Page 16 of Canvas of Lies (Spruce Hill #3)

Chapter Eleven

Nico

A lthough it hurt—a great deal—to abandon my carefully laid plans, I reminded myself that flexibility had always been a priority in this venture.

And, if I were completely honest, the prospect of having Kat at my side moving forward was a comfort. I’d been on my own since my father died, but now she was here with me, a partner instead of the pawn she’d called herself.

Her brilliant mind would be an asset.

I threw together a haphazard brunch, laid the spread across the coffee table, and we sat down on the sofa to eat before getting into a more serious discussion about what the hell to do from there.

Kat, dressed in only one of my t-shirts and a pair of my boxers, wiped a drop of syrup from her lip with a paper towel .

“So,” she said, tucking her feet under her as she turned toward me. “Tell me what happened, from the beginning. How did my father get his hands on the painting in the first place?”

I leaned back against the cushions. “I didn’t know my dad was sick, not until the day before he died—even then, I had no idea the illness was that serious. I talked to him on the phone and he insisted it was just a bad cold.”

“Unsurprising. I don’t remember him ever taking a day off.”

He had, but only rarely. It’d been a bone of contention between us, especially after I finished college and was able to view the situation from the outside.

We’d argued about it—he insisted he had no need of vacations, but I knew he missed France, missed his family.

Only once, for my sixteenth birthday, had we made the trip back to visit my mother’s grave.

It was the only gift I asked for that year.

“As it turns out, it was a lot worse than that. Some woman called me the next day, your dad’s assistant or secretary, I think, to tell me he died that morning. I couldn’t believe it. He was only in his fifties.”

If anything happens to me, anything strange . . .

My father’s words from that night had hit me the second I hung up the phone. Now, I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from spilling it all to Kat. If she knew what was at stake, she’d throw herself headlong into danger before I could blink.

Her fingers curled around mine in a silent show of support.

That period of my life had been bleak, to say the least. With a single phone call, everything changed.

The only member of my family who lived on the same side of the Atlantic was gone.

Looking back, I wished I’d realized how great a loss it was to Kat, too, but I’d been too tangled in my grief—and then my rage—to consider how she would feel about my father’s death.

I forced myself to shove down the emotions those memories drew to the surface.

“By the time I got to the cottage, the painting had been swapped out for some generic piece of crap like you’d find at a doctor’s office.

As you might imagine, I had some choice words for your father, but his security guards forcibly removed me from the premises. ”

“So he’s had it for what, two years now?”

“Yes.”

“Why now? What changed?”

“A while back, I was sitting in a cafe when the news came on. There’s an exhibit in Rochester coming up, featuring Hugo Clément’s work.

The guy started talking about the number of unsigned paintings Clément left behind, then mentioned the discovery of a piece belonging to your father.

I guess he claimed he hadn’t known who the artist was before then. ”

“It’s a Clément?” she whispered.

“Yes,” I said, smiling at her awed expression. She’d always loved that painting, which had inspired years of fascination with other Impressionists. Not telling her the truth when I learned it had been nearly impossible.

Kat frowned a little. “Why would he have even bothered with that particular painting? ”

“Right.” From her expression, I knew she was puzzling things over.

“Then he should have had no idea who the artist really was. It’s beautiful, don’t get me wrong, but my father’s not exactly a connoisseur of fine art. Anything owned by one of his household staff would’ve been considered below him—he wouldn’t have taken it just because it was pretty.”

For a long moment, I stayed quiet. When I looked over at her, my brows drawn low over my eyes, I said, “I hadn’t really thought about that, but you’re right. I don’t know why he would’ve taken it, if he didn’t know it was worth anything.”

“Your dad must have known who painted it though, right? He never said as much to me, certainly never gave me a name. Not that the name of an artist would’ve meant much to me at the time, but it always seemed like there was more to the story.

He’d get this smile on his face, like he was feeding me clues, waiting for me to figure it out. I never did, though.”

“Yes, he knew, and he told me, though he warned me that it needed to stay secret. Probably for this exact reason.”

“I always hoped he’d loop me in, make me part of your family instead of my own.”

I felt another twinge of guilt for not realizing how unhappy she had been all those years ago, but I nodded. It hadn’t occurred to me just how helpful it would be to have someone to talk this through, someone who knew the people involved as intimately as I did .

“Kitten, you have to know that he did consider you family, whether he told you the whole story or not. I was sixteen before I heard the name Hugo Clément. He told me while we were in France.”

I watched her swallow the hurt flashing in her eyes before she asked, “When did the news first break about Clément being the artist?”

“About six months ago,” I answered, studying her now with interest.

For as long as I could remember, Kat always got a certain look on her face when the wheels in that brilliant mind turned at full tilt, and she wore it right then.

Anything was better than the note of sadness that crept into her eyes, even if the alternative meant she’d gone into her most devious state of mind.

“Did you ever look into the source of the leak?”

My mouth opened, then snapped shut before I finally shook my head. “No. I didn’t think it would matter, but I guess I assumed some hoity-toity guest had spotted it at the house or something. Your father runs with a pretty ritzy crowd and art collecting seems like a rich person's hobby.”

Kat smirked. “That’s true, and I guess it’s a plausible explanation. But what if he leaked it? What if he knew the painting was done by Clément when your father died, and that’s why he took it in the first place?”

“My father wouldn’t have told him that,” I replied quickly, but she shot me a soft, sympathetic glance .

“Nico, your father was ill. Dying. Do you remember that time I got food poisoning in seventh grade?”

My brows lifted. “Yeah, from that seafood buffet I told you not to visit.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re a genius. Anyway, in between bouts of puke, I was rambling—you recorded some of it because I kept talking about ocean insects and aliens. We listened to it by the creek a few days later and I thought you were going to sprain something laughing so hard.”

“Okay,” I said slowly, still unclear about where she was going with this.

“What if your dad was feverish or delirious? What if he thought he was talking to you in those final hours while my father or one of his minions was nearby? Who knows what he might have said?”

She reached over to lay a hand against my cheek. I knew it broke her heart to speak so callously, but what she said made sense. I managed a weak nod, considering the ramifications of the scene she’d just painted.

“It would be more believable than my father pulling a random painting off a wall just to spite you, no matter how much he hated you,” she finished.

“Son of a bitch,” I whispered.

Everything she’d proposed was far more likely than my own assumption that Aidan Willoughby had recognized a treasure when he saw it. In truth, I was a little embarrassed I hadn’t thought of it myself. I sighed heavily and realized I should’ve asked for her help much sooner.

“You’re a genius, Kitten. If you’re right about this, then your father has known all along how valuable that painting is.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Which means he’s playing the long game, which in turn means he has a plan. Whatever that plan might be, I can assure you it is not going to involve trading the painting for something as useless to him as the daughter he never wanted.”

I grabbed hold of her arm and pulled her onto my lap, scowling down at her. “Look, I’ll agree to exploring other options, Kitten, but only if you stop referring to yourself like that. It breaks my heart.”

Blue eyes wide with surprise, she leaned back to look at me. “It does? Why?”

“Because,” I murmured, placing tiny kisses from one corner of her mouth to the other, “while my father might have been the one who made you feel like you weren’t a failure, you’ve always been that person for me.”

“Oh,” she said, the word escaping her lips on a soft exhalation.

When I continued to kiss a line down her throat, she lifted her chin and closed her eyes.

It hadn’t been a long conversation, but I was already tired of talking about artwork and secrets and plots.

Here she was, straddling my lap, warm and soft and inviting.

With her head tipped back, her hair fell nearly to my thighs in a waterfall of silky golden curls .

“Sweet Kitten,” I whispered, making my way back up the other side, “do you have any idea what you do to me?”

She shifted her pelvis against mine, smirking as she lifted her head. “I think I’m getting the idea.”

I took her hand and pressed it flat against my chest. “Here, too.”

With a sharp intake of breath, she dropped her forehead to mine and closed her eyes. I’d always assumed she knew how important she was to me, knew how much I wanted her. Now I felt like I had years of misunderstandings to correct, oceans of feelings I needed to convey.

“You don’t have a fireplace here,” she said after a minute, twisting her head to glance around.

I laughed, unfazed by the sudden change of subject. Her brain had always worked at a faster speed than anyone I knew. Just because I couldn’t always follow the connections in her head didn’t mean they weren’t there.

“No, I don’t. What made you think of that?”

She flushed. “Nothing.”

“Oh, you cannot possibly believe I’ll let you get away with that.”

After biting her lip, she finally said, “Just one of the things I used to daydream about.”

“You mean fantasize?” I studied the pink staining her cheeks and neck. “I’m going to need to hear more about these daydreams. ”

“Just, um, things I thought we’d grow up and do together. Champagne on New Year’s Eve, reading in front of a fireplace.”

“What else?”

“There might have been a hot tub version after I started reading romance novels,” she admitted.

“No hot tub here, either. I hadn’t realized just how lacking this place was until you got here. Maybe I’ll upgrade one day.”

Instead of replying, Kat slumped down against my chest, her forehead resting to one side of my Adam’s apple. My hands left her hips to stroke slowly up and down her back. The sudden silence didn’t bother me any more than the zigzagging conversation.

I knew exactly what she felt, because I felt it, too. After half a lifetime of simply accepting what was between us as children, we’d spent the other half denying it, ignoring it, trying to get past it. Now here we were, in the middle of nowhere, together.

It might have been funny if it wasn't so strange and overwhelmingly potent.

While I held her, my thoughts tangled and meandered.

After two years of planning and plotting, could I just .

. . let it go? Accept that I would never see the painting again?

Leverage aside, it had been in my family for generations, passed down from firstborn to firstborn, the tales told like a bedtime story from one cradle to the next.

I’d spent my life loving it—but the same could be said for loving Kat .

If the tradeoff of accepting defeat was a chance at a real relationship with her instead of a series of stolen moments like this one, then I’d have to think long and hard about what I would risk to get the painting back.

I wouldn’t have considered it before that exact moment in time, but now I had to.

I wanted the painting, and I wanted Kat. I just didn’t know if there was a way for me to have both.

A few minutes later, I set the conundrum firmly aside. She was involved now—beyond serving as a willing hostage, beyond being collateral damage. Knowing her as I did, there wasn’t a chance in hell she would ever agree to just let the painting go.

If anyone held a more intense grudge against Aidan Willoughby than I did, it was the man’s only child.

Kat gave a soft sigh against my throat. “Should we make a list of options?”

“Not yet,” I said, twirling a lock of her hair around my finger.

“Are we just going to hide away here and have lots of wild sex?”

I laughed and drew back to bounce my eyebrows at her. “Fuck, you’re onto me. Now that I’ve had a taste of you, it’s all I can think about.”

“While I’d be delighted to give you more opportunities for carnal bliss, we need to sort at least a few things out, Nico dear.

Most pressing, in my opinion, is informing Erin that I’m okay and she doesn’t need to check up on me.

If she shows up at my apartment with soup and cold medicine and I’m not there, she’s going to think I was abducted by a serial killer. ”

I grimaced. “I know. Just give me a second to mourn the death of my ransom plan.”

“Would you rather have a SWAT team show up outside?” she asked dryly.

“If you’re not sending a message to my father and letting him be responsible for keeping Erin from calling the cops, we’ll need to do it ourselves.

I’ve almost never taken a day off of work, nevermind being randomly out of touch for days at a time. ”

I knew she was right, but shutting the door on all my years of planning was still a harsh blow.

“You never take a day off?” I asked, fully aware that I was stalling.

Kat was equally aware, if her glare was anything to go by. “Not really. Look, we’ll come up with a plan, Nico, I promise you. But it’s not going to be trading me for the painting.”

With a groan, I conceded. “Fine. You can use my phone to call or text her if you really have to.”

She leaned forward and kissed me, the kind of kiss that sent all conscious thought straight out of my brain. When she finally pulled back, I must have looked as dazed as I felt, because she grinned.

“We’ll figure this out. Together.”

I ran my hands along her bare legs, from knee to hip. “You’re right. But first, I don’t think I’ll be able to focus on the problem at hand until you put some pants on.”

Laughing, Kat obliged.