by Ryan, Lexi
I shrug as I think of the sexy stranger I met tonight. I don’t like thinking about how close I was to doing something that might have ruined everything with Colton. It’s new and I like it, but I’m insecure enough that I thought maybe he wasn’t feeling the same.
“So do you like my friend?” The smirk on his face tells me he’s not too worried about it.
“I like guys who don’t stand me up.”
Colton stops, half the length of the living room between us. He frowns. “I’m sorry if I disappointed you. I should have called to let you know I was running late, but I didn’t stand you up. I wouldn’t.”
“Well, then maybe I like you.” I groan as I look him over. He’s tall and broad-shouldered, and the sleeves of his fitted black tee stretch around his biceps. Colton’s not just fit, but built—a man who makes his living with motocross and needs the strength of his body to keep him on the bike.
Now it’s my turn to do the stalking. I close the distance between us, wrap my arms behind his neck, and kiss him hard. Less than an hour ago, his friend was whispering dirty suggestions in my ear. Now I’m anxious to wash Levi away, to replace those thoughts with thoughts of Colton. To hold him here where I need him.
I kiss him harder, press my body closer. “What do you mean when you say I’m your girl?”
“I mean I’m not sharing.” He grabs my dress in his fist and tugs it up to my waist before smacking my bare ass. I bite back a moan at the sweet sting. “I mean Levi needs to stop looking at you like he’s counting down the seconds until he can sweet-talk his way between your legs.” He bites my neck even as his fingers gently stroke the flesh he just smacked.
“I thought you weren’t a ‘serious relationship’ kind of guy.” I close my eyes, already turned on, already aching for more than mouths and hands. Colton is rough and unapologetic. He isn’t a gentle lover, and I don’t want him to be. “I thought this was just casual.”
He pulls back, and his eyes darken as he looks down at me. “It was supposed to be, but I can’t stop thinking about you.” He says it with wonder, as if this has never happened to him before, as if he’s never been infatuated or had a crush.
“I like that you’re thinking about me. I like that a lot.” I gasp as he traces the lace of my thong over one hip, then brushes his knuckles across my belly.
“Do you think about me?”
“Yeah.”
“About me touching you?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“About being with me and no one else?”
“I don’t want anyone else. I’m yours. As long as you want me.”
“That’s just it. I can’t imagine not wanting you, and this is new for me. Wanting to protect someone is new for me.”
I laugh. He sounds so somber. “What do you need to protect me from?”
He hesitates a beat. “My father isn’t a good man. Promise me you’ll tell me if he ever tries to make you do something you don’t want to do.”
I frown, struggling to focus on the conversation when his hands are on me. “You mean sexual things?”
He freezes. “That’s not what I meant. Christ. I’d lose my mind.” He skims his thumb across my bottom lip, but his nostrils flare in anger. “If I found out he touched you, I’d kill him.”
“He won’t. And I won’t do anything I don’t want to.” I search Colton’s face, trying to figure out what he’s not telling me.
“You promise?”
What did he make you do? But I don’t ask. A man like Colton wouldn’t answer that question. “I promise.”
“And I promise to protect you.” He flicks his tongue over my ear then yanks my dress higher and pins me against the wall. One of his strong thighs presses into the aching pulse between my legs. “I won’t let you down.” He hooks his thumbs into the lace of my panties and sinks to his knees, tugging them off. “I promise to take care of you.”
He grips my ass in his hands, and I close my eyes in surrender as he does as he promised.
Ellie
“You’re a genius, Ellie.” Nelson McKinley grins at me as he spins a slow circle around my art gallery—his gallery. It only feels like mine. A month ago, I started with nothing but an empty storefront and a budget that would have made my teenage self pee her pants.
The old me would have been terrified by this new opportunity. The new me knows what consumers will pay for art and what artists will sell it for. The new me is fucking perfect for this job and grateful my boyfriend’s father took a chance on me.
Nelson turns to me, his eyes intense. “I spoke with your old boss this afternoon. Tate misses you. He said travel isn’t as fun without you by his side.”
“I won’t pretend I didn’t love the excitement. This is all great.” I wave a hand, indicating the contents of the gallery of prints that can all be purchased for less than the cost of a designer handbag. “But it’s nothing compared to the rush of being near rare art.”
He beams, and I can’t decide what I think of this man. He’s a lawyer by trade, not an art guy. He has money, friends in high places, and a son who hates him but is happy to use him for what he can. I need him for this job, but I always feel as if I’m not sure I can trust my boss. “What if I had a job for you? Something to get you back to the magic of less commercialized art without taking you away from this little venture?”
“You know this is cruel, right? Like offering a recovering addict a single hit?”
“Who wants to be cured of an art addiction?” He rocks back on his heels and studies me. “I have a client who’s a big fan of Ethan Bauer’s work. He wants me to use my connections to help him build his collection. After asking around, I know enough to suspect you’re the only one who can deliver on his requests.”
“Bauer?” I study the ceiling, trying to remember what I know. It’s a rush to think I could help curate a collection again. “The professor who did all those provocative paintings of his students?”
“You know him.” Nelson nods, looking more than a little smug as he folds his arms. “You can take a girl from the art world, but you can’t take the art out of the girl.”
I laugh. “I’m pretty sure running an art gallery keeps me part of the art world.”
He grunts and scans the prints of watercolor skylines and black-and-white photography on the walls. “If you can call peddling prints of pedestrian paintings art, I suppose.” He waves away his criticism. “Back to Bauer. You know his work. What do you know about the Discovery collection?”
“It’s an interesting story. The paintings were shown only once in a gallery in Indiana—the gallery in New Hope.” I shake my head. “So someone wants Bauer’s stuff. He’s pretty prolific, so it shouldn’t be too hard to track down a few pieces. Why do you need me?”
“My investor wants the Discovery collection.”
I laugh. “Don’t we all.”
“His offer is hard to resist.” Nelson’s tongue darts out to touch his lip. “The commission will set you up nicely for your life here. Provide you with the funds for the lifestyle you prefer.”
The hair on the back of my neck rises. I hope this isn’t going where I think it is.
He presses his hand to his chest. “I wouldn’t ask if I thought it would be a risk for you. You know I value you too much for that, right? My investor is hungry.”
A hungry investor is always willing to pay more than a passive investor. Getting the most out of a deal depends on getting the right timing. My old boss is a shark and always had ways of closing deals at the moment they’d be most lucrative to him. I’m guessing Nelson is no different. “If he’s a fan, surely he knows no one has seen those paintings in years. There are rumors they’ve been destroyed.”
“Which is exactly why you’re perfect for the job.”
My stomach twists. “What do you mean?” But I already know. Tate is a talker.
“Tate told me your talents for art go far beyond buying and selling.”
I bite my lip, my cheeks warming in shame. S
omeone else knows my secret. “Oh.”
He beams—a smile that lights up his normally calculating eyes. “Is that a maybe?”
I bite my lip, hating how the promise of money has me considering it. But Mom’s furnace is on its last leg, and she doesn’t have the money to replace it. I’ve been helping as much as I can, but I don’t make much. “I don’t know.”
He nods. “Have dinner with me. There’s a lovely Italian place down the street, and I’ve made reservations for seven o’clock. We’ll talk it through.”
“You mean you’ll talk me into it?”
“Has anyone ever been able to talk you into anything you didn’t want to do?” He winks at me, and then heads to the door. “And beautiful work here. Even if it is a bit beneath your talents.”
My stomach flutters with excitement. Though my job is now to manage this gallery, my first year out of college was spent helping a man curate collections for private investors. I loved every part of it—the travel, the thrill of chasing down privately owned collections and making offers with more zeroes than I’ll ever have in my bank account in my entire life.
I might have done it forever if I hadn’t found myself as in love with my boss as I was with my job. Tate Andrews looked at me like I was the most beautiful woman on the planet and treated me like I was special and fascinating. He taught me more about the art world in that first year I worked for him than I learned in all four years of undergrad as an art major. He made every day an adventure, and I was madly in love with him. Unfortunately, so was his wife.
I’m confident Tate would’ve happily had a torrid affair with me, but he was never going to ask his heiress wife for a divorce. He said he didn’t want to walk away from the money, and I didn’t want to be anyone’s mistress. I moved to Jackson Harbor to escape temptation, but I miss that job.
Despite myself, I even miss the way Tate navigated the ethical gray areas of being an art dealer who specializes in hard-to-find originals.
Nelson’s request makes me think of the promise I made to Colton, but I’m already making mental lists about where I can research Bauer’s Discovery collection and what I need to confirm before moving forward.
Levi
“My fucking father.” Colton’s staring at his phone. He’s antsy, itching for another adventure when we agreed to stop. Hell, I’m itching too, but the money we make in our little side jobs becomes a dangerous commodity where Colton’s concerned. Too much of a good thing, and he goes off the deep end.
Gambling. Drugs. And then it’s all gone and more, and we’re making another deal with the devil to bail him out. Nelson’s a big man in town, but he has expensive hobbies and friends in low places. If I didn’t know better, I’d think Nelson McKinley intentionally turned his son into an addict just so he’d have Colton to do his dirty work. And there’s always dirty work.
“What’d he do this time?”
“He has something he shouldn’t.” He meets my eyes. “We’re going to have to take it.”
My eyes go wide. “Excuse me?” I don’t like the idea of stealing from Nelson. I’d rather stay on the good side of a man powerful enough to make people disappear.
“Come on. Don’t pretend you’re above it now.”
“We agreed we were done. Remember?”
He tosses his phone onto the couch beside him and leans back. “I thought you liked the thrill.”
“Maybe I’ve grown up.”
He grunts. “Sure you have.” Standing, he stretches his arms over his head and yawns. “Are you going to tell me you’re not even a little curious?”
“About stealing from Nelson? Nah.”
“It’s more like stealing from Ellie,” he says, watching me.
I stiffen at his girlfriend’s name. I’ve never seen Colton as serious about anyone as he is about her. It’s been three months since I met Ellie at that fundraiser. That night, I never would have guessed that he could make it this long with one girl, but there’s something special about Ellie. He knows it, and I know it. “Why would you want to do that?”
He shrugs. “Let’s just say it’s something Nelson will benefit from her having. Something she doesn’t know how to get rid of herself. Are you in?”
“Fuck no.” But it’s a lie. I was in the second he said her name. Because like it or not, I want to know more about Ellie Courdrey. And if Colton wants to steal something from Ellie that’s tied up with Nelson, it means she’s gotten tangled in Nelson’s world, and Colton’s trying to protect her.
Despite all logic, I want to protect her too.
Ellie
“You’re sure nothing else was taken?” Nelson asks.
“As far as I can tell.” I squeeze my eyes shut for a beat. When I open them, Nelson’s are hard on me, blazing with accusation. Who did you tell? Why did you fuck this up?
“What about cash? Did you check the register?”
I shake my head. “I do our deposits after I lock up every night. I never leave cash on the premises.” We rarely deal in cash anyway, but there is the occasional tourist buying a cheap print who will hand over a few twenties rather than their Visa. “We’re lucky they didn’t take anything else. At least we don’t have to get the cops involved.” Because we can’t tell the police about this.
Nelson squeezes the bridge of his nose. “Lucky,” he mutters.
I fold my arms across my chest, and the silence reverberates between us, heavy with his disappointment.
I don’t know how much I just lost him, but I’d guess it’s a number that involves at least seven digits. His investor was so desperate for Bauer’s Discovery collection that he’d have paid anything for it. He was about to close a deal worth millions. I was about to get a commission with six figures. I could have finally helped my mother in a big way and put the rest in savings so I’d never again have to put another artist’s name on something I painted.
“The alarm didn’t go off,” Nelson says quietly.
My cheeks burn. “I must have forgotten to set it.”
“And the security cameras?”
“I hadn’t checked them in a few days. I had no idea they hadn’t been running properly.”
His hands ball into fists at his sides. “Jesus Christ, Ellie. I trusted you with the job.”
“At least they didn’t steal anything real.”
“You think that fifteen million you just cost me wasn’t real? You’d have thought it was all kinds of real when you took your cut.”
I look away, my cheeks heating in shame. Not shame for losing the deal—because fuck him—but shame for being complicit in the deceit. I should never have agreed to it. Every day I worked on this project, I wanted to call Nelson and tell him I was out, but I was in too deep. It was too late.
“Any chance it could have been the investor?” I ask, grasping at straws.
“You think my investor came here from South Africa, broke into the gallery, and stole the paintings?”
I turn up my palms. “Nobody else would have known what we had.”
“He didn’t even know we had it here. As far as he knows, we’re still cultivating the collection,” he says through clenched teeth.
“I’m sorry. It was a mistake.”
“Yeah. It was. And maybe it was my mistake to trust a gutter rat with my gallery.”
I want to spit in his face. I’m well aware I don’t come from the same social class as this man, but he’s never rubbed it in my face before.
“Hell, maybe you did this.” He stalks toward me. “I know your conscience was giving you fits. Maybe this is your way of getting out of our deal. Or maybe Colton’s behind this. Maybe he’s trying to get back at me for being a shitty father. Daddy never loved me. Boohoo.”
I press the keys into his hands. “Maybe this is my way of quitting.”
“You’re not walking out that door,” Nelson says.
I shrug. “I can’t work for someone who doesn’t trust me. You don’t trust me anymore, and I don’t blame you. I’m sorry about the pai
ntings.”
“What are you going to do, Ellie? Work the register at McDonald’s? Go back to Dyer and move in with your mom?”
“You’re being a dick. I’m sorry about what happened, but I don’t know what else I can do.”
“Lock up.” He tosses the keys onto the counter. “That is, if you remember how. I’ll call you in a few days. We’ll talk again then.”
“Don’t bother. I’m not doing this anymore.”
“I will call you.”
“Don’t bother,” I say, but he’s already walking out the door.
I wait until he’s in his car and driving away, then I pick up my phone to call Colton. My boyfriend. The man who kept me drunk on orgasms and lust all night while someone broke into my gallery.
“Yeah?” His voice is rough from sleep.
“We need to talk.”
“Can it wait? I was up pleasuring a goddess all night.”
I bite my lip. “We need to talk about the paintings you stole.”
He’s quiet for a long time. “What about them?”
I squeeze my eyes shut. “Thank you.”
Levi
“Why are you still with her?” I scowl at Colton, who’s currently putting on a fucking tie for a date with Ellie.
“Because I like her. Because she’s hot and fun. And other reasons.” He tops off his sentence with the mischievous grin my sister Shay calls “panty kryptonite.”
“You’re dating her after we stole from her. That’s asking for trouble.”
“How do you figure? She didn’t even report it.”
I grunt. They were probably stolen before we ever got our hands on them. Nelson probably told her not to report it.
“She doesn’t know. She probably didn’t even notice they were missing. Or, hell, maybe she didn’t know they were in there to begin with.”
I shake my head. We’re supposed to be going straight, but I agreed to do this one last job with Colton. Not our usual work, but the thrill was there all the same. And, fuck, I wanted to help her. But every day she’s with him eats at me. “You can’t stay with her. How are you going to have a real relationship with someone you can’t be honest with?”