Page 74 of Flirting with Forever

Peter stepped directly into Jacket’s line of vision, close enough for him to feel Peter’s breath on his face. “Sir, you have misjudged me. Let me make myself plain. I want the painting now, and I will pay you for it.” He lowered his voice as the model emerged, hopping in one shoe as she slipped the other onto her foot. “It is as clear to me as it will be to your fiancée what has transpired here. One of us is going to take that painting now, break it in two, and destroy it. Which of us shall it be?”

Jacket’s eyes flashed, and for a long moment he said nothing.

The model grabbed her coat off the bed. “What are you two whispering about?”

“Nothing,” Jacket said without breaking Peter’s gaze. “Go.”

Jeanne called, “Hello? Hello? I’m sorry it took so long. The meter maid and I were having a little disagreement over how close I was parked to the hydrant.”

Anastasia shrugged. “Okay, then. Bye.” She ducked out of a door in the back.

“It’s me,” Jeanne called as her footsteps drew closer. “Is anybody here?”

Jacket stepped around Peter, pulled the painting off the easel, and snapped it with his foot. He dropped it into a large, barrel-like contrivance and wiped his hands on his breeks. “Fuck you,” he said.

Jeanne stuck her head in the door. “Peter? Oh, Christ! Jacket, hi. I, uh, see you’ve met Peter.”

“Oh yes,” Jacket said. “We’ve just been chatting over pints.”

“Ah, you Brits,” she said, laughing nervously. “It’s all pint this and perambulator that. Peter, can I see you in the other room, please?”

Peter nodded and bowed to Jacket. “Many thanks.”

Jeanne pulled him into the main room. “What did you say to him?” she demanded. “Please tell me you didn’t say anything.”

But before Peter had time to answer, the door through which he had entered the apartment opened and Campbell Stratford stepped through.

“…really isn’t necessary,” she said to an older man holding the door open. “Really, Mr. Ball, even without a doorman, the building is quite—” She stopped when she saw Peter.

He hadn’t seen her for more than a month, and he had never seen her dressed in the clothes of her time. The effect took his breath away. She wore closely tailored men’s breeks of a dark, heathered brown that brought her hips and legs into stunning perspective, and an equally formfitting shirt. Her hair was loose and fell in streaming ringlets of crimson sunlight over her shoulders. He’d never seen a woman look like this, not even in the salacious tableaux of the king’s private parties, and while part of him felt the old wound reopen, another, less estimable part was titillated by the shameless rejection of propriety. Still another, keenly aware of the eyes of the other men upon her—for Jacket had entered the room as well—nearly drove him to madness with the desire to roll up his sleeves and scrap.

“Peter,” she said.

His heart soared. Would this woman who had just said his name in that hauntingly sweet voice, who gazed upon him with tremulous uncertainty, destroy everything he loved with a tawdry exposé? They had shared something that night. Surely she had felt it too.

“Peter,” she said softly, “I think we should talk.”

Aye, this was a woman who could be reasonable.

Thirty-one

“You!” Cam said, banging open the kitchen’s swinging door and hoping the return might knock Peter senseless. “You have a goddamned lot of nerve.”

She didn’t like the way he looked at her, that “been there, had that” gaze that made her want to stick a paintbrush in his eye, and she hated the way her heart had done a high jump when she’d first seen him. It wasn’t that he looked so good in the khakis and work shirt, she told herself, though, to be frank, Rusty had never filled out that shirt the way Peter did. It was just that he looked so different, so…part of her world.

She didn’t know how he got here, he had no right to be here, and in about three minutes she was going to have to deliver a riveting explanation to a bunch of people in her living room, who were probably lining up their popcorn and soft drinks right now.

“I have a lot of nerve?” Peter rubbed his head. “Is there something you’d like to tell me, ‘Mrs. Post’?”

She flushed. “What difference did it make what my name was? You apparently knew it wasn’t the truth.”

“Aye, the truth was a rather precious commodity that night.”

The fire in his eye only fanned her fury. “But you, you’re a paragon of honor. School for Wives. Hilarious. That was a month of hard work.” Her voice choked on the last words, and she had to muster iron determination to vanquish the memory of nearly destroying her career. “You’re a jerk.”

He hesitated. “I-I am not proud of that. I was put in a difficult situation by a friend and allowed myself to believe that excused a willful deception. I was wrong, and I apologize.”

“Yeah, well, this time I don’t need to depend on secondhand sources. This time I know the story perfectly.”