Sinful Temptation (5 page)

He was familiar with her work?
Really?
She knew she had talent, of course, but this was the equivalent of a freelance magazine writer getting a call from the head of G.P. Putnam’s Sons offering to buy a manuscript from her. She had the undignified urge to squeal with delight and spin in gleeful circles, but then she got suspicious. She shot Tony a questioning look, but his bland expression gave nothing away.

“Thank you,” she replied. “It’s great to meet—”

But Marcus’s attention had already wandered, and he was heading off to study some of her paintings. “I’ll just have a look around,” he said vaguely, producing a pair of edgy black-rimmed glasses from a pocket and slipping them on.

O-kay, then.

That left her to greet Cooper, the surly one. She shored up her courage, praying he wouldn’t kill her for saying hello.

“Hi,” she said, extending her hand. “Thanks for coming.”

It took him a minute to shake because he’d been distracted by something over her shoulder. Snapping to attention, he took her hand, said, “Pleasure,” in an indifferent voice, and then looked past her again.

Bemused, Talia followed his line of sight to discover Gloria still working on packing boxes.

“And you are…?” Cooper asked Gloria.

“The sister,” Gloria told him. “Ignore me.”

With that, she finished taping a box closed, swung it around and headed to the studio’s back room, giving Talia a suppressed smile and a wink as she went.

Cooper stared after her, a vague frown marring his brow. “Excuse me,” he finally said to Talia, and then wandered off to join his brother as they studied the paintings.

Which left Talia semi-alone with Tony.

“What’s going on?” she asked, not bothering to hide her open suspicion.

Shrugging, he took his time answering, and her nerves stretched accordingly. He had to know that she was freaking out and overwhelmed in the presence of a couple of men who could give her career a huge boost with little more than a snap of their fingers.

“We told you. We wanted to take a closer look at your work.”

“Why? Slow week? Did you run out of Picassos and Monets to buy and sell?”

“Not exactly.”

“What exactly, then?”

“A couple things. First, a wall in my Hamptons estate was damaged in the storm a few months ago.”

“And you decided to come down here and share that news flash with me?”

“Not that news flash, no. This one—a huge mural depicting scenes from
The Odyssey
was destroyed. My mother, who was a Greek professor, commissioned that mural, and she loved it. Therefore, it means a lot to me, and I’d like it to be replaced.”

Talia blinked, letting all that information sink in.

Oh, no.

Oh, no.

Freezing her poker face into place, she waited for the rest, although she already had the terrible feeling that this conversation was going to culminate in a
Godfather
-esque offer she couldn’t refuse, no matter how much she knew she should refuse it.

“Is that so?” she murmured.

They seemed to be locked in an impromptu game of chicken, each trying not to waver or show weakness first and undermine their own bargaining position.

He watched her with narrow-eyed interest for a beat or two, waiting for some further reaction, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. For reasons she couldn’t identify, it felt crucially important never to reveal weakness of any kind to Tony. If she did, she feared he’d swallow her alive in a single gulp.

When she didn’t say anything else, his lips curled with what looked like reluctant admiration, as though he’d realized that, like him, she was a player.

She tried to look bored, which was hard given the way her heart thudded with the strain of waiting.

“Additionally,” he continued, now studying the tips of his neat fingernails as he crossed his ankles and leaned against the table, “we’d like to commission a mural for the lobby of Davies & Sons. The main building over on—”

“—Madison Avenue,” she finished for him. Like she hadn’t had her nose pressed to the sleek glass windows of the auction house millions of times, desperate for a glimpse of the artwork inside.

One heavy brow rose, mocking her. “You’re familiar with it? Excellent. We thought that would be a great place to showcase an edgy new painter. We want something that’ll make people stop and stare when they walk in the building. You feel me?”

Oh, she felt him, all right. She also couldn’t breathe.

“We figure we could unveil the new lobby mural at our fiftieth-anniversary gala the week before Labor Day. The artist we choose will get a tremendous amount of exposure. Of course.”

Of course.
Bastard.

Finished dangling his rotten little carrot in front of her starving face, he looked up and straightened his posture. There was a glint in his eyes that looked suspiciously like amused triumph, but, to his credit, he didn’t smirk.

“Know anyone who might be interested?” he wondered.

Interested?
She was damn near frothing at the mouth.

It took everything she had to shrug and keep her face blank.

“I couldn’t say,” she lied.

“Really?” That quirked brow of his rose higher, and her fingers itched to rip it off his amused face and stomp it beneath her foot like a fuzzy caterpillar. “Why don’t you think about it for a minute.”

Oh, she was already thinking about a lot of things.

First of all, there was a silky and disconcerting note in his voice that glided across her skin like a feather’s touch and made nerve endings zing to life all over her body. Second, she’d been so sure that her path for the foreseeable future was set. She’d made her list of priorities, with no room for last-minute deviations.

She’d been working too hard, she’d thought.

Life was short and she didn’t want to miss a second of it, so she’d planned to get off the merry-go-round and travel while she could. Choose different, better goals than merely being a successful painter.

She wanted, in short, to
live.

Third, her superlative deductive skills had led her to one inescapable conclusion: this mural commission was a gambit to get around what she’d told him yesterday. She’d lied and said she felt nothing romantic for him, he knew she was lying, and now he’d manufactured a reason to throw them together.

He was betting he could wear down her resistance if they spent more time together.

He was right.

“Talia?”

“Why are you doing this?” she asked, low.

Like magic, the intensity burning behind his brown eyes died out, and his expression became as bland as a bowl of infant rice cereal with milk.

“Doing what? Proposing something that could benefit both of us?”

“You don’t really need me.”

His lips tightened into a grim line. “Is that so?”

“You’re trying to uproot my life, Tony.”

“I’m merely making a business proposition to you.”

“I’ve told you I’m planning to travel for a while.”

“Then tell me no,” he said flatly.

She opened her mouth. Nothing came out. She closed her mouth.

He watched her, unsmiling. This moment—this decision—had somehow become too important for petty things like winning or losing, and he seemed to take no pleasure in her struggle.

“Why me?” she asked finally. “There are a million other artists who’d be—”

He edged closer, more firmly into her space. There was something predatory about him now, threatening in a way that had nothing to do with her physical safety. It excited her almost as much as it—he—terrified her.

“Well, now you’re raising an interesting point, Talia. This is a good offer. Lots of other artists would snap it up in a heartbeat. So why are you acting like I’m serving you a plate of nuclear waste?”

“You’re not answering my question. Why me?”

“Why not you?”

“I don’t want to work with you.”

“Because…?”

Was he trying to force her to say it? Again? Well, fine. “Because we have different expectations about our—” her cheeks flushed “—relationship.”

He frowned, looking baffled. “No, we don’t.”

“You’re not serious.”

“I am serious. I told you I had feelings for you, you said you don’t have feelings for me, so that’s it. We’re friends only. End of story.”

Standing there with him, close enough to see the sparks of black-and-gold in his brown eyes and feel the heat from his body, it didn’t feel like the end of any story.

It felt as though their story was just beginning.

“So you’ve just…given up. Is that what you’re telling me?”

“No means no, Talia,” he said lightly. “You stood right there, looked me in the eye and told me you don’t have romantic feelings for me. Remember that?”

As if she could forget. Even now, the lie clogged her throat, threatening to choke her. “I remember.”

Though his expression was still unfathomably blank, his voice was the purest spun silk. “You’re not a liar, are you?”

The funny thing was, she wasn’t normally a liar, and the whopper she’d told yesterday felt as if it was scraping years off her life.

Could he see it on her face? The longing she felt for him, locked in a death match with her fear of being hurt, her fear of being left, and all the other terrors that stalked her in the night? Could he feel the way her frustrated desire for him radiated off her skin like steam? Did he know that the thought of him was a relentless ache inside her, never giving her a moment’s peace?

Did he know that she reread his letters all the time and kept them in a treasure box that held no other treasures?

“I never lie,” she lied.

He hit her again with that lopsided smile, but this time there was something hard about it, almost cynical. Her belly responded by tightening into sickening knots.

“That’s what I thought.” Shoving his hands in his pockets, he shrugged. “So don’t worry. I’ll never mention it again.”

The promise did nothing to improve her mood. “You won’t?”

“Absolutely not. So are you interested?”

Having run through all her lies and accusations, she had precious few weapons left, so she tried bravado. “You couldn’t afford me.”

His eyes agleam with quiet satisfaction, he reached into an inner pocket and pulled out a folded check, which he held between his first two fingers the way he might hold a tip for a bellman.

Arrogant jackass.

Irritated beyond words, she snatched it away and—

Oh, my God.

She stared down at the check, stalling for time and making sure she hadn’t miscounted the number of zeroes.

She hadn’t.

How the hell was she supposed to walk away from this kind of a deal? she wondered with growing desperation.

She was a successful artist, true, but right here, in her hot little hands, she was holding more money—and opportunities—than she’d made on her last three commissions combined. Here she’d thought travel was her heart’s desire. Hah. It turned out that she was, at the core, a ruthlessly ambitious artist who couldn’t turn her back on the almighty dollar, the same as every other person in the universe. Besides, with this kind of money, she could buy her own small island in the Caribbean and spend winters there.

Even so, she didn’t have to make it easy for him.

“Tony, I—”

He checked his watch, as though he was tired of her wasting his time and wanted to wrap up this whole annoying negotiation so he could get to the important part of his day.

“I’ll give you the other half when you’ve finished both murals.”

Dumbstruck, she stammered like an idiot. “The—the
other half?
”

“I assume that’s okay?” he asked mildly.

Was it hot in here all of the sudden? Why did it feel like there was a tightening noose around her neck? What the hell had her greed led her into?

Increasing desperation made her fling out the only remaining excuse she could find. “Maybe your cousins don’t think I’m the right artist for the lobby mural.”

“Good point.” Twisting at the waist, Tony looked to Marcus and Cooper, both of whom were bent over one of her paintings, murmuring and pointing. “So what do we think?” Tony called.

Marcus backed up a step, cocking his head to look at the painting from another angle. “She’s got potential, but the work is still immature.”

Ouch.

“So we don’t want her for the lobby mural?” Tony asked.

Marcus moved closer to the painting again, squinting at her brushstrokes. “I didn’t say that. In a couple of years, I expect she’ll be getting six figures a pop. I’m seeing flashes of brilliance here.”

Talia stilled, her queasiness fading as her insides launched into a happy dance. Brilliance? Did he say
brilliance?