Assault and Beret Read online

  “Keeping it sacred?” I guessed.

  “Exactly,” he said. “And I believe you have to use all of the tools of the trade to do so.”

  “What sort of tools?” I asked. “I thought it was up to the experts to study the brushstrokes of a painting to determine whether it belonged to the artist or not.”

  “Now you’re stepping into the fray,” he said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you, Mr. Gr—” I began but he interrupted.

  “Please call me Will.”

  “Scarlett,” I said.

  He looked at me for a moment and I wondered if Viv had told him about me. My name isn’t that common; maybe it was stuck in his memory bank somewhere. He shook his head as if trying to get back on track.

  “Sorry, I just . . . never mind.” He cleared his throat and resumed lecture mode, which was not unpleasant. “What’s happening in the art world now is very divisive,” he said. He led me farther into the room, where I could see art history books stacked all over the place, along with microscopes and some tools that I assumed were used for taking paint samples and yet looked pretty lethal to me.

  “You have the old-school connoisseurs pitted against forensic experts,” he said. “Take the Red, Black and Silver piece by Jackson Pollock. His lover and his wife squabbled over whether it was an original Pollock all the way to the grave.”

  “That’s some serious grudge holding,” I said.

  “It’s what the difference between a five-figure estimate of worth and a seven-figure one will do for you. His wife hired the connoisseurs to make her case, people schooled in Pollock who knew his style probably better than he did himself, and they believed that the composition of the painting was inconsistent with his body of work.

  “His lover, on the other hand, went with the forensic experts. These were people schooled in police work who also knew how to test the painting without damaging it, and they were able to find a polar bear hair in the painting that belonged to Pollock’s own polar bear rug, which was on the floor of his living room in 1956, the same year the painting was said to have been done for his lover.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “What happened?”

  “That case is still at a standstill,” William said. “The point being that just because a polar bear hair was found only means that the painting was done in Pollock’s house but not necessarily by Pollock.”

  “So, they need a witness,” I said.

  “Yes, one other than the lover who says she got him to paint it for her after he’d taken a two-year hiatus and was battling alcoholism,” Will said.

  “Are all your investigations so sordid?” I asked. I could see by the gleam in his eye that he clearly loved his work.

  “Only the really good ones.” He laughed. “What brings you into O’Toole’s, by the way? You haven’t discovered an old Hopper in your grandmother’s attic and want to insure it, have you?”

  I glanced around the empty room. This was my moment then. I looked him straight in the eye and said, “Actually, I’m here about your wife, Vivian Tremont.”

  Chapter 5

  If I’d zapped him with a Taser, I don’t think I could have stunned him more.

  He stared at me for a second and then said, “Your eyes. You have the same eyes. That’s why you looked so familiar when I first saw you.”

  “Viv is my cousin,” I said. “We own a hat shop together in London.”

  He stared at me like he couldn’t quite believe I was standing here in front of him, talking about his wife. He turned and found a rolling chair and sat down. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees with his hands loosely clasped together.

  “Is she all right?”

  “She’s fine.”

  He looked at me with equal parts dread and hope, and I felt a sudden surge of irritation at Viv for putting me in this situation. Artistic temperament or not, she really needed to curb the rash behavior. I mean, now we were wrecking marriages—even if it was her own, it was too much.

  “Did she send you to find me?” he asked.

  The hope in his eyes was shadowed by dread. I glanced away. It was clear to me that he was not exactly on the same page as Viv. Great, just great.

  “Sort of,” I said. I drew in a breath and figured this was like taking off a bandage. I could torture the poor guy by easing it off hair by hair or just rip it and get it done. “She wants an annulment.”

  “No!” he cried.

  I glanced back at him and saw the look of alarm on his face. Great, this was going to go even worse than I had feared.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But she was very clear—”

  “I don’t care,” he said.

  That got my back up. He didn’t care, eh? Those were fighting words. The look on my face must have given away my unhappiness, because he sat up and raised his hands in a conciliatory gesture.

  “I didn’t mean I don’t care about what Vivian wants,” he said. He looked pained. “I care very much about what she wants, which is why I let her go. I always thought . . . I believed . . .”

  His voice trailed off and I knew without him saying it that he always believed she’d come back to him. That was a punch to the chest I could live without. His gaze when it met mine looked tortured.

  “You always believed she’d come back.” I said it for him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Pretty stupid, right?”

  “No, blindly optimistic, sure, but not stupid,” I said.

  He pushed out of his seat and strode over to the window. It was narrow and thick paned and looked out over the roof of the shorter building next door. He ran his finger down the inside of the glass, tracing a drop of condensation as it traveled down the outside.

  “Did she meet someone else, then?” he asked.

  Judging by the gruffness in his voice, the question cost him. I thought about the handsome barrister, Alistair Turner, who was pining for Viv back in London. I adored Alistair, but as far as I knew, Viv had kept him at arm’s length, knowing that she wasn’t available while still being married and all.

  “No,” I said. “There’s no one.”

  He glanced back at me and I saw the hope flare up in his eyes again. Oh, boy, I hated to be a buzzkill but I figured it was better coming from me than Viv.

  “Look, we’re only here for a week, so the papers—”

  “‘We’?” he interrupted me. “By ‘we,’ do you mean you and Viv? She’s here? In Paris? Right now?”

  Uh-oh. I had the feeling that I might have just opened the door to more trouble. Why, oh, why didn’t I ever check the peephole first?

  “I . . . uh . . . it . . . we . . .” Here’s a tip. Stall-stammering never helps when you’re trying to avoid answering a question or five; in fact, it’s a dead giveaway.

  He took a few steps toward me, his gaze locked on mine. “I have to see her.”

  “I don’t think that’s—”

  His rough-hewn features hardened, cementing into stubbornness right before my very eyes.

  “It’s nonnegotiable is what it is,” he said. He crossed his arms over his chest. “If there are papers to be signed, Viv will have to meet with me, over dinner, before I agree to the dissolution of our marriage.”

  “But it’s been almost two years,” I said. “Don’t you think if the two of you were going to work out, you would have found your way back to each other by now?”

  “She’s here now,” he said. “Maybe this is us finding our way right now.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” I said. “But I can’t make any promises.”

  He grinned and it lit up his eyes, giving him a boyish charm that was infectious. I scowled to keep myself from smiling back at him.

  “It’ll likely just be a quick meet-up at a café over coffee, with pens at the ready,” I said. I hoped my tone was sufficiently discou
raging.

  He shook his head at me. “Dinner tonight.”

  “She’ll never go for that,” I said. Honestly, I had no idea if she would or not, but I figured it was best to brace him for not.

  “Yes, she will,” he said. He looked supremely confident.

  Why exactly was that so attractive in a man? It should be annoying, but alas, it was not.

  “Fine. Dinner it is, but I’m going with you,” I said.

  He looked amused.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’ve just never had a chaperone before. Somehow, I never expected to have one who was younger than me and so cute, too.”

  My face grew warm. I knew he was teasing me and I shouldn’t feel embarrassed but I couldn’t really help it if my face flamed bright pink. I could only imagine how lovely it looked with my fiery red hair.

  “Flattery will get you nowhere,” I said. “Where do you want to meet? That’s assuming, of course, that Viv is willing to do this.”

  “She will. Is nine o’clock all right?” he asked.

  Most restaurants didn’t even serve the evening meal in Paris until after eight. We ate late in London because of the hours of the shop, but this was late even for us.

  “How about eight thirty?” I countered.

  “All right. Tell me where you’re staying and I’ll pick you up,” he said.

  “No, I think it best that we meet at the restaurant,” I said. Just because he seemed like a nice guy didn’t mean he was, and since I’d come to appreciate how valuable privacy was over the past year, I was always very cautious about my personal information such as where I was staying, etc.

  He gave me a look that I was pretty sure was full of respect as opposed to him being irritated with me, so that was nice.

  “You’re a tough negotiator, Scarlett,” he said. “Tell you what, I’ll give you my number. You can text me when you have Viv’s answer about dinner and then I will text you the location of the restaurant. Does that sound all right?”

  I studied him. He had an honest face, and he was clearly well liked at his job, which was a pretty cool profession for a guy brought up on a farm in Iowa. Did I trust him? Yes.

  My gut instinct told me that William Graham was exactly as he appeared to be. A good guy. Still, I wondered.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Anything,” he said.

  “Why didn’t you ever come after Viv?”

  Yes, this was the one thing that bothered me. Why had he just let her walk away? He was an investigator, after all; surely he had to know where he could find his wife.

  “Did Viv tell you how we met?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “She’s been very quiet about your marriage.”

  “I can see that. We met in the Jubilee Gardens in London,” he said. “Well, we didn’t exactly meet there, but that is where I saw her for the very first time.”

  “The park near the London Eye?” I asked. He nodded.

  “It was a warm day in June. She was wearing an enormous red sunhat.” He held his hands out by his head to demonstrate. “Her long blond curls trailed down her back over the pretty white and black dress she wore. I can still see the way it fit her curves and then flared out just above her knees. She was taking long strides in these black spike heels that made her legs look impossibly long. Pretty much every guy in the park stopped whatever he was doing to stare as she went past.”

  He had a faraway look in his eyes, as if the memory of that day was one that he held very dear.

  “I followed her,” he said. He gave me a wide-eyed look as if he was embarrassed to admit that he had done that.

  “How far?” I asked.

  “All the way to the Underground, where I hopped on the same train she got on,” he said.

  “You realize that’s borderline stalker behavior,” I said.

  “There’s nothing borderline about it,” he said. “I followed her all the way to a neighborhood in London called Notting Hill, well, you know the area, I suppose.”

  “I do, indeed,” I said. “I have to tell you that’s either the most romantic thing ever, or seriously creepy.”

  “I know,” he said. He cringed. “Even at the time, I kept telling myself I was crossing a line, but I knew if I didn’t figure out where she belonged or if she belonged to anyone, I might never see her again and that was completely unacceptable.”

  I leaned against a steel cabinet, rested my elbow on it and then propped my chin in my hand. This was fascinating. I could not believe that Viv hadn’t told me any of this.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “On the train to Notting Hill Station, someone recognized her and called her ‘Viv,’” he said. “I thought it suited her because she was exactly that—vivid and vivacious. Then she got off at Notting Hill Gate and I followed.”

  A slow smile spread across his face and I knew he was reliving the moment.

  “I thought I was being so smart about it,” he said. “But then I turned a corner, you know where you leave Pembridge Road and take a left onto Portobello?” I nodded. “Yeah, well, when I got around the bend, she jumped out at me with an umbrella in hand, a big one, and she threatened to clobber me with it if I didn’t stop following her.”

  He laughed and I felt myself smile. He was genuinely amused at the memory.

  “Honestly, with her eyes crackling blue fire and her white knuckles gripping an umbrella as big as she was, it was love at first sight,” he said.

  “How did you get her to put the umbrella down?” I asked.

  “I was honest and told her that she looked like she had just walked out of a painting by Manet and that I couldn’t not follow her at least until I knew her name,” he said. “I think that is the only thing that saved my melon from a bashing.”

  “The art connection,” I said. That made sense.

  “I begged, literally begged on one knee, for her to have dinner with me,” he said. “She agreed to meet me for a pint at the Duke of Wellington Pub.”

  “How did you go from a pint to marriage?” I asked.

  “One pint turned into two, then dinner, then a walk where we never stopped talking about everything from art to music to our childhoods, then dessert, until within days we were planning our elopement and then we just did it,” he said. “When she left, I thought she’d change her mind and come back, but she never did, and then . . . well, I didn’t want the marriage to end, and I figured if I pushed it, she’d make it permanent, so I didn’t chase her, figuring someday she’d come find me and give us another chance.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  Here I’d been holding Harrison at bay for almost a year and this guy and Viv had sealed the deal within weeks. It boggled. Still, here we were, looking to get an annulment. I couldn’t forget that this was what Viv wanted now and I was in charge of making it happen.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Romantic beginnings aside, Viv may not change her mind about the marriage,” I said. “You have to be prepared for her to ask for an annulment tonight.”

  “I am,” he said. “But I’m also confident that what we had was real and that if she just spends some time with me, she’ll see that and change her mind.”

  I didn’t have the heart to argue with him, plus this was Viv. I honestly had no idea how this was going to go.

  “All right, then,” I said. “I’ll text you her decision about dinner and we’ll go from there.”

  “Thanks, Scarlett,” he said. The smile he gave me was sweetly hopeful. “No matter what happens, Viv is my wife. I will always look out for her, even if she doesn’t want to give our marriage a go.”

  I nodded. That clinched it. As objective as I tried to be, I really liked William Graham.

  Chapter 6

  I managed to find my way back to our arrondissement an
d only went the wrong way once. The sky had cleared up, and when I walked home from the Dupleix Station, I felt the tension that had been dogging me since we arrived in Paris lift. My mission had been to find William Graham and negotiate an annulment. Now that I had met him, I sensed that things were going to work out, one way or another, and I felt as if my mission was very close to being accomplished.

  As I wandered through our neighborhood, I paused to glance down the street and caught sight of the Eiffel Tower. My heart swelled just like it did whenever I saw it. I mean, seriously, it was the freaking Eiffel Tower and I was looking right at it. How incredible, rather, incroyable!

  It struck me then that while I was fine with being here with Vivian, I really considered Paris a place for couples, not cousins. The City of Light was meant to be a backdrop for falling in love, romancing your chosen one, taking long strolls along the Seine, making vows atop the Eiffel Tower, and latching a small padlock onto the Pont des Arts Bridge—although the locks had been removed from the famous bridge a couple of years before, I still considered it a very Parisian thing.

  I didn’t have to think too hard to know who I would share all of this with if I had my choice. I fished my phone out of my bag and opened my contacts list. I pressed the name of the person I was missing without overthinking it. I mean, he had asked me to check in with him, so I was just doing what he’d asked. So there.

  “All right, Ginger?” he answered on the second ring and just the sound of his voice warmed me from the inside out.

  “Just fine, Harry,” I said. “How about you? How goes saving your big investment business?”

  “Who cares?” he asked. “Boring paperwork, endless meetings, dodgy solicitors, it’s madness. Tell me about your quest for Viv’s husband.”

  “I found him, actually,” I said. “Making me the best cousin detective ever.”

  “No doubt,” he agreed. “Come now, don’t leave me wondering. What happened? What’s he like? Is he a decent bloke or a complete git?”