Dangerous Passion d-3 Page 3

  Feinstein pulled the strip more tightly so they could see better and Drake nearly had a heart attack. Fuck, a little more pressure, the paper would rip, and something irreplaceably precious would be lost.

  Drake barely stopped himself from attacking the gallery owner. He had to consciously freeze his muscles and hope Feinstein understood enough to pull with only enough power to pick up the slack and not rip the strip apart.

  Otherwise Drake would rip him apart.

  Whoa. Where had that thought come from? The man was portly, elderly, with the soft mottled hands of the old. An art gallery owner, for Christ’s sake. Drake didn’t attack civilians and he certainly wouldn’t attack an elderly gentleman, particularly not one who’d been instinctively kind and was this remarkable artist’s friend.

  But still. For a second there, when he thought that miracle strip of paper was going to be ruined, he could feel his hands closing around the man’s neck, dewlap and all. He wouldn’t have lasted a second. Drake had known how to snap a man’s neck since he was ten and he’d only gotten better with the years.

  The trio was shuffling along the strip, pointing out landmarks, excitement in their voices.

  “Franco,” the woman drawled, her red-painted lips pursing at the final O, “this would look just divine in your studio, wouldn’t it? All along the yellow wall.”

  “Si, cara.” Franco shook his head admiringly. “I’d frame it simply, not to distract from the clean lines. A giorno.”

  No! Mine! Drake clamped his lips together tightly or he’d have shouted the words.

  They reverberated in his chest, rolling around like huge granite stones, pinging off his rib cage.

  Mine.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d desired something this intensely.

  He’d been rich for a long, long time now. There was nothing material he couldn’t buy. Nothing. He’d even been offered his own country, a minute island. More a speck of land barely rising above the water, really, but still.

  He owned an entire skyscraper in Manhattan, plus villas scattered around the world. He had expensive planes, expensive cars, expensive clothes, expensive women, though lately he’d been off sex.

  It had been years since he’d felt that burning in his chest that meant he coveted something. In his childhood, it had flared particularly strongly in winter, when he wanted a warm room. And always when he caught the whiff of a restaurant and his empty stomach growled.

  How he’d wanted then. Ferociously. But that was a long time ago, another life ago.

  So the intensity of this wanting took him completely aback, the echo of a child’s desperate need in a man’s mind.

  Things shifted in his head, taking in this new, completely unexpected desire, making it fully his. At times, it was as if the very concept of desire had fled his life and he welcomed it back, a little gingerly. An old foe who had somehow morphed into a friend.

  He looked around at the walls and knew that he had to have everything on them. Oils, watercolors, drawings. Everything. It all had to be his, there was no other way.

  It would have to be done anonymously, through one of his many lawyers, using one of his shell companies.

  He turned his head slightly, to where Grace Larsen was watching the three patrons and Feinstein, full lips slightly upturned. He had the distinct impression she didn’t smile much. Which he understood completely, because neither did he.

  The gray winter clouds outside must have parted, because suddenly she was suffused with light, making her skin glow, picking out an incredible play of colors in her shiny hair. She stood in the center of the rectangle of light painted on the hardwood floor, as if on a stage.

  Feinstein was starting to roll the strip up. He glanced over to her and said, in a quiet voice, “Well done, my dear. Bravo.”

  Her head bowed just an instant, a knight accepting a king’s just praise.

  The word mine roared in Drake’s head again, reverberating, nearly flooring him with surprise.

  If it had been years and years since he’d wanted things, he had never wanted people. Not specific people.

  He didn’t have lovers, he had sex partners.

  He didn’t have friends. He had employees.

  He hired the best at what they did, paid them more than market price and let them do what they did best.

  Women came and went, rarely staying in his life for more than a night or two. He didn’t pay for sex. He didn’t have to. The women who came to his bed understood very well what he could offer. A thank-you gift the next morning was always sent from Tiffany or Fendi or Armani, chosen in rotation.

  Having one woman in his life—even if he’d wanted one, which he didn’t—would be insane.

  He had his layers of security for a reason. He had enemies. Smart, ruthless enemies, some stretching back twenty years. A woman he cared about would have a huge bull’s-eye painted on her forehead, a fast and easy way to break through his defenses. She would be the softest target in his world.

  There wasn’t a woman alive who would be willing to live beneath his heavy blanket of security, never being able to walk around, never being able to do her own shopping, not even allowed to go for a walk, because he sure as hell would never allow his woman to be a target.

  And what would be the point of being able to buy all the clothes and jewelry you wanted if you could never be seen in them?

  Not to mention the possibility of children.

  God, just the idea of having a child made him break out in a sweat. He’d seen too many children die violent deaths. He’d go insane if there were a child of his somewhere out in this cold and violent world, a target for someone bent on vengeance.

  So occasional safe—very safe—sex with occasional partners was as close as he ever got to another human. He had very little recollection of the women who’d trooped through his bed. If he closed his eyes, he could remember little details. A mole on the underside of a breast. A shaved pubis. Pretty knees. An artistic tattoo. That kind of thing.

  That was it, though. The women the details had been attached to—gone. He couldn’t remember their names or their voices. He could barely remember their faces even right after fucking them.

  But he remembered her face. Oh, yes. Every detail.

  Everything about her was so perfect. Just…perfect. Large eyes the color of the sea, hair that seemed to have a thousand colors in its glossy depths, pale, perfect skin.

  And an air of melancholy over all that.

  She bewitched him. She didn’t know of his existence, but hers filled his life in an instant.

  Grace Larsen was indeed her name, and she came to the Feinstein Gallery every other Tuesday afternoon, as Drake found out soon enough. When he got home he made it his business to know everything about her. So every other Tuesday afternoon, Drake was there, too. In an alleyway, in the shadows, hidden and alone, watching through a small window that only gave him a narrow view of the gallery and that afforded him only isolated snatches of Grace.

  It was folly, it was insanity, but he couldn’t have stayed away had a gun been pointed at his head.

  And now one was.

  He was going to pay the extreme price for his folly.

  At the sound of a round being chambered, he reacted instinctively. He had superb hearing and was able to triangulate the position. About a yard behind him and slightly to his right.

  Time went into slow motion, though his body moved faster than thought, instinctively, violently. He still had fractions of a second before the trigger could be pulled, enough time to remove himself from any possible trajectory.

  Drake was a ground fighter. He dropped instantly to the cold, oil-stained concrete. Whoever the man was, Drake knew he was concentrated exclusively on the shot, therefore his balance would be top-heavy. All the attention in his body would be concentrated in his eyes and hands. He probably wasn’t even feeling his feet.

  Drake had trained himself to be aware of all parts of his body in combat, but he knew that ability
was rare. He dropped, shot out his leg; his heel hooked the shooter’s foot and brought the man down with a foot lock.

  He’d learned SAMBO from one of the Russian masters. Once he got an opponent on the ground, the man was his.

  The man toppled and fell. He was as tall as Drake had instinctively calculated from the source of the sound, but the shooter was heavier than Drake had imagined. He fell badly, right on Drake’s left knee. A blast of pain shot through his knee, red-hot, almost unbearable. For a second, he wondered if it was broken, then dismissed the thought. If it was, there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

  But he didn’t think so. He knew the feeling of deep injury and this wasn’t it. It was just pain. Pain could be ignored.

  Drake had the man in a half guard, elbow against his neck, but he couldn’t block the man’s lower body with his wounded leg. Through the thick down jacket, Drake could feel that his opponent was large, bulked up with solid muscles. Unusual for a shooter, and his damned bad luck.

  But though Drake was less bulky, he was strong and fit. His hands were very strong from a lifetime of judo. Grunting, sweating, he walked his right hand down to where the shooter was holding his gun, trying to wrench it around.

  The shooter was strong. But Drake was stronger.

  He dug his thumb into the tendons of the shooter’s inside wrist, feeling muscle then bone beneath his fingers. He tightened his grip as the man got off a shot. Luckily, he was holding the gun away from himself and it pinged silently off the brick wall, shards of brick spattering against the plate-glass window, then raining down on them.

  Drake dug his thumb in deeper, felt the man grunt in pain. One more second and the man’s grip loosened, dropping the gun to the concrete with a clatter. Drake broke the man’s wrist and picked the gun up. A SIG P229.

  A side door opened, an elongated rectangle of light falling onto the filthy alleyway.

  Two people stood in the doorway, two other men behind them.

  A pale, beautiful woman with the muzzle of a Beretta 84 dug so hard into her temple a rivulet of blood ran down the side of her face. The man holding the gun to her head was a tall, long-haired Latino with bad skin and cold, cruel eyes, wearing a long leather coat. Behind him stood two other Latino-looking men, smaller but no less vicious. Gangbangers.

  And all bets were off. Because the woman with blood streaming down her face was Grace Larsen.

  “Drop the gun. Now.” The tall Latino’s voice was cold, slightly hoarse.

  Drake hesitated. He was armed beyond the SIG. He had a Glock 19 in a shoulder rig and a Tomcat in his waistband, but giving the SIG up went against every instinct he had. If he was to get Grace Larsen out of this situation alive, he needed every advantage he could get.

  “Throw it,” the man growled. He tightened his arm around Grace’s beautiful neck. Her nostrils were white and pinched, her lips turning blue. He was cutting off her oxygen.

  Drake could blow his arm off. It wouldn’t be the first time. But he couldn’t guarantee that the man wouldn’t move at the last second, that he wouldn’t hit Grace instead.

  “Throw it!”

  Drake opened his hand and let the SIG tumble to the ground.

  Two

  Feinstein Art Gallery

  November 17

  “Your secret admirer is going to love this,” Harold Feinstein said to Grace, holding up a pastel. She’d worked on it for an entire day, not eating, not drinking, stopping only to go to the bathroom, working feverishly to catch every stingy ray of winter sun that drifted down through her skylight.

  She’d seen the image when she’d woken up and gone to the window to raise the blinds. A seagull, escaped from the ocean to the concrete of Manhattan, feathers a pristine white in the smoky city air, great wings outstretched, riding a thermal up the side of the nineteenth-century brick building across the street.

  The building across the street from her apartment was worn, old, used up. It was slated for demolition soon and looked it—boarded-up windows, broken front door, the shell of a building no one lived in and no one loved anymore. A dying artifact.

  In contrast, the bird had epitomized newness, freedom, lightness—the ability to simply pick up and leave troubles on the ground. She’d watched, entranced, for a few minutes as the bird reveled in its flight, wheeling in the sky above the street, lightness and grace. Utterly inhuman yet symbolizing the best of the human spirit.

  How hard she’d worked to capture that magic moment of utter freedom.

  Harold lay the pastel reverently on the big glass table in the center of the gallery, next to the watercolors she’d brought, lining her work up like brightly colored soldiers. It was a ritual they’d been following for well over a year now, ever since she’d walked into his gallery with a portfolio under her arm and 150 dollars left in the bank.

  Harold touched the edge of the paper with his index finger, then moved on to touch a watercolor of a drake in last week’s snow in Central Park.

  “He’s going to love these,” Harold murmured. “And I’m going to love selling them to him.” His eyes gleamed behind his thick glasses. “I’m raising your prices again. He’s not going to complain. Not when he sees this.”

  Grace tried not to smile. “Harold, you don’t know it’s a he and neither do I. The man who buys my work on this other person’s behalf is a lawyer, for heaven’s sake. His client could be anyone. Man, woman. Could be a Martian, for all we know.”

  What did she care? Whoever the lawyer’s client was, s/he was buying Grace’s entire output and didn’t so much as blink when Harold kept upping her prices. After years of struggling, trying to make it as an artist, she was finally supporting herself and more—socking money away. Real money, to her astonishment. After a lifetime of living like a student, she got a huge thrill every time she checked her bank statements.

  Whoever was buying up her work had turned her life around. She didn’t even really mind that whoever was scooping up her work wasn’t showing it anywhere. Harold had told her that anyone who spent that much money and who had that amount of work of a single artist was usually planning a major show and in any case would want to publicize the collection, for investment purposes. But her unknown client was keeping her work tightly under wraps. Abroad, apparently.

  Grace didn’t care. She wasn’t in the business to become famous. She was an artist because she couldn’t be anything else, not and remain sane. She had a lousy record of being fired from temp jobs, waitressing, teaching, trying to entice women she didn’t care about to buy things she found absurd and useless in her very very brief stint as a shop assistant at Macy’s.

  “Ah. Him again.” Harold stopped and picked up a portrait. A small full frontal portrait in oil of a strong-featured man with dark eyes and short dark hair. Unsmiling and powerful, with a jagged white scar along the side of his face. “Different but the same.” Harold’s eyes were shrewd as he slanted a glance at her. “Nightmares back?”

  Grace looked away, ashamed that once, when she’d been exhausted because she hadn’t slept, she’d confessed to Harold that she had nightmares, often.

  Not nightmares, not really, not always. Just…very vivid dreams—full of color and sound. Often steeped in danger and heartache. So utterly unlike the calm progression of her days, her nights were etched in blood and turmoil.

  She often dreamed of a man. The same man, every time, though each time his features were different. She never clearly saw his face anyway, just rough glimpses, as if through a thick fog.

  A strong jawline, narrow nose, hooded eyes. By day, when she tried to capture the man on paper, his features would melt. Each portrait she did of him was different. The only things common to all the men were harsh features, dark eyes, short dark hair and a white scar like a lightning bolt on the left side of his face.

  She saw him often from behind, walking away. And every time he walked away, there was a keen sense of aching loss in the air. She could never run after him, though she wanted to. She was always some
how mired in the horrible paralysis of the dream world.

  The nightmares were due to stress, she knew that. She’d read every book there was on the subject because going to an analyst was out of the question. She didn’t have the time or even, really, the inclination.

  What was a shrink going to tell her she didn’t already know? That she came from a highly dysfunctional family? Check, no secrets there. That her father’s abandonment when she was nine years old and her mother’s decline and indifference to her had colored her early years? That she immersed herself in her art because she didn’t function well in the world? What else was new?

  No, analysis would be a huge waste of her time and money. Grace thought she had a pretty good handle on herself. On what she could do and couldn’t do.

  “…framing?”

  Oh God, she’d done it again. Zoned out while someone was talking. And that someone was Harold, no less. He cared for her, it was true. He was estranged from his only son, and treated her like a beloved child. They’d grown to be great friends. In fact, Grace probably talked more to Harold in the couple of hours a month she spent in his gallery than she did with any other human being.

  But Grace was also very very aware of the fact that every cent she earned came through him. Not listening while he spoke to her was incredibly rude and—worse—stupid.

  “Sorry, Harold. I didn’t quite—”

  He gave his characteristic bark of laughter, placing a light hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry, my dear. Wherever it is you go when you do that, it must be a much more interesting place than my blathering on about the matting and framing.”

  Grace smiled, ashamed. The matting and framing in question was of her work. Harold worked really hard to make sure each painting, watercolor and drawing was presented in the best possible way.

  Though it was also true that her mysterious buyer was snapping up everything she produced, no matter the matting, no matter the framing.

  “Come,” he said gently. “Let me make you a cup of tea.” Harold’s remedy for just about everything.