Page 100 of Scarlett and the Big Bad Billionaire
“It is her,” the guy next to her said.
What was everyone yelling about? Were they looking at a picture of me online? Why? It wasn’t like I was famous or anything. I’d been mixing with party guests all evening, and no one had seemed that excited.
“That means she knows him,” the woman said. “Sheknowswho Inksy is.”
“Hell, based on that drawing, she’s fucking the guy,” one of the men said.
Pounding down the stairs toward us, the group started shouting questions. “Do you know Inksy? Who is he?”
“What’s his real name?” a man shouted.
“Are you lovers?” someone else demanded to know. “Are you his muse?”
Instinctively I backed away. Gray stepped in front of me and held out an intimidatingly large hand.
“What’s this about? What’s going on?”
The woman turned her phone around and held it so the screen was facing us. “This is her, right?”
Craning to see around his large frame, she spotted me. “It looks just like you. It has to be you.”
I gasped at the same time I felt Gray’s body stiffen in front of me.
He stepped forward and snatched the phone from the woman’s hand so he could look at it more closely.
I didn’t need to.
I’d recognized the image immediately.
It was a photo of the drawing he’d done of me. Naked.
Somehow the drawing had been posted online, and the woman had come across it.
“Give that back,” she demanded.
“Where did you get this?” Gray asked, sounding furious.
“At Verizon. And it cost a fortune—give it back.”
He handed her the phone. “I don’t mean the phone. I mean the picture. Where did you find it? How did itgeton your phone?”
“Somebody texted it to me,” she explained, seeming annoyed with him. “It’s gone viral—everyone’s speculating it’s an authentic Inksy. When I saw it, I compared it to online photos of his other work. I think itisan Inksy.”
Leaning to the side to see around Gray again, she said, “Which meansthatwoman knows who he is.”
Gray turned around to face me. I knew the second I saw his eyes—it was true.
Ididknow who Inksy was.
Gray.
Hewas the reclusive artist who’d created street art under the cover of night around the world, whose works now sold for millions if not tens of millions of dollars apiece. He was the one who’d painted that piece worth twenty-five million in Vivi’s gallery.
He must have been the one who’d gifted it to her, too.
All along, as I’d been falling in love with Inksy’s art—and with Gray—they’d been one and the same person.
And he hadn’t told me.
