s club in Maiden Lane, but not Charles himself, and it had taken Peter more than three-quarters of an hour to track down the king in the Berkeley Square dressing room of the Honorable Genevieve Longchamps, though how much longer Genevieve’s title would apply given the king’s obvious intentions he could only guess.

Peter slipped a hand in his waistcoat and touched the letter, more valuable than gold. He believed the king would keep his word and sign it. He had to believe it. Charles had his faults, to be sure, but for the most part he was a man of honor in business, and he had always treated Peter fairly—as fairly as a monarch could treat anyone—though he had certainly extracted his pound of flesh in the years since their first meeting thirty years ago, Charles the wide-eyed, ten-year-old son of the king and Peter the scrape-farthing Dutchman with the striking palette of colors.

Six years from now, Peter knew, Charles would bestow a knighthood on him. Charles would say it was for a lifetime of contribution to English art, though Peter knew it had been as much to lift his spirits. But the gesture would fail, and Peter would be dead within the year, collapsing at his easel and finally earning the peace for which he had so longed. Or so he had thought, until he found that death, at least the part of death spent in the Afterlife, had not erased any of his memories.

How long would Ursula’s death haunt him?

A double tap at the door roused him from his thoughts. Stephen. Peter felt disloyal for returning here, like a spy, into the lives of his friends and the people who worked for him, with no admission of his prescient knowledge of his future as well as theirs. Mertons, however, had insisted Peter tell no one, and so no one had been told.

“Come,” Peter said.

Stephen, as upright as a bishop, but with the broad, good-natured face of a tavern owner, ducked in and began to gather the stray dishes from breakfast.

“Miss Quinn?” Peter asked as he took his seat.

“Attended to.”

“Good. And Sir David?”

“Gone.”

“Which reminds me.” He caught Stephen’s eye and let the corner of his mouth rise. “The king has taken a new fancy.”

A look of horror came over Stephen’s face. “We cannot begin the painting over. Not again. First Nell, then Barbara Villiers, then Nell again, and now someone else? The paint on the face has been scraped down so many times the canvas is getting to look like my gran’s lacework underneath.”

“I think we are safe with Nell for now,” Peter said. “We should endeavor to finish it this week, however. With that delivered, the king’s only choice will be a new commission.” So long as the king maintains his royal prerogative with the women of the court, Peter thought, I shall always have work. “How are the mezzotints today?”

“Good, good. Except for Collins with the broken finger, we’ve been producing at a prodigious rate. Nothing to worry about there.”

Peter felt the pause. “But?”

“Might I observe the new apprentice, the tall one with no hair, is not going to make much of an artist.”

He meant Mertons. Peter snorted. “He’s my cousin. From my mother’s first marriage. I’m afraid it was this or transportation to the New World.”