Picture Me and You: A Devil's Kettle Romance, #1

by Sey, Susan

  “Best guess?”

  She pressed her fingers to the line that had taken up permanent residence between her brows. “You saw most of it — the perfectly lovely dinner with Peter and Georgie, then Matty stomping off in a fit of adolescent angst.” She dropped her hand, studied it where it lay on the table. “Evidently he decided at some point to amuse himself by burning things in the studio’s trash can.” Her lips twisted. “With the help of some paint thinner.”

  Addy’s stomach dropped. “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes. Of course he set off the fire alarms. I nearly had a heart attack. Thank God for the fire extinguishers Jax has hung all over this place.” A smile ghosted over her lips. “They’re incredibly ugly hanging there in plain sight but I was never so happy in my life to have one handy.”

  “He’ll be glad to hear it.”

  “Tell him and I’ll disown you. For real this time.”

  Addy swallowed involuntarily, her mouth suddenly Sahara dry. “It wasn’t real last time?”

  Bianca flicked the thought away. “Of course not. I was angry. You know you can’t trust a thing I say when I’m angry.”

  “But you weren’t angry later,” Addy said carefully, the pain still a sullen ache inside her. “All the next week, you let me think—”

  “Oh, darling.” Bianca reached across the table, took her hand. “It wasn’t you I was letting think. It was everybody else.”

  “Everybody else?”

  “Nan, Gerte, Matty.” She waved that expansive hand. “The whole town.”

  “What were you letting them think?”

  “That we were in chaos up here.” She smiled enigmatically. “That those paintings you rescued from the carriage house fire were game changers. That they had us at each others’ throats.”

  “They are.” She stared. “They do.”

  “Ah, but nobody knows why, do they? We could be showing Diego’s early nudes. We could be debuting Matty’s work. We could be showing Diego’s post-Angel works of you. Possibly of you and him, if you take my meaning. You know how people’s minds work.” Addy’s stomach twisted She did know, in fact. Bianca’s smile hardened dangerously. “Or we could be showing those paintings of Julia Gates.”

  Her heart rocketed painfully into her throat. “Julia—”

  “That self-serving, hatchet-faced, girl-reporter harpy.” Bianca’s dark eyes burned. “You think I didn’t recognize her? You think I didn’t know what she did to you? To my boy?” She shook her head. “Diego was…he had his weaknesses. You were good for him, Addison. You brought out what was good in him. I really thought, or maybe I only hoped…” She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what I’d hoped. Julia destroyed my hopes. She destroyed my son. She encouraged the sex, the drugs, the dirty. Everything that made him hate himself, she magnified. She gloried in it. She was the photo negative of you, and she sank her hooks into him in a way that nobody could undo. She drove him to madness, then into his grave.”

  “But why?” Addy’s throat tried to close. Shock rang in her ears and she couldn’t feel her fingers. “Why would she do that?”

  “Because she couldn’t have him. She couldn’t have my boy, so she decided that nobody could.” She smiled bitterly. “Certainly not some farm-fresh twenty-one-year-old virgin. So she found the cracks in his soul and wormed her way into each one. She indulged his taste for the dirty, the dark. She fed him drugs, taught him her kinks, catered to his. God only knows what else they got up to. But by the time she was done with him, he was addicted. Damaged beyond repair.” Tears gathered in her dark eyes. “You can see it in every brush stroke of those paintings you hid all those years. He’s unravelling, going mad with self-hatred, with agony. He simply can’t bear what he’s becoming. What he’d become. But he was powerless to stop himself, and she only urged him on. And that last painting, Broken?” She shook her head. “That’s not you. Well, it is, obviously. I don’t mean to mitigate your pain, darling.” She covered Addy’s hand with her own again. Addy hardly felt it. “But it’s a self-portrait, too. He was finally broken, and it was breaking you that forced him to see it.”

  Chapter 27

  “WHY DIDN’T YOU tell me?” Addy’s throat was on fire, her head spinning. “Why didn’t you tell me you knew?”

  “There’s no place within a marriage for a mother-in-law.” Bianca sat back, flicked the question away with impatient fingers. “Believe me, I know.”

  “But if I’d known you knew—”

  “What?” Bianca’s eyes burned into hers. “What would you have done differently? Would you have brought me those paintings? Would you have been ready to show them? Would you have asked me for help, for counsel? Would you have asked me to side with you against my son? Would you have asked me to protect you from him when I couldn’t even protect him from himself?”

  “No.” Addy twisted her fingers together on the table and stared at them. Willed her heart to stop bleeding. “No, I’d never have asked that.”

  “Then what? What would you have had me do?”

  Just be with me, she thought. Hold me. Keep me. Promise me. I was so alone. So afraid.

  But the Davises weren’t her family. Or, if they were, they were Diego’s family first. They’d had to hold, keep, promise him first. Oh, they loved her. She didn’t doubt that. But she could never come before blood.

  “Nothing,” she said finally. “There was nothing you could do for me.”

  Bianca covered Addy’s twisted fingers with her cool palm again. “I can do something for you now. Something for all of us.”

  “What?”

  “I can destroy Julia Gates.” A smile flickered at the corner of Bianca’s mouth, like a flame licking at the curtains. It was a house fire waiting to happen, that smile. “Let me show those paintings, Addy. Let me expose her for the poison she’s always been. Let me make sure she’ll never do to anybody else what she’s done to us. To Diego.”

  “And if I do?” Addy lifted her eyes to Bianca’s, forced herself not to recoil from the agony burning in the older woman’s face. “Will you tell Matty he’s free? That he never needs to paint so much as an apple again, and you’ll love him just the same?”

  “No.”

  She stared, startled. “Why not?”

  “First, because the boy has a gift, and I refuse to let him waste it.”

  “He’s not wasting it. He’s just finding his own way to it.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” Bianca rolled a shoulder. “But do we really want to take that chance? Do we really want to leave a teenager in charge of a gift of this magnitude?” She folded her hands with an air of finality. “He needs guidance. He doesn’t want it, no. But he needs it and I’m going to give it to him. I’m not making the same mistake with him that I made with Diego.”

  “Which was?”

  “Letting him find his own way to his gift.” Her smile was wry. “But I’ll agree to tell Matty I have no intention of showing his work alongside Diego’s for Devil Days.”

  “Thank God.” Addy exhaled for the first time in what felt like minutes.

  “Just not yet.”

  She should’ve known better. “Why not?”

  “Because he’s a terrible liar and we both know it. If I want Nan to believe I’m showing his work — alongside whatever else the tiny minds in this town want to think — he needs to believe I’m showing his work.”

  “Nan? What’s Nan got to do—”

  “She’s the closest thing Devil’s Kettle has to actual press.” Bianca wrinkled her nose, a little moue of distaste. “You heard her in the gallery yesterday — Julia Gates is all over her, desperate to know what we pulled out of the carriage house.”

  Her stomach went sour. “Julia knows exactly what we pulled out of the carriage house.”

  “Oh, but she doesn’t.” Bianca pointed at her. “And she’s very aware of that fact. Why do you think she’s all over Nan? She’s evil, not stupid. She’s hardly going to release the memoir unless she knows for sure that we’re releasi
ng her nudes.”

  Addy drew back, startled. “Memoir?”

  “Of course.” Bianca’s mouth tightened. “She’ll cast herself as Diego’s true muse, I’m sure, the angel of sex and mercy to a man trapped by his honor in a loveless marriage, separated from his gift by his up-tight little bride’s provincial morals. You’ll be the villain, the woman who demanded a good husband for herself and didn’t care that she cost the world a great artist. Julia will be the forbidden fruit who brought him back to life but in the end simply wasn’t enough to undo your damage.”

  Nausea roiled in Addy’s stomach. “She wants us to show those paintings?”

  “Oh, she needs us to.” Bianca leaned in. “How else is the world to know that she was Diego’s true angel? That she was his final, blazing masterpiece, not you?”

  “But she wasn’t.” Addy’s mouth felt stiff, odd. She had no idea how she was forming words. “He painted Broken.”

  “I know that.” Bianca’s lips curved but Addy would never call it a smile. “And you know that. But does Julia know that?”

  “I…” She broke off, her head spinning. “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I. But I intend to find out. Which is exactly why Matty can’t know he won’t be making his triumphant debut over Devil Days. If he believes I’m showing him, then Nan believes I’m showing him. Which means—”

  “Which means Julia believes you might be showing him—”

  “—instead of Diego’s nudes of her, yes. She’d rather we went with the nudes, of course, but if she thinks there’s a chance — any chance at all — that Matty is as good as Diego was? That he’s better? She’d never let somebody else get that story first.” Bianca spread innocent hands. “Or maybe I am showing those nudes, and this is simply a clever smoke screen. In the end, there’s only one way for her to be certain.”

  Addy closed her eyes, overwhelmed with horror and yet utterly unsurprised. “You want her to come here.”

  “I want to destroy her.” Bianca flattened both palms on the table and leaned in. “She was never anything but a drug to Diego, just one more sordid weakness he was ashamed of. Broken can reveal that in one astonishing instant. It can show the world exactly what she was. But not if she sees it coming. Not if she knows it exists. Which is why I need to see her, face to face. So that I can know.”

  “And Matty is the bait you’ll use to get her here, is that it?”

  Bianca made an impatient noise. “I know you disagree. I know you’d rather I told him, spared him this pain. But what about my pain, Addy? I still bleed for Diego, every single day. The wound just won’t close and lord knows I’ve tried to let it. But if I can do this? If I can make Julia Gates pay for what she did? I think maybe it can finally start.”

  Addy considered her for a long moment, then slowly nodded. “Okay,” she said. “I understand. I won’t tell him, not until you give me permission. But I’m still going to talk to him.”

  “You should. Matty needs somebody on his side right now, and he’s not going to believe it’s me. So until I can be his mother again — just his mother and nothing else — please impress upon him that we’d rather he didn’t burn the house down.”

  “Or anything else.”

  “Excuse me?” Bianca’s eyes were sharp, fierce.

  “Did you ask him?” Addy held that gaze, didn’t allow herself to even blink, let alone flinch. “Did you ask him if he had anything to do with the other two fires in town last night?”

  “Of course I didn’t. I didn’t need to.” Bianca lifted her chin. “He was with Peter when both fires started, first of all. Secondly, I wouldn’t insult him with the question. He’s not Diego. You may think I don’t know the difference, but I do. Matty would never do such a thing. That sort of destruction simply isn’t in him.”

  “But it was in Diego?”

  Bianca didn’t look away. “You know the answer to that as well as I do.”

  Addy mounted the curved stairs toward Matty’s bedroom, a hot chocolate in one hand, the doughnut box in the other. It wouldn’t make the conversation any easier, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt her cause. She hit the top of the stairs and hung a left, her shoes soundless on the thick carpet runner. She stopped in front of Matty’s closed door, and lifted a hand to knock.

  “Matty?”

  “Go away.” His voice was flat and thin through the door.

  “It’s Addy.”

  Pause. “Go away please?”

  “I’ve got doughnuts.”

  “Oh, fine. Come in.”

  She opened the door and found Matty lying on the bed fully dressed, hands stacked under his head, regarding his ceiling as if the answers to the universe had been written there in invisible ink. Every other square inch of the room was covered with comic book covers and movie posters — The Avengers, The X-Men, Spiderman, that flaming guy on the motorcycle, and some Addy didn’t recognize. But a few patches of bare wall stood out like missing teeth, and Addy’s heart cracked.

  “Oh, Matty. Is that what you were burning?”

  “It was time to move on.” His eyes stayed fixed on the ceiling. “Mom said so.”

  “But, Matty, they were yours. You loved—”

  “It doesn’t matter. They’re gone.” And the dead finality in his tone cut through her protest. So she set the cocoa and the pastry box on the nightstand and drifted from wall to wall, touching the blank spaces while fury and sorrow churned inside her. While she struggled to contain them both.

  From the time he could operate a thumb tack Matty had covered his walls with heroes. Movie posters, pages from his favorite comic books, shelves of outrageously muscled action figures. And he’d put himself among them as soon as he could hold a pencil. He’d spent hours pulling lantern-jawed crime fighters from his imagination, giving them life on paper. And he’d tacked his creations shoulder-by-cape with Spiderman, Wolverine, Iron Man. But now that place — Matty’s place — was empty. He’d taken down his work and burned it.

  She resisted the urge to fling her arms around him and pour all her affection and acceptance into his wounds. She doubted he’d even allow it, much less thank her for it. So she scooped up the to-go cup she’d left on the nightstand, and poked at Matty’s man-sized boots. He sighed but sat up and she perched on the edge of his bed.

  “Doughnut?” She slid the box off the nightstand and onto the bed between them, flipped open the lid with a little flourish. “I stopped by the Sugar Rush on my way up the hill. Some of them are still warm.”

  Fat and sugar fumes wafted into the air between them and Matty leaned over for a look. He selected a chocolate-frosted custard bomb and polished it off in two listless bites. She nudged the box a little closer and he went the powdered sugar route this time. It sprinkled down the front of his Last Gunslinger t-shirt and gave him an endearing white mustache as he chewed. Addy wanted to wrap him up in her arms and rock him but contented herself watching him eat.

  “Matty—” she began when he’d polished off a third doughnut.

  “I’m not going to talk about last night,” he said, but there was no heat in his words, no fire. Just a cold, implacable finality. He’d arrived at some decision. Settled something within himself. Apprehension gripped the back of her neck with icy fingers.

  “Okay,” she said carefully. “You don’t need to.”

  He shot her a suspicious look and she held up her hands in surrender.

  “Seriously,” she said. “You don’t want to talk about last night, fine. I’m not your mom. You don’t answer to me. I’m here because I’m your sister, Matty. I’m here because I love you and I don’t know who you are lately.”

  He gave a crack of laughter so abrupt it startled her. “Yeah, there’s been some speculation on that point, hasn’t there?”

  “As to who you are?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who are you, then, Matty? Tell me, and I promise I’ll love whoever that is.”

  He stared at her for a long time. For a solid two minutes she
wondered if he was going to say anything.

  “You don’t know?” he asked finally. “Really?”

  “How would I?” She smiled. “You haven’t said it yet. So who are you, Matty?”

  “I’m not who I’ve always thought I was, that’s for sure.” He gave a soft, sad laugh. “Definitely not who Mom wishes I were.”

  “None of us are who our parents wish we were.” Lord knew she wasn’t.

  “Yeah, but Mom’s taken it farther than most.” He took a deep breath and met her eyes. “She’s been lying to me.”

  Addy stared. He knew? He knew Bianca wasn’t planning to show his work at Devil Days? She swallowed, then said carefully, “About what?”

  “About who I am.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I finally caught a clue, Addison.” He turned away from her. “I finally get the situation, okay? I’ll be a good boy from now on. I can’t make myself talented but I can at least be cooperative.”

  “You don’t need to be talented or cooperative, Matty.” Fear uncurled inside her. Something was wrong here. Did he know somehow what Bianca needed from him? What she was planning? “You just have to be you.”

  “Sure, Addy. Tell Mom it was an accident, okay?”

  Fear leapt into dread. “What was an accident, Matisse?”

  He waved a hand at the blank spaces standing out on his walls. “Mom said drawing what I like was selfish, and it was time to burn that bridge. So I did.” He jerked a shrug. “I didn’t mean to set off the fire alarms, though.”

  A surge of pity closed Addy’s throat. The kid was thirteen. He had a right to be selfish. No, he had a responsibility to be selfish. To go through his mental dress-up trunk, try everything on, accept and reject until he’d patched together the man he was supposed to be. The man he wanted to be. Unfortunately, Matty’s rights had been trampled by grown-up concerns and machinations that had nothing to do with him. His needs had been superseded by his mother’s desperate attempt to put her grief behind her once and for all. And if taking down Julia Gates was what Bianca needed to finally let go of one son so she could be present for another, well, Addy had to help her. She only hoped that Matty would still be open to his mother’s love once it was finally his again.