A noise made her turn, but it was just another apprentice, trotting hurriedly by the door. Reluctantly she exited and took her bearings. When she spotted more buckets and a ladder, she hurried farther down the hal , only this door was closed.
She reached for the knob, but just as her hand gripped the cool, polished brass a voice behind her made her jump.
“Madam. These rooms are off-limits. May I show you the way to the waiting room?”
Cam wondered how hard it would be to pretend she didn’t speak English. Her col ege roommate, Natalie, had been Puerto Rican, and Cam had picked up a few key phrases. “Qué?” She jerked the knob but her effort went unrewarded. The door was locked.
“Madam, please!”
She turned. A tal , extraordinarily reedy bald man with an armful of papers gazed at her sternly. She slipped the phone unobtrusively into her bag. “Qué?”
“Kay?” he repeated blankly and looked at a paper in his hand.
“Qué. Qué?” Oh, the hell with it. “My name is Kay, er, Katie Holmes.” She dipped a curtsy. Her English accent ranked somewhere above Madonna’s but below Renée Zel weger’s. The man frowned and began a slow, careful review. Realizing with a horrified start she had no shoes, she thrust her shoulders back, and the man’s eyes screeched to a halt at her neckline. Different ages, different clothes, same hormonal magic.
His face relaxed into a slightly less concerned smile. “I presume you wish to see Mr. Lely, aye?”
“Ye—Er, aye.”
“About a painting?”
“Aye.”
“That is possible, of course, only with an appointment.”
He scanned the paper in his hand. “I don’t see a Katie Holmes here. You do have an appointment, I presume?”
Cam shifted. Run or lie? Running would likely get her removed from the premises. She fingered the phone in her pocket. She had to stay, one way or another. “I, wel … It’s complicated.”
7
Peter brushed by the desk usual y occupied by his clerk, Stephen, and let his office door shut behind him. After a quick look to ensure it had closed, he went to the storage room and lowered the window to its original position. He damned his luck at running into that blackguard, Sir David.
Even entering by way of the servants’ door had forced him to take a hel of a chance of running into Mertons.
Charles’s entourage had been at his club in Maiden Lane, but not Charles himself, and it had taken Peter more than three-quarters of an hour to track down the king in the Berkeley Square dressing room of the Honorable Genevieve Longchamps, though how much longer that title would apply given the king’s obvious intentions he could only guess.
He slipped a hand in his waistcoat and touched the letter, more valuable than gold. He believed the king would keep his word and sign it. He had to believe it. Charles had his faults, to be sure, but for the most part he was a man of honor in business, and he had always treated Peter relatively fairly—as fairly as a monarch could treat anyone
—though he had certainly extracted his pound of flesh in the years since their first meeting thirty years ago, Charles the wide-eyed, ten-year-old son of the king and Peter the scrape-farthing Dutchman with the striking palette of colors.
Six years hence, Peter knew, Charles would bestow a knighthood on him. Charles would say it was for a lifetime of contribution to English art, though Peter knew it had been as much to lift his friend’s spirits. But the gesture would fail, and Peter would be dead within the year, col apsing at his easel and final y earning the peace for which he had so longed. Or so he had thought until he found death, at least the part of death spent in the Afterlife, had not erased any of his memories.
How long would Ursula’s death haunt him?
A double tap at the farther door roused him from his thoughts. Stephen. Peter felt disloyal for returning here, like a spy, into the lives of his friends and the people who worked for him, with no
