MisMatch (A Humorous Contemporary Romance)

by Nana Malone

  The last part of his sentence came out on a growl. He reached for her.

  “Don’t you put your hands on me! Who the fuck was I kissing?”

  Eli shoved his hands in his pockets, tipped his head back and slammed his eyes shut. “That was my brother, Samson, the artist.”

  “You’d be surprised how often I have to ask this question. Who the fuck are you?”

  “I'm Eli, his twin.”

  She started waving her arms around. “Yeah, I gathered that.” Enlightenment dawning, she smacked her forehead. “That was you that day in the studio when I came to see his work.” Furious, she narrowed her eyes at Eli. “Have I been sleeping with both of you? Do you tag out when one of you is too tired?”

  “Sassy stop. Sam tried to play match maker. I didn't realize how we'd be together. I thought I’d have better control.”

  “You freaked out on me when I called you Samson.” She watched as his jaw worked.

  “I couldn't stomach you kissing me and using his name.”

  “So you lied. Instead of coming clean then, you lied.” She tried to climb into her car.

  He held on to the door frame. “Jess, you have to listen to me. I'm so sorry. Shit. I wish…fuck. I never should have lied.”

  “Yeah, that about sums it up.” Smacking his hands off the door frame, she slammed the door shut. “Just my luck that I still need you for the gallery opening. But I’ll be getting you another point of contact. You and I are done.”

  Chapter 25

  “Any luck finding her?”

  Eli paused abruptly in his doorway, keys still in the lock. In his living room, perched on his sectional, sat his brother. Eli tossed his keys on the sideboard and made his way into the kitchen. He grabbed two sodas before joining Samson. He didn’t sit, but tossed one of the sodas in Sam's direction. Samson caught it one-handed.

  “No. She's not in Malibu, and she's not at her mother’s. I can’t find her.” He glared at his brother. “You want to tell me what you’re doing here? How'd you get in?”

  Sam nodded and hung his head as he played with the tab of the can. “Already forgot you gave me the key to this place? Nice.” Then more contrite, he added, “Damn, Eli, I'm sorry I let shit get so fucked up for you. I feel completely responsible.”

  Eli cracked his neck. As much as he would like to blame Samson for all the trouble he was in, Jessica was right; he could have pulled the plug at any time. Could have told her the truth from the start, but he didn't. He'd made the choices not to. “Yeah, well, it's not your fault. I fucked it up every way I could think of.”

  Samson narrowed his eyes. “You going to do the Atlas bit here? You put everything on your shoulders again, man?”

  Eli barked out a mirthless chuckle. “Nope, this time I'm going to share some of the blame.”

  “Eli, I'm so fucking sorry I kissed her. I shouldn’t have, and I didn't at first, but then I was still so fucking mad at you for thinking I'd relapse like that and not call Jocelyn or you. It sucked. And there she was kissing me, and it sort of happened.”

  “It sort of happened? Story of your fucking life. You know what? Fuck you, Samson.”

  “No, fuck you, Elijah. It’s not like I wanted this to happen.”

  “Yeah, your favors have a way of costing me.”

  Sam pushed to his feet and glared. “Dude, ever since we were kids, you had this way about you. Like you always had to take care of me or something. Maybe you should have let me figure some things out for myself.”

  “Oh, yeah, and stood by while that landed you in the morgue?”

  Samson scrubbed at the day-old beard growing in on his jaw. “I will always be grateful to you for saving my life, but it's my life. You have to let me live it. You’re not responsible for my future. You’re not responsible if I fuck up. You're not responsible for getting me my next job. You don’t have to hold it all together. If I fall down, I’ll get back up. That's kind of the thing about recovery. I have to learn how to get back up.”

  “Enough, Samson.”

  “No, not enough, Eli. You keep thinking it's your job to keep me out of trouble, and it's not. Let me fail if I'm going to fail.”

  “No.”

  “Why the fuck not?”

  “Because it's my fault you ended up where you did. I was supposed to look out for you, and I didn't. I was a jealous and self-centered little shit. When I looked up, you were already so far gone. I should have helped you sooner. All those times you called, and I was too busy with my own shit.”

  Sam let his arms fall to his sides as he shook his head. “No, Eli, the only person to blame was Dad and myself. You had nothing to do with it. The old man fucked me up bad not being able to see you or Mom. You weren't responsible for the divorce. You weren’t responsible for him being a gambling addict and con man. You have to let that shit go. It's been eating you alive for too long.”

  Eli swallowed around the lump in his throat. “There has to be something I could have done differently.”

  “No. Everything that happened was supposed to lead me to this spot. I'm alive and painting and happy. I have you, my family, and that's all that matters. I don’t want to look back. I don’t want you eating yourself alive trying to protect me anymore. You should have told Vince as soon as you suspected I'd forged the paintings. You’re putting your career in jeopardy to save my skin. It's like when you tried to claim you’d done the forgeries so it would keep me out of jail. You have to stop.”

  Eli flinched. He was exhausted. When the Feds had come to his house to question him and his mother about Samson, it had been a knee-jerk reaction to claim the paintings as his. He’d tried to say they were for a project. He hadn’t counted on the agents testing him. He didn’t have Samson’s skill and he’d failed the test. “I should probably tell you that I'm getting closer to figuring out what's going on.”

  “That would be great news if I thought you had some back up. Look, I didn't kick heroine and that other shit just to watch you get taken out by some scum. Did you tell Vince?”

  Eli nodded. “He's on it, but I had a run in with Jessica’s step-dad to be. He knows about your past.”

  Samson didn’t even flinch. “Any idea how he found out?”

  “Not a clue. But the douchebag was suggesting that I might want to start playing nice with him if I wanted to keep my new career. I've got vice pulling his prints now. I know we know him from somewhere. I just wish I could place his fucking face.”

  “You’ll figure it out. In the meantime, are we good?”

  “We’ll get there.”

  “Fair enough. Look, about Jessica. I wasn’t really trying to kiss her. For what it's worth. She loves you, Eli. Not me.”

  Pain radiated in Eli’s chest. “Well, up until twenty-four hours ago, she thought we were the same person.”

  Sam shrugged before levering himself back onto the couch. “Not exactly. When she came to the studio yesterday, and I tried to get her out of there so I could call you, she knew right away that I wasn’t you. She kept looking at me funny and eventually stopped calling me Eli and started calling me Samson.”

  “You’re saying she knew?”

  “Not exactly, but she knew something was off. At the very least, she probably thought you had dissociative personality disorder or something.”

  Eli huffed out a breath. “Great, she thought I was crazy.”

  “Well, crazy or not, she told me and I quote, ‘I love my Eli.’”

  Sassy. Shit, the lump in his throat started morphing from golf ball into beach ball.

  “You really don't have any idea where she is?”

  “I’ve looked everywhere I can think of. There’s always the chance that her friend Izzy is lying, and Jessica is there, but her car isn’t in Malibu.”

  Sam raised a brow. “How do you know her car isn’t in Malibu?”

  “I had Vince run a GPS tracer on it.”

  “Dude.”

  “What? It's not like I’m stalking her. She told me she had GPS i
nstalled in case the thing ever got stolen. So I had him hack her GPS...” He let his voice trail. “Okay, so I’m a little bit of a stalker.”

  “Yeah, I’d say so.” Sam grinned. “It's good to see you like this. Not so buttoned-up”

  Eli rolled his shoulders. “I'm not buttoned-up. Didn’t you hear? I’m an artist.”

  Sam grinned. “That's right. My brother, the sculptor. I want to commission a piece, by the way, to replace the one you sold out from under me.”

  “Bullshit, you put it into the exhibition so it would sell.”

  Sam shrugged. “Maybe. But you have to admit that you are an artist. Maybe I got more attention for it when we were kids, but you were every bit as talented. You weren’t nearly as outspoken or brash. You preferred to sit with your clay and quietly build stuff.”

  “You ran around the house with a paint brush screaming, ‘look at me.’”

  “Hey, we each have our talents.” Sam nursed his soda. “So what are you going to do about Jessica?”

  “Find her. Explain. Beg her to forgive me.”

  “You really love her, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You should see the look on your face when you talk about her.”

  “She’s something else. I—” His phone buzzed. Jogging over to the kitchen counter, he snapped it up. “Yeah, Vince, did you find her?”

  “No luck, buddy, but I might have a different present for you. Those prints you brought over?”

  “Yeah?”

  “The name Michael Ellis ring a bell?”

  Eli frowned and tried to remember where he'd heard that name before. “The name Ellis sounds vaguely familiar, but I’m not sure why.”

  “Go ahead and ask your brother if he knows the name.”

  “Sam? Uh, yeah, he's here. One sec.” Covering the mouth piece he asked his brother, “The name Mike Ellison mean anything to you?”

  Sam's eye widened. “Yeah. I was his daughter's friend back in high school. She and I took a bunch of the advanced art classes together. Good artist, but never quite great. I often got scholarships over her. We also used to hang out and smoke pot behind the bleachers. She eventually introduced me to the big guns behind the art thefts, but she was innocent. She just thought they had connections to get me a show or something. Apparently, they’d approached her about a gallery opening. He even came by to see me in jail when I first got arrested. He was really nice. Said a nice kid like me didn’t deserve to be in there. Why?”

  Eli held up a finger and turned his attention back to Vince. “You catch any of that?”

  “Yep. There was no reason you should have recognized him when you met him the first time.”

  “No, of course not. But he looked like he'd seen a ghost when he saw me.” Eli frowned, then added, “Actually, he didn't look surprised to see me, more like he was surprised I was in his house or something.”

  “You think he knew you weren’t Samson?”

  “Hard to tell. You got anything usable on him?”

  “Prints came back. Fenton’s a match. Thought you’d want to know. Your girlfriend wasn’t kidding about him. He'd be behind bars if any of them would press charges.”

  “What about Jessica nearly being run over?” When Jessica had told him about the attempt the night of the benefit, he’d wanted to go after Ellis then, but she’d begged him not to until they had more on him.

  “Trust me, I'm doing everything I can, but the license plate was obscured. Unless she physically saw him behind the wheel, there's not too much we can do.”

  “Shit.”

  “My sentiments exactly.”

  “You have any fucking good news?”

  “Well, this is something. It's too much of a coincidence that he's in the mix. You said he prompted the mom to recommend that Jessica run down and check Samson out right? I have a feeling he's been watching your brother since he got back on the art scene.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “We have hits on other small time jobs in Vegas, and in DC, and Miami, then San Francisco. Now L.A.”

  “You think he's after Sam?”

  “Not sure. But I’ve also been trying to tie his movements with any high profile forgeries.”

  “Please tell me you have something. In three of the cities, SF, DC, and Miami, several high profile art works were forged and replaced. He has to be our guy.”

  “Like you said, we can’t pin it on him with just our guesses, and you would have told me if he had the art chops to pull it off.”

  “No, he's not the forger, but I get the impression he's pulling the strings.”

  “We need to find the forger he’s directing. We know it's not Samson.”

  “Funny you should mention the forger. I'm on my way to talk to Michael’s daughter.”

  “You’re saying she’s also in L.A.?

  “Yep and has been in Miami, and DC, and San Francisco.”

  The hairs on the back of Eli’s neck stood up. “And Sam already said she has the skills.”

  “Would somebody tell me what the fuck is going on?” Samson muttered.

  “Sam, give me a sec.” Eli turned his attention back to Vince. “You got a lead on where to find her?”

  “This is where your Christmas gift comes in. She’s going by the alias Jocelyn Mills. She’s got her own dog walking business.”

  Eli's head swam. “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah, I'm sure. She was busted for bad checks using the same alias. And the dog walking business we're pretty sure is a front for a drug dispensary.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Yeah, you’re telling me. You want to talk to her when we bring her in?”

  “Yeah, let me know when you scoop her up. And Vince?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks, man.”

  Eli hung up. How the hell was he going to tell Samson that his sponsor, the one who'd helped keep him clean, was also the reason he got arrested all those years ago?

  “Come on, man, you have to tell me what’s up.” Sam put a hand on his brother's shoulder. “E, what's the matter? You look like you got nothing but bad news coming my way.”

  “Sam, dude, I don't know what the fuck is going on.”

  “Then tell me what the fuck you do know.”

  Eli exhaled. “Okay, so you know Fenton. You know how I told you Jessica’s convinced he's just after her mother's money. Well, she's no dummy. Vince has been chasing him for years. He says he's been linked to a sting of rich widows who he's pretty much swindled out of their fortunes. None of them want to press charges because they're in high society. Vince thinks he's the one who tried to run down Jessica.”

  Samson looked horrified. “Shit, I'm sorry. Obviously, he's going to arrest him, right?”

  “Not exactly. We don’t have enough to hold him on that. No witnesses, and Jessica didn’t get a good look at the guy driving the car.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yeah, well, I get the impression you're going to be saying that a lot.”

  “Huh?” Samson frowned

  “There’s more bad news. So Fenton or rather Ellis was the one who pushed Jessica into coming to see your show at the club that night. He wanted her to be your manager.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “I doubt he had any idea how convoluted everything would get. But my guess is he wanted to lure me, you, one of us in with the lure of legitimacy.”

  “I think you missed a step. Go back. What does this have to do with Mike?”

  “Step-dad-to-be is Mike. They're the same person.”

  “No, that’s impossible.”

  “Not impossible. Prints don't lie.”

  “I barely even knew that guy. He was just being nice to a fucked up kid.”

  “I doubt it. Once Vince brings him in for questioning, I’d bet money he was behind the forgeries the first time around.”

  “None of those pieces are gelling yet, bro.”

  “Look, back when you were kids, you said his daugh
ter and you were in many of the same advanced placement programs together, right? Did she have your talent then?”

  Sam frowned and shook his head. “No. She was really good, but she couldn't forge those kinds of pieces. Her hands weren’t steady enough. Maybe with time she—” He paused, light dawning in his eyes. “You’re thinking she's the one forging art pieces now?”

  “It's a theory. Vince is going to pick her up.”

  “She’s in fucking Los Angeles?”

  Eli winced. “Yeah, that's the other thing. Several of the cities that we've tried getting your career going in, have also had a similar string of thefts and forgeries. Miami, DC, and SF. She's used several aliases, but they seem to always be in the same city at the same time.”

  Samson rubbed his temples. “What's her name?”

  “Sam, I don’t think—”

  “What's her fucking name, Elijah?”

  Eli rocked back on his heels and shoved his hands in his pockets, ready for the blow back. “Jocelyn Mills.”

  Sam just stood there and stared. Then he did the inexplicable. He started laughing. And didn’t stop. Clutching his sides, he held on to the counter. “You mean to tell me that my sponsor Jocelyn is Emma?”

  “Uh, yeah. What's so funny?”

  “I thought you said you went through every single piece of that file of mine. If you had, you'd have seen pictures of Emma. She was a brunette. Two, two-fifty easy. Her nose was bigger. For the love of God, Eli, you’ve seen her. You’re saying she lost over a hundred pounds and changed her appearance. C’mon, man, Jocelyn’s a dog walker, not a master forger.”

  No, it didn’t sound like the same girl, but it was. They had her prints. “I'm sorry, Sam. But it's true. She’s running this scam with her father.”

  “You’re for reals on this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re telling me this chick has been fucking with me my whole life? Why?”