She moved past the front desk on her way out, giving a little nod to Becca and letting her eyes linger on the handsome man sitting there. "It's a very nice gallery," she said politely, not wanting to just walk out. She might not be buying anything, but she'd still be polite.
"Thank you," Becca replied, equally politely. The man beside her said nothing, but his smile grew a little wider as he watched April head for the door, as if he'd guessed that she would be leaving empty-handed, and she was proving him right.
For a moment, April nearly turned back and asked that man for his name, if he worked here, if he had any art of his own. Her mind briefly danced with fantasies of him taking her out to dinner to discuss his artwork, maybe even drawing her into those big, strong arms to give her a hug in thanks for listening to him discuss his passion...
Oh, if only she had come here as a young woman! Sure, April had a couple men at the senior center express interest in her, and Bill was actually rather handsome when he combed his white hair back, but neither of them could hold a candle to this perfect specimen. Stepping out into the hot air, April heaved a last sigh of regret.
On her way here from the hotel where she was staying for this weekend getaway, she'd passed a shop with all sorts of Davis-themed gear, sponsored by the University of California campus that squatted in the southwest corner of town. April didn't approve on principle of college kids, considering them to be immature and rude, but she could perhaps duck into that store and find a suitable souvenir to bring home.
Wincing at how the heat made little beads of sweat pop out instantly on her skin after she'd grown used to the cooler air inside of the Halesford Gallery, April set off back in the direction of her hotel, heading down the sidewalk and doing her best to keep out of the direct sun. If that young man in the gallery had been dating Becca, she hoped that the woman appreciated what a catch she had sitting next to her. Men like that certainly didn't come along every day.
April closed her eyes for a moment, letting her fantasies grow inside her head. Maybe, if she was thirty years younger, that man might have come dashing out of the gallery after her, begged her to come and join him for a drink or two. Then, with those drinks giving her courage, she might even think of doing the unthinkable and asking him to accompany her back to her hotel room for a wild night...
With a sigh, April Henderson opened her eyes and pulled herself reluctantly back to the present. Ah, to be young again!
Chapter Two
*
I sighed as I watched the old woman leave, her arms empty. "Another day, just like usual," I complained.
Next to me, Carter James pulled his feet down from where he'd propped them up on the desk, stretching his big arms up over his head and making his muscles in his torso and shoulders bulge even more than usual. "Totally won that bet," he said. "I knew that she wasn't going to buy anything."
"Yeah, and I didn't agree to bet you anything," I replied. "Besides, that's ninety percent of the senior citizens who wander in here. They look around, fantasize about you for a minute, and then leave."
Carter paused, his grin slipping slightly. "Fantasize about me? That old lady wasn't fantasizing about me."
"Are you kidding?" I burst out, trying to hold back my laughter. "She totally had a lady's version of an erection from the moment that she set eyes on you! If you'd offered to take her out for a drink, she probably would have had a heart attack on the spot from excitement!"
Carter shook his head at me, his relaxed attitude slightly shaken. "I don't believe it."
"Believe it," I told him, reaching out and grabbing one of his arms, pulling it against me and feeling his muscles flex beneath the skin. "Ladies, young and old alike, fantasize about what it would be like to feel you do the nasty deed with them."
"All ladies?" he asked, turning towards me and reaching out to loop his other hand around my waist. "That include you, too?"
"Maybe," I said, trying to ignore how his arms around me sent a spark racing up the length of my spine, burying itself in the base of my brain and reminding me just how sexy Carter James could be when he set his mind to it. "Mostly not."
He just grinned, drawing me in closer. "Becca, you can't lie to me. I can see right through you."
I smiled back at him - damn it, I couldn't help it, he just looked so adorably cute - but I didn't let his perfect smile charm me completely. "But that's the problem, too," I said, dragging my eyes off of his so that he wouldn't sucker me into kissing him right here where anyone could walk in and see us.
"Your attraction to me is a problem?"
"No, you idiot," I said without rancor, standing up and extracting myself from his arms. "My problem is that this place doesn't get a lot of foot traffic, and of the few people who do come wandering in, ninety percent of them leave without buying anything."
"At least it gives you plenty of time to flirt with me," Carter said, clearly still thinking with a part of his anatomy other than his brain, but I took another step away so that he couldn't tug me back into another embrace.
"Sure, but what it doesn't give me is money - commission, payment, cash, moolah, all of that," I went on. "And right now, I'm barely keeping up on my various bills. I really need to find some way to get more people in here, or at least more people who are seriously willing to buy something."
Carter sighed, his flirtatious smile dropping off of his face. "You know, that's the challenge in businesses like this," he said, his tone more serious. "Same thing happens with real estate. Lots of people come through, but ninety percent of them aren't planning on actually buying anything, and never will. It's a lot of fishing, sorting through all of the little nibbles in order to find someone who will actually bite."
"I don't think that's how fishing works," I said after a moment, frowning at him.
He shrugged. "Come on, Becca, look at me. Look at this suit. Do I look like I go fishing much?"
"You look like an ass, that's what I think," I told him, laughing and dodging aside as he swung a mock fist at me. "By the way, you still haven't told me what you're doing here in the first place, anyway. Aren't you supposed to be off running your own business?"
Carter pursed his lips at me, although he made even that expression look hopelessly sexy. My friendship with Carter only spanned back over the last month, but I already felt comfortable with him, something that often took a considerable amount of time. I didn't know exactly how to define what we had between us, but whatever it was, I liked it.
I'd first met Carter a month previously, when I first started running this art gallery. I claimed that I took over the day-to-day management of the Halesford Gallery as a favor to my uncle, Preston Halesford himself, but in truth I didn't have anywhere else to turn for help out of my desperate situation. Fresh out of a divorce from a greedy, cheating lump of an ex-husband, I needed a quick way to earn enough money to pay for my liabilities from the failed marriage, and I turned to selling art as my last resort.
Somehow, to even my own surprise, I managed to make it work. With only a couple days left before the deadline for making the payment to my ex-husband, I managed to sell a big piece, one with a six-figure price tag, and earned enough commission to buy my complete and total freedom from that crashing failure of a marriage!
Along the way, I'd also struck up a relationship with Carter James, the man sitting beside me and easily driving me half-crazy with all his flirting. Carter worked as a commercial real estate agent, helping rent out buildings in town to various businesses. He bought a fair amount of art from the Halesford Gallery to decorate the spaces that he showed off to clients, so I'd been ordered by my uncle from day one to keep Carter happy.
For some reason, Carter decided that he wanted to sweep me off my feet and try and carry me off to bed! I did my best to hold off his advances politely, but I couldn't deny the attraction that I felt towards him. Despite just getting out of a disaster of a marriage, I let him take me out to lunch, then dinner, and then eventually back to the cute little house tha
t he owned.
Still, I wasn't totally ready to commit to a new relationship so soon after my last one ended, so I tried to keep our interactions late. Carter tolerated my standoffishness, it seemed - but he never missed a chance to slip in a flirtatious comment, if only to make me blush beet red.
Now, Carter just shrugged, still sitting behind the front desk of the art gallery. "I'm waiting for clients to call me," he answered. "It's the best way to run a business - I put out the feelers, wait for a client to express interest, and bam! Reel them in, tug them into my net, and sign a contract. Dinner, all caught!"
"You really need to improve your fishing metaphors," I told him, shaking my head.
"But seriously, maybe you can think of a way to improve the business," Carter went on, sitting up a little. "Here, you're complaining that the problem is that you're not getting much foot traffic, right? How could you fix that?"
I tried to think of some solutions. "Maybe hold some sort of social event?" I suggested after a minute. "Or offer something to people to get them in the door. Some sort of advertising, perhaps? Or feature a new artist, someone who can draw a lot of people in?"
"All good ideas," Carter nodded, but I was already shaking my head.
"Yeah, they're good ideas," I went on, "but most of them won't work without me putting in money - which I don't have! I don't have any extra funds to offer people free stuff, or to pay for advertising. And we haven't gotten a new artist in a while. So there go all my ideas, shot down right away."
I sat back down in my chair, dropping my forehead down until it pressed against the cool surface of the desk in front of me. "Hopeless," I finished, speaking into the stack of papers beneath my head.
After a moment, I felt Carter's hand settle softly on my back. Thankfully, he didn't try any moves on me this time. Instead, he just softly rubbed back and forth with my knuckles across my shoulder blades. It felt seductively good, but I didn't lift my head up yet.
"I'm sure something will come along," he told me. "Besides, when things do start happening, they'll all come at once, and you'll be thinking wistfully back to times like now, when you weren't so stressed. Try and enjoy the peace before the storm hits."
"Thanks for the Zen wisdom," I said sarcastically into the papers beneath my head.
He chuckled. "You know the expression about the ancient Chinese curse, don't you?"
I shook my head.
"'May you live in interesting times,'" Carter quoted.
"And that's a curse?"
"Yep. It sounds like a great thing - up until it happens to you, and all you want is for things to relax, calm down, and go back to boring old normal."
Still with my head down, I considered this proverb for another minute or two. "Nope, I don't see it," I finally said, lifting my head back up and brushing my forehead in case any of the papers decided to cling to my skin. "I would still rather be in interesting times than boring ones."
And as if on cue, waiting for me to speak those very words, my phone started to ring in my purse.
Both Carter and I paused, and exchanged a glance with each other. "The curse!" he whispered to me, wiggling his fingers in a manner that might have been intended to appear spooky (although in truth, it reminded me of an attempt at doing "jazz hands").
"Knock it off," I told him as I reached for my purse. I felt around until my fingers closed on the hard, vibrating rectangle, and I pulled it out.
"Who is it?"
I frowned, looking down at the caller ID. "It's my Uncle Preston," I responded.
"As in Preston Halesford, the owner of the gallery?"
"One and the same." I swiped my finger across the phone to answer the call, turned and shushed Carter by holding that finger up to my lips in the universal gesture for "quiet," and then lifted the phone up to my ear. "Hello?" I said.
"Hi there, Becca! How are things going?"
"Um, hi to you too, Uncle," I replied, not sure why he decided to call. "Things are going fine; there's not much new. It's pretty quiet here." Had Uncle Preston heard something bad about the gallery? Was I in trouble? He'd never called me before, so I wasn't sure what might have changed.
"Great, great. So you're not too busy then, are you?"
"No?" I answered, feeling like this might be the wrong response to give. Maybe he was going to give me some unenviable task, like cleaning out the mess of disorganized papers that he'd left behind in the back storage area, or trying to figure out which members of the artists' collective had died and were no longer coming in to pick up their residual checks.
"Great, that's good to hear. I mean, not particularly, but it's good in this case." Preston paused, muttering something to himself.
"Uncle?" I asked. "What's going on?"
"An opportunity, that's what's going on!" he responded. "And as soon as I heard about it, I knew that you were just the right person to put in charge of this new task."
"Oh. Great."
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of Carter raising his eyebrows. "May you live in interesting times," he mouthed at me.
If he wasn't so damn sexy when he smiled at me, I would have punched him...
***
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Chapter One
*
"Admiral" Theodore Whiskers was missing.
Although I didn't want to even consider the possibility, I felt my blood pressure rising as I moved from room to room in my little house. I knew all of his usual hiding spots, but with each place that turned up empty, my heart rate ratcheted up by another ten beats per minute.
"Whiskers!" I called out, trying to keep my voice from cracking. "Come on out, buddy! Where are you hiding?"
Nothing. Not even a meow.
In desperation, I turned to the big guns - the wet food. I grabbed one of his cans of cat food from the cupboard, holding it out in the middle of the kitchen as I pulled on the metal tab to pop off the top. The sound of the seal breaking resonated throughout my little cottage, but I still saw no sign of the large orange tabby.
Dammit, I cursed, trying to use anger to control my rising panic. Now, just when I had so many other problems that I should be addressing in my life, my cat had to vanish.
I set the open can of cat food down on the counter, vaguely hoping that maybe Whiskers would come out and approach it on his own. He wasn't what anyone could call slender or svelte, after all, and he'd grown used to getting his can of wet food in the morning, chowing down while I dosed myself with caffeine. I picked up my still-steaming cup of coffee, taking a sip and hoping that the jolt of energy would bring inspiration with it.
Should I call the police? The Truckee Firefighting Department? I knew that they (firefighters) were the ones to call about cats stuck in trees, at least according to popular myth, but I didn't know what they could do about missing cats. Thank goodness that I didn't have any children, I thought grimly to myself. I couldn't even keep a damn cat without losing him - and then panicking.
Okay, Elaine. You can handle this. Just stay calm.
What would a calm, normal, rational person do in this situation?
I took another sip of my coffee, focusing very hard on keeping my hand from trembling. There we go, I told myself. Just relax. Everything is under control. No need to panic.
A normal person wouldn't bother calling out Whiskers' name, because he never responded to his name. I didn't even know if he knew his name - how cou
ld I tell?
So, running around the neighborhood frantically shouting out "Admiral Theodore Whiskers!" was out.
A normal person would first search her house, looking for where her damn cat might be hiding. Check. I'd already checked all of his usual nooks and crannies, with no luck.
Next, a normal person would look for possible escape routes. How could he have gotten out? I normally kept the house on tight lockdown, since he'd previously shown that he was willing to claw through a screen door-
My eyes drifted up, above the sink full of dirty dishes that I'd been meaning to roll up my sleeves and wash for the last few days. They settled on the open window above the sink, my curtains flapping gently in the slight spring breeze that blew into my little cottage from the outdoor world.
Dammit.
Okay, my cat has managed to get outside. But he can't have gotten far, I'm sure. He's a big, fat, lazy orange lump, and he's not especially inquisitive. I bring home cat treats and toys for him all the time, and he usually only prods them for a minute or two before giving up on them and pretending that they don't exist. He wouldn't be tempted to run away.
Sure, because cats are totally logical creatures. Right.
I took a deep breath, downed one more gulp of my coffee, and then headed outside. "Here, Admiral Whiskers," I called out softly, just in case anyone I knew happened to be out for a morning jog and passed by my house. Didn't want to give the impression that I'd gone totally around the bend. "Here, kitty kitty. Where are you?"
There weren't many places in my sparse backyard for my cat to hide, at least. The grass was fairly short, most of it slowly turning brown from lack of water and attention. I most definitely did not possess a green thumb. A couple scraggly bushes stood around the edges, up against the wooden fence that separated my backyard from the Winterhearst mansion on the property next door. At least that fence would surely prevent my cat from getting out of the yard - it stood a little over five feet high, made of wooden slats bolted onto beams running the length of my yard-
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