Timeless (A Time Travel Romance)

by Jasmine Cresswell

  “That makes me feel a little better. So how did you find out it wasn’t genuine?”

  “Almost by chance. The insurance company requested a routine X ray of a repair done by our workroom, and the pictures happened to include a section of one joint that looked suspicious. So I ordered a complete survey of all the joints and the report that came back was unequivocal. The cabinet was manufactured within the last few years, probably within the last year.”

  “A couple of the other tests don’t hold up either,” Gerry said. “I’ve spent the past two days reworking them and going over the provenance documentation. As soon as I was certain of my conclusion, I came straight over to tell you. What I want to know is how the hell the cabinet passed the first set of tests we ordered. How did three different testing companies screw up and certify the piece as genuine?”

  “Those are good questions,” Zach said. “Any answers?”

  Gerry shook his head. “The more I think about it, the less I understand what happened. The tests are all run by experts with impeccable reputations.”

  “The Gallery’s reputation is impeccable, too,” Robyn pointed out. “And yet we’ve come within a hairbreadth of selling a fake.”

  Gerry scowled. “Are you saying the experts made mistakes, or that they were bought off?”

  Robyn lifted her hands. “It could be either, couldn’t it? Or a combination of both.”

  Zach and Gerry fell silent for a moment contemplating the unpleasant implications of her comment.

  “Right now, we shouldn’t get sidetracked,” Zach said. “The most important task for the Gallery over the next couple of weeks is to make sure this can’t happen again. We need to go over our systems and see where the weak points are in our verification process. What made you suspicious of the cabinet, Gerry? You said you couldn’t spot anything wrong with the feel of the piece, so what tipped you off?”

  “Coincidence, I’m afraid, even more so than in your case. The fact is, I had dinner with Will on Saturday night.” Gerry stopped and glanced toward Robyn, shuffling his feet uneasily.

  “Go on.” Zach walked to the small bar in the corner of the room and searched for a bottle of Scotch. “You had dinner with my brother, although what he has to do with the Farleigh cabinet I can’t begin to imagine. He hates antiques, genuine or fake.”

  “But he knows a lot about them,” Gerry said. He cleared his throat. “If you’re planning to open that bottle of Scotch sometime soon, I would appreciate a drink, Zach.”

  “Coming right up.” Zach poured a shot into a crystal tumbler and added ice. “Robyn, would you like something?”

  “No, thanks.” She joined him at the bar and spoke quietly. “Zach, Gerry seems uncomfortable talking about this. Are you sure your conversation wouldn’t be easier if I weren’t here?”

  “Not for me.” He turned his back on Gerry and looked down at her, vivid blue eyes dark with emotion. “I want you to stay,” he said, and she knew he was asking her to remain not just for Gerry’s visit, but for the entire night. His voice husky, he murmured, “Robyn, I need you.”

  She had spent twenty-nine years wondering why people made fools of themselves when they fell in love. Now she knew. She gazed up at him, helpless to hide her feelings. “Of course I’ll stay.”

  He smiled, and she felt the warmth of his relief and pleasure right down into her toes. “Thanks, honey.” He took the Scotch and carried it over to Gerry. “After what happened on Friday night, Robyn deserves to know everything about this situation that you and I do.”

  Gerry’s ears almost visibly pricked. “What happened on Friday? You two had dinner together, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Zach said. “And when we left the restaurant, someone took a shot at us.”

  “My God!” Gerry choked on his Scotch. “Where? When? You weren’t hurt, were you?”

  “On Fifth Avenue, right by La Grenouille. And fortunately, as you can see, the bullets missed us.”

  “Thank God for that.” Gerry’s face was pale. “Good Lord, did you tell the police?”

  “No, what would be the point?”

  “None, I suppose,” Gerry admitted, taking a calming sip of his drink. “With their workload, unless you’re injured or dead, they won’t do much more than file a report. But I certainly hope you’ve arranged for security guards from a private firm?”

  “Yes, I did,” Zach said. “They’re already on duty.”

  Gerry frowned. “This is terrible news, Zach. I’m sorry you and Robyn had such a nasty experience. Let’s just hope it was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Zach smiled grimly. “Yeah. I can think of better ways to impress my date than having her sprayed with bullets.”

  Gerry swirled his ice around his glass. “But Robyn wasn’t exactly a date, was she? I mean, that was a business meeting for the two of you, wasn’t it?”

  “It started out that way,” Zach said. He didn’t elaborate, nor did he mention that the shooting on Friday night wasn’t the first time he’d been shot at. Robyn wondered why.

  Gerry set down his glass. “Of course, there’s no reason whatever to connect the shooting on Friday with the fact that the Farleigh cabinet is a fake. On the contrary. The sort of artist who could produce a reproduction as perfect as that cabinet isn’t likely to cruise the streets spraying bullets. Why on earth would he? What would he achieve?”

  “I assume he was warning me off,” Zach said.

  “Warning you off what precisely?”

  “My investigation into the provenance of the cabinet.”

  “Hmm, I suppose that’s a possibility. But why attack you with Robyn there?”

  Zach leaned forward in his chair. “Maybe he knew that Robyn is very important to me.”

  Gerry glanced from Robyn to Zach, then took a long sip of Scotch. “Yes, well, this speculation is all very interesting, but we’re leaping to rather a lot of unfounded conclusions. If you think about it, old chap, this is New York City. It’s much more likely that you were the victim of a random shooting than anything else.”

  “Why do you say that?” Zach asked.

  “Well, God knows, New York has plenty of random shootings—”

  “Not many of them occur on the corner of Fifth and Fifty-Fifth.”

  “True.” Gerry shrugged. “But drug deals don’t only go wrong in the South Bronx, you know. And besides, if the gunman was aiming at you, he must have known you would be eating at La Grenouille that night—”

  “I agree, but so what?”

  “Very few people knew where you planned to eat on Friday,” Gerry protested. “In fact, probably nobody except Robyn and your assistant.”

  “But almost everyone who works at the Gallery could find out where I planned to eat,” Zach said. “The reservation was entered on Shirley’s desk calendar, so anyone who walked into her office could have seen the notation.”

  “But that means the person who shot at you was put up to it by a Gallery employee!”

  Zach’s eyes turned a hard, bright blue. “Who else? Come on, Gerry, let’s inject a note of reality into this discussion. Our verification systems are superb. They can only be defeated by an insider. That means the Farleigh cabinet was introduced into the Gallery by a senior employee—someone we all trust. You know that, and so do I.”

  “I suppose so.” Gerry looked gray with misery. “My God, I can’t quite get a handle on all this. Last week, everything at the Gallery seemed to be going so smoothly it was almost boring. Now—”

  His voice trailed away, and Zach picked up. “Now we have some problems to solve. And we need to pool all of our information if we’re going to solve them quickly. Tell me about your dinner with my brother last weekend. How in the world did he manage to tip you off to the fact that there was a problem with the Farleigh cabinet?”

  Gerry drained the last of his Scotch. “Okay, here goes. As you know, Will was in the Gallery a couple of weeks ago and I showed him around.”

  “Yes, y
ou told me.” Zach turned to Robyn. “My brother has shares in the family trust and he always pays a token visit to the Gallery once a year.”

  “Will stayed longer than usual this year,” Gerry said. “He may not like antiques very much, but he’s an artist. He appreciates beauty and he was fascinated by the Farleigh cabinet.”

  “It’s a very striking piece,” Zach said. “The painting on the doors is of unusually high quality.”

  “Right, and it was the painting that fascinated Will. We chatted about the artist’s depiction of the elephants for several minutes. Then Will left to catch his flight for L.A. and I never gave his visit another moment’s thought.”

  Gerry fell silent and Zach prompted him. “But he called you?”

  “Yes. While he was in L.A., Will happened to visit a very rich friend of your father’s who was considering buying one of Will’s paintings. And there, sitting in pride of place in this very rich friend’s living room, was the exact duplicate of the Farleigh cabinet. The friend had bought it from Goodwin and Child’s in Boston and he naturally insisted it was the genuine article. Will called me the minute he got back to New York, and I started to check into things right away.”

  Zach’s fingers drummed on the table. “That’s an amazing coincidence.”

  Gerry smiled tightly. “Amazing coincidences happen all the time in the antiques trade. The fact is, we’re an incestuous business and anyone who knows enough about high-class antiques to produce a perfect duplicate of the Farleigh cabinet ought to know that you can’t get away with passing exact duplicates into the marketplace. The circle of potential buyers is too small and you’ll be found out sooner rather than later.”

  “When did Will call you?”

  “Over a week ago.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me earlier that you had suspicions about the Farleigh cabinet?”

  Gerry shrugged. “Probably for the same reason you didn’t share your doubts with me. This is an explosive accusation, and I wanted to be damn sure I wasn’t getting worked up about nothing. Will’s no expert on antiques, and frankly, I expected the whole brouhaha to turn out to be a storm in a teacup. But by the time I’d rerun the tests and rechecked the details of the provenance papers, I knew we were in trouble. This isn’t a false alarm, it’s a major, full-blown crisis. I came over here to consult with you as soon as I finished running the last test and getting all the documentation together.”

  “Any suggestions as to how we should handle this?” Zach asked.

  “The first step has to be to notify the departmental heads at the Gallery to reexamine their inventory for fakes,” Gerry said.

  “I agree, but I don’t want this story to break while I’m in Europe. Can you keep this to yourself until I get back?”

  “It might be better if you canceled your trip,” Gerry suggested. “At the very least, we’ll have to pull the Farleigh cabinet from the sales floor and people will wonder why.”

  “Don’t pull it. Announce that it’s been sold,” Zach said. “Say I’ve bought it to give to a relative who’s getting married.”

  For some reason, Gerry’s cheeks flushed scarlet. He coughed. “We could do that,” he agreed. He seemed to feel a need to change the subject. “And while you’re in Europe, I can personally double-check on every significant piece in the Gallery to make sure we don’t pass on any fakes. Can you imagine what would have happened to our reputation if we’d actually sold a copy and passed it off as a genuine eighteenth-century piece?” Gerry’s forehead broke out in a sweat, and he mopped it with the silk handkerchief tucked in his breast pocket.

  “That’s one major disaster averted,” Zach agreed.

  Robyn looked up, then quickly looked away, wondering again why Zach had chosen not to mention the other fakes that the Gallery might already have sold. Surely—it just didn’t seem possible—surely he didn’t suspect Gerry of playing any part in the scam?

  Gerry yawned. “Sorry, I didn’t realize how tired I was until I got that pile of garbage off my chest.” He stood up. “I’ll be on my way, unless you have any other instructions you need to pass on, Zach?”

  “None,” Zach said. “I do have a question, though.”

  “Fire ahead, old boy.”

  “Why did Will call you with his news about the Farleigh cabinet and not me?”

  Gerry gave a broad, insincere smile. “I don’t think you should read any deep significance into that, Zach. Will and I chat almost every week. I was the person who’d shown him the Farleigh cabinet in our Gallery showrooms. I suppose it was natural for him to contact me—”

  “I’m the president and general manager,” Zach interrupted. “Will has always respected my professional judgment, just as I respect his artistic ability. We may have a pretty screwed-up relationship, but mutual professional respect is the one area we always had straightened out. He knew I was the logical person to call, so why didn’t he? He’s been avoiding me for the past three months, and I’d like to know why. Something’s going on.”

  Gerry paced nervously. “Look, I feel very much caught in the middle here, but I’ve already told Will it’s ridiculous of him not to let you know what’s happening. The truth is, he’s planning to get married.”

  Zach’s face broke into a huge smile. “That’s great news! Why the hell is he keeping it secret?”

  Gerry looked up at the ceiling, then down at his shoes. “He’s... um... planning to marry Claire.”

  Robyn’s head jerked up, and Zach’s smile froze. “Claire?” he repeated. “My ex-wife? Jesus H. Christ! Are you telling me my brother is planning to marry my ex-wife!”

  “Er... yes. That’s what I’m telling you.”

  “He can’t do that!” Zach yelled. If he had previously appeared the model of brotherly affection, he now appeared the model of Neanderthal jealousy and sibling rivalry. “What the hell is he thinking about? For God’s sake, they’ll drive each other crazy within a month.”

  Gerry seemed more at ease now that he’d broken his bombshell. “Actually, I don’t think they’ll drive each other crazy at all. They seem head over heels in love.”

  Zach walked over to the bar, poured himself a Scotch, threw in a couple of ice cubes, and drank it neat. When he put the glass down on the counter, he seemed more in control, although Robyn suspected a stewpot of emotions bubbled just beneath the surface calm.

  “Will should have told me,” he said curtly.

  “Sometimes you can be a pretty intimidating man,” Gerry said. “Anyway, Will’s news is out now, so you can handle it however you think best.” He shrugged into his overcoat, obviously anxious to get away. “It’s one o’clock,” he said. “I need to get home. My sister’s paying a flying visit from England and she’ll be wondering what’s happened to me.”

  “Your sister?” Zach asked.

  “Yes, you remember Gloria, don’t you? The two of you met once before, a couple of years ago. She teaches at a school in Dorset, not too far from Starke as a matter of fact.”

  “Of course, I remember now. We spent a weekend together at your place in the Hamptons. Give her my best. Next time she’s in New York, we must get together for dinner.”

  “She’d like that, I’m sure.” Gerry walked toward the exit and gave Robyn a friendly smile. “I’ll see you in the morning, my dear. Don’t let Zach keep you up too late. I have a lot of work waiting for you tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be in the office by nine on the dot,” Robyn said.

  Zach escorted Gerry to the door. When he came back into the living room, he grimaced apologetically. “I’m sorry, I set you up for that parting shot of his.”

  He looked exhausted, as well as apologetic, and Robyn moved instinctively to offer reassurance. It seemed so natural to slip her arms around his waist and lean her head against the rock-hard wall of his chest that she didn’t stop to consider all that was implied by her offer of comfort.

  He wove his fingers through her hair, stroking gently, and she nestled against him. “Why didn’t you tel
l Gerry about the other fakes and the other attack on you?” she asked.

  “For the obvious reasons,” he said tiredly. “Gerry is one of six or seven people working with me who have the expertise, the position, and the contacts to pull off a scam like this.”

  “But you can’t seriously suspect Gerry,” she protested. “That’s absurd.”

  “On the contrary,” he corrected tersely. “I have to suspect Gerry, along with every other senior buyer at the Gallery.”

  Robyn grimaced, unable to dispute his logic however uncomfortable it made her feel. “Where do we go from here, Zach?”

  “I’m leaving for Paris tomorrow night, and then I’m going on to Starke. I can’t do anything until we get back from England. Maybe a few days of breathing space will bring some fresh ideas.”

  “Maybe Gerry was right. Perhaps we shouldn’t go to Starke.”

  He tightened his arms around her waist, rubbing his cheek against her hair. “We have to go,” he said softly. “Right now, the thought of you and me alone in a quaint English hotel is about all that’s keeping me sane. I’m counting on having two very long nights to put my campaign into action.”

  “What campaign is that?”

  He tilted her head backward and lowered his head slowly toward her mouth. “My campaign to seduce you.”

  Her body flushed with heat, and her mouth went dry with longing, but she resisted the foolish urge to close her eyes, drown in his kisses, and count the world well lost for love. She spoke with all the firmness she could muster.

  “Zach, let’s be sensible. An affair between the two of us would never work. I can’t let you seduce me. You’re my boss, the president of the company I work for. Right now, with the situation at the Gallery, you can’t afford to show even a hint of favoritism—”

  He silenced her protests by the simple expedient of covering her mouth in a passionate, seeking kiss. The kiss continued for several mind-blowing minutes. When they finally came up for air, Robyn discovered that she was lying on the sofa, with Zach on top of her, and her white blouse draped over the antique fire screen, along with his tie. When she was near Zach, she seemed to experience real difficulty in keeping her clothes on.