Discover Me & You, A Devil's Kettle Romance: Book 2

by Susan Sey

  She stepped to the side, grasped the sheet and pulled it free of the frame.

  Even Eli gasped. It was like Diego had taken the joyful optimism of his Angel and run it through a nightmare machine. It was still unmistakably Addison on the canvas, and she lay across a rumpled bed in much the same attitude as in the Angel but that was where the similarities ended. This Addison was face-down, wracked with grief, her body exposed rather than revered. In Diego’s Angel, she wore silk and the artist’s devotion. In Broken, she wore ill-suited lingerie, the artist’s dissatisfaction, and her own shattered heart. Grief and pain and disappointed expectations oozed from the frame and wrapped ugly tendrils around Eli’s heart. He found himself rubbing his sternum as he gazed at it, trying to break free.

  Georgie stepped forward. “Beginning tomorrow, Broken will be on permanent display right here on the central wall of the gallery, a bookend to Diego’s Angel. But beginning tomorrow evening, we’ll veil both it and the Angel and direct patrons first to Diego After Dark, the collection on display in the private gallery.” She tipped her head toward the white curtain at the back of the gallery. “Diego After Dark is a selection of Diego’s work we’ve never, as my mother mentioned, shown before. It begins with some teenaged pencil sketches and progresses chronologically through each era of his career, culminating in the Angel and Broken, side by side. We recommend you all experience the collection in this way, as it gives his later work such context and depth. The subject matter is graphic, however, so you’re welcome to simply view the Angel and Broken if you’d rather. Either way, you’ll see that Diego was both a complicated man and a great artist. We hope you’ll join us in celebrating him.”

  The crowd surged toward the curtain.

  “Should we get in line?” Eli asked.

  Willa reached up as if to snug her ball cap down but it wasn’t there. Her hand fluttered back to her side and she dipped her head. “I’ve already seen it,” she said.

  He tugged her hand until she looked up at him. “We can go, you know. If you don’t want to be here, just say the word and we’re out.”

  “No.” She set her lips. “We’ll stay. Addy asked me to be here. I’m not bailing on her.”

  “Okay. But, Willa, if you don’t want—”

  “I’m fine. I’m maybe not fully dressed, but I’m fine.” She nodded toward Addy, standing bravely between both versions of herself, her smile tight, her hand secure in her fiancé’s. “Let’s go see how she is.”

  Two hours later, the gallery was nearly empty and Willa’s feet ached intolerably. Having no role at this party, and no particular desire to look at any of Diego’s work, Willa had appointed herself to the wait staff, freshening champagne glasses and restocking the doughnut tree while keeping a gimlet eye on Addy. Her friend’s smile had loosened up over the course of the event — the bottomless glass of champagne Willa kept in her hand had probably helped — and lately even Jax didn’t look like he wanted to toss everybody bodily into the street. Eli, bless him, had dutifully and silently pitched in, no questions asked. She might love him just for that, if she didn’t love him already.

  She froze there in the little kitchenette off the private gallery, an empty champagne bottle halfway to the recycling container. Did she love him already? Was she in love with Eli Walker?

  “Here,” he said behind her. She whirled, startled, and Eli stuffed a doughnut hole into her mouth. “There was only one left and I really want to recycle this box. Thank you for your sacrifice. If I ate one more, I was going to puke.”

  The chocolate melted sinfully in her mouth and she realized she’d never eaten the doughnut hole Eli had hand-picked for her hours ago. Nor had she finished her single glass of champagne. But she’d survived this night without anybody else comparing her to her mother or obviously ogling her chest, so she was calling it a win. She closed her eyes, dropped the champagne bottle in the recycling and took a moment to just savor the chocolate in her mouth and the man who’d put it there. Tomorrow was soon enough to worry about why he’d put it there, why he seemed to like feeding her, or why she seemed to like it when he did. Because he seemed to have taken an interest in her body, a very proprietary one. But whereas that sort of attention typically made her cringe, coming from Eli, it only made her insides shiver. In a good way. A hot way. A…happy way. And that should worry her. A lot.

  Tomorrow, she assured herself. She would worry about all of it tomorrow.

  Eli shoved the doughnut box into the recycling, put his fists in his lower back and stretched. “Good Christ. I’d forgotten how much people love free food.”

  “Free alcohol is worse,” Willa managed, and swallowed her doughnut. “I think Nan alone put away two bottles.”

  Eli grinned and shook his head. “I wouldn’t doubt it. I might be in love with that old lady.”

  “Send me a postcard from the Shire, will you?”

  He laughed and Bianca appeared in the doorway.

  “Willa,” she said. “A word?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer but withdrew into the private gallery that housed Diego After Dark. Foreboding immediately soured the chocolate in Willa’s stomach. She glanced at Eli. He lifted baffled shoulders, and they followed Bianca into the room where Willa had stared down Georgie the day before. The room from which she’d evicted a chipmunk a few days before that. The room where she’d last seen Matty, who was growing up so fast and so beautifully and so very far away from her.

  Bianca saw Eli and stiffened. “If you’ll excuse us.” She smiled politely at him. “I’d like to speak to Willa privately.”

  Eli turned to Willa. “Your call.”

  “Stay. Please.” But she folded her arms when he would’ve reached for her hand. She wanted that comfort, wanted it desperately, but knew she shouldn’t take it. Couldn’t afford to. Her gut had been telling her all week that something bad was brewing. That this sea-change in Bianca’s attitude couldn’t portend anything good for Willa’s future. It looked like Bianca was finally ready to drop the other boot, and everything in her screamed to send Eli away. To protect him from the knowledge of who she was and what she’d done, but also to protect herself from the sight of disappointment and confusion replacing the affection and warmth in his eyes when he looked at her.

  But wasn’t that why Willa had asked Eli to come with her tonight in the first place? So he’d know who she was here? So he’d know everything? So the fragile seedling of love burrowing its way into her heart could get squashed before it did any real damage?

  Bianca shrugged elegantly. “As you like.” She strolled to the far end of the long, narrow room, past the thin ledge running the length of the wall on her right. The ledge was about chest high, and on it were perched frames of various sizes and shapes. Spotlights on the ceiling bathed each work in its own individual aura of golden light. A small chest of drawers stood against the far wall next to a discreetly closed bathroom door, and Bianca pulled from the chest three small frames. She placed them on the ledge with the other pictures, as if they would be the collection’s new opening salvo. She stepped back and gestured for Willa to look.

  Willa obeyed, her heart pounding, her mouth dry, but unable to do otherwise. They were pencil sketches, she saw immediately, their black frames echoing the bold, black strokes on thick, creamy paper. Bianca pressed a beautifully lettered placard to the wall above them that read simply Diego at Fifteen.

  “I found these in one of Diego’s old sketchbooks,” Bianca told her. “I don’t know why I'd even saved it. I’d flipped through it before and only found geometry proofs. It was in one of the boxes that tipped over the other day when you were working back here and that chipmunk got loose. I grabbed the sturdiest book from the pile to swat at it, and there they were.” She waved a hand at the frames, then paused. “There you were.”

  “Wait, this is you?” Eli asked, leaning forward to examine the sketches more closely. Willa couldn’t speak. She could hardly breathe. Hot panic skittered across her icy skin, scalding and mercil
ess. She reached desperately for her thinnie, closed her eyes and poured herself into the effort. She found it somewhere deep in her soul, dragged it into ruthless focus and let the ageless peace of it sweep through her.

  “Willa?” Eli asked again. “This is you?”

  CHAPTER 23

  SHE OPENED HER eyes and found him gazing down at her, those huge blue eyes filled with surprise and…concern? How odd. She tipped her head and studied the sketches. “These two I remember.” She pointed at the first two frames where a few confident pencil strokes had captured a girl, fully nude and asleep in the summer grass. In the first, she had one foot planted on the ground, the knee upraised, one arm and a tumble of wild hair over her face while she slept. In the other, she’d rolled away from the artist’s eye, and his pencil had flowed in one long, lovely line from her shoulder to her ankle, capturing the inchoate curve of a hip just beginning its reach toward womanhood.

  “That one?” She waved a hand at the third sketch. The setting was the same, and the subject was still nude but the artist had focused on just her naked back this time. All that hair tumbled toward lush, rounded hips, and there was a knowing, almost coquettish arch to the spine, as if the subject were sending an invitation through her lashes to the artist behind her. “I don’t remember that one at all.”

  She had her suspicions, yes. A memory, however? No.

  “The sketches were undated,” Bianca went on, “but we checked Diego’s school records. He took geometry in ninth grade, so we’re assuming these were drawn the summer between his freshman and sophomore years.”

  It had been the summer before freshman year for Willa. The summer before she’d begun high school, when the future was still something she looked forward to.

  The curtain separating them from the main gallery twitched and Georgie appeared. “Addy and Jax are seeing our stragglers to the door,” she announced. “I told them to just go home, that we’d lock—” She saw Willa and stopped. “Oh. You’re doing this now?”

  “What choice do I have?” Bianca lifted slender shoulders. “Devil Days opens tomorrow and these sketches are too important not to show.” Willa felt Bianca’s eyes on her, focused and sharp. “They’re the prologue to Diego’s entire career, and give this showing the context it needs.”

  “I thought you were going to talk to Matty first.” Georgie drifted over to them with her usual lazy grace, though she wore an unhappy frown. Willa crossed trembling arms over her chest, tucked her cold fingers into her elbows and swallowed a lump of terror. For years, she’d wanted nothing more than to know Matty. To be allowed to love him. He wouldn’t love her back, nor did she expect him to. She was practically a stranger to him. But what if Bianca finally stepped out from between them, and he hated her? Once he knew the whole story, how could he not hate her?

  How could this not have occurred to her before?

  “I would have spoken to him if he’d gotten home on time,” Bianca said, rolling her eyes. “I only agreed to let him go on this silly field trip because that coach of his promised me he’d be here in time for tonight’s preview.” She flicked the irritation away with one hand. “Ah, well. It’s probably better this way. We should know how Willa plans to respond before we start that conversation with Matty, anyway.”

  Behind the bathroom door, a toilet flushed. Bianca froze, her eyes going wide and latching onto Georgie’s. Georgie shrugged, her eyes equally wide. The sink ran, and Bianca stepped gracefully in front of the new frames. The door opened, and Gerte stepped into the room.

  “Beg pardon,” she said. “Am I interrupting—” She leaned around Bianca to glance at the new frames on the wall. “Were those there earlier?” She stepped over to peer at them. “Goodness, no, they weren’t. I’d have remembered these. Diego at fifteen, eh?” She pinched her lips together and shook her head. “Fifteen years old, and already getting girls naked in the grass. How very…unsurprising.” She sent a smile of poisonous sweetness to Georgie. “You’d have been, what, thirteen or fourteen that summer?” She shook her head in wonder. “My gracious, what an adventurous year for the Davis children.” She shifted that smile to Bianca. “You must be so proud.”

  Willa blinked at that one, momentarily lost. Then she remembered that most of the town suspected Matty to be Georgie’s bastard, not Diego’s. This would’ve made Georgie barely fourteen at conception, and Gerte was only too happy to shame Bianca for having raised such dirty children. Beside her, Eli stood in silence, his head swiveling like he was at a tennis match. Before Bianca could eviscerate Gerte with one of those icy set-downs she was so good at, the emergency exit swung open and Matty appeared, flushed and breathless.

  “Hey,” he called and wrestled his duffle bag and lacrosse stick through the narrow doorway. “Sorry I’m so late. Adam thought it would be funny to make a pot joke at the border and we almost had an international incident.” The door banged shut and he hustled over to join them. “Is it over? Did I miss it?” There was a beat of taut silence, everybody evidently at the same loss for words. Matty frowned. “What? What’s going on?”

  “Nothing, dear.” Gerte smiled primly. “Goodness, look at you! You’re practically all grown up these days, aren’t you? How old are you now?”

  “I’ll be fourteen in a few days.”

  Gerte sent a significant look toward the placard that read Diego at Fifteen. “Any girlfriends yet?”

  “Uh, no,” Matty stammered, baffled and embarrassed. “I haven’t, I mean, I’m not—”

  “Ignore her, Matty,” Georgie drawled. “She’s trying to slut-shame me, and you’re just getting caught in the cross-fire.”

  “Why, Georgie!” Gerte widened her eyes innocently. “What a thing to say! I was only making conversation!”

  “No, you were implying that if Diego could talk a girl out of her clothes at fifteen, and if I — as rumor loves to have it — could get pregnant with Matty here at fourteen, then we really ought to keep a sharp eye on this kid before he goes off the rails, too.”

  “Georgie, enough,” Bianca said quietly. “Gerte, I think it’s time to say goodnight.”

  “You’re wrong, you know,” Matty said to Gerte, his voice flat. “About Georgie. She’s not my mother.”

  “Well of course she isn’t,” Gerte said quickly. “My word, who ever said she was?”

  “Everybody.” He laughed bitterly. “But guess what? I’m not stupid. I’m not deaf, either. You think I don’t know that I’m adopted? You think I don’t know that Georgie’s your top choice for my birth mother? Did you honestly think a town like this could keep a secret like that?”

  Gerte didn’t say a word, only gaped at Matty like a bemused fish.

  “I don’t know what kind of sick thrill you get out of talking about it all the time, or out of calling my sister a slut. I don’t really care, honestly. But since you’re so curious, you might be interested to know that I actually do know who one of my birth parents is.”

  Willa’s heart stopped. It froze inside her chest. Her hands and feet went dangerously numb and her lips tingled. Blackness pressed on the edge of her vision and she concentrated on pulling deep, even breaths into her lungs. Even as her head threatened to float away like a balloon, she breathed. Eli’s hand found the small of her back.

  “Easy,” he murmured. “Steady.”

  “You do?” Gerte sounded sincerely shocked.

  “Of course I do. I look just like him.”

  “But you look just like Diego,” Gerte breathed, her eyes bouncing from Matty to the sketches and back. “Oh my lord, you’re Diego’s?” She turned those bewildered eyes on Bianca. “But if Diego’s the father, who on earth is—”

  “—my mother?” Matty jerked a shrug. “I don’t know. But I’ll bet she does.” He aimed his chin toward the frames on the wall. A icy shock skittered along Willa’s bare skin, as exposed in this dress as it had been in the summer grass. “I was born, what, the summer after he drew those? And if Diego was talking some girl into posing naked for him in the su
mmer, he’d probably talked her into doing more by the winter. And if I’m right, if he did? Then that girl’s my birth mother.”

  “He didn’t leave any notes,” Bianca said evenly, and she didn’t twitch so much as a betraying lash Willa’s direction. “He didn’t even draw her face, so there’s no way to know from these sketches who she is.”

  “Not unless you actually look at the sketches,” Gerte said impatiently. She stepped into the frames until her upturned nose was mere inches from the drawings. “This is a small town and I know the north woods when I see them. I’ve lived here my whole life, haven’t I?” She squinted at the sketch, then drew back to squint from a different angle.

  Bianca exchanged a worried look with Georgie, then hooked a hand through Gerte’s elbow. “I bow to your superior sleuthing skills, Gerte, but even you can’t positively identify a fifteen-year-old sketch by a head of hair.”

  Gerte folded her arms and gave a satisfied huff. “I can when that hair’s standing right in front of me.” Willa’s heart jerked once, then gave up and went still. Gerte tapped a finger to the wall next to the first frame, next to a lush tumble of sun-warmed hair and a slim shoulder in the grass, all of it suggested by nothing more than a few bold pencil strokes. “That’s Willa.”

  “It’s you?” Matty breathed, his eyes filled with bewildered anguish. “You’re my mother?”

  Willa’s heart tore in half. It simply ripped in two and bled for him, for the hope-streaked agony that filled his voice. She felt it happen across the vacuum of the thinnie, knew herself to be mortally wounded. She only hoped her borrowed composure held firm and carried her home before the storm broke and her own agony fell down on her like rain.

  She turned to Gerte instead, that awful calm falling between her and the pain like a white curtain. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Oh dear lord.” Gerte stopped, her soft hand clenched in front of her throat, sincere distress in her pale eyes. She stared at Willa as if she’d never seen her before. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I was so surprised, it just popped out.” She blinked, evidently as dazed as Matty. “All these years, I thought Georgie was the one who—”