Rogue Passion (The Rogue Series Book 5)

by Chelsea M. Cameron

  PJ poked her head into the hallway. “We’re ready for you, your highness.”

  She flipped off PJ. “Listen, I gotta go. Do you have some time tomorrow when we can iron out details?”

  3

  Frannie managed to hang up the phone before she let out the completely undignified squeal she’d been holding in from the moment Ashley’s smoother than honey drawl climbed through the tinny speaker. Of course, as soon as she did, Holly came running into the room.

  “What happened? Are you okay?”

  “Ashley Patterson is about to rescue us, so yeah, I’m good.”

  “What? Really?”

  “We’re going to crowdfund it.”

  Holly cocked her head. “Ashley Patterson is going to rescue the show by crowdfunding it? I know we have a lot of eyes on us right now, but I don’t know if that kind of straight fundraising is going to make up the difference.”

  Frannie sighed. Holly might be right, but it was worth a shot. They couldn’t afford to lose the exhibition, in both actual ticket sales and the blow to her reputation. “It might not. But we’re going to offer some incentives for big-money donors, and Ashley is going to play at the opening party, so we’ll up the ticket price for that. Ashley is wrangling help from friends, and she’s offering up a print in exchange for a five thousand dollar donation. We’ll offer rewards with minimal costs, private tours and stuff like that.”

  “She’s really going to give up one of Sampson’s prints?”

  “So she says. I’ll believe it when I see it in writing. I wouldn’t blame her if she came back and said her enthusiasm got the better of her.”

  “Still. Makes me wish I had five grand lying around.” Holly came around to Frannie’s side of the desk, watching over her shoulder as she set up an account with a nonprofit-friendly platform. “Have you mentioned this to the board yet? I don’t think they’re going to like it.”

  “I think if they want to keep the doors open they don’t have a choice. Besides, if I do it and show money coming in, they really won’t be able to say no. What are we going to do? Return donations?”

  Once they had the site set up, Frannie chewed her lip. Of course the site immediately prompted the user to start sharing it on every social media platform known to man, but without board approval, she couldn’t exactly send it to the museum’s official accounts. Frannie had never been an “ask for forgiveness instead of permission” kind of person. She supported transgressive, progressive art and artists, but she was a rule follower herself. There was a reason she wrote grants and didn’t make art.

  She opened an email. Started typing. Deleted the words. She still couldn’t believe she had any reason to be in possession of Ashley Patterson’s email address. Maybe it was an elaborate prank. Their detractors would have to know how desperate Frannie would be. What if someone had called her impersonating Ashley offering help, and in reality she didn’t give a shit about whether or not the show happened at this one little museum that would never get its hands on something like this ever again if she failed now.

  Frannie pushed away from her desk and paced to the window. When this was all over, she could let the fear and anger and frustration that had been the undercurrent of every day since that greasy little weasel threatened her museum overwhelm her. She didn’t have time for panic now, not with the straggling herd of protesters that had taken to camping across the street from the main entrance. Not with the future of the museum and the twenty years’ worth of work she’d put in to get here in jeopardy.

  Trenton Everett Markham III and his terrifying politics would not win. Not off her back, not on her watch. That bastard was going to rue the day he fucked with what was hers.

  She sat back down, dashed out a few words and copied the link to Ashley. She might get fired for this stunt either way, but if it worked—when it worked—she would be able to leave with her head held high. She’d done everything she could to save this. For the museum. For the patrons who deserved access to this. For the kids who needed to see themselves. For herself.

  With phones sent to voicemail and the museum buttoned up for the night, Frannie kept working through the evening. If her anger made her decide to put a near life-size portrait of a naked Ashley, all jet-black hair and heavy makeup, against a sunshine-yellow backdrop, standing straight-on, staring defiantly into the camera as the heat of the flash exposed every dimple, every stretch mark in the expanse of pale skin across her big belly and her wide hips, breasts hanging low— a visual “fuck you,” if ever there was one—well, Frannie couldn’t be blamed. They wanted to say it was pornographic, then she was going to meet them at the door with it.

  Ashley sat up groggily with her alarm. Last night’s session had been a series of frustrations punctuated by DMs to anyone she could think of with something to give to keep Frannie’s museum afloat. Rian had always had a tight-knit group around them, but their straggling little family had suffered growing pains without Rian there to be the glue. They weren’t dirty, sweaty kids at a basement show anymore. But they had a network, and she wasn’t afraid to use it. Not for this.

  She’d been distracted and unfocused, using up studio time they didn’t have coming up with a plan to raise money for a museum she had no connection to other than she liked Frannie. Her passion for the project, her commitment to it, and hell, Ashley really liked the sound of her voice. And the dapper soft-butch thing she had going in interviews with her trim jackets and crisp white shirts and the slightly messy hair that Ashley wanted to run her fingers through. Not that she’d been tracking down clips of Frannie between takes. PJ had finally kicked her out at midnight to get some sleep and get her shit together.

  Which she should be doing now. But first she checked the crowdfunding page. Money was trickling in at the lower tiers that promised a show postcard to the donor. Nothing for the big-ticket tiers, but they hadn’t finalized what those would be yet. Ashley checked her messages. A new one from Frannie. This was business, she knew that, but her heart still went fluttery as she opened it. She did not have time for a crush right now.

  You wouldn’t happen to know anything about several large donations that came directly to the museum last night? I respect the rights of donors to remain anonymous, but if you had anything to do with it—and please tell me it wasn’t you—I’d like to extend my thanks. They’ve likely spared me giving private tours seven days a week for the entire run of the show.

  Ashley had her suspicions about who might have ponied up some real cash and wouldn’t want to receive any kind of recognition or reward. She’d find a way to thank them later.

  Lying on her bed, propped on her elbows, knees bent with her feet in the air like a damn teenager, she composed her reply.

  It wasn’t me, but I told you I was going to send some messages. I’ll make sure to extend your thanks to the likely parties.

  A thought, since you mentioned private tours. If the timing works for you, I could give a tour just prior to the opening. Their own personal trip down my memory lane in exchange for a sizable donation.

  Let me know what you think. I’m home until about two and then I’ll be in the studio and my bassist will actually kill me if we get any further behind schedule, so I’ll probably have to surrender my phone. Just in case you were trying to reach me and couldn’t.

  She pressed send before she could rethink that last sentence. Despite the reputation for being a flirt that her drawling accent got her, she was terrible at it. And she wasn’t supposed to be flirting with Frannie anyway.

  She might live to regret offering to take a walk through the exhibition with a donor, just like she might regret offering to give up a piece of Rian’s work. She joked about selling off her least favorite piece, but what she had in her possession was all too close, too real. She’d been holding on to them so tightly since the moment Rian’s lawyer told her they were hers. The work was the only tangible thing Ashley had left of them.

  There had been a time she’d been sure Rian was truly the great, if mos
tly platonic, love of her life. It was always going to be them, in the end. They both bounced between other lovers, other relationships, but Rian was it for her. And then Rian had stubbornly refused to do anything about their persistent cough—scared of the expense, yes, but more scared of going to a doctor as a person who didn’t neatly tick a box of male or female—and then that cough had been the pneumonia that killed her best friend, the love of her life, her person.

  Ashley had been lost. She’d spent the last eight years working herself into the ground to keep from feeling how much that loss hurt. She’d flirted and hooked up and scratched the occasional itch, but she couldn’t fathom getting involved. It had taken her this long to attempt a career retrospective of Rian’s work because she hadn’t been able to bear looking at it until a year ago.

  And then Frannie had walked into the proverbial room and Ashley was offering to give pieces of it away. To let strangers invade her memories. She set her phone on the nightstand. She would do what she’d said, she would help Frannie raise the money to keep the show, but that was it. If they weren’t able to keep it, the work was going to sit in crates for eight weeks until the next stop because no one was going to be able to take it last-minute. Making this happen was in the best interest of the work. That was it.

  “Frances, what did you do?” Jonathan burst into her office without knocking and Frannie braced herself. If she was about to get fired, she wasn’t going down without a fight. But first she had to get the trucking company delivering the work off the phone. The company she was now going to be able to actually pay, thanks to Ashley’s anonymous friends.

  When she had finished making the delivery arrangements, Frannie turned to her boss, still waiting in the doorway with his arms crossed. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “Frances.”

  “You told me to handle it.”

  “And the museum appreciates receiving sizable donations through its regular channels, especially ones specifically earmarked for this exhibition. But crowdfunding? What were you thinking? Do you even know what the tax implications are? The board is already shifty, they’re going to be baying for your blood if we suddenly have the IRS breathing down our necks too.”

  “Which is why I specifically selected a platform that works with nonprofit fundraising. Think of it like an online silent auction. Everyone will get a tax statement, and anyone who wants to donate straight cash is being directed to the museum’s website. It’s no different than public radio offering tote bags in exchange for donating at a certain level. And yes, I talked to accounting and legal this morning.”

  “After you set it up.”

  “And we could have quietly taken it down if they’d given me a different answer. But we’re losing time. The show delivers next week. We can’t afford to do things through the usual channels. We should have had something like this up the minute the word boycott left that grease stain’s mouth.”

  Jonathan shook his head. “On your head be it.”

  It was going to work. It had to. “I take full responsibility.”

  He left, and Frannie returned to her installation plans. The work was to be arranged in groupings, set by Sampson’s team, each group mixing work from all stages of their career, emphasizing the narrative threads that carried through from their early experiments with the camera up until their death.

  Ghostly black and white self-portraits from Sampson’s freshman year of college showed their gradual shift toward androgyny from their assigned girlhood. The awkward angle of a cheap point-and-shoot selfie captured the relief and the tears on their face as their long hair was sheared away by a friend whose face was obscured by the heat of the automatic flash. Frannie remembered the feeling well, how cutting her hair boyishly short for the first time was liberating and terrifying, sitting in her desk chair in a dorm bathroom, watching a new outward identity take shape in the mirror.

  All of those ugly beautiful feelings—the shaping of identity, the founding of a chosen family, the tangle of words for how it felt to not fit into the identity you were given at birth, the joy and defiance in creating a new narrative for people who looked like you, loved like you did, that wasn’t a tragic cautionary tale, but a celebration and a middle finger—would carry the show from beginning to end. From Ashley’s fuck you gaze in the first portrait, to the final grouping, which included a large family shot from Sampson’s last Thanksgiving. A photograph dashed off without a thought, lovely regardless, but something more in retrospect, full of humor and tenderness, but with Sampson apart, behind the camera, watching the family they’d built from behind the lens.

  Frannie was lost in the catalog, thinking about Sampson’s own insistence that there was nothing precious or special about their work, to the point of stipulating that it be displayed unframed, using thumb tacks to affix it to the walls, when a list of promised donor rewards arrived from Ashley. She’d managed to go most of the day without squealing to herself about having Ashley in the museum, at the opening, giving a personal tour through the exhibition. Frannie hoped to hell she would be allowed to tag along for that. How differently must she see it, filtered through her memories of the events and of who Sampson had been, what they had been to each other. She was the Patti to their Robert, and even had the funding controversy to go with it.

  The full list of offered incentives was impressive, and would even put them over-budget, which would mean offering free admission to more underserved kids. She couldn’t assume they were going to get donors for every level. That would be foolish. But part of her still hoped.

  Ashley,

  This is more than I could have dreamed. This will break us even and then some if we can get donors at every level. There is some tax and legal stuff I’ll have to send and have you forward to anyone else donating goods or time, and we’ll need actual dollar amounts for everything to issue receipts.

  Frannie paused, stuck for words to express her gratitude. She didn’t understand why Ashley was so determined to make this happen for her little museum, why it felt like it was personal, and not just about making her friend’s work accessible. It was in her head. It was personal to Frannie, so of course she would think it was personal to anyone else. Ashley probably didn’t want to see the show sitting in storage for eight weeks if they couldn’t make it happen here. That was all it was. Still, Frannie felt like she needed to say something more than thank you and talk about tax receipts.

  I am stunned to the point of not having words for how grateful I am to have your support in this. It means so much to me to bring this exhibition into this community. I never want it to be as hard as it was for us to figure out who we were, but I never want to forget the work we did to make it easier for the next generation to be seen. Thank you for helping me fight for them.

  She hit send before she could regret being overly personal.

  4

  Us. She’d used the word us. Ashley had never been under the impression that Frannie Thorpe was precisely straight, but it wouldn’t have been the first time she’d been fooled by a woman who erred on the side of short hair and trim suits for professional purposes. But she hadn’t. And so her crush wasn’t a ridiculous, certain to be unrequited one on a wholly unattainable straight woman. No, it was destined to be unrequited because this wasn’t a personal relationship. And even if it wasn’t professional, Ashley had only been keeping company with the hard ball of grief that sat in the pit of her stomach for the last eight years. There was too much distance, too much baggage, and too little time. She’d be back on the road the day after the show opened.

  Her therapist would have things to say about it. More about running away from her grief, being afraid of connection. How new and different it was for Ashley to care enough about someone that she didn’t want to scratch the itch that was Frannie with a one-night stand.

  She was ethical. She never made promises she couldn’t keep. But she’d floated from brief connection to brief connection for purely physical release for years now. And it did its job. She mother-henne
d the people she loved—keeping them close to the point of smothering, if PJ had anything to say about it—and kept her distance from the people she fucked. She didn’t mix the two. And someone like Frannie deserved more than that.

  None of that stopped her from thinking about the other woman all damn day while she was in the studio. If Frannie’s face was in her mind while she opened her mouth to sing, no one had to know. Just like she’d never admit how many times she’d been singing to Rian. The fact that anything could feel remotely similar, and over a woman she barely knew, should have shocked Ashley.

  Maybe she was finally ready to move on. Maybe she was trying to justify getting Frannie into bed. But she’d never lied about who she was or what she wanted before and she wasn’t going to start now.

  She ran her fingers through her hair and pulled her ponytail after her voice cracked, flubbing another take. Screaming until her voice broke was one thing when she’d been yelling at the top of her lungs in front of a loud as fuck two-piece punk band. She was trying to do something different now that she’d had the fear of vocal chord polyps keeping her from being able to sing at all put into her. She hadn’t taken voice lessons for two years to have her voice crack on a take.

  “What’s with you, dude?” PJ asked from the other side of the glass as she scrubbed a hand over her face, dislodging the backwards hat that was keeping her long hair out of her face. “Is your throat sore or are you just not paying attention?”

  The backing vocal tracks were literally the last thing on their schedule and she needed to nail them down and get it done and get the hell out of there. They couldn’t afford additional time. It meant cramming a whole lot of vocal work into a short period of time, but she’d put it off to cobble together funding for Frannie and now she was stuck. She could not be distracted by a girl. She was not fourteen anymore. She was thirty-seven goddamn years old and she needed to get her shit together.