Page 85 of Flirting with Forever

“It’s not my Van Dyck. And it’s in transit as we speak.”

Cam had been a powerhouse of efficiency for the last three weeks, clearing away mountains of museum work like a battalion of snowplows in order to preserve as much time as possible for her writing.

“So,” Cam said without looking up from the monitor, “is this all we can find on him?”

Jeanne sighed. By “him,” of course, Cam meant “Lely.” It had been the only “him” in her life for the past few weeks. It was a wonder Jacket hadn’t given up on Cam and gone back to London. Jeanne dropped her bag on the floor and hung up her coat. “Yes, you’re now officially the most knowledgeable person on Earth about a subject no one really cares about. I believe there’s a special wing of the Star Trek Society that will be honoring you soon.”

“No, I mean is this all? Weren’t you getting an article from Burlington Magazine?” Cam was at her desk surrounded by a dozen open books. When she was really engrossed in what she was writing, as she was now, the keyboard clicked like a Geiger counter, punctuated by cracks loud enough to make Jeanne jump when she hit Enter at the end of a paragraph.

“I guess the mimeograph’s working kinda slow on their end. The article’s from 1932.”

“Christ!”

The look on Cam’s face reminded Jeanne she needed to pick up some bug spray on her way home. “Maybe you’d like to pull up a chapter on England on your magical little Amazon flying carpet and hop on over there yourself?”

Cam shook her head in disgust and returned to typing.

“You know, you don’t actually have to have the book done by the board meeting,” Jeanne said. “You only need a contract for it, which you already have.”

“This book is practically writing itself.” Cam hit the Enter key so hard Jeanne wondered if the keyboard was going to flip in the air. “I am awash in heavenly inspiration. Meeting Peter Lely was just what I needed.”

“Heavenly is the word for it, all right. You’re like an angel.”

“What?” Cam grimaced fiercely in her admin’s direction.

“Heavenly,” Jeanne said louder. “I said you’re like, one of our Father’s celestial seraphim.”

Cam grunted. She dug into the stack of books, holding up two with her elbow, and flipped the pages of a particularly large and musty-looking folio while attempting to keep the whole improbable Jenga tower from taking her little easel, the dead Christmas cactus, and about sixteen Flair pens over the edge like a biblio–Mount Etna. “Dammit!” she cried. “There’s just not enough information on Ursula.”

“Information? I thought we decided you were going to make this stuff up.”

“I-I—” A warm pink crawled across Cam’s cheeks. “I’m not going to make it all up. And there’s nothing official anywhere about his marital status. A good author, you know, checks at least some of the facts.”

“Yeah, but who cares whether some woman whose last name we don’t even know was married or wore a wedding band or liked apples? Apples? I mean, really! Yesterday you had me spend an hour with a magnifying glass trying to tell if her hair was naturally curly or curled with a curling iron.”

They both turned to look at the book that held the plate of the demurely capped Ursula, which Cam had placed on an easel on the bookcase, right next to a sketch of the same woman, entitled “Lady Lely.” “I mean, c’mon,” Jeanne went on, “who’s going to care unless you’re—Oh my God! You’re jealous!”

“I am not jealous.”

“You told me nothing happened. I fell to my knees, praying something would happen, but you swore to me, nope, nothing happened between you and Lely.” Now it all made sense to Jeanne. The book in which the sketch appeared—the sixteenth that had been ordered from various booksellers around the globe—had arrived earlier in the week, and Cam had flipped through it madly after the package arrived and sunk slowly into her chair when she’d come to that page. Then she’d lapsed into a moody silence that had lasted for the rest of the day.

It took two more seconds for Jeanne’s brain to catch up. “‘Lady Lely,’” she said. “It’s the title. That’s why you’re so upset. He didn’t tell you he was married.”

“I told you, nothing happened.”

“Nothing happened? You called me, wearing nothing but a silk sheet and raving so much about what fun it was to pose naked I thought my phone was gonna catch fire. If you didn’t get laid after that, there’s nothing left for you except an IV and bed restraints. No wonder he came barreling back after you. The poor guy’s probably got an erection that reaches from here to the Battle of Trafalgar.”

“He didn’t come back for me. I told you that.”

“You have told me exactly nothing since you started revising the Van Dyck biography. You told me nothing when your publisher did an about-face on the book and suddenly it was about Lely instead of Van Dyck. ‘I miscalculated,’ you said. You told me nothing when I dropped not one but two big-as-life cross-century FedEx packages on your doorstep. You have done nothing but bitch, type, run up a tab at every bookstore between here and Tokyo, and wrinkle your nose like you’re smelling donkey poop—yes, just like that—since you got back, and now you’re telling me you didn’t sleep with him?”

“I did sleep with him,” Cam said angrily. “The nothing that happened happened after we slept together.”

“Oh. Oh.” Jeanne winced.

“Right. A big, honking awkward mistake. One of those horrible miscalculations where the only upside is the laughs you get when you tell your friends about it two decades later.”

“Worse than the photographer you were dating who said you reminded him of an older Lindsay Lohan?”