Harlequin Desire June 2020 - Box Set 1 of 2

by Maureen Child

  A few months later she’d hurtled into marriage with the youngest Murphy brother, hauling along a cruise liner’s worth of baggage, all rational thought doused by their hectic sexual attraction.

  Like moths to a flame, rivers flowing to the sea and stars burning out, her landing in Finn’s arms and in his bed had been inevitable.

  Beah was terrified that on meeting him face-to-face again, history might repeat itself.

  Since their divorce they’d both made a silent but concerted effort to avoid each other, even though they both still worked for Murphy International. Living on two different continents helped, and on the few occasions she’d needed Finn’s expert opinion on a painting or an objet d’art, she sent him detailed photographs or, if that didn’t suffice, he met the client on his own.

  They’d made avoiding each other into an art form.

  “Look, I know you can’t possibly be nervous about having a business meeting because you’re nothing like the girl you used to be,” Keely said, returning to their conversation. “You’re head of acquisitions, responsible for advising Murphy’s rich clients on their collections, about what they could acquire and what they should dispose of. You’re smart, funny and gorgeous.”

  This was why every woman needed a best friend, someone to shore up her defenses when the cracks started to show. “You need to remember how far you’ve come, what amazing things you’ve done, Bee.”

  Beah closed her eyes, happy to let her friend talk.

  “You walked out of your marriage and soon afterward you moved back to London, joining Murphy’s UK office. You worked your tail off, clawing your way up the ladder to become one of the most powerful people in the organization. Murphy’s is lucky to have you, Bee, and that’s why they pay you the very big bucks, because they know your clients are loyal to you and will walk if you walk. Hell, you could open your own art consulting company right now and you’d have a list of wealthy clients as long as your arm.”

  Yeah, about that…

  “Um, actually, that reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Beah said, and asked Keely to switch to FaceTime. When Keely’s face appeared on her screen, she smiled at her brown-eyed, blond-haired friend. “There you are…”

  Keely waved her words away, eyes bright with curiosity. “What? Have you met someone?”

  Beah rolled her eyes. “I don’t have time to date.”

  “No, you don’t make time to date because you use your busy work schedule as a shield. You think that if you keep busy, you won’t have time to feel anything for anyone.”

  Okay, a bit too close to the truth. And not something she wanted to think about right now… “Do you want to hear this or not?” Beah demanded.

  Keely handed her that patented, I’m-so-smart smirk. “Sure, go for it. But we will revisit this topic at a later date.”

  Not if Beah could help it.

  “Michael Summers. Have you heard of him?” After Keely shook her head, Beah continued. “He’s a prominent art adviser, consultant and dealer. One of the most respected in the world. He has decades of experience and is an art guru…”

  Beah twisted her vintage flower ring around her middle finger. “He wants to retire and he’s looking for someone to run his business, to start taking over his client list.”

  “You?”

  “Me.” Beah nodded. “It’s a hell of an opportunity, Keels. He’s a legend and I’m honored he wants me to join him. But…”

  “But it would mean leaving Murphy’s.” Keely tapped her finger against her cheek. “Could you still work with Murphy’s or would you be persona non grata?”

  Beah tasted panic in the back of her throat. Murphy’s was the only place she’d ever worked, all she knew.

  Beah pushed her fear away; she was just scared of the unknown. Change was never easy and she hadn’t signed an oath in blood or a lifetime contract to work for Murphy’s.

  She was allowed to move on. “Not that they ever would, but they would be stupid to blackball me because a lot of Michael’s clients purchase art from Murphy International. They’d be cutting off their nose to spite their own face.”

  “And I presume Murphy’s has had other employees leave, other salespeople, nicking their clients?”

  “Sure, it happens all the time.”

  “And Murphy’s has survived?” Keely persisted. “So in this context, you are not thinking of yourself as an employee but as a Murphy, as Finn’s wife.”

  “Ex-wife.” Beah corrected, feeling the familiar pang in her chest. She’d loved adding Finn’s surname to hers. Beah Jenkinson-Murphy felt damn right.

  Had felt right.

  “If you were working for any other company, would you be hesitating?” Keely demanded, as forthright as always.

  “Probably not. This is a hell of an opportunity. And an even bigger commitment. If I take this position, I might be able to schedule dinner with you in, maybe, five years or so. My life will go into hyperdrive.”

  “Mmm, interesting.”

  Beah knew that when Keely said “interesting” in that tone of voice, she had many, many thoughts on the subject. Beah glanced at her watch and grimaced. “Condense your thoughts into two sentences, Keels, or I’m going to be late.”

  “Why haven’t you jumped at Michael’s offer if it’s so amazing, Beah? I suspect it’s because you are letting your personal feelings for your ex and his family cloud your judgment, which is strange because you profess to be very over Finn Murphy.”

  Beah was over him. After nine years, she had to be.

  “Also, apart from the prestige of working for someone of his stature, Michael’s offer also intrigues you because you’d be so busy you wouldn’t have time to think, to feel, to date. It’d be another excuse for you not to engage in real life.”

  This? Again? Beah loved Keely, she did, but her best friend was both opinionated and stubborn. And sometimes, an attack was the best defense. “And you? Are you dating?”

  Keely didn’t flinch at her accusation. “This conversation is about you, not me.” Keely cleared her throat and Beah knew her next words might have the potential to sting. Keely, forthright and honest, rarely pulled her punches.

  “While I hate that you, and Finn, were hurt by your divorce, it was, in many ways, good for you, Beah. You learned to stand on your own two feet, to ask for what you want, to chase down a goal. Though I sometimes do think you’ve become a little too independent.”

  “Is that even possible?”

  “Let me put it this way… I worry you push people away, that you don’t allow anyone to get close.”

  Because that was what Finn had done to her.

  “I’m close to you,” Beah protested.

  “Mostly because I push and pry and keep pounding on the door when you slam it close,” Keely replied.

  Beah couldn’t argue with her.

  Over the past nine years, Keely had been her North Star, her compass point, her bedrock. She didn’t need anything more than to know she was standing in her corner. Keely’s friendship was the equivalent of having her own thirty-girl squad. “I have you, Keels.”

  “But as fabulous as I am,” Keely replied with asperity, “I do not have a pair of big arms, a low voice and a non-female point of view. You need love, Jenkinson, and God knows, you need sex. When did you last go on a date? And for the love of God, do not tell me the last person you had sex with was Finn Murphy,” Keely demanded.

  Beah shook her head. She’d had sex since divorcing her ex. Not often and not great sex, but it still qualified. Just.

  Beah glanced at her watch and grimaced. If she didn’t hustle, she would be late and she was never late. She stood up and tucked her clutch bag under her arm. It was a fantastic excuse to end this frustrating conversation. “I need to go, Keely. My bosses won’t be impressed if I’m late, and Paris Cummings hates tardiness.” />
  “I suppose I should know who Paris is but I don’t,” Keely said, sounding peeved.

  “Art collector, old money, a property developer. Reclusive and grumpy.” Beah said, heading for the door. Paris Cummings was an art collector she’d been pursuing for years, and she had to attend this dinner and help woo the stubborn collector to their side of the fence.

  And that meant sitting at the same table as her ex-husband, pretending they hadn’t spent the best part of a decade avoiding each other.

  Beah blew Keely a kiss and tucked her phone back into her clutch. She placed the bag under her arm and pulled an insouciant smile onto her face.

  She was no longer the impulsive wild child who, within a week of meeting Finn Murphy, moved into his luxurious apartment and married him in Vegas on the three-month anniversary of the day they met.

  She was successful. She was confident. She was in control…

  At the entrance to the very upmarket restaurant, Beah smiled at the maître d’ and surrendered her coat. Resisting the urge to check that no red curls had escaped her smooth chignon, she looked over the exquisitely decorated dining room, her eyes immediately going to the best table in the room.

  As if he could feel her eyes, Finn jerked his head up and their gazes clashed.

  Beah’s feet felt glued to the floor and she couldn’t pull her eyes off his masculine, oh-so-handsome face. There was a hint of the nerd he’d once been, in the wire-rimmed glasses over sharply intelligent eyes and a slow-to-smile mouth. A close-cropped, super-short beard covered his cheeks and jaw; his dark blond hair was overlong and could do with a trim but his shoulders were wide in a designer suit, exquisitely tailored for his tall frame.

  Finn pushed his way to his feet, unfurling his long, muscled body. He wore a black shirt without a tie and his eyes, a light green, remained on her with laser-like intensity.

  He used to look at her like that while they were making love, as he was about to slide into her. Like she was a puzzle he didn’t understand but needed to complete…

  “Ms. Jenkinson? Ma’am?”

  Beah heard her name being called from a place far away and wrenched her eyes off Finn onto the concerned face of the maître d’.

  “The Misters Murphy are expecting you and, I’m sure, delighted to have you join them.” He gestured her to precede him.

  Beah forced herself to cross the room, to keep her face impassive. Yeah, she could pretty much guarantee Finn Murphy was not delighted to see her.

  She wasn’t thrilled to see him, either.

  Fifteen minutes earlier…

  It was just another dinner with another client in a swanky restaurant. While he wasn’t a fan of the concept, he’d attended more than a few as an owner of Murphy International.

  There was no reason to feel nervous.

  Finn Murphy lifted his hand to loosen the tie cutting off his air supply and silently cursed when he realized he wasn’t wearing a tie and the collar to his black shirt was open.

  He was not nervous. Stressed maybe, but not nervous. He and his brothers were in the final stretch of preparing for one of the biggest art auctions in a generation and it was his responsibility to ensure every piece auctioned—including paintings by the old masters, impressionists and cubists, negatives by Ansel Adams, and one of the best collections of Jade in the world—was beyond question and reproach. Every provenance for roughly eight hundred items needed to be checked, verified, collated.

  If his nerves didn’t play up when he was falling off three-hundred-foot buildings BASE jumping or flying down black-diamond ski runs, then he had no reason to feel jittery while waiting for the arrival of one of the wealthiest art collectors in the world.

  And his wife.

  Ex-wife, dammit.

  Finn picked up his water glass, put it down again and reached for his glass of red wine, lifting the crystal rim to his lips. He would not look at his older brother, not just yet. Carrick could look past Finn’s devil-may-care attitude to the rolling mess below his seemingly steady surface.

  He didn’t want to talk about how the thought of seeing Beah again, even if it was just a business dinner, made him feel nerv—a little tense. They’d once been as close as two people could legally be; now they were little more than across-the-pond work colleagues, vague acquaintances.

  “Take a deep breath, Finn.”

  Finn narrowed his eyes at Carrick. His oldest brother looked calm and controlled, but amusement flickered in his light green eyes. Finn considered, as subtly as he could manage it, flipping off his brother. At fifteen, when he’d been the biggest rebel and pain in the ass, that might’ve been his reaction. At thirty-three, he was way past acting like a child. Or he should be.

  But the urge was there.

  “Why are you acting like a cat on a hot tin roof?” Carrick asked, picking up his tumbler of whiskey.

  “I’m fine,” Finn replied through gritted teeth. “You know I prefer to be left out of these client dinners. I’m not good at making small talk.”

  It wasn’t a lie—he really wasn’t. Carrick and Ronan were able to charm and coerce, to make small talk, but Finn tended to be too terse, too abrupt. His bluntness was legendary throughout Murphy International. There was a reason why he preferred to work alone, why he buried his head in books and texts and research. He was better with art and objects than he was with people. Inanimate objects didn’t talk back, dammit.

  He was the company nerd, the brain, the Murphy recluse. He had no problem with any of those descriptions. They were all, to a degree, true.

  Carrick’s gaze was steady. “You are here because Cummings wants to meet you. Apparently he’s quite a fan.”

  Finn snorted. “He’s a fan? You make me sound like the front man of a boy band.”

  “He was very impressed that, despite being blasted by every authority on D’Arcy, you refused to cave when the art world insisted you were wrong.”

  This again? Years ago, fresh out of college with a PhD in art history, he’d published a paper suggesting the painting Thief in the Night, by the celebrated French artist, was painted by one of his apprentices and not by the master himself.

  He’d been called an upstart and arrogant and worse, but he hadn’t cared then and didn’t care now. He knew what he knew and was rarely proved wrong. It had taken a year, and a series of forensic tests, for the art world to accept he was right. The owner of the D’Arcy, whose painting lost millions because Finn refused to budge, was still not a fan. But as Murphy International’s head of world art, Finn’s responsibility was to the art, not to the owners.

  “Anyway, Paris Cummings was impressed by your research and your steadfastness under intense pressure.”

  Finn picked up his wineglass and swirled the liquid around the bowl. “I don’t regret sticking to my guns but I do regret the bad PR around that incident.”

  His arrogant attitude hadn’t helped. Back then he’d been particularly impressed with himself, thinking his double degree in art and forensics, and his ability to speak a half dozen languages, made him special, and he’d liked his reputation for being something of an art genius. He most definitely hadn’t liked being questioned. Admittedly, he’d been a bit of an ass.

  These days, after a failed marriage and a decade to grow the hell up, he wasn’t so quick to tell people he was better, smarter, quicker. He’d come to realize that while he was smart in certain areas—he excelled at anything book-based and was naturally sporty—he was shockingly bad with people.

  Unlike his brothers, he wasn’t emotionally intelligent. Concepts were easy; people weren’t.

  People, and their sticky, complicated psyches, were a complete mystery to him. He didn’t think that would change anytime soon.

  Finn leaned back in his chair and glanced at his oldest brother. His brother and Sadie—the art detective he’d hired to do a deep delve into a painting that might
be a lost Homer—were engaged and besotted with each other. The air crackled whenever they were in the same room and the glances they exchanged were blowtorch-hot.

  Ronan, the middle Murphy brother, was also currently distracted by his, so he said, inconvenient attraction to Joa, his temporary nanny.

  Finn’s brothers’ preoccupation with their women suited Finn; it took their attention off him—BASE jumping, Finn, are you mad? Shark diving without a cage? You take too many risks—and he was grateful for the reprieve. They didn’t understand his need for adrenaline, his willingness to push the envelope.

  He didn’t understand why, after experiencing divorce and death, they were even flirting with love and commitment, so he considered them even.

  To Finn, handing over his heart was the biggest risk of all. Allowing oneself to be vulnerable was, to him, the most dangerous thing one could do.

  He’d tried love once but hadn’t allowed himself to go all the way, to risk everything, with Beah. And, not surprisingly, their marriage had crashed and burned.

  Carrick pulled back the cuff to his designer jacket to check his watch. “Cummings will want to talk art with you. He’s a bit of an art history and science buff. Just go along with it. Beah and I will jump in if you start getting…impatient.”

  Finn knew Carrick wanted to add irritated.

  But holding an intellectual conversation with one of the world’s wealthiest collectors of art, in front of Beah—the woman who still starred in his every sexual fantasy—was going to be a challenge.

  “I saw your email saying you are wanting to take some vacation time in a few weeks. Where are you going?” Carrick asked.

  “Ice climbing in Colorado.”

  Three, two, one…