by Meg Watson
Each had sold. All had sold. All nine paintings.
Scanning the front gallery, I caught Bridget’s eye. She seemed to have been waiting for me and gave me a huge, glorious grin. Fanning myself deliriously, I made my way through the crowd toward her waiting, open arms.
“I don’t know what you said to them,” she muttered as she smoothed back my hair. I stifled what felt like sobs in my chest and tried to just focus on her words. “But you did it, girl. You really did it.”
I pulled back and smiled up at her. With the gallery lights behind her and her extreme heels, she looked gorgeous yet slightly terrifying, like a mythical creature of some kind.
“I’m as amazed as you are.”
“For sure,” she agreed with a sassy quirk of her painted eyebrow. “But, uh--”
I backed up and stared at her, instantly wary. “But what?”
She wrung her hands in front of her chest and pulled a face. “The buyer wants to see them in place before she commits.”
“No, Bridge!” I shook my head fiercely as all my excitement drained out of me.
“Yes! You’ll take them on Saturday, and it will all be fine!”
“Tomorrow, are you kidding me?”
“Well…” she shrugged helplessly.
“So you marked them all sold. All sold… and they are not sold?”
“I’m sure you’ll sell them,” she said quickly.
I glanced back over my shoulder at the crowd of people milling in the breezeway, gazing at paintings they thought they couldn’t buy.
“You just locked me out of sales I could be making right now, Bridge! Look over there! None of those people think my paintings are available. I could be selling to actual buyers!”
“Well… I mean, you could be… Or not.”
“Fuck you.”
“Listen, I’m sorry,” she said sincerely. “The Burkes set it up and I didn’t feel like I could say no.”
The Burkes. Nice. More men who just as happy to drive you bankruptcy, I thought bitterly. You have got to stop listening to your stupid sex drive.
“You’ll do it, right, Mar?”
“What fucking choice do I have?” I hissed and whirled toward the front door, stalking across the floor as fast as my heels would let me go. Somehow, that brief moment of success and safety left a hole when it left, even bigger than the one that had already been there.
My purse jangled, and I rummaged through it as I walked out the front doors, finally finding my phone at the bottom.
I miss u -Kevin, came the text.
I stared at it for long minutes as I stood on the corner in downtown LA under the changing streetlight. Green, yellow, red. Green, yellow, red. Finally I just slipped the phone back into my bag and started into the crosswalk, aiming for home.
###
TRUSTED
Billionaire Brothers - Book 2
Meg Watson
CHAPTER 1
SATURDAY MORNING, I rolled over into a trapezoid of bright yellow sunlight on the sheets and was immediately sizzling. The summer felt as unrelenting as a prison sentence.
The far side of the bed was empty as usual. I ran my hand along the sheets and traced the outline of Kevin’s absence again and again until my palm went numb from the friction and the gesture became an abstract sworl.
As I rolled over, a bright reflection caught my eye. The tiny diamond M pendant that Declan and Jackson had given me the night before brought back all the memories of the gallery in a rush. At first I grinned shamelessly and my hips resonated with the sensory memory of Jackson and Declan walking arm and arm with me through the gallery… Jackson’s breath on the back of my neck when he placed the pendant on me… and the sensation of being utterly taken over in the dark, metal boat. It had seemed like a dream I had been waiting for my whole life.
But then I remembered I am not that kind of girl. Cringing shame flooded me like a tidal wave and I rolled over and moaned into the pillow. I was supposed to be a professional, and I had acted like… Well, like a professional something, I guess. What would they think of me? Suddenly I wanted a shower. Maybe I could just move away? New name? Go blonde?
I imagined them high-fiving each other like locker room teammates over their mimosas or squeezed pomegranates or whatever it was billionaires had for breakfast. They probably did this sort of thing all the time, and I had cartwheeled like a class-A bimbo right into the middle of whatever game they were playing.
I groped on the table for my cell phone and texted Bridget with my eyes closed.
R U awake?
Holding the cell to my chest, I tried to push the images away. A voice in my head kept saying It’s not that bad, come on, and then the judgey part of me shoved another reminder of just how bad it was. Two at once, remember? the judgey part said, and then played a little mental video clip of that part of the night complete with sounds, sensations and an encore presentation of hot, clenching wetness between my legs. I kicked my feet against the sheets until they billowed around my calves.
Luckily, I didn’t have to wait long for my opportunity to confess. I swear Bridget sleeps with her phone under her pillow just for me.
“What’s up, Buttercup?” came her voice over the line, gravelly with sleep. I heard the small gasp that meant she was lighting up her first cigarette of the day.
“I need you to tell me if I’m crazy.”
“You are for sure crazy.”
“No, seriously, Bridget. I need you to hear this.”
I recounted the whole story to her in a low voice, talking right into the phone’s mic. She didn’t even interrupt me once, which was my first hint that I had really crossed the line this time.
When I finished, she didn’t say anything.
“Are you still there?”
She sighed.
“Seriously, Bridget. Have I freaked you out completely?”
“Completely?” she finally answered. “No. Are they both still alive?”
“Alive? Yes, of course,” I stammered.
“Not chopped up in pieces in the dumpster behind the gallery?”
“Bridget, come on.”
“Well, if they are alive then I am not freaked out completely. There is still room for more freak, is what I am saying.”
I could picture her face clearly in my mind. She was probably still half dressed, having fallen unconscious on her sheets sometime after three am. I imagined her eyebrows knit into a straight line across her nose in disapproval as she smoked her dark brown cigarette.
“OK,” I sighed.
“So let me get this absolutely clear. I sent you to pick up a couple of collectors…”
“Yes.”
“Correction: a couple of whales. I sent you to pick up a couple of fucking whales…”
“Um.”
“And you thought it would be cool to fuck them both…”
“Bridge…”
“Inside a gallery exhibit. Which for all you know was live-streamed onto Twitter.”
“Oh my god, Bridget, was it??”
“How the fuck would I know!” she spat, and I heard her gasp through a choking drag on her smoke. “I don’t keep track of what those art school idiots do with their fucking installation art bullshit! Fuck!”
“OK, OK, sorry,” I said quickly while my mind raced through a fast-forward version of the whole episode. Please, by all that is byzantine and baroque, let them have run out of NEA money.
“OK, what?” she said irritably.
“OK, I know what you’re thinking!”
She laughed, that hard barking sound she made when something was either funny or really not funny.
“Margot, girl, you don’t know what I’m thinking. I don’t even know what I’m thinking.”
“Oh,” I said. I’d never heard that one before.
There was a pause. I heard her flicking the tips of her long acrylic nails against each other.
I waited as long as I could. “I just need you to tell me that I am not crazy.”
She sighed. I vividly imagined the long cone of cigarette smoke shooting up to the ceiling. Man, did I miss smoking.
“I can’t do that,” she said finally. “You may very well be crazy. Or you may be the luckiest bitch I know. The jury is still out.”
I chuckled with relief. “You’re a jerk.”
“No, you’re a jerk. Can I get me some of that? Can I come over?”
“What? Shut up.”
“I could be there in 20. Are they still there?”
I buried my face in the pillow so no one could hear me laughing, then remembered there was no one to hear me anyway. So she wasn’t entirely convinced of my sanity, but she wasn’t writing me off either… Well it could be worse, right?
“No, no... I left them at the gallery, hopefully never to be seen again.”
“Yeah well… That’s too bad. The Burkes are beyond loaded. That could have been just the patronage you needed.”
I shrugged even though she couldn’t see me and tried to form a response that didn’t sound sour-grapey at all. “You know, Declan really enjoyed that carnival installation. They probably wouldn’t have been a fit for me anyway. But I think he was seriously interested in the Tilt-A-Skull.”
“The what?”
“Um, you know… The Tilt-A-Whirl ride with the skulls painted on the backs of the cars or whatever?”
“Ohhh, right… Actually that’s called Still Life With Tangerines And Ennui.”
There was a long sigh as she exhaled what must have been a beautiful vesuvius of smoke.
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope,” she chuckled. “And that thing where you got the double-P? Landscape After A Cleansing Fog.”
“Oh come on.”
“I can’t even make this shit up, Margot.”
“Kind of makes you wonder if the real piece of art is the title, doesn’t it?” I mused.
“Whatever, haha. Snicker all you want: that stuff moved a half mil last night. What did you do again?”
My jaw gaped open.
“It did not!”
I heard her huff as though heaving herself off the bed.
“It did, and you should thank them for keeping your sorry ass on the walls. They paid the rent and then some.”
Cringing, I shook my head. Being still on the walls was not something I was willing to thank anyone for. My paintings hadn’t sold, they had just been reserved. All of them.
Apparently Bridget remembered at the same time. “You need to close that sale today,” she said.
“God, Bridget, I still can’t believe you did that,” I whined. The memory of my elation when I saw the red dots galloped through me, followed closely by the crushing disappointment of “Reserved,” scribbled in pencil on each one.
“And, hey... why am I closing this deal?” I continued. “What do I even have you for if not to, you know, close the deals?”
She made some noise that I was sure came with a shrug, and a scuffling sound meant she was probably half naked by now.
“Am I making commission on this?” I asked sarcastically.
She sighed for an impossibly long time. “Fine.”
“What? Seriously? I was kidding but that would be great.”
“Yeah, whatever, fine,” she said irritably. We had gone way past her ADHD attention span a few minutes ago. I wondered if she would even remember this, but it was a start.
“I’ll give you standard associate commission of twenty percent on top of your fifty.”
“What? Is that what your assistants make?”
I heard the cough-sigh of Done Talking With You.
“I mean I’m just asking,” I said, backing off immediately. “That’s good. It just seems like maybe they would stick around longer with that kind of money.”
“Yeah, well, it’s only money when the deals close, Margot. So get in there and sell your paintings and oh my god what is that noise?”
“What, the noise?” I repeated and sat up, my head cocked like a dog. “Oh that… that’s my doorbell, I guess.”
“Well Jesus, go answer it.”
“Yeah, OK,” I mumbled, kicking my way out of the sheets and looking for a robe.
“I didn’t know you had a doorbell.”
“Well, nobody ever uses it because they come through the studio door except you, and you always just come right in like you own the place.”
Rrrrrinnggggg.
“It’s hideous,” she informed me as I padded down the hallway where it echoed crazily off the slate tiles.
“Yeah, I know… It’s just what came with the… Hi can I help you?” I said, flinging the big door open and staring at the small, crumpled man in the entryway.
“Margot Trask?”
“Who’s there?” Bridget asked in a tinny, receding voice as the phone slid away from my ear.
“Yes, I’m Mar--”
The man shoved a cream colored envelope at me and gave me a little salute, then got back in his Escort while I tore through the seal.
“Who is it? Who’s there?”
“Bridget…”
“Margot?”
I held the letter in front of me, skimming it over and over, assembling a few more words each time into a pattern that made some sort of sense.
“I gotta go, Bridge,” I muttered.
“Who’s at the fucking door?!”
I shook my head and then… shook my head some more.
“It was a process server, Bridge,” I said in a clear, steady voice. “Looks like my house is being foreclosed.”
CHAPTER 2
TRAFFIC DOWNTOWN WAS BRUTAL as always, and I cursed the heat as I sweltered at red lights, wishing I had left the top down on the way there, at least. I recalculated the probable cost of running the AC six times and talked myself out of it over and over. Every penny counted from now on.
It’s a relief in some ways, I reminded myself. I knew this was coming, and now it’s finally here. At least I don’t have to wonder anymore.
Panic rose like bile in my throat, over and over, threatening to overtake me as I drove. Gripping the wheel of my old Saab 900, I forced myself to concentrate on not sweating through my top and grimly focused on my task list.
I tried to corral my panic into productivity, and it turned into something like an old fashioned school teacher pacing the perimeter of a small, glaringly lit prison cell, muttering to herself.
Get the paintings.
Get the address.
Dazzle the fuck out of my buyer.
Ask for cash? Nobody keeps that kind of cash around, dummy. Well, at least get a check. A check deposited today will be available by Monday afternoon, Tuesday morning at the latest. That will be just in time.
That will totally work.
Three days. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Three days to get a cashier’s check and appear in room 404 of the county building to redeem the taxes in person plus 1.5% interest for every quarter they had been late plus of course the redemption fee because obviously a person so desperately in need of redemption should absolutely have to pay an additional fee to obtain it.
The morning traffic went all blurry and surreal as I squinted at the cars in front of me, wishing I knew where my sunglasses were. Finally I swung into the alley behind the gallery and let myself in the service door. My footsteps rang out dramatically across the darkened installation as I crossed the space, my head down, on a mission to simply make it to the breezeway. The air still smelled cloyingly of cotton candy and popcorn, and the polished concrete floor was littered with multicolored mylar strips.
When I got there, Melissa looked up at me with her mouth open, her hands hovering over the crate of wrapped parcels.
“Oh,” she said, surprised, “did you need to see these or something before I finished up?”
“Melissa?”
“Yeah, hi… I hope you don’t mind,” she cringed, looking around uncertainly.
“What? No… actually this is totally cool, saves me having to crate them myself.
I’m just surprised you’re back. I thought you… uh, left.”
She waved her hand in the air like she was wafting away an invisible bong hit. “Oh, no… no… That was all a big misunderstanding, I guess. My band had a thing in Denver… Or no, we didn’t but I thought we did, and--”
“Yeah, that’s cool,” I interrupted. “Listen, do you have the address handy? I don’t even know where I’m taking these.”
She blinked at me in slow, mechanical, delayed-reaction type blinks that were fascinating to watch. For just a moment, looking at her distracted me from the muttering schoolmarm in my brain and her task list mantra.
Close the deal. Close the deal.
“Melissa?”
“I sure do. They’re right here,” she said without acknowledging the delay in any way. Reaching along the floor, she retrieved a sales order slip and held it in the air for me to grasp.
I took it from her and scanned the details. Edna Mayfield... Now why did that sound familiar? And an address that was about a half mile from my house.
“OK, are we good to go then?” I asked, smartly folding the sales invoice in half.
She backed away with her hands up as though surrendering. “Sure, Margot. It’s all ready for you,” she sang in her sleepy voice.
She helped me carry the crate back out through the loading dock door and then somehow we got it into the Saab’s shallow trunk. With a nonchalant wave, she shuffled back inside and was gone.
See? I told myself. This is a sign. Everything is going so smoothly. Got the paintings, got the address. Now go dazzle the buyer.
This will totally work.
Dazzle the buyer, my imaginary schoolmarm reminded me again. Go. Now.
***
I turned onto a street just a couple blocks past my own and then into the curving brick driveway that ran up the hill, through a small lemon grove and to the front door. The house was classic old Hollywood: Spanish architecture, wrought iron flourishes, stucco, marble, and money. The hedges had been clipped into undulating ribbons that raced toward the front door, which was under an elegant arch draped with jasmine and wisteria.