Читать книгу The Billionaire Gets His Way / The Sarantos Secret Baby - Оливия Гейтс - Страница 10

When Anna had told him Raven French was waiting outside to see him, Gavin had been even more furious than he’d been Saturday at her book signing. It was easy—and safe—to defame a man from a distance. But coming to his office like this violated the first primal rule in The Man Handbook: You never challenge a man on his own turf unless you want to get your ass kicked from here to Abu Dhabi.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked by way of a greeting. Doubtless that violated some rule in whatever handbook women used to get by in life—probably something with the word chocolate in its title—since their first rule would almost certainly dictate polite behavior. Which was all the more reason, Gavin rationalized, to be impolite.

To her credit, she didn’t flinch. Even though he had adopted his most menacing corporate bigshot behavior. Even though he towered over her. Even when he deliberately moved forward to crowd her space even more—and was assailed by the fragrance of something surprisingly subtle and even more surprisingly sweet. On the contrary, she met his gaze levelly and smiled. A flimsy, uneasy smile to be sure, but a smile nonetheless.

Men three times her size—who had infinitely more strength and power than she possessed—had practically wet themselves when Gavin had been this intentionally scary. Raven French, however, smiled. Which just went to show how very badly she’d underestimated him.

“And hello to you, too, Mr. Mason,” she said. But her voice wasn’t nearly as steady as it had been on Saturday. When he’d invaded her turf.

He said nothing in response to her salutation, since he was still waiting for an answer to his question. Both simply gazed at each other in silence, as if neither was sure how to proceed next.

Interesting. On Saturday, there had been no hesitation between them, even though they’d been on display in front of a number of bookstore patrons, which should have inhibited their exchange. Now when it was only the two of them, alone, neither seemed to know what to say.

He still couldn’t believe she’d come here. No one challenged him. Ever. He was the challenger in any situation, be it the boardroom or the bedroom. If Raven French had even an ounce of sense, she’d realize that. And she’d give him satisfaction immediately, in whatever form he demanded it, be it a retraction for her ridiculous book or—

Or something else.

A thought started to creep into his brain at that, one he really had no business entertaining, so he tamped it down. That was a form of satisfaction he neither wanted nor needed from her. Even if she did have long inky shafts of hair that made a man want to wind great handfuls of it around his fist. Even if she did have extraordinary violet eyes a man could find himself drowning in. Even if she did have a red, ripe mouth that made a man want to commit mayhem.

That wasn’t why he was here. It wasn’t why she was here, either. Why was she here, anyway?

“Was there something you wanted, Ms. French?”

Immediately, he cursed himself for being the one to give in to their standoff. Damn. How had that happened?

She smiled again, a little less sharply than before, and he knew she had noticed the same thing. Damn. Again.

“Yes,” she said. “I was hoping you and I could discuss this matter more reasonably than we did on Saturday. You could start by releasing me and giving me a little breathing space.”

“What’s to discuss?” he asked. But he didn’t release her. Or give her any space. “You wrote a steaming pile of garbage that included a thinly veiled chapter about me that painted me in a very bad—not to mention false—light. Your book has significantly damaged both my professional and personal lives. And unless you come clean publicly and admit you were lying through your teeth, you’ll have to pay for it.”

She inhaled a deep breath and released it slowly. Then she surprised him by admitting, “You’re right. That chapter is a pack of lies. In fact, every chapter in that book is a pack of lies. I admit it. None of what I said about any of the men in that book is true.”

Gavin arched his eyebrows at that. She was already giving up? Evidently, his reputation had preceded him. But then, it always did. Maybe she really did know what she was up against here.

Reluctantly, he loosened his grip on her wrist and released it. But he was only reluctant because that left her less vulnerable. It wasn’t because he’d actually kind of liked holding her wrist. Well, okay, he’d kind of liked holding her wrist. But only because it gave him the upper hand, that was all.

“You’re admitting you made it all up?” he asked suspiciously.

She nodded. “Every word.”

Now Gavin’s eyebrows arrowed downward. She was saying exactly what he wanted to hear. So why wasn’t he enjoying this more? Oh, right. Because she hadn’t agreed to make her confession public. “And you’re willing to admit that publicly?” he asked.

She nodded readily. “I am.”

“You’ll inform both local and national media outlets? Tell everyone that nothing in the chapter entitled ‘Ethan’ is true?”

“I will.”

Okay, that was what he’d wanted to hear. But he still didn’t feel triumphant. Why was she giving up so easily? Why wasn’t she fighting him?

More to the point, why was he so disappointed that she wasn’t?

Still needing to hear her spell it out, he asked, “You’ll admit, in public, on national television and in the press, that you deliberately defamed me in your book?”

Her gaze skittered away from his and she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Then she crossed her arms over her midsection in a way that could only be called defensive. “Well, um, no,” she hedged. “I won’t do that.”

Ah-ha. That was why he’d been feeling disappointed. Because that last admission was the one he’d really wanted her to make. And now she wasn’t. He suddenly felt strangely happy that they were still sparring. What was that all about?

“You’ll admit it’s all a pack of lies,” he said, “but you won’t admit it’s defamatory?”

She smiled at him, and his confusion compounded. Because her smile was self-satisfied and somehow became her, and there was nothing becoming about a self-satisfied woman. Women were only supposed to be satisfied by the men in their lives, regardless of the nature of that satisfaction. Women satisfying themselves was—

Well, okay, women satisfying themselves was actually pretty erotic, he had to admit. But only when that self-satisfaction was sexual in nature. Even if it was Raven French doing that, it would still be erotic. In fact, he thought as he homed in again on her ripe, red mouth, if it was Raven French doing it, it would be even more—

Annoying, he immediately, adamantly, interrupted his own wayward musing. Unfortunately, like all men, once a sexual thought began to unravel in his mind, there was absolutely no way to stop it, and the next thing he knew, he had an image imprinted at the forefront of his brain of Raven French lying stark naked in the middle of his bed, one hand covering her breast, the other between her legs, stroking herself with measured, leisurely caresses and looking as if she were about to come apart at the seams.

Damn. An image like that wasn’t going to go away anytime soon. And he had a busy afternoon ahead of him.

“That’s right,” she said.

For a single maddening moment, Gavin thought she was agreeing with his belief that women shouldn’t be satisfying themselves unless it was sexually. For another, even more maddening moment, he thought she was going to reach behind herself and lock the door, peel off every stitch of clothing, and gratify herself right there in his office in exactly the way he had imagined.

Then he remembered that she was the enemy, that she had defamed and libeled him and turned him into a laughingstock at both work and play, and he reminded himself that, even if she did do that whole erotic self-satisfying thing right there in his office, it would be really bad form for him to enjoy watching her.

Wait. What was the question?

Oh, yeah. She’d been admitting she had flagrantly lied about him, but that flagrantly lying hadn’t defamed him.

“Why plead guilty to the first, but not the second?” he asked.

“Because my book is a pack of lies, but it is in no way defamatory.” He opened his mouth to object, but she hurried on. “It’s fiction, Mr. Mason. Fiction is, by definition, untrue, and therefore lies. Likewise, by being untrue, it cannot be defamatory.”

He bit back a growl of irritation. “So we’re back to that again, are we? Your novel that everyone knows isn’t a novel at all, but a memoir about your sordid, tawdry life.”

“We’re back to that because that’s what’s true. Not the part about my life being sordid and tawdry,” she rushed to clarify. “Since it’s neither of those things and never has been. Well, not too sordid,” she clarified further after a telling second. “And only a little bit tawdry. And only in the past, not now. And only if you define tawdry in the sense of shoddy and unsophisticated, not crude and gaudy. And if you define the sordidness more as callousness and unpleasantness and not poverty and squalor. Okay, maybe poverty wouldn’t be so out of place, but I did not come from squalor. Nor do I live in squalor now.”

She spoke so rapid-fire and with such a roundabout delivery that Gavin’s brain was looped in knots by the time she finished—she was finished, wasn’t she?—with her. whatever it was she’d been talking about.

“The book is fiction,” she continued before he had a chance to think any more about what she’d said. Not that he wanted to think any more about it, since that would probably make his brain explode. “There’s no way you can prove otherwise.”

Due to the fog that had rolled in over his thinking, it took another moment for her statement to settle in. But when it did, just like that, the fogged cleared, and Gavin felt the upper hand slip back into his grasp. “I can’t, can I?”

Something in his tone must have notched a chink in her determination, because her expression, which had begun to grow smug, suddenly went a bit slack. “Um, no?” she replied—in the inquisitive tense, not the demonstrative, which heartened him even more. “No, you can’t?”

“Ms. French, I can not only argue that the book is nonfiction, I can prove it.”

“That’s impossible?” she said. Asked. Whatever. “Because there’s no way to prove it? Because it’s all a figment of my imagination?”

“Really?” Gavin said. Asked. Whatever. Dammit.

This time, Raven French only nodded her reply. Evidently she, too, had realized that she was beginning to sound like an uncertain second-grader.

He strode over to his desk and withdrew his copy of High Heels and Champagne and Sex, Oh, My! from the drawer into which he had crammed it over the weekend. As he thumbed through the pages, he made his way back to where Raven French was standing, this time stopping with even less space between them than before to make her even edgier. Immediately, she took a step in retreat. Without looking up, he completed another step forward. That elicited another one backward from Ms. So-called Raven French.

“Tell me,” he said as he continued to flip through the pages and took yet another step forward, knowing it would be impossible for her to retreat further, since the door was now at her back. “Is Raven French your real name?”

When she didn’t answer right away, Gavin glanced up from the book to see that she’d bowed her head and was fiddling with a button on the sleeve of her jacket. When he looked at her face, he was astonished to find that she was blushing. What kind of high-price call girl blushed?

Immediately, he answered himself, Those whose prices are so high because they’ve become such accomplished actresses.

Doubtless the blushing was a part of her professional persona. Or at least had been when she was making a living on her back—or her stomach or knees or whatever position commanded the most money—before she had begun to support herself with the more honorable profession of libel.

“Ms. French?” he prodded. “Raven? Is that your real name? “

“Um, no. It’s a pen name.”

Just as he’d suspected. “And why would you take a pen name, unless it was to protect yourself from all the men you’d be outing in your book and all the lawsuits that would result once it was published?”

Still not looking at him, but at least giving up on making the button do something it clearly did not want to do, she replied, “Actually, it was the publisher’s idea for me to take a pen name, not mine.”

He nodded, found the page he wanted, marked it with his finger, and studied not-Raven French again. “So they must have wanted to protect themselves from all the lawsuits that would result once your book was published.”

She did look up at that, but the moment her gaze connected with his, it skittered away again. And, once more, pink blossomed on both cheeks. Amazing, Gavin thought.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a conversation with a woman who blushed. Even by design.

“Actually,” she said again, “they didn’t think my name was, um, exciting enough. They thought the book would do better if the author’s name actually sounded like a call girl’s name.”

“In that case, you won’t mind telling me your real name.”

“I guess not….” But her voice trailed off without her doing it.

Gavin said nothing, only did his best to crowd her space some more in an effort to make her even more uncomfortable. And he told himself it was because he wanted to maintain the upper hand and not because he was hoping maybe she’d blush again….

Violet’s breath hitched tighter in her chest when Gavin Mason inched another millimeter toward her, an action she wouldn’t have thought possible since the guy had practically crawled inside her already. And dammit, she really wished her muddled brain had put that another way, because saying anything about him being inside her only made her thoughts even more muddled.

She tried to pretend his nearness had no effect on her. Because his nearness really did have no effect on her. None whatsoever. Not a bit. In fact, she had barely noticed how much warmer the air—among other things—became when he was this close. And she had hardly paid any attention to the scant spicy scent of him that teased her nose, or the way the lamplight in the room somehow made his arresting pale blue eyes even paler and more arresting. And no way had she paid any attention to his broad, broad, oh-my-God-they-were-like-a-football-field shoulders or his chiseled, honestly-he-could-slice-gouda-with-those-things cheekbones.

Nope, the only thing Violet noticed was how his nearness had no effect on her. In fact, she noticed that so much that she continued to gaze at the floor, because it was way more interesting than Gavin Mason.

“Ms…. whatever your name is?” he prodded, making her twitch. “You were going to tell me your real name? “

Actually, she still hadn’t decided whether she was going to do that or not. Even if she refused to tell him her real name, she was sure he’d find some way to discover it. Not that she was taking any great pains to hide it. It had been the publisher’s idea, too, to copyright the book under her pen name. It wasn’t unusual for authors who assumed pen names to do that, they’d told her. To protect their privacy, they’d said. In case they made a gazillion dollars with their books and became big celebrities, she’d been told.

Yeah, like that was going to happen with a big lawsuit hanging over her head.

“Violet,” she heard herself say. Oh. Evidently part of her had made the decision to tell him her name. Would have been nice if that part of her had informed the other parts. “Violet Tandy.” She started to go one step further and tell him that Violet was a nickname, and that her real name was Candy Tandy, but if he didn’t believe Raven French was her real name, he certainly wasn’t going to buy into Candy Tandy.

He had started to open the book again, but closed it once more. “Violet?” he asked, his voice reflecting his obvious bewilderment.

Something in his tone made her feel defensive for some reason, and she tipped her head back to look him defiantly in the eye. Doing that, however, only made her defiance crumble. Nevertheless, she squared her shoulders and commanded herself not to look away.

“Yes. Violet. Is there a problem with that?”

He opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again. Then he shook his head. “Not a problem. It just doesn’t suit you, that’s all.”

Violet thought it suited her quite well, but she didn’t want to make an issue of it, so she said nothing. Gavin must have thought she would, because he remained silent for a moment more, one dark eyebrow cocked in query. Strangely, he seemed a bit disappointed in her continued silence, but then he opened the book to the page he had marked. And then—oh, dammit—he began to read aloud. “The moment I saw Ethan, I knew he was a captain of industry, the kind of man who had built his business from the ground up. He’d begun with dirty fingernails and secondhand clothes, performing backbreaking labor from sunup ‘til sundown to collect a paycheck that barely sustained him. He schooled himself at night, both in the ways of business and the streets, still managing to earn his degrees—yes, he had three of them—”

At this, he took a break from the reading to glance to the left. Violet followed his gaze and found herself looking at three framed degrees hanging on the wall.

“—three of them,” Gavin continued, returning his attention to the book, “earning them in less time than his infinitely more privileged classmates took to earn one. And don’t think the realization of that had humbled him in any way. On the contrary. Ethan’s feelings of entitlement, authority and superiority were all rooted in those early days and had only flourished since.

“Those days were well in his past, however. When I met Ethan, he was wearing a twenty-five-hundred-dollar Canali suit—wool and cashmere, of course—and Santoni loafers that must have set him back at least another fifteen hundred. His tie, I knew, was a silk Hermès—I’d soon learn that all of his ties were silk, which made those evenings when he wanted to tie me to the bed with them that much more enjoyable—and his shirt was a fine cotton Ferragamo. I know my men’s fashion, dear reader, and trust me. Ethan, more than any of the hundreds of men I’ve bedded, knew men’s fashion, too.”

He looked up from the page, closed the book, and stared straight at Violet. “I’m sorry I don’t read out loud with the breathlessness and pretentiousness a passage like this demands, but—”

“Breathlessness?” Violet interrupted indignantly. “Pretentiousness?” she echoed even more angrily. “Roxanne isn’t pretentious. Today’s readers love all that name-dropping product placement. Didn’t you ever watch Sex and the City? Jeez. And she’s only breathless because her clients pay good money for that kind of thing. They want her to sound like Marilyn Monroe.”

Gavin eyed her steadily, a faint smile dancing about his lips. “I thought you said this was fiction.”

Violet felt her defensiveness rising to the fore again, and she straightened, squaring her shoulders once more. “It is fiction.”

“The way you talk about Roxanne, she sounds like she’s real.”

Now Violet lifted her chin an indignant inch, too. “Well, she’s real to me. All my characters feel real when I’m writing about them.”

“Maybe because they are real? Real people you haven’t even tried to disguise except for lamely changing their names?”

“No way,” she stated adamantly. “You ask any novelist worth her salt, and she’ll say she feels like her characters are real, even if she knows they aren’t.”

“Everything you wrote about Ethan in that passage could be said of me.” He smiled in full now, but there wasn’t anything happy in the gesture. “But then, you already know that. How you know it, I’m not sure, because much of it isn’t common knowledge. You must have found someone who knew me twenty years ago in New York and paid them a bundle to reveal the information. Even more than I paid them to keep it quiet.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Violet assured him. “I’d never heard of you before you forced your business card on me.”

Now his smile turned indulgent. Which still wasn’t happy. “Okay. Let’s pretend you’re as ignorant as you say. Let’s act as if you really don’t know anything about me.”

“I don’t know anything about—”

“You saw the letters on my card,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “GMT stands for Gavin Mason TransAtlantic. I started off working as a longshoreman on the Brooklyn docks, loading and unloading ships for an auction house in Manhattan. Art, antiques, artifacts, that kind of thing. I didn’t have much interest in what was in the crates I pulled off the ships. I just wanted to pay for the college classes I was taking at night. Until one of the auction house guys left a catalog behind one day and I saw how much some of that stuff was selling for. Six, seven figures, most of it. And the auction house got a nice bite of the take. Just for moving the pieces from one land mass to another and unloading it for the seller.”

He smiled another one of those unhappy smiles. “Except that they weren’t the ones unloading the items. I was. They got to stand in a climate controlled place and push around paper. I was the one lugging crates in the rain and snow. From sunup ‘til sundown some days,” he added, quoting the passage from the book. “And all I got was union wages. So I started taking more classes, in addition to studying for my business degree, to learn more about the import business. And I still managed to graduate in less time than my … how did you put it?” He read from the book, even though Violet was sure he had the words memorized. “My infinitely more privileged classmates.”

“But—”

“And those words infinitely more privileged are key here,” he interrupted. “I’m a very important man in Chicago. No one here—no one—knows my background. As far as they’re concerned, I was brought up in the same, infinitely more privileged, society they were. I’ve never gone to bed hungry. I’ve never lived in a crap apartment where the cockroaches and rats vied for crumbs. I’ve never had dirt under my fingernails, and I’ve never wondered which of a half dozen men might be my father.”

Violet’s back went up at his words, so full of contempt were they for a life of need. Except for the rats thing, he could have been talking about her own past. “And what’s so terrible about all those things?” she demanded. “People can’t help the circumstances they’re born into. Poverty isn’t a crime. I’d think you’d be proud of yourself for overcoming all those difficulties to become the man you are now.” Then, although she had no idea why she would admit such a thing to him, she added, “I don’t know who my father is, either.”

“Yes, well, that doesn’t exactly surprise me.”

“Hey!”

He ignored her interjection. “I am proud of myself for overcoming my past,” he said fiercely, “but that doesn’t mean I want anyone else to know about it. The kind of people I rub shoulders with don’t want to know poverty exists. They sure as hell don’t want to know anyone personally who came from that world.”

Well, that, Violet knew, was certainly true.

“They think I’m one of them,” he continued. “That’s a big part of why I enjoy the kind of life I do now. I’ve worked hard not just to get to the top of my profession, but to get to the top of the social order, too. That’s meant hiding the facts of my past from all of them. Which I’ve done very well.” He held up the book. “Until now. Now everyone knows.”

So it wasn’t only the damage he thought his image had taken because people were saying he hired call girls that had him so up in arms, Violet thought. He was as angry—maybe even angrier—about people thinking he wasn’t the pampered blueblood he presented himself to be.

Well, boo hoo hoo. There was nothing wrong with growing up needy. “Like I said, what’s so terrible about that?”

“Breeding is everything with these people,” he answered immediately. “It’s not enough to be successful now. You have to come from the right mix of blood—the bluer, the better. Not from—” He halted abruptly. “Not from where I come from. And now, thanks to you, everyone knows where I come from.”

“Well, I don’t see how they can assume you’re Ethan from that passage,” she hedged. “I wrote that Ethan is a captain of industry. What you do isn’t industrious. It’s an import business.”

“Industry, import,” he repeated. “The two words are very similar. The same way the names Gavin and Ethan are.”

“Similar sounding maybe, but they’re not the same thing at all. The careers or the names.”

“Still, you have to admit, now that you’ve heard about my circumstances, what you wrote about Ethan’s background is almost identical to mine.”

It wasn’t identical. Sure, there were some similarities, but a lot of men in Gavin’s position could have backgrounds similar to his. Many men like him—and women, for that matter—had started with nothing and built empires. To do that, of course, they would have had to do everything themselves and learn what they could and fight their way up the ladder. It was all the more proof that the character of Ethan was a blend of many people, someone she’d created after reading books and articles about dozens of self-made millionaires.

“There are a lot of people who built their businesses the way you did,” she pointed out. “That passage doesn’t prove anything. Besides, you said hardly anyone knows your history that far back. So why would you think anyone would draw the conclusion that you’re Ethan based on that description?”

He said nothing in response to that, and Violet hoped maybe that would be the end of it. Then, without a word, he dropped a hand to the top button of his suit jacket and pushed it slowly through its hole. Then he unbuttoned the other one. As he walked toward Violet again, he began to shrug out of it, something that made a funny little sensation fizz in her belly. He draped the jacket over one arm and went for his necktie next, loosening the knot at his throat enough to unfasten the top two buttons of his shirt, as well.

For a moment, Violet thought he was undressing for … for … for something … something he really shouldn’t be undressing for, not in his office, and not when she barely knew him, and not when she had already been having thoughts about him she absolutely, unequivocally should not be thinking. But he stopped when a good foot of space still lay between them, and when he reached for her, it wasn’t to pull her close. It was to—

Offer her his jacket? But that was such a gentlemanly thing to do, she thought, confused. And he was no gentleman. Besides, it wasn’t cold in the office. In fact, it seemed to be getting hotter and hotter with every passing minute.

She shook her head, not even trying to hide her puzzlement. “I don’t understand.”

Somehow, he seemed to know the wayward direction her thoughts had taken, because his smile was full of mischief. And wow, when he smiled like that, as if he meant it, he was really kind of … slightly … rather …

She bit back a sigh that came out of nowhere. Breathtaking. That’s what he was when he smiled like that.

“The label, Ms. Tandy,” he said. “Check the label in the jacket.”

Her brain still a bit foggy—never mind some of her other body parts that had no business being foggy in mixed company—it took a moment for her to figure out what he meant. “Oh. Right. The label.”

She took the garment from him and turned it until she found the designer’s name stitched to the lining beneath the collar. “Canali,” she read. Just like Ethan’s.

“And what kind of fabric?”

She searched the jacket again, this time looking for the smaller label on the inside seam that would offer the information. “Wool and cashmere,” she read. “But how do I know you didn’t buy that after reading the book, just to make your ridiculous charge seem real?”

“I bought this suit two years ago for a professional portrait I had made. Two years ago,” he added adamantly. “Check the shirt and tie, too,” he instructed.

She did. Ferragamo and Hermès, respectively.

He toed off a loafer and scooted it toward her with his foot. Santoni. Damn him.

He opened the book again as he slipped his shoe on, flipped a few more pages, then began to read. “Ethan’s work environment was a study in contradictions. The building that housed his office was a looming edifice of glass and metal, lacking in color or texture or character, as cold and stark and ruthless as the corporate world itself. But his office reflected the true magnificence, prosperity and hedonism of the man—rich colors, skillfully, beautifully wrought furnishings, decadent artwork.”

Gavin paused there, looking up to meet Violet’s gaze. Of course, she knew why. He wanted to gauge her reaction to what she knew came next. She had written the passage, after all. But she felt trapped somehow, pinned by his gaze, uncertain what she could say or do that would prevent him from reading the next paragraph. And when she said nothing to stop him, he seemed as if he were looking forward to reading the words that ensued.

“I have many, very special, memories of an oxblood leather chair tucked into one corner.”

At this, he glanced at something over her right shoulder. Sensing what she would see, she turned around anyway, only to find—ta da!—an oxblood leather chair tucked into that corner of the room. Damn. That didn’t look good. She turned back to Gavin, but he’d dropped his gaze to the book.

“So often,” he read, “when Ethan requested I come to his office for one of our sessions, he would be sitting in that chair upon my arrival, a cut crystal tumbler of fine, singlemalt Scotch—neat, of course—in one hand. Without even greeting me, he would demand that I take off every stitch of clothing, which, of course, I would do. Then he would beckon me over and offer me the glass. I was to fill my mouth first with the Scotch, long enough to warm it, then drop to my knees and fill my mouth with him. As much of him as I could, anyway. I spent entire afternoons on my knees in that office by that chair, first giving him oral pleasure and then bent over the cushion so he could take me from behind, again and again and.” He halted and looked up at Violet once more, smiling even more broadly. “Well, I think I’ve made my point, haven’t I?”

Oh, yes! Yes! Yes! Yessss! Violet wanted to shout. “Um, I believe you’ve tried,” she said instead. She cleared her throat indelicately and avoided his gaze. “However, you failed.”

“Oh?”

She nodded. And avoided his gaze some more. “Your artwork is in no way decadent.”

Now Gavin raised both dark brows in surprise. “Ms., ah, Tandy, have you looked closely at those paintings?”

“Why do I need to look closely?” she replied. “They’re all abstracts. I don’t care much for abstract art. I mean, not that I’m much of an art connoisseur in the first place. But I really don’t like the kind of art where I can’t even tell what it’s supposed to be.”

“No, I’m sure you’re more inclined to view the images in the Kama Sutra, but indulge me. That one over there, for instance,” he said, pointing to one on the other side that was executed in bold lacerations of purple and brown. “What does that remind you of? “

She cocked her head to one side as she viewed it from this distance. “A peanut butter and jelly sandwich,” she finally said. Well, that was what it reminded her of. Hey, she’d told him she wasn’t an art connoisseur. So sue her.

He laughed at that, a full, uninhibited laugh that rippled over her, making something in her belly tighten. Not in a bad way, but in a way that made her feel.

Um, never mind.

“Move closer,” he told her. “Tell me what you see.”

She sighed, growing tired of his efforts to find comparisons between himself and Ethan where there simply were none. But she did as he requested, completing the half-dozen steps necessary to put her within five feet of the painting. She looked at it, trying not to focus on the individual parts and instead considering the whole. She let her focus blur a little, and, sure enough, a figure began to emerge from the swirls of colors. Not a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but a … a … Hmm. It did look sort of familiar. In fact, it looked like a … like a …

“Oh. My. God,” she finally said. “That’s a man’s … a man’s, um …”

“A man’s um-physical attribute that makes him a man,” Gavin finished for her.

Violet spun around, gaping at him. “And you have it hanging in your office? That is so crass.”

He laughed again. “The artist is massively in demand in the art community,” he said. “Her greatest inspiration was Georgia O’Keeffe, but she’s taken that artist’s, ah, proclivities, one step further.”

“Yeah, I’ll say,” Violet agreed. Unable to help herself, she looked at the other paintings in the room. Sure enough, a theme began to develop. One picture depicted—quite graphically, once you got the gist of it—a woman’s, um. that part of a woman that made her a woman. Another picture was of a woman’s breasts. And a fourth painting was of all the subjects of the other pictures coming together in a way that, had they been a magazine cover, would have had them banned in every decent grocery store in the Midwest.

“I cannot believe you have pornography hanging on your office walls,” she said.

Gavin covered the distance between them until he stood beside Violet, towering over her as he had before. “Where does a woman who makes her living performing sex acts get off impugning a woman who paints them, or a man who collects those paintings?”

Enough. She’d had enough of Gavin Mason and his stupid ideas about her and her book. Settling her hands on her hips, she said, “The description of everything in that passage could be a description of a thousand buildings, offices and men in this country. I’m tired of arguing with you. You want to sue me, Mr. Mason, go ahead. You’ll be hearing from my attorneys this afternoon.”

With that, and without allowing him time to regroup and attack again, Violet turned on her heel and fled.