Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
Of all the things that could have brought him closer to Rafe and given him the feeling that they were once again on the same side, artistic plagiarism was not the one Jake would have chosen.
“I cannot believe that anyone would stoop so low as to steal someone else’s work and pass it off as their own,” Rafe growled as the two of them hurried up to the house once the hot shop was in order.
“That’s because you’re a good person,” Jake said, walking close enough to take Rafe’s hand if he needed to. “But trust me, people are shitty. I’m surprised this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often. Maybe it does and we just don’t hear about it.”
Rafe made a sound of derision. “What’s the use in stealing someone else’s idea? The entire idea of art is to create and to learn and grow through the creative process.”
Jake couldn’t help but smile. Rafe was so noble and pure of heart. Maybe it was because he’d always had a family to support him or maybe it was something else. Either way, it increased the pull that Jake felt toward him and made him want to move mountains on Rafe’s behalf.
“What?” Rafe demanded with a scowl, noticing Jake’s smile as they reached the front hall of Hawthorne House. “What’s that look for? Do you think I’m that big of a fool to allow this to happen to me?”
“No,” Jake said, his smile fading. “I think you’re a wonderful, good, incredibly talented man who does not deserve something like this happening to him.”
Rafe stopped, blocking the flow of students trying to move in and out of the building for a moment so he could stare at Jake suspiciously. When an older man with smears of clay all over his trousers cleared his throat and gave Rafe a rude look, Rafe grabbed Jake’s arm and moved both of them over to the side.
The touch was surprisingly electric. They faced a huge, possibly insurmountable problem, but all Jake wanted to do was fall into Rafe’s arms and do whatever it took to make him feel okay again.
“You’re probably laughing at me for being so blind,” Rafe said in a quiet, bitter voice once they were off to one side of the hall, near one of the large front windows and a display of kids’ art. “You probably think I deserve this.”
Jake gaped at him for a moment. “Not even a little bit,” he said. “I’m furious with Hélène for thinking she can step all over us like this. It’s disgusting, and I plan to do whatever we need to do to expose her for the fraud she is.”
He wasn’t sure how he expected Rafe to react to his declaration, but he didn’t expect the strange look that came over him.
“You’re not gloating,” he said. “You’re not laughing at me and telling me it serves me right for being a trusting fool.”
“Why would I do anything like that?” Jake asked, shifting closer to Rafe.
Rafe lowered his head slightly. “Because I am a fool,” he said. “I let my head be turned by Hélène when you saw how untrustworthy she was. You tried to warn me.”
Jake shook his head and rested a hand on Rafe’s arm. “I burned my credibility a long time ago,” he said. “Even with you. I’m the boy who cried ‘wolf’. Of course you questioned my motives. But that’s all behind us. We’ll deal with it later, once the bigger problems are taken care of. Right now, we need to pin Hélène down, get her to admit stealing our work, and have her, I don’t know, print some sort of retraction or take down her posts at the very least.”
Rafe stared at Jake intensely. The air between them practically fizzed. There was so much more there than just the art theft they were dealing with, but right then wasn’t the time to deal with it.
Rafe drew in a breath and nodded. “Let’s start by trying to contact Hélène,” he said, pulling his phone from his back pocket. “I know it’s unlikely, but maybe this is all just a mistake. Maybe she posted the wrong pics and she’s actually working on something else entirely.”
Jake knew that wasn’t true, but he stayed silent as Rafe dialed the number Hélène had given him the other night.
He could tell from Rafe’s tight expression that either no one answered or the number wasn’t real. It didn’t come as a surprise.
“Maybe there’s another way to contact her,” Rafe said when he lowered his phone and tapped to end the call.
“Possibly, but you know how likely that is,” Jake said.
Rafe sighed and put his phone away, then rubbed a hand over his face. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
“Can’t believe what is happening?”
Jake turned to find Janice walking toward them with a look of motherly concern in her eyes.
“Mum,” Rafe said, adorably relieved that his mother was there, despite being a grown man. “Hélène Rénard has apparently stolen some of my and Jake’s work and is passing it off as her own online.”
Janice paused a few steps before reaching them, her expression turning angry. “What’s going on? What exactly has she done?”
“She’s put up a post on social media with a few of the pieces Rafe and I made, claiming it as her own and the start of a new collection she’s working on,” Jake said.
Janice’s expression went from generally angry to spitefully furious in a heartbeat. “Was it a bowl and a vase?” she asked, her voice rising.
Jake’s insides sank. Janice knew something.
“Yes,” Rafe said.
“That bitch!” Janice hissed. Her fury would have been comical in any other situation. “She told me they were gifts.”
Rafe tensed and balled his hands into fists. Jake threw up his arms in frustration and rolled his eyes. “And there’s another way she could wriggle out of the whole thing,” he said. “If we call her out for stealing the pieces, she can claim they were a gift.”
“She watched us make a few pieces using our experimental techniques,” Rafe said, like a volcano about to blow. “This whole thing is my fault.”
“No, it isn’t,” Jake was quick to tell him. “It’s not your fault for being trusting and friendly and for treating another colleague as an equal.”
Janice huffed an ironic laugh. “Hélène Rénard is anything but your equal, dear,” she said. “You are a thousand times the talent that woman is. Anyone who has to steal someone else’s art to make as much money as she claimed to me that she makes is nowhere near your equal.”
That much was certain, but standing around complaining about it wasn’t going to fix the situation.
“She’s not answering Rafe’s call,” Jake told Janice. “Did she give you some other way to contact her by any chance?”
“No,” Janice snapped, still angry. At least she wasn’t angry with him now. “I suspect you’re not going to be able to get through to her unless you march down to Paris and bang on her front door.”
Whether she was being flippant or not, Jake turned to Rafe, his eyebrows going up. “We could always go to Paris and confront her,” he said.
Rafe had been simmering in his own thoughts throughout Jake’s exchange with Janice. He dragged himself away from whatever had been boiling in his head and turned to Jake.
“Yes,” he said. “We need to get to Paris as soon as possible to demand that she give us credit for those pieces and the entire concept.”
Jake’s heart skipped a beat. There was more to that statement than was on the surface. Rafe had an idea.
“How do we get to Paris from here?” Jake asked him.
“Plane, train, or automobile,” Janice answered for him. “I prefer to take Eurostar myself. There’s no fussing with traffic when you go by train.”
Jake nodded and turned to Rafe. “How do we get to the train?”
“St. Pancras,” Rafe said, still half in his thoughts. “First we have to get to St. Pancras.”
“Then let’s do it,” Jake said, thumping Rafe’s shoulder.
At least, he intended to thump Rafe’s shoulder, like they were teammates about to go into the big game. His hand stayed on Rafe, and he felt the pull to hug Rafe and let him know it would be alright again.
“I’ll go make your reservations,” Janice said, immediately walking off with a sudden sparkle in her eyes.
Jake smirked for half a second before turning all his attention to Rafe. “We’re going to be alright,” he said. “Even if Hélène watched us making those pieces, it took us weeks to really get the full process down. I still think we could refine the whole thing and make it even better.”
Rafe blinked fully out of his thoughts and turned to Jake. “You’re telling me all our hard work has been rubbish and we could do better?” he asked. “Now?”
There was enough of a twinkle in Rafe’s eyes for Jake to tell he was partially teasing. That in itself was the best sign that things would be okay that he’d had so far.
“I think we could get much better,” he said, grinning in return. “We’ve only just begun to figure out how we work together. I think there’s plenty of room for us to grow and meld our skills.”
Rafe’s mouth twitched like he would smile. More importantly, his gaze dropped to Jake’s lips. “Is that so?”
The mood suddenly shifted. Excitement of a different sort entirely pulsed through Jake. He sidled closer to Rafe and slipped his arms around him. “I definitely think that’s so.”
Rafe hummed, then cupped the side of Jake’s face and leaned in for a kiss. It was the last thing they should have been doing when they had plans to run to Paris and defend their intellectual property, but neither of them could help themselves. Sometimes when the world turned upside down and things became intense, you needed a moment of passion to remind yourself what really mattered.
They were interrupted by Rafe’s phone ringing. Kissing was forgotten as Rafe rushed to take his phone out. He stared at the screen in confusion for a moment before answering it with a puzzled, “Hello?”
Jake’s nerves frayed as Rafe looked at him, his eyes widening a bit.
“Yes, they are the same pieces Nally was telling you about,” Rafe went on. He was silent for another moment, his eyes growing wider, then he stopped whoever was on the other end of the call to say, “Hold on a moment. I have Jake Mathers here with me. We worked on the pieces together. Let me put you on speaker so you can tell him, too.”
They stepped farther into the corner of the room, and Rafe tapped his phone to put it on speaker.
“Alright, go ahead,” Rafe said.
“Hey, Jake, it’s Todd Renfield,” the tinny voice on the other end of the call said, though he didn’t sound particularly pleased.
“Hey, Todd,” Jake answered, his gut tightening. Todd Renfield was one of the other artists who had been at Corning while Jake and Rafe had been in residence. He was British, but Jake hadn’t dared approach him with his marriage scheme. It sounded like he knew Nally as well.
“I was just telling Rafe that Hélène Rénard is a nasty piece of work and that she steals concepts from up-and-coming artists all the time and passes them off as her own. Her last three collections can actually be traced back to students at home and abroad. Some of them even did the work for her. I’m not sure she’s produced an original piece herself for years now.”
“I knew it,” Jake said. “She’s a liar and a cheat.”
“Like knows like, right,” Todd said sharply, causing Jake to color.
“Never mind all that now,” Rafe said, frowning at the phone. “The important thing is that she’s done this before.”
Todd laughed bitterly. “This is all she does. The woman couldn’t come up with an original idea if her life depended on it. It probably does. That’s why she’s such a crafty thief. She stole my entire Fragile Forest collection two years ago and passed it off as her own.”
Rafe sucked in a breath. “That was your work?”
“Every drop of it,” Todd said. “And now, when I so much as whisper about what she’d done, she turns around and discredits me. I’ve lost three jobs in the last two years because of her malicious lying. My reputation is shattered when really, hers should be.”
“And there’s been nothing you can do to prove she stole your work?” Rafe asked.
Todd sighed. “I trusted her. I didn’t have anything documented. She knew I wouldn’t have a credible way to prove she stole from me. She’s picky when it comes to who she steals from. Picky and clever. That’s why she’s able to keep doing this without being caught.”
“Keep doing this?” Jake asked.
“There’s an entire group of us who suspect or know outright that she’s taken our designs and concepts,” Todd said.
“If there’s a whole group, shouldn’t you be able to come forward together and do something?” Rafe asked.
“Not against someone with Hélène Rénard’s power,” Todd said. “It takes a lot more than a few less experienced artists to bring down someone as influential as Hélène.”
It was the truth. It made Jake wonder if there was any point in going to Paris at all. He’d seen the same thing a dozen times in other industries, Hollywood, the literary world, everywhere. It was nearly impossible to bring someone that big down unless they were caught in the act or had some other kind of gross misconduct to tarnish their image. Even then, people were so invested in their heroes’ images that they would do mental gymnastics to excuse even the worst behavior.
“We’re about to leave for Paris to confront Hélène directly,” Jake said, glancing at Rafe and trying to gauge how he was feeling about things. “We can keep you in the loop and let you know what she says and does.”
“I definitely want to stay involved in this,” Todd said. “I’ll try to work on things from my end, too. It’s about time we all banded together to put a stop to this shit.”
They said their goodbyes and Rafe hung up. He continued to stare at the phone for a few seconds, his brow creased in thought.
“What are you thinking?” Jake asked. “Is it anything I can help with?”
Rafe remained silent for another few seconds before meeting Jake’s eyes. “This might be impossible,” he said. “Todd is right. It’s incredibly difficult to bring someone down once they’ve risen as high as Hélène has.”
“But we can do it,” Jake said, resting a hand on Rafe’s arm. “I’m not going to let anyone, no matter how important, take away from your accomplishments. That’s your work, our work, and the world is going to know that. You deserve every bit of the praise she thinks she can get for it.”
Rafe smiled, his shoulders dropping. “I don’t know how you can still be on my side after the way I behaved when Hélène was here,” he said.
Jake rested a hand on the side of his face. “I’m just standing by my man is all.”
Raffe huffed a laugh. “I’m not sure your man deserves standing by.”
Jake laughed and took a step back. “Imagine how I feel? I’m the compulsive liar who has to rewrite thirty years of behavior to stop his life from completely falling apart.”
He started for the family corridor, Rafe by his side.
“You’re a better man than I am,” Rafe said.
“I am not,” Jake snorted. “But we’re both better than Hélène.”
“I can agree to that,” Rafe growled. “She’s not going to get away with this. We’ve worked too hard to let anyone else take credit for the things we’ve done.”
“Damn straight,” Jake said, excitement pulsing through him. He felt like they were getting somewhere. He wasn’t sure it even mattered if they were able to bring an artistic giant like Hélène Rénard down. The two of them were working together, and he wasn’t going to let anything come between them.