Page 21 of Forgery, Love, and Other Lies
The gallery was bare, its blank walls patterned with squares of varying sizes whereby the wallpaper’s brightness had been preserved by paintings hanging over it and dimmed by the sunlight and dust everywhere else.
Damn.
She stumbled away from his side, and when she reached the wall, stretched a trembling arm out toward it. “They’re gone.” Her voice as much a ghost as the missing paintings.
“Is that”—he raised an arm to point at a bit of wall with bright squares of a familiar size, found it trembling, too, and clenched his fist to tame it—“where the Rubens resided?” She nodded, one hand clapped over her mouth. “I think you need to sit down, Miss Frampton.” He reached for her, wrapped his hand around her upper arm.
Her bobbing head began to shake instead. She needed to sit. But there were no chairs, and her body slowly dropped to the bare floor. He eased her down and joined her. She dropped her face into her palms, and her skirts spilled over her legs and his.
“A nightmare,” she mumbled.
A nightmare indeed. And so soon after that brief ray of hope.
Miss Frampton’s head popped up, and she looked at him with wild green eyes. “Perhaps she’s loaded up the paintings and taken them with her wherever she’s gone to.”
He grunted. “Unlikely. If the dowager has such a neat little hiding place for her illicit art collection, why risk it during travel?” He eyed the blank spaces on the wall behind her. “Did you paint all of those missing from the wall?”
“Only some. And I cannot say whether or not the originals or the copies hung here. I thought—she told me—that she kept all my copies, but you’ve told me you have the copies at your house, and she has—had—the originals. I just cannot say anymore. Perhaps she offered the same service to others that she offered you.” She shook her head, her eyes going crystalline.
Hell. No, no, no.
He patted the top of her head, and her chin sank toward her chest with each pat. “We’ll find them. Don’t worry.” Should he really be comforting her? Her copies were safe at his brother’s estate, and his originals were… nowhere he knew of. Double hell. But his paintings were not the only ones she’d copied. She needed comforting, too.
They could soothe one another.
The thought led to action instead of more thought as it should have, and he cupped his hand around her neck, brushed his thumb up and down the warm, smooth skin there. He dipped his head low, their foreheads almost touching, and continued his rhythmic ministrations to the murmur of words he barely heard, needing to reassure her, to stop the tears.
Her body melted forward, her face coming so close to resting against his shoulder. Then she stiffened and pushed out of his embrace. With a scowl, she wiped the tears away.
“Do you think she’s sold them? Your originals and my copies?” Her voice was soft but strong.
Good. She’d recovered.
He cleared his throat and jumped to his feet a touch too quickly. “God, I hope not. Come along.” He offered her a hand.
She took it, and they left the room, closing the door silently behind them and returning to the dowager’s home through the secret wardrobe door.
When they stood in the shadowy foyer, she said, “You saidwe.”
He frowned at her. “Pardon?”
“You said ‘We’ll find them.’ And that’s a phrase that suggests you plan to include me in your search.”
Hell.He had said that. Worse, he’d meant it. He rather owed her something after showing him the hidden gallery. And she stood to lose as much as he did if the dowager’s careless handling of her art led them into trouble. Or if something sinister had happened to her and someone else had the art.Double hell.
All his reasons not to let Miss Frampton close remained, but his will to cling to them became sand between his spread fingers. It was her life, and she should be able to control it. He knew well how reliance made one vulnerable, knew the satisfaction and relief that came from taking one’s own fate into one’s own hands. He and his brothers had done so even before their father’s death, taking work to prevent the flood of funds from the coffers, a useless task in the face of their father’s deluge of spending.
“Yes,” he groaned, “you can help, but frankly, I don’t see how.”
She bounced up and down on her toes. “You can come by the shop once a week, and we can share any new information we might have with one another.”
“I can’t do that. Your father will think I’m courting you.”
She snorted. “No, he most certainly will not.”
Zander wagged a finger in her face. “A single gentleman stops by the shop once a week to speak alone with his beautiful daughter? Hell, Miss Frampton, of course he will. I’m sure it’s happened before. How the deuce aren’t you married already is what I want to know.”
He didn’t really want to know that. It was neither here nor there, not of any usefulness to their investigation or to anything really. Except that, perhaps, a husband would have kept her out of trouble, kept her too busy in the bedroom to even think of forging anything. He pinched the bridge of his nose.
