Page 9 of Dangerous Passion

Two people stood in the doorway, two other men behind them.

A pale, beautiful woman with the muzzle of a Beretta 84 dug so hard into her temple a rivulet of blood ran down the side of her face. The man holding the gun to her head was a tall, long-haired Latino, with bad skin and cold, cruel eyes, wearing a long leather coat. Behind him stood two other Latino-looking men, smaller but no less vicious. Gangbangers.

And all bets were off. Because the woman with blood streaming down her face was Grace Larsen.

“Drop the gun. Now.” The tall Latino’s voice was cold, slightly hoarse.

Drake hesitated. He was armed beyond the SIG. He had a Glock 19 in a shoulder rig and a Tomcat in his waistband, but giving the SIG up went against every instinct he had. If hewas to get Grace Larsen out of this situation alive, he needed every advantage he could get.

“Throw it,” the man growled. He tightened his arm around Grace’s beautiful neck. Her nostrils were white and pinched, her lips turning blue. He was cutting off her oxygen.

Drake could blow his arm off. It wouldn’t be the first time. But he couldn’t guarantee that the man wouldn’t move at the last second, that he wouldn’t hit Grace instead.

“Throw it!”

Drake opened his hand and let the SIG tumble to the ground.

Chapter Two

Feinstein Art Gallery

November 17

“Your secret admirer is going to love this,” Harold Feinstein said to Grace, holding up a pastel. She’d worked on it for an entire day, not eating, not drinking, stopping only to go to the bathroom, working feverishly to catch every stingy ray of winter sun that drifted down through her skylight.

She’d seen the image when she’d woken up and gone to the window to raise the blinds. A seagull, escaped from the ocean to the concrete of Manhattan, feathers a pristine white in the smoky city air, great wings outstretched, riding a thermal up the side of the 19thcentury brick building across the street.

The building across the street from her apartment was worn, old, used up. It was slated for demolition soon and looked it—boarded up windows, broken front door, the shell of a building no one lived in and no one loved any more. A dying artifact.

In contrast, the bird had epitomized newness, freedom, lightness—the ability to simply pick up and leave troubles on the ground. She’d watched, entranced, for a few minutes as the bird reveled in its flight, wheeling in the sky above the street, lightness and grace. Utterly inhuman yet symbolizing the best of the human spirit.

How hard she’d worked to capture that magic moment of utter freedom.

Harold lay the pastel reverently on the big glass table in the center of the gallery, next to the watercolors she’d brought, lining her work up like brightly-colored soldiers. It was a ritual they’d been following for well over a year now, ever since she’d walked into his gallery with a portfolio under her arm and $150 dollars left in the bank.

Harold touched the edge of the paper with his index finger, then moved on to touch a watercolor of a drake in last week’s snow in Central Park.

“He’s going to love these,” Harold murmured. “And I’m going to love selling them to him.” His eyes gleamed behind his thick glasses. “I’m raising your prices again. He’s not going to complain. Not when he sees this.”

Grace tried not to smile. “Harold, you don’t know it’s a he and neither do I. The man who buys my work on this other person’s behalf is a lawyer, for heaven’s sake. His client could be anyone. Man, woman. Could be aMartian, for all we know.”

What did she care? Whoever the lawyer’s client was, s/he was buying Grace’s entire output and didn’t so much as blink when Harold kept upping her prices. After years of struggle trying to make it as an artist, she was finally keeping herself and more—socking money away. Real money, to her astonishment. After a lifetime of living like a student,she got a huge thrill every time she checked her bank statements.

Whoever was buying up her work had turned her life around. She didn’t even really mind that whoever was scooping up her work wasn’t showing it anywhere. Harold had told her that anyone who spent that much money and who had that amount of work of a single artist was usually planning a major show and in any case would want to publicize the collection, for investment purposes. But her unknown client was keeping her work tightly under wraps. Abroad, apparently.

Grace didn’t care. She wasn’t in the business to become famous. She was an artist because she couldn’t be anything else, not and remain sane. She had a lousy record of being fired from temp jobs, waitressing, teaching, trying to entice women she didn’t care about to buy things she found absurd and useless in her very very brief stint as a shop assistant at Macy’s.

“Ah. Him again.” Harold stopped and picked up a portrait. A small, full frontal portrait in oil of a strong-featured man with dark eyes and short dark hair. Unsmiling and powerful, with a jagged white scar along the side of his face. “Different but the same.” Harold’s eyes were shrewd as he slanted a glance at her. “Nightmares back?”

Grace looked away, ashamed that once, when she’d been exhausted because she hadn’t slept, she’d confessed to Harold that she had nightmares, often.

Not nightmares, not really, not always. Just … very vivid dreams—full of color and sound. Often steeped in danger and heartache. So utterly unlike the calm progression of her days, her nights were etched in blood and turmoil.

She often dreamt of a man. The same man, every time,though each time his features were different. She never clearly saw his face anyway, just rough glimpses, as if through a thick fog.

A strong jawline, narrow nose, hooded eyes. By day, when she tried to capture the man on paper, his features would melt. Each portrait she did of him was different. The only things common to all the men were harsh features, dark eyes, short dark hair and a white scar like a lightning bolt on the left side of his face.

She saw him often from behind, walking away. And every time he walked away there was a keen sense of aching loss in the air. She could never run after him, though she wanted to. She was always somehow mired in the horrible paralysis of the dream world.

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