How to get even, p.7
How to Get Even, page 7
Air punched out of Chase’s lungs. Jesus Christ, she was hitting him with both barrels today.
‘How did you know about that?’ he demanded, rising out of his chair.
She glared at him and he couldn’t quite work out whether her famous poise was holding her tongue, or just because she was that angry.
‘Our PR firm heard rumours. Do the team know?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he confessed, taking a breath. ‘I’d wanted to be able to present the team with a solution.’
He’d wanted so much not to fuck this up. Dammit. He ran a hand over his face.
‘You have to tell them,’ she as much as accused.
‘No,’ he denied. Not until he’d figured out who to replace the featured artist with.
She stared at him blankly, the look having the same impact as a sharp inhale of frustration, which was impressive, really, when you thought about it.
‘I would like you to advise me how best to do my job when you are withholding significant information from me,’ she articulated with such patience that it only served to show how impatient she was with him.
Chase barked out a laugh.
‘You know, most people would phrase that question differently,’ he said.
‘How so?’
‘Something along the lines of… How the fuck am I supposed to do my job like this?’
He watched her closely. She all but flinched at his curse.
Jesus, they were like chalk and cheese. But that didn’t mean she was wrong.
He bit his lip, failing to see her eyes flick between his mouth and his gaze and by the time he glanced back to her there was a pretty blush on her cheeks, presumably from his curse, or her question.
‘Is this how you want to run a gallery?’ she asked hotly. He seemed to have driven her beyond the boundaries of her usual poise, and that he felt a second’s worth of pleasure from it was warning enough. But he couldn’t deny that he quite liked seeing her off balance, when it was all he was most of the time. ‘We’re all doing separate things and no one person is talking to another. It will be a miracle if we make it to opening at this rate,’ Bella said as if more to herself than to him. But it was her last jab that landed particularly hard. ‘How can we help you if you won’t let us?’
The question reverberated in Chase’s mind, echoing back through the years. One that he’d said himself, to the father who had been stretched to the point of breaking. Standing in his father’s garage, sucking the smell of oil and exhaust into his lungs the way most kids did with the sugar in a candy store. His father, his hero, callused hands the size of dinner plates and overalls that were never clean, utterly devastated by the loss of the wife he’d loved more than anything in this world.
All those people who’d come by after the funeral, wanting to help with food, or things around the house and his father had not let anyone help him. He’d done it all himself – the Miller way – but it had come at a cost. Unable to talk about his feelings, a distance had grown between them, and Chase had been left alone to navigate his grief. A distance that became physical when he’d left for art college in London.
Was that what he was doing now? Making the same mistake as his father?
‘Can I ask, what is it you want for Nayak?’ Those grey eyes, startling and surprising in such a classically beautiful face, delving where he didn’t want her to go.
‘Because I can’t see it,’ Bella said. ‘Not in any of the material provided to Magenta, not in the website design, not in the artists that you have managed to secure. I can’t see it in the layout, I can’t… see it,’ she concluded with frustration.
That she even wanted to see it was frankly a minor miracle. So far, since arriving, he’d insulted her, tested her without her knowledge, withheld information that she needed to do her job and – from the looks of the way she’d held herself walking around the office – accidentally committed bodily harm by omission.
Is this how you want to run a gallery?
Christ, no. He railed at the accusation. He’d just… he’d just wanted to prove that he could do it. He’d wanted to come up with the solutions. Wanted to get them out of the mess that he’d caused. Dammit.
And it was his fault that she couldn’t see what he wanted Nayak New York to be. Tej trusted him completely. He wanted, needed, Bella to see what he did, what he knew Nayak could be. He might not be able to explain it, but he could show her.
He looked at his watch.
‘What are you doing right now?’
She squinted at him. ‘I’m talking to my boss,’ she said slowly as if he were a child, or had had a stroke. Either one was a possibility in her eyes, he realised with a smirk.
‘Funny. Okay, do you have plans after work or can you come somewhere with me?’
‘Now?’
‘No. Tomorrow.’
‘Funny,’ she shot back and him and his thought was, There is still hope.
He pulled out his phone and fired off a message to an old friend.
She was right. What he wanted for Nayak wasn’t here. But hopefully when she saw what he wanted to show her, she’d get it.
‘Grab your stuff. I want to show you something,’ he said.
She hesitated.
‘If you want to see what I want from Nayak, then this is it,’ he said. Now or never. It seemed a tad on the dramatic side, but for some reason it felt that way.
‘Okay,’ she said, rising and leaving his office to get her things. His phone pinged with a message from Mannon explaining that keys had been left with security. The simple act of trust in Mannon’s reply meant a million times more now that he was starting his own gallery.
And frankly, after Annalise, he wasn’t sure that he’d ever be able to trust someone like that ever again.
6
[She] will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.
THE ART OF WAR, SUN TZU
Bella followed Chase out of Nayak, wrapping a scarf around her neck to stop the bite of the wind and rubbing her hands together as Chase nodded towards downtown and set off at an unhurried pace. Their breath streamed out like jets of smoke only to be eaten away by the night.
How can I help you if you won’t let me?
She’d nearly said sabotage. How can I sabotage you, if you won’t let me?
Bella bit her lip.
‘It’s not far. We’ll be out of the cold soon,’ he said as he forged his way through harried commuters and tourists heading to their important destinations.
‘That’s okay, Paris was even colder just before I left,’ she said, choosing to weave through them instead.
‘Did you like it?’ Chase asked.
She blinked. No one had asked her that. Not really. In part because they’d all known that she’d been pretty much exiled by the fallout from the aborted wedding.
‘No,’ she admitted with a rueful laugh. ‘Not really. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s beautiful and the food is delicious,’ she said. And there hadn’t been a bunch of reporters hiding behind corners, waiting to judge her for eating all the sweat treats she could before exercising the calories away.
‘But?’
Bella scrunched her nose.
‘Why were you there then?’
‘It was deemed prudent,’ she admitted.
‘For who?’
‘Whom,’ she absently corrected. ‘For my family’s foundation. They didn’t want the negative press attention.’
She felt the heat of his gaze on her.
‘They sent you away? After the…?’
His shock made her uncomfortable. It skated too close to how she’d felt. It nudged at the closed door she’d locked her hurt behind.
‘But who wouldn’t want six months in Paris?’ she said, forcing a smile to her lips.
‘Whom,’ he incorrectly corrected.
‘That’s not the—’
She looked up to find him smiling at her, a tease glinting in his eye. He’d given her a chance to change the conversation. And she took it. But she didn’t like being so easily readable to him. And she didn’t like how it made something in her gut flip when he did that.
She’d had a little of that with Olly, but not like this. With Olly, he’d been obvious to the point of charming. There was a wryness to it that she had become used to. But Chase? Chase was sneaky, hoarding his charm until you least expected it, so when you were hit with it, it was sudden, unexpected, and much harder to defend against.
She looked back across the sidewalk only to find that she’d lost him. She pulled up short, catching the person coming towards her by surprise and Bella had to step nearly into the road to stop them from colliding.
She glanced back over her shoulder to find him standing by a side alley waiting for her with a smirk that made her want to growl. She didn’t have this reaction to people. But there was something about Chase Miller that got her hackles up.
Standing there in his long line coat, the street light picking out the tussles of his hair and the sharpness of his cheekbones, he looked like restrained wildness.
Bella shook her head. She must have caught hypothermia. It was the only possible explanation.
Shaking herself off, she cut her way through the throng of people and met him at the mouth of an alleyway, peering down into the darkness warily.
‘Don’t chicken out on me now, Carmichael.’
She clenched her jaw and shot him a look. No one had ever called her Carmichael. Apart from maybe the boys’ Phys Ed teacher in high school. There was something taunting about it, a challenge that she was helpless to resist.
Half way down the alley, Chase tugged her elbow and led her to a back door with the word EXIT clearly printed on the sign, and knocked.
She quietly shifted out of his grasp without his notice and stamped some feeling back into her feet, until a large man in a security uniform pulled open the door.
Every good-girl instinct screamed in alarm. Were they doing something illegal? Surely if not, they would have just used the front entrance to wherever they were.
‘Chase,’ she whisper-hissed, now pulling at his elbow.
‘Miller,’ exclaimed the big burly man in the uniform. ‘Been a while.’
Chase huffed out a laugh. ‘Just a bit,’ he replied as the security guard pushed the door open wide enough to let them through into a brightly lit startlingly white corridor.
‘Ma’am,’ the security guard said, dipping his head to her before returning his attention to Chase. ‘Mannon said you’d need these.’
‘Thanks, man,’ Chase replied, taking the keys from the guard’s palm and slapping him on the beefy side of his arm.
‘Lock up when you’re done and drop them off on the way back out.’
‘Sure thing,’ Chase said easily as Bella watched the guard lope off down the corridor all the way to the end.
She looked back to Chase who had that infuriating smirk across his face again. One she wanted to wipe off with a startling amount of violence. Still, she followed him down the corridor until Chase paused in front of one of the many doors. Chase slid a key into the lock and pushed open the heavy door into the darkness beyond.
She was curious despite herself, which was warning enough.
She cleared her throat. ‘I would like to know if I’m about to be involved in a bank heist.’
He peered at her, something bright flickering in his gaze.
‘Would you do that?’
‘No,’ she replied definitively.
‘Just checking,’ he teased, and pushed the door completely open, reaching around to the left to find the light switch that illuminated an absolutely huge space.
Oh.
Bella couldn’t help herself. Her footsteps echoed as she walked past him into a space that was inconceivably near football-stadium large. The space seemed to be partitioned into zones that made her organisational heart near sing with joy. The flooring changed from concrete to white slats, not joined like wooden flooring, but with a line running across them. She followed the line to the deceptively simple wire racks on which hung frames of different sizes and shapes.
This was a gallery storage. And from the glimpse of the paintings she saw, a very well-known gallery.
‘Chase!’ she exclaimed. ‘We shouldn’t be in here,’ she realised, the flush of wrong-doing painting her cheeks in a pink blush.
‘I know a guy,’ he dismissed with a shrug.
‘You know a guy?’ she demanded.
‘Take a look,’ Chase said, gesturing to the sliding racks. ‘We have time. If memory serves, there’s a Rembrandt in that one.’ He pointed just over her shoulder.
Oh, the arrogance of this man! To just be able to wander through the most highly secret, inconceivably valuable, part of one of the world’s most renowned art galleries. As if it were his own apartment and she could just ‘take a look’.
But she wanted to!
In that moment she didn’t think she’d wanted anything more in her life. She’d seen some incredible artwork at galleries around the world. But this was different. It was intimate. It wasn’t curated.
She walked deeper into the belly of the warehouse, casting longing gazes at the racks either side of her, feeling a thrill of doing something illicit as the lighting flicked on above her.
If you want to see what I want from Nayak, then this is it.
And what was ‘this’ for Chase?
Because it wasn’t about famous artists. He’d been near dismissive telling her that there was a Rembrandt on the rack. And she knew that there were hundreds more just as famous, she thought, catching a glimpse of a Hannah Höch.
She paused to take it all in.
‘What is your favourite painting?’ Chase asked, following her from a few feet behind, watching – inspecting – her reaction. She felt as if he were giving her a test and couldn’t help but wonder whether he’d brought Maurice and Ali here.
But she didn’t think so.
‘That’s a bit like asking what someone’s favourite movie is,’ she replied.
It’s a bit like a date question, she thought and bit her lip.
He waited patiently for her answer.
It wasn’t a date question, but it wasn’t a harmless getting-to-know-you question either. From an artist, from Chase, it was more.
‘Judith Slaying Holofernes,’ she replied over her shoulder as she veered off to take a closer look at the racks. The sounds of her shoes punctuated the thick silence of the warehouse.
‘One of my favourite critiques was written about that painting,’ Chase said, his voice unusually thick.
‘Really?’ she asked, not wanting to know. Not wanting this intimacy at all. Suddenly she wanted to be back out on the street, with anonymity amongst the pedestrians and—
‘“Relentlessly physical”,’ he quoted, pulling her reluctant attention back to him, only to find his eyes thankfully on a painting on the other side of the warehouse.
He seemed to be searching for something. ‘There is another Gentileschi down’ – he paused and pulled on the handle at the end of a rack – ‘here.’
He gestured for her to take the handle as if he were offering her an apple in the garden of Eden.
Chase bit back a smile as Bella looked longingly towards the rack.
‘I can’t just…’ She hissed out the words in a whisper, but it was clear how much she wanted to.
Christ.
That was something, right there.
Bella tempted.
It was like the name of a painting itself.
Her eyes lit with a desire to do something she thought naughty. Wrong. And it was probably the most beautiful thing in this entire room.
‘You do that, while I just go and find…’
Something else to look at.
He turned away from her, leashing his body back under his control with a restraint that was alarmingly difficult. He tried to walk it off, thinking of anything that would dampen his suddenly raging libido. Mrs Lebroux, their elderly neighbour back in Secaucus. Secaucus itself. Scribbling on the concrete outside their little house with the chalks his mother had given him, falling in love with colour and marks and art for the very first time.
His mother.
His heart caved in on itself like it always did. The old familiar sting of grief, the pain of not seeing her, hearing her, feeling her touch, melded with the guilt of not achieving what she’d wanted for him, and the fear that she’d be so very disappointed in him now. He clenched his jaw, reflexively bracing against the direction of his thoughts that were one sure-fire way of getting his libido well and truly doused.
He looked back at Bella, peering at one of the seventeenth century’s most impressive artists, getting as close as she possibly dared. Closer than she’d ever be able to in a gallery, that was for sure.
Was he surprised by her answer about her favourite painting? No, and that surprised him. It was a question that he never usually asked people. But with Bella he was just curious. Curious in a way that he knew was absolutely no good whatsoever.
She was sharp, in both intelligence and character. But he’d never seen her sharp with Maurice or Ali. Of the few connections he’d reached out to about her, she’d been described as invaluable, sweet, a problem solver and a fixer. ‘The soother of ruffles,’ one person had called her.
Except his, it seemed.
There was enough antagonism between them to light a city block. He was old enough to know what it was, and old enough to know better than to act on it. And having firmly told himself that, he turned back to watch Bella gazing at the Gentileschi, every thought and feeling showing across her face like words on a page.
Appreciation, wonder, sadness, regret, understanding.
What would she see in his work? And what would he see when she did?
There were one or two here, stored amongst the greats and the not-so-greats. He classed himself with the latter, it went without saying. But he imagined the flush on her cheek, the brightness in her eye. The understanding. Without words, without explanation, just to be known, understood. To be enough.
Christ. Chase passed a hand over his face, hoping to wipe away his thoughts, and headed towards the part of the storage that was the reason he’d brought them both here.
