Page 86 of Brushed By Moonlight

I did my best not to imagine what that entailed.

“And expert enough to know you have no place on this mission,” he added — gently, to his credit. Or maybe he was just buttering me up for more sex.

“Right. Themission.” I made quote marks in the air. “A mission that doesn’t ensure that the painting — if it’s genuine — ends up in the right hands. It will just change hands, from one private collection to another.”

He shrugged. “You don’t know that.”

I made a show of tapping my lips. “Let’s see. The person who wants this paintingandknows where it is doesn’t contact the current owner or the special commission responsible for such things — and believe me, there are several that would be delighted to unearth a long-lost Van Gogh — such a person doesn’t exactly screamgenerous philanthropist, does he — or she?”

He raised then dropped a shoulder. “I wouldn’t know. Not a lot of generous philanthropists in my line of work.”

I frowned at the photos on my dresser. Gordon appeared in the one taken at my college graduation, one arm around my shoulders and one around my sister’s. My mother was out of frame, behind the camera. My gratefully debt-free mother, and us, her debt-free children, thanks to Gordon’s generosity.

For the tenth time that morning, I prayed Marius and the others were wrong about him. And for the tenth time that morning, I seriously doubted it.

But how could we have missed the dark side of his business dealings in all our years of close contact?

“Let’s pretend for a minute that going after that painting doesn’t come with any risks,” Marius said. “You come with us, we get the painting, and you have a close look. It turns out to be the real deal…”

I nodded along, loving that version of events.

“…and we hand it over to Gordon, who hands it over to his client.”

I frowned.

He touched my chin gently, and I met his eyes. “Still no happy end. Not for you anyway. Could you live with that?”

“How canyoulive with it? Doing deals like that, I mean?”

His eyes clouded over. “Better not to ask about my morals, Mina. You’ll only be disappointed at what you find.”

“Would I?”

Of course you would,his stormy eyes promised. Stubbornly, almost.

Maybe. But something made me think there might be a rainbow hidden behind that tempest. Something to believe in. To trust. Maybe even to love.

Naive? Probably.

Definitely,the back of my mind warned. But I still couldn’t help believing in him.

“Anyway, it’s likely to be a forgery.” I forced myself to hit a lighter tone.

“Do you know enough to spot a fake?”

“I’m a…a very expert amateur,” I said truthfully.

My father had an entire dossier on lost artworks of World War II and the forgeries that had surfaced since, and I’d been over the details countless times. I’d used that dossier for everything from a tenth-grade art project, to my college thesis, to designing an interdisciplinary unit for my school district. At least half of the forgeries my father catalogued had been easy to spot, even for me. I’d also interned at a Boston auction house, and everyone there, including the most highly regarded veterans, declared I had a sixth sense for discerning genuine art from forgeries. So maybe a little ancestral magic had trickled down to me after all.

“Let’s say we quickly decide it’s a fake,” I said. “Then I’ll know not to care about it, right?”

“And if it is real?” Marius challenged. “You realize you can’t tell Gordon, right? He can’t know you know. And if we fail in this job…” He trailed off, then shook his head. “We can’t fail, Mina. That painting might be worth a lot, but what about us?”

So far, he’d been pretty cavalier about…well, everything. His past, his present, his future. Bene had done most of the talking when it came to how much was riding on their bargain with Gordon. But for the first time, Marius communicated that too. Not in words, but in the scratch in his voice, the anxious flicker in his eyes.

They could not afford to fail. Period.

So, shouldn’t I help them — and find a way to save that painting?