Jennifer Crusie - Faking It

“What?” Ronald said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re breathing heavy.”

“Asthma,” Davy lied. “Give me her address and her account numbers.”

Ronald furrowed his brow. “I don’t think that would be ethical.”

“Rabbit,” Davy said, putting steel in his voice. “You have no ethics. That’s how you got into this mess. Give me the damn numbers.”

Ronald hesitated and then took a pen and notebook from his inside jacket pocket, flipped to a page, and began to copy numbers down.

“Thank you, Rabbit,” Davy said, taking the page Ronald tore from the notebook. He stood up and added, “Don’t leave town. Don’t steal anything else. And do not, for any reason, call Clea.”

“I’ll do anything I damn well please,” Ronald said.

“No,” Davy said. “You will not.”

Ronald met his eyes and then looked away.

“There you go.” Davy patted him on the shoulder. “Stay away from Clea, and you’ll be fine. Nothing but good times ahead.”

“At least admit you stole her money, you crook,” Ronald said.

“Of course I did,” Davy said, and went off to rob the most beautiful woman he’d ever slept with. Again.

BREAKING INTO Mason Phipps’s house had been a bad idea, but Tilda hadn’t been able to think of a better one. Now, creeping through Mason’s halls in the dark of night, she was reconsidering. She really wasn’t cut out for this kind of work. She was a retired art forger, not a thief. Plus, the place was deserted except for a caterer in the kitchen and Gwennie’s Dinner Party from Hell in the dining room, and it was spooking her out. “Drama Queen,” her dad would have said, but she had reason to be spooked. She’d searched an empty billiard room, an empty library, and an empty conservatory, and now she stood in the barren hall, thinking, I’m knocking over a Clue game. Miss Scarlet in the hall with an inhaler. Those were the days, the Golden Age, when men were men and women didn’t have to do their own second-story work. What she needed was one of those old-fashioned guys who rescued women and stole things for them.

Oh, pull yourself together, she told herself. She crept upstairs and opened the doors to one empty room after another until she found a bedroom full of silky things tossed everywhere, perfume scenting the air, the kind of room that fit the kind of woman that Tilda would never be. For one thing, she’d never have enough money.

Something glowed on a desk. Tilda squinted at it through her glasses and realized it was the edge of a laptop computer. Clea Lewis had closed her laptop without shutting it down. Careless, Tilda thought, looking around at everything the woman had and didn’t take care of. Really, she didn’t deserve to own a Scarlet.

Downstairs, a phone rang, and Tilda picked up speed, making a circuit of the room in the dim streetlight that filtered through the curtains, checking behind furniture and under the bed, feeling her way when the shadows were too deep to see. The Scarlet wasn’t that small, she thought as she turned to the quartet of paneled closet doors along one wall. Where the hell had Clea stashed it?

She opened the first two doors and shoved the clothes apart to search the back of the closet.

A man stood there.

Tilda turned to run, and he slapped his hand over her mouth from behind and yanked her against him. She kicked back and connected with his shin, and he swore and lost his balance and dragged her to the carpet as he fell.

He weighed a ton.

“Okay,” he said calmly in her ear, while she struggled under him, trying to pry his hand from her mouth before her lungs collapsed. “Let’s not panic.”

I can’t breathe, Tilda thought and sucked in air through her nose, inhaling a lot of dusty carpet.

“Because I’m really not this kind of guy,” he went on. “There’s no criminal intent here. Well, not against you.”

He had a grip like a vise. Her lungs seized up as his hand pressed against her mouth, her muscles clenched, the world got darker, and the familiar panic overwhelmed her.

“I just need to be sure you’re not going to scream,” he said, but she was going to suffocate, she’d always known she would someday, her treacherous lungs betraying her like everything else in the Goodnight heritage, but not like this, not in the middle of breaking the law while being mugged by some deadweight lowlife, so as her lungs turned to stone and his voice faded away, she did the only thing she could think of.

She bit him.

DOWNSTAIRS, GWEN SMILED over the last of dinner at sweet, chubby Mason Phipps, trying to keep her thoughts on the landscape that Mason was showing her and not on her youngest daughter, roaming somewhere in the house looking for evidence of her misspent youth.

“What do you think?” Mason said, and Gwen yanked her attention back to him. “It’s a Corot.” He stroked the top of the frame with one finger. “Tony wasn’t sure, but I said, ‘No, that’s a Corot.’ And when I had the canvas tested, I was right. It’s a Corot.”

It’s a Goodnight, Gwen thought, but she said, “It’s very beautiful.”

“Those were the good old days, collecting with Tony,” Mason said, and Gwen thought, Tony sure thought so. She listened with one ear while Mason waxed on and on about the old days. This dinner was lasting for months. She could have done an entire Double-Crostic by now. A hard one.

“I prefer folk art,” the blonde at the other end of the table said, and Gwen turned to look at Clea Lewis, lovely as a spring morning, if spring had been around for forty-odd years but had taken really, really good care of itself.

“Folk art,” Gwen said politely. “How interesting.”

“Yes, I’m still collecting it,” Mason said. “But it’s not the same without Tony. He really had the life, buying art, running the gallery, hosting all those openings.” The envy in Mason’s voice was palpable, and Gwen thought, Yeah, Tony had a good time.

“And living with you and the girls, of course,” Mason added, smiling at her. “Little Eve and Matilda. How are they?”

Eve’s been divorced since her husband came out of the closet, and Tilda’s given up forgery for burglary. “Fine,” Gwen said.

“You were always the best part of his life, Gwennie,” Mason said. “You don’t mind if I call you Gwennie, do you? It’s what Tony always called you. It’s the way I always think of you.”

“Of course not,” Gwen said, thinking, Yes, I mind, and a fat lot of good it does me.

“Mason and I first met at a museum opening,” Clea said, looking beautifully reminiscent, all dreamy blue eyes and creamy soft skin and silky blonde hair. Gwen thought about throwing a plate at her. “My late husband’s grandmother founded the Hortensia Gardner Lewis Museum,” Clea went on. “It was Cyril’s passion.” She smiled at Mason. “I find passionate men irresistible.”

“Cyril was a good man,” Mason said. “We were more than business associates, we were great friends. I helped him the way Tony helped me.”

Oh, God, I hope not. Gwen picked up her glass of wine. “The Lewis Museum?” She tried to remember if Tony had ever sold them anything. Private museums could be so gullible.

“It’s a small museum,” Mason said, adding, “Of course it got larger when I gave it my Homer Hodge collection.”

Gwen choked on her wine.

“And now I’ve come home to finish the last of my new collection with a southern Ohio painter, Homer’s daughter, Scarlet,” he said while Gwen tried to turn the choke into a cough. “Do you remember Scarlet Hodge?”

“Uh,” Gwen said, and hit the wine again.

“According to a newspaper interview Tony did back in eighty-seven, she only did six paintings.” Mason leaned closer to Gwen. “In fact, as I remember, Tony had exclusive rights to her work.”

“Are we having dessert?” Gwen said. “I love dessert.”

“You eat dessert?” Clea said, clearly appalled, and Gwen turned to her gratefully.

“Every chance I get,” she said. “If possible, I eat it twice.”

“Good for you,” Mason said. “I was hoping to come by and look at your records. I’d like to contact the others who bought Scarlets.”

“The records are confidential,” Gwen said. “Couldn’t possibly. Unprofessional. So, dessert?”

Clea had been tapping on her water glass, evidently trying to summon the caterer who showed up now, looking like Bertie Wooster in his white jacket and slicked-back dark hair.

“Dessert, Thomas,” Clea said.

Thomas exchanged a look with Gwen, not the first of the evening.

“Confidential, of course,” Mason was saying. “But perhaps you could contact them for me. Let them know someone is interested in buying. For a commission.”

“Really, Mason,” Clea said. “The woman came for dinner, not to be harassed.”

Mason looked across the table, his face suddenly hard, and Clea shut up. “But what would really help,” he went on, turning back to Gwen, “would be to meet Scarlet. I’d like to do an article on her, nothing professional, of course.” He laughed self-deprecatingly, and Gwen thought, Article? Oh, no. “Do you know where she is?” Mason asked.

Upstairs burgling your mistress. “I think she’s dead,” Gwen said.

“But she was so young,” Mason protested. “In her teens. How did she die?”

Gwen thought about Tilda, throwing the last canvas at Tony and walking out the door seventeen years before. “She was murdered. By an insensitive son of a bitch.” She smiled cheerfully at Mason. “And I have no idea what happened after that.”

“That’s fascinating,” Mason said, leaning forward.

“Not if you’re Homer or Scarlet,” Gwen said, as Thomas brought in the cheesecake. “Then it just stinks. Oh, good, chocolate. My favorite.”

Beside her, Clea contained her scorn, and Gwen cut into her dessert and prayed that she’d heard the last of Homer and Scarlet Hodge.

“So when can I come by the gallery and talk more with you about Scarlet?” Mason said.

“Excellent cheesecake,” Gwen said, and kept eating.

❖ ❖ ❖

DAVY HAD been braced for Clea, so he was pleasantly surprised when he fell on somebody soft and padded. Definitely not Clea, he thought as he pinned her to the carpet in the darkness and tried to reason with her, one adult to another. It was a fine manly show of control for the ten seconds before she bit him. Then he jerked his hand away, swallowed his scream, and resisted the urge to deck her. A fistfight was not in his best interest at the moment, especially with somebody who fought dirty.

“Have you had your shots?” he whispered to her as he rubbed his hand.

She stayed under him, braced on one hand, gasping for breath as she fumbled for something in her pocket, the bill of her baseball cap shielding her face in the dark. He heard a whoosh and another gasp and leaned over her to see if she was all right, and she whispered savagely, “Touch me and I’ll scream.”

“No you won’t,” he whispered. “If you were going to scream, you’d have done it already.”

She exhaled hard and pushed herself up from the floor, a blur in the darkness as she knocked him back, and he caught her sleeve as he rolled to his feet.

“Easy,” he whispered. “I can’t let you go yet I haven’t-”

“I don’t care.” She was whispering, too, as she tried to tug her sleeve away from him. “Let go, I have to get out of here.”

“No.” He pulled her arm closer and caught a hint of her scent, something sweet “The thought of you on the loose discussing this with the cops does not-”

“Look, you idiot.” Her whisper was savage as she tried to pry his hand from her arm. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t even know what you look like. How can I possibly tell anybody about you?”

“Good point.” Davy dragged her over to the window and pulled back the drape to let the street light in, keeping to the shadow so she couldn’t see him.

“Hey.” She was wearing a sloppy Oriental jacket buttoned to her throat, and she glared up at him, her strange light eyes glowing behind huge hexagonal glasses that made her look like a bug. “Are you insane?” she hissed at him. “What if somebody’s out there?”

She jerked away from him again, and he let go of her arm before she dislocated it. “What are you dressed for?” he whispered. “Chinese baseball?”

She shoved past him, and he pulled off her baseball cap and held it above her head, feeling disappointed when her hair was too short to come tumbling down. She took another deep breath and turned back to him.