Page 1 of Meet Mason, the Billionaire

Chapter One

Megan

The polished marble floors of the Briar Galleria cast my inverted reflection up at me. I strode with purpose across the main showroom, my strappy patent heels clacking on the onyx surface. My knee-length sleek dress matched the shoes, black as the night was long. Normally I don’t like to dress so plain, but the Galleria had a dress code.

I mean, the nerve. The pretentiousness. It’s not like we artists could afford fancy clothes like the dress I wore. I’d borrowed it from a friend of mine, Junebug, and I hoped to return it in one piece.

My circle of Soho friends tended to share and share alike, pooling our community resources to succeed in the man’s world. I was in possession of a laser printer, for example, a carryover from one of my more affluent but still terrible mistakes. When people needed to print up a resume or a recipe, or create hard copies of their art prints, I helped them out—provided they helped pay for paper and ink.

The heels were mine, fancy Italian leather and all. I’d found them at a street market and had almost pissed myself when I saw them for ten dollars. The vendor didn’t know what he had.

As sweet as the heels made my calves and ass look, they had a dark side, however. Namely, they slowed me down, allowing the creep with an ill-fitting suit and way too much cologne to catch up to me.

I tried to stare at an impressionist rendering of a manor house on a hill, pretending to be enthralled with the utterly pedestrian piece. The creep sauntered up to me, scratching his five o’clock shadow and inundating my personal space with the alcohol on his breath.

“Hey, sugar.” His voice grated on my eardrums like sandpaper. It was like he’d taken all the worst qualities of pick-up lines from pornos and somehow melded them into his entire persona. “You forgot your drink.”

I forced a smile on my face and took the drink from him. “Oh, right, thank you so much.”

No way in hell was I going to drink that drink. A girl from New York knows better than that.

I held the glass and searched for the nearest potted plant to pour it out in as Mr. Schmooze edged up a little closer. He damn near knocked me on the ground with his breath. He’d been hitting up the wet bar early and often.

“So, this is an amazing piece, right?” He said, gesturing at the four-foot-tall, three-foot-wide oil painting. “It really speaks to me.”

“Me too.”

He looked up with surprised delight. “Really? In what way?”

“Hmm. Well, to me it says that the artist has ill-advisedly attempted to bring post-modern expressionism with cubist overtones to an impressionistic work. The result is a pastiche of a zombified Monet with entirely too much emphasis on form rather than expression.”

His jaw went slack. “So, anyway, it was nice meeting you. Enjoy the gallery.”

And he was off. I sighed and poured the drink out in a nearby water fountain. Then I wove off into the crowd, taking in the different exhibits.

I truly wasn’t impressed. The Galleria is a pay-to-play establishment. If you want your work on exhibition, you had to pay thousands of dollars. This meant that most of the work on display was by people who had more money than talent.

Some of the works were nice. I did like a bust of Poseidon done by a Greenwich sculptor. Other than that, there was really only one reason I hadn’t left yet.

One of the paintings in the Galleria was mine.

I hadn’t painted it myself, not entirely. I’d found the half-finished portrait in my grandfather’s attic when I cleaned it out after his passing. I’d been instantly intrigued.

Grandpa Willie was a painter, like myself, but he was so much more. He could sculpt, weld steel, sing, play any instrument he picked up, and even dance. He’d taught me everything I’d ever known about painting, and if I lived to be a hundred I probably still wouldn’t know half as much as him.

The portrait itself was done in a photo-realistic style, a rarity for my grandfather who was more of an expressionist painter. The man in the portrait was a stranger to me. I’d went and looked at old family albums and hadn’t found anyone close. He stood in front of a cherry red convertible sports car, leaning against the hood with a contented smile on his face.

The man in the picture was in his forties, or so I thought. I hadn’t been able to identify him, and I wondered if he was even a real person at all or just an imagined subject. I’d been able to identify the car in the picture, though. A Shelby Cobra, one of the rarest and most treasured classic cars in the world.

Eventually I wandered out to the terrace. I looked out on the towers of glass and steel on Manhattan Island. The Hudson flowed past like an inky black ribbon in the night, reflecting the lights of the skyscrapers back up at me.

The night breeze stirred my hair, and I leaned my elbows on the cool metal rail. The sounds of the party became muted as the glass door swung shut behind me.

“I miss you, Grandpa,” I said to the wind and the night. “I’m trying to make it, just like you told me to. Keep one foot in the gutter, and one fist in the gold.”

I laughed softly, disturbing a pigeon who had been roosting on a ledge nearby.

“I never understood what that was supposed to mean.”

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