Page 94 of Flirting with Forever

Peter scooped up the bird and offered Natasha the other end. “Aye?”

Then it struck her. She turned, victorious. “I was dressed when we did it!”

The reporter stopped talking, the maid sloshed coffee onto the Limoges platter, and one of the collectors, a slight man with a Mahatma Gandhi face and Lilly Pulitzer trousers, rubbed his hands together and said, “Now, that’s what I call provenance.”

Peter looked up from the tug-of-war in which he was engaged and said to Cam under his breath, “I suggest you stop talking about it. You’re doing yourself no favors.”

“Stop talking about it? Stop talking about it?! I’ll spend the rest of my life having to talk about this. How could you have done this to me?”

Peter let go of the woodpecker. He took Cam’s elbow and guided her into a small alcove off the gallery.

“I didn’t do this to you,” he whispered fiercely. “If you’ll recall, I was chivalrously silent on the matter of my muse. You’re the one who revealed yourself. I had no intention—”

“No intention, my ass,” she said and caught Mahatma whipping around to see what part of the painting she was referring to now. “Fiction. Those paintings are fiction.”

“‘All art is fiction,’ someone told me once. ‘Mine more than most.’”

Cam growled. “If you think for one minute this is going to stop me from writing my book, you’re mistaken. It only makes finding the ending a little easier.”

“The ending?” Peter’s eyes flashed. “What ending do you mean?”

Suddenly the alcove felt far smaller than its eight-by-eight area. She crossed her arms. “I know all about Ursula.”

“Do you?”

“Yes,” she said quickly, feeling the intensity of his gaze, “I do.”

“And?”

“It’s not a secret, Peter.” She heard the tone of researcher rise defensively in her voice. “There is very little written about your personal life. Because you’re a painter of less reputation than Van Dyck or Vermeer, the record you have left behind is almost strictly about your work, a fact I imagine you’ll be glad to hear.” He hadn’t been glad to hear “less reputation,” she noted, and had made a gratifying wince. “Nonetheless, you left behind several portraits of Ursula, including,” she added, hoping her voice did not crack, “one entitled Lady Lely.”

The muscles in his jaw flexed, and his eyes took on the color of molten iron.

So, it really was true, she thought, feeling the last brutal slap of betrayal. She didn’t need a marriage record. The look in his eyes was all the proof she needed. Ursula might have abandoned him, but he had been left not just bitter, but bitter and married, and for whatever sins Cam might have forgiven Peter, she would not forgive him for drawing her into infidelity without her acknowledged consent.

“There is one entitled Lady Lely, another Ursula, and another,” she went on, “in which you are so enamored of your wife, you have painted her four times in one painting—the maiden, the Madonna, the muse, and the whore.”

The last word was a blow, and he seemed to double in bulk.

“And what did you make of this?” His words were as sharp as blades.

“You mean other than the fact that you lied to me?”

“Aye. Other than that.”

“What I made of it is a story—and a damned fine one, I might add. I was able to lay out a classic, Peter, a classic. Wealthy painter meets woman of the street. He falls for her face—the Cupid’s-bow mouth, the wide, childlike eyes, the porcelain skin—but he falls for her body too.” Cam thought of the slim, high-breasted form, so unlike her own, to which Peter had paid homage on canvas and undoubtedly in his bed, and hated herself for the black jealousy that poured into her heart. “He saves her, he marries her, and, in his greatest ode to her, he paints her four times, surrounded by the cherubim of heaven, so great is his love for her.”

“They were not cherubim.”

She heard a note in his voice that was not there before, but his face was still as cold and hard as steel. She wondered what it would take to break that damnable reserve.

“But his ego is too great,” she went on. “Samuel Pepys, a chronicler of the time, calls him ‘a mighty proud man’—”

“Bounding little catchfart.”

“—and having won his prize, the painter tires of it and begins to pursue the women of the court, whoever warms his posing chaise, until brokenhearted and cast aside, Ursula, the girl he raised from the streets to the rank of Lady Lely, finds herself falling for—”

“Stop,” Peter cried. “She was not my wife.”