Flirting With Forever (30 page)

“Seventeen, actual y,” Mertons said, patting the briefcase at his feet.

“I might need your advice.” She smiled.

Jacket waved away the idea like it was a swarming cloud of locusts and broke into a jog. “Lots of work,” he said. “Wine’s in the kitchen.”

When she heard the studio door shut she turned to demand an explanation, but Mertons had his head buried in the briefcase. Good God, she thought with a start, I’m not actual y going to have to hear about insurance, am I?

He pul ed out a piece of paper, nearly laid it on the table, then picked it up again. “I need to talk to you about Peter.”

She felt a charge of fear. “Is he okay?”

“He’s fine.” Mertons regarded her closely over the top of his glasses.

“Oh. Good. I guess.

“Have a seat.”

She sunk into the couch opposite him and put her wine on the table.

“Is he your boyfriend?”

She flushed. “Look, I don’t know what he told you, but sleeping with Peter doesn’t exactly make you his girlfriend.

If anything, it makes you something a little closer to an idiot.”

Mertons examined a nonexistent crease in his tie. “I was talking about Jacket, Miss Stratford.”

Great, Cam
. Maybe you can post the story on Face-book, too. “Um, yes, I guess you could cal him that.”

Mertons nodded and bal ed the paper in his hand.

Pressing the bridge of his glasses upward, he said, “You’re aware what you’ve done is il egal.”

She felt a different sort of warmth creep across her cheeks, the sort of warmth one feels when cal ed into the principal’s office. “I’m not aware of any law I violated.”

“Ignorance is a very weak defense.”

“Who are you?”

“Gregory Mertons, Guild time-jump accountant.” He held out his hand.

“Time-jump accountant?”

“Yes.”

“What were you doing in Peter’s studio?”

He lowered his hand. “I’m an envoy and an observer. I travel the world to ensure the appropriate rules are being fol owed. Think of me as a U.N. ambassador, the painting world’s version of Angelina Jolie.”

She looked at his hangdog eyes and Abraham Lincoln–

like lank. “Um …”

“The Guild has been watching for you for some time.”

“Watching? Spying, do you mean? And what is the Guild?”

Mertons reached into his pocket and retrieved a mechanical pencil. “It’s not spying when the use of the time tube is unlicensed.”

“Gee, and I swear I sent in my application.”

“We don’t consider this to be humorous, Miss Stratford.

Time travel is exceedingly risky, especial y unprecalculated time travel.”

“Good news. I aced precalculus in high school. I never travel without my quadratic formula.”

“Miss Stratford—”

“Mr. Mertons, why are you here?”

“How shal I put it? Your travel visa has been revoked.”

Jacket had won every game of strip blackjack they’d played until he taught her to read the “tel .” Mertons clicked his pencil.

“You’ve shut down the tube?” The laptop with the extra-special version of Amazon was in her bag on the table in the entry hal . She tried to keep her eyes focused on Mertons.

Click click click click
. “Yes.”

“Gosh, it was my favorite part of the DeLorean.”

The pencil stopped. A muscle contracted at the corner of Mertons’s eye. She felt like her laptop was practical y tapping her on her shoulder, and she cupped a hand around her eye to block her view.

“Yes, wel , I’m certain you’l find other uses for it,” he said uncertainly.

Wel , wherever he’d been in his life, he hadn’t been anywhere in the western world in the 1980s. She should have introduced herself as Pat Benatar.

“I also want to talk with you about your book.”

“My goodness,” she said, “it’s just a festival of fun tonight. I think I would have preferred the insurance pitch.”

“This is a bit awkward, I know, but I’d like you to consider dropping it.”

“Drop my book?”

“Yes.”

“Did Peter send you?”

“No. In fact, he would be considerably unhappy to know I was here.”

“Wel , I’d certainly hate to be the cause of any unhappiness for him.”

Mertons paused, clicked his pencil a time or two. His gaze cut to the rol ed-up paper, then back to Cam. “May I show you something?”

“Sure.” She picked up her wine and tossed back a large gulp. It seemed only a moment ago that the Cabernet had had flavor.

He turned the paper facedown on the table and went over to the suitcase. It was a large beige hard-sided valise with leather straps and buckles, the sort her grandfather might have traveled with. “Gee, where are you heading?

Nineteen forty-two?”

He gave a weak laugh, but only enough to remind her that that might be exactly where a time-jump accountant was traveling. She wondered if he used Amazon, too.

Jeanne swore the laptop had been turned off the night he and Peter arrived, which had baffled Cam. But he must not know about Amazon’s unique “LOOK INSIDE!” feature since he clearly didn’t have the faintest idea how she traveled.

He opened the buckles and cracked the top. Using both hands, he pul ed a painting out of the case and set it on the table.

It was her. Done by Peter. She wore the olive dressing gown she had worn that night, but it was not quite the pose she remembered. Her hair, which had been pinned up that night in his studio, fel loosely over her shoulder. Instead of frank eroticism, the look in her eyes was one of relaxed delight. And most important, she was clothed. The painting was an imagined moment of quiet joy, one that had not occurred, and she looked at it without knowing quite what to say.

“That’s not the painting from that night, is it?”

“No, but it was painted soon after. And many more were painted here.”

“
Here?
Peter’s stil
here
?” She didn’t know what she’d assumed, but it wasn’t that Peter had remained anywhere in the vicinity of, wel , now. “Why?”

“He says his desire is to stop you from writing your book.”

The slight emphasis on
says
made her look up. “What’s that supposed to mean? You’re not going to suggest that that isn’t his desire, are you?”

“No. I just wondered if there might be another reason for his single-mindedness as wel .”

Her gaze went from the painting to the veiled hint in Her gaze went from the painting to the veiled hint in Mertons’s eyes. “Look,” she said with an iron edge, “the man gave me a bul shit story that nearly ruined me as a writer.”

“He did it for a friend. Under duress. I know. I helped make it possible.”

“Wel , thanks a hel of a lot. You and Peter can take your little two-man Mean Boys act and go back to the seventeenth century.”

“Peter can’t go back.”

“What? Is his foot caught in a time tube? Tel him to hook that DeLorean up to a lightning rod. One point twenty-one jiggowatts of electricity shooting up his ass is just the thing to get him on his way.”

“You’re thinking of the Peter of 1673. The Peter you and I know lives in another place. The Afterlife. He’s dead.”

She nearly dropped her wine. “What are you saying?”

Mertons sighed. “The Afterlife is where we go when we die. You, me, Peter, anyone you’ve ever known. Some stay forever, but only if they’ve reached the end of al the lives they were meant to live. Most wait for a new life to be assigned. While Peter was waiting for his new-life-to-be, he was asked to return to his former life for a short assignment

—stopping you. He had no wish to return and accepted the task with great reluctance.”

“He didn’t appear very reluctant.” She thought of those lips as she and Peter stood on the balcony that night. There wasn’t a movement he’d made that had seemed even remotely hesitant.

“Then I would assert you don’t know him very wel .”

“Then I would assert you don’t know him very wel .”

She made a peremptory sniff, and her eyes returned to the painting. It certainly seemed to have been drawn with honest regard. She looked at the curls framing her shoulders and felt a shiver as she remembered him removing that hairpin. “And this is what he’s been working on?”

Her companion’s moral superiority appeared to down-shift. She felt the lurch of the Mertons-mobile.

“Peter’s been working on a number of projects,” he said obscurely.

“So what are you tel ing me? I should stop the book because Peter found a conscience and now has feelings for me?”

Mertons let out a long sigh. “Yes.”

How much of the book is revenge, she asked herself, and how much is a story that should be told? She shifted.

“Mertons—”

“Look, I’m not saying you’re another Romeo and Juliet

—”

“You’re aware they ended up dead?”

“Fine, a Scarlett and Rhett—”

“Estranged and unhappy? You’re getting warmer.”

“What I’m trying to say is, look at the work. You’re an art expert. What does that art tel you?”

She al owed herself to remove the lens of anger and hurt that had colored her thoughts about Peter since they’d parted. She was a trained curator, after al . What would she see if she real y let herself look?

She closed her eyes and opened them. What she saw made her heart ache, not just because what Peter had seen in his mind’s eye when he painted was the sort of moment of comfortable intimacy that makes the best part of a relationship, but because it reflected what she herself had desired for the two of them. If this is what Peter’s art said about Peter, she thought, what does my book say about me?

Touching the corner of the canvas with care, as if it might spark under her touch, she said lightly, “It tel s me a lot of things, actual y.”

“You see! I’ve seen his work! He has not painted something like this ever before, not even of his wife. Don’t you see the impact you’ve had on him?”

Wife? Ursula was his wife? She fought to keep her hand from shaking. “He painted his wife?”

“Oh, any number of times. She was his muse, I am told.

But it was never like this.”

No, one never paints one’s wife the way one does the woman one draws into adultery. She felt il .

“I think,” she said softly, “you had better leave.”

Mertons frowned, obviously confused. “But—”

“Go. Please.”

“I should like to leave you the painting.”

“That’s unnecessary. Peter wil see it’s missing.”

“No. No, he—” Mertons came to a dead stop.

“He what?”

Mertons shifted his weight. “He asked me to dispose of it.”

“Then I’l ask you to do the same.”

“Miss Stratford, al sentiment aside, do you have any idea how much a Peter Lely is worth in today’s market?”

“Not enough to tempt me a second time. Take it.” Cam made her way to the entry hal , hoping Mertons would take the hint.

His shoulders fel . He slipped on his coat, placed the canvas under his arm and picked up his briefcase and valise. “And the book?”

She pressed the security button to cal the elevator. “Tel Peter he’s been my muse. Now, if you’l excuse me …”

Cam made it al the way to her bedroom before she started to cry.

* * *

He stopped. He’d heard that sound in her voice before.

Hel , he’d heard the same words from her before. But why would she be saying them to an insurance agent? He took his hand off the refrigerator door and strained his ear in the direction of the living room.

The next bit was garbled, as the ice maker dropped a fresh batch into the storage compartment, but then, clear as a bel , he heard the insurance guy say, “Miss Stratford, al sentiment aside, do you have any idea how much a Peter Lely is worth in today’s market?”

Peter Lely
again
? What the hel was going on? Who was this guy?

He barely had time to process her answer before the sound of approaching steps made him run to the studio, a smart move on his part since she rushed by the door an instant later and went straight into her room.

When he heard the door close, he stuck his head out for a look. The insurance guy stood in front of the elevator with a canvas under his arm. The door opened, and the man hesitated. He held the door with his foot, put his cases on the floor and placed the painting down, front side against the wal . Then he picked up the cases and got in. The door closed.

Jacket ventured from the studio, not sure what to think.

He went to the row of windows in the dining room, the ones that faced down onto Washington Road. He saw the man exit the building, cross the street and head into Aldo’s coffee shop.

Then Jacket crossed to the elevator and turned the painting. Jesus, it was Cam, and worse, it was good. He wondered if she’d keep it. He wondered if she wanted him even to know about it. He looked to see if Cam’s door was open. It wasn’t. He pul ed his cel phone out and took a snap. There. Clear as day.