Page 71 of Possession

Were there more answers in the house?

Sure, we’d had moments of fun and intrigue with our trips to the cove to bury treasure for the mermaids, but nothing on this scale.

Nothing that would make her personal version of hide and seek any more decipherable.

I skimmed the pages filled with more codenames and her biting humor. Even here, she’d filled the pages with gossip.

Kitty and the Tomcat were on the prowl again. Could they be more obvious? Tomcat wasn’t exactly a genius when it came to keeping his gentleman in his pants. The problem for both of them was that it required far too much money to keep their respective sidepieces. So much so that Kitty came looking for play money again. Just a touch too expensive to keep her boy toy in Boston. Even with the interest rising, she still wants more, the fool.

I wasn’t sure why she hid this journal entry. She hadn’t bothered to bury her distaste for Catherine Bishop in any of her other entries. Then again, she rarely held herself in check when they’d been face-to-face, so it really wasn’t a surprise she’d only give Cat a perfunctory codename.

Husbands were about as faithful as tomcats in my grandmother’s social circle. The rich liked to play a little too much as far as I was concerned. My own circle didn’t fare much better, but then again, I didn’t really keep track of those that I’d gone to school with. I didn’t care about social standings. I’d cared even less for their one-upmanship at parties.

Art was all I cared about for so long.

My grandmother had even tried to get me involved with other children from surrounding towns in the summers. As I’d gotten older, she’d encouraged me to teach, and though I’d obliged her for a while, I didn’t have the head for it.

All I wanted to do was create, not help others find their way into art.

That made the fact that I’d met Blake all those years ago even more damning. Was I truly that in my own head?

Evidently so.

I wanted other children to understand and love art as I did, I just didn’t want to be the one doing the teaching. That required patience, and I’d been sleeping off an artistic fugue state when the gods had been handing out that particular virtue.

My own projects? I could sit for hours with shards of glass and find my way into a design.

As long as people left me the hell alone to do it.

When glass was on the table, that was where my focus stayed. Eventually, my grandmother had left me to my own devices in college. My internships had been wretched, but I’d endured them to find new techniques and test new materials.

In the end, I’d returned to the antiques, and the broken. I found that I liked to restore just as much as I loved creating new.

Philomena had understood that. She’d used that fire to get me into the gallery and showed me how to channel it into money. How to let go of the pieces I hoarded and to believe they were worth something to other people.

She’d helped me sell my first piece. Oh, I’d had my first showing in college, with a few prospective buyers, but I’d gotten caught up in a typical college romance and had slacked off on coming up with more items to sell right when I was on the cusp of breaking through. That she’d given me another chance later, and that she’d been at my side when I finally first sold, meant more than I could ever say.

I owed her a debt that I’d never be able to repay. But instead of working my ass off on another piece to sell, I was hip-deep in gossip and spreadsheets that didn’t make any sense.

I toggled to the spreadsheets and lowered to lean on my forearms as I scrolled through names of companies I didn’t recognize. It was obviously a ledger of some sort, but for what?

The companies had nothing to do with Marblehead—hell, nothing to do with Massachusetts for most of them.

A hand slipped over my hip, and I screeched.

“What are you doing, Ms. Copeland?”

I whirled around and punched Blake in the arm. “Do. Not. Do. That.” Each word was a hit.

Instead of wincing, he simply stood there and took it, one eyebrow raised. His hair was disheveled, and he was only wearing a low-slung pair of sleep pants, his feet bare.

I should be used to his body by now.

I should be used to every part of him after the last few months, but I wasn’t. The moonlight from the skylight tripped down the wide plane of his chest, down the rigid muscles of his torso. If that wasn’t bad enough, his tattoo was on complete display.

It swirled over one half of his chest and down his left arm. So intricate, just like the man himself.

“Continue to look at me like that, and you’ll end up on the counter.”

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