Chapter 6
6
[She] will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.
THE ART OF WAR , SUN TZU
Bella followed Chase out of Nayak, wrapping a scarf around her neck to stop the bite of the wind and rubbing her hands together as Chase nodded towards downtown and set off at an unhurried pace. Their breath streamed out like jets of smoke only to be eaten away by the night.
How can I help you if you won’t let me?
She’d nearly said sabotage. How can I sabotage you, if you won’t let me?
Bella bit her lip.
‘It’s not far. We’ll be out of the cold soon,’ he said as he forged his way through harried commuters and tourists heading to their important destinations.
‘That’s okay, Paris was even colder just before I left,’ she said, choosing to weave through them instead.
‘Did you like it?’ Chase asked.
She blinked. No one had asked her that. Not really. In part because they’d all known that she’d been pretty much exiled by the fallout from the aborted wedding.
‘No,’ she admitted with a rueful laugh. ‘Not really. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s beautiful and the food is delicious,’ she said. And there hadn’t been a bunch of reporters hiding behind corners, waiting to judge her for eating all the sweat treats she could before exercising the calories away.
‘But?’
Bella scrunched her nose.
‘Why were you there then?’
‘It was deemed prudent,’ she admitted.
‘For who?’
‘Whom,’ she absently corrected. ‘For my family’s foundation. They didn’t want the negative press attention.’
She felt the heat of his gaze on her.
‘They sent you away? After the…?’
His shock made her uncomfortable. It skated too close to how she’d felt. It nudged at the closed door she’d locked her hurt behind.
‘But who wouldn’t want six months in Paris?’ she said, forcing a smile to her lips.
‘Whom,’ he incorrectly corrected.
‘That’s not the?—’
She looked up to find him smiling at her, a tease glinting in his eye. He’d given her a chance to change the conversation. And she took it. But she didn’t like being so easily readable to him. And she didn’t like how it made something in her gut flip when he did that.
She’d had a little of that with Olly, but not like this. With Olly, he’d been obvious to the point of charming. There was a wryness to it that she had become used to. But Chase? Chase was sneaky, hoarding his charm until you least expected it, so when you were hit with it, it was sudden, unexpected, and much harder to defend against.
She looked back across the sidewalk only to find that she’d lost him. She pulled up short, catching the person coming towards her by surprise and Bella had to step nearly into the road to stop them from colliding.
She glanced back over her shoulder to find him standing by a side alley waiting for her with a smirk that made her want to growl. She didn’t have this reaction to people. But there was something about Chase Miller that got her hackles up.
Standing there in his long line coat, the street light picking out the tussles of his hair and the sharpness of his cheekbones, he looked like restrained wildness.
Bella shook her head. She must have caught hypothermia. It was the only possible explanation.
Shaking herself off, she cut her way through the throng of people and met him at the mouth of an alleyway, peering down into the darkness warily.
‘Don’t chicken out on me now, Carmichael.’
She clenched her jaw and shot him a look. No one had ever called her Carmichael. Apart from maybe the boys’ Phys Ed teacher in high school. There was something taunting about it, a challenge that she was helpless to resist.
Half way down the alley, Chase tugged her elbow and led her to a back door with the word EXIT clearly printed on the sign, and knocked.
She quietly shifted out of his grasp without his notice and stamped some feeling back into her feet, until a large man in a security uniform pulled open the door.
Every good-girl instinct screamed in alarm. Were they doing something illegal? Surely if not, they would have just used the front entrance to wherever they were.
‘Chase,’ she whisper-hissed, now pulling at his elbow.
‘Miller,’ exclaimed the big burly man in the uniform. ‘Been a while.’
Chase huffed out a laugh. ‘Just a bit,’ he replied as the security guard pushed the door open wide enough to let them through into a brightly lit startlingly white corridor.
‘Ma’am,’ the security guard said, dipping his head to her before returning his attention to Chase. ‘Mannon said you’d need these.’
‘Thanks, man,’ Chase replied, taking the keys from the guard’s palm and slapping him on the beefy side of his arm.
‘Lock up when you’re done and drop them off on the way back out.’
‘Sure thing,’ Chase said easily as Bella watched the guard lope off down the corridor all the way to the end.
She looked back to Chase who had that infuriating smirk across his face again. One she wanted to wipe off with a startling amount of violence. Still, she followed him down the corridor until Chase paused in front of one of the many doors. Chase slid a key into the lock and pushed open the heavy door into the darkness beyond.
She was curious despite herself, which was warning enough.
She cleared her throat. ‘I would like to know if I’m about to be involved in a bank heist.’
He peered at her, something bright flickering in his gaze.
‘Would you do that?’
‘No,’ she replied definitively.
‘Just checking,’ he teased, and pushed the door completely open, reaching around to the left to find the light switch that illuminated an absolutely huge space.
Oh.
Bella couldn’t help herself. Her footsteps echoed as she walked past him into a space that was inconceivably near football-stadium large. The space seemed to be partitioned into zones that made her organisational heart near sing with joy. The flooring changed from concrete to white slats, not joined like wooden flooring, but with a line running across them. She followed the line to the deceptively simple wire racks on which hung frames of different sizes and shapes.
This was a gallery storage. And from the glimpse of the paintings she saw, a very well-known gallery.
‘Chase!’ she exclaimed. ‘We shouldn’t be in here,’ she realised, the flush of wrong-doing painting her cheeks in a pink blush.
‘I know a guy,’ he dismissed with a shrug.
‘You know a guy?’ she demanded.
‘Take a look,’ Chase said, gesturing to the sliding racks. ‘We have time. If memory serves, there’s a Rembrandt in that one.’ He pointed just over her shoulder.
Oh, the arrogance of this man! To just be able to wander through the most highly secret, inconceivably valuable, part of one of the world’s most renowned art galleries. As if it were his own apartment and she could just ‘take a look’.
But she wanted to!
In that moment she didn’t think she’d wanted anything more in her life. She’d seen some incredible artwork at galleries around the world. But this was different. It was intimate. It wasn’t curated .
She walked deeper into the belly of the warehouse, casting longing gazes at the racks either side of her, feeling a thrill of doing something illicit as the lighting flicked on above her.
If you want to see what I want from Nayak, then this is it.
And what was ‘this’ for Chase?
Because it wasn’t about famous artists. He’d been near dismissive telling her that there was a Rembrandt on the rack. And she knew that there were hundreds more just as famous, she thought, catching a glimpse of a Hannah Hoch.
She paused to take it all in.
‘What is your favourite painting?’ Chase asked, following her from a few feet behind, watching – inspecting – her reaction. She felt as if he were giving her a test and couldn’t help but wonder whether he’d brought Maurice and Ali here.
But she didn’t think so.
‘That’s a bit like asking what someone’s favourite movie is,’ she replied.
It’s a bit like a date question , she thought and bit her lip.
He waited patiently for her answer.
It wasn’t a date question, but it wasn’t a harmless getting-to-know-you question either. From an artist, from Chase, it was more .
‘ Judith Slaying Holofernes ,’ she replied over her shoulder as she veered off to take a closer look at the racks. The sounds of her shoes punctuated the thick silence of the warehouse.
‘One of my favourite critiques was written about that painting,’ Chase said, his voice unusually thick.
‘Really?’ she asked, not wanting to know. Not wanting this intimacy at all. Suddenly she wanted to be back out on the street, with anonymity amongst the pedestrians and?—
‘“Relentlessly physical”,’ he quoted, pulling her reluctant attention back to him, only to find his eyes thankfully on a painting on the other side of the warehouse.
He seemed to be searching for something. ‘There is another Gentileschi down’ – he paused and pulled on the handle at the end of a rack – ‘here.’
He gestured for her to take the handle as if he were offering her an apple in the garden of Eden.
Chase bit back a smile as Bella looked longingly towards the rack.
‘I can’t just…’ She hissed out the words in a whisper, but it was clear how much she wanted to.
Christ.
That was something, right there.
Bella tempted .
It was like the name of a painting itself.
Her eyes lit with a desire to do something she thought naughty. Wrong. And it was probably the most beautiful thing in this entire room.
‘You do that, while I just go and find…’
Something else to look at.
He turned away from her, leashing his body back under his control with a restraint that was alarmingly difficult. He tried to walk it off, thinking of anything that would dampen his suddenly raging libido. Mrs Lebroux, their elderly neighbour back in Secaucus. Secaucus itself. Scribbling on the concrete outside their little house with the chalks his mother had given him, falling in love with colour and marks and art for the very first time.
His mother.
His heart caved in on itself like it always did. The old familiar sting of grief, the pain of not seeing her, hearing her, feeling her touch, melded with the guilt of not achieving what she’d wanted for him, and the fear that she’d be so very disappointed in him now. He clenched his jaw, reflexively bracing against the direction of his thoughts that were one sure-fire way of getting his libido well and truly doused .
He looked back at Bella, peering at one of the seventeenth century’s most impressive artists, getting as close as she possibly dared. Closer than she’d ever be able to in a gallery, that was for sure.
Was he surprised by her answer about her favourite painting? No, and that surprised him. It was a question that he never usually asked people. But with Bella he was just curious. Curious in a way that he knew was absolutely no good whatsoever.
She was sharp, in both intelligence and character. But he’d never seen her sharp with Maurice or Ali. Of the few connections he’d reached out to about her, she’d been described as invaluable, sweet, a problem solver and a fixer. ‘The soother of ruffles,’ one person had called her.
Except his, it seemed.
There was enough antagonism between them to light a city block. He was old enough to know what it was, and old enough to know better than to act on it. And having firmly told himself that, he turned back to watch Bella gazing at the Gentileschi, every thought and feeling showing across her face like words on a page.
Appreciation, wonder, sadness, regret, understanding.
What would she see in his work? And what would he see when she did?
There were one or two here, stored amongst the greats and the not-so-greats. He classed himself with the latter, it went without saying. But he imagined the flush on her cheek, the brightness in her eye. The understanding. Without words, without explanation, just to be known, understood. To be enough.
Christ. Chase passed a hand over his face, hoping to wipe away his thoughts, and headed towards the part of the storage that was the reason he’d brought them both here.
Bella followed him as he found his way to the racks housing the section he was looking for.
Every gallery had one. He’d first discovered it as an intern at the Tate Modern in London and it had made him both sad and angry: the art that was ‘shelved’. And ever since then, he’d made a point of visiting similar works whenever and wherever he could.
And he wanted Bella to see it too. Because he wanted her to understand what he wanted for Nayak. Because he was going to need her help to achieve it. But for that, he was going to have to trust her and just the thought of it made his gut clench.
She waited patiently behind him, unaware of his mental wrangling, as he pulled out a rack that looked just like any other rack in here.
He stood back, inviting Bella forward.
‘What do you see?’ he asked, feeling a little like a school teacher with his student, which just led his dirty, sex-starved mind down a path he had absolutely no intention of following.
‘Expressionism, but early. On the cusp with Impressionism. I don’t… I don’t recognise the artist,’ she said, sounding defeated, as if she’d failed a test, rather than passing it.
‘That’s not surprising. While some of her work is kept here, none of it ever made it into a gallery.’
Bella frowned as if not quite liking what she heard.
‘Not even here?’ Bella asked.
Chase shook his head.
‘That’s a shame. It’s good. Bold, powerful. Physical.’ She smiled up at him, as if having forgotten herself for a moment. ‘Not relentlessly , but still. I… like it,’ she said as if making up her mind. ‘Why is it here?’
‘It’s part of a collection on loan to the gallery, but as it failed to reach critical acclaim at the time, lack of interest led to lack of awareness and it’s not considered part of the acceptable cannon of Expressionism.’
Bella frowned, little angry lines between her brows. ‘She was a female artist at a time when there were enough powerful men shaping the tastes and appetites for others,’ she said, coming to the explanation herself. ‘Could Nayak loan it out?’
‘This one, quite possibly. But all the rest? There isn’t enough money or time in the world,’ Chase said bitterly.
She looked up, querying what he meant by ‘all the rest’.
‘Look around you. Rack after rack after rack. Each containing any number of three to thirty paintings, depending on size. How many artists do you think have work here? And how many do you think get to be the chosen few to be seen? Of those paintings, which will make enough money for the gallery to justify wall space?’ he asked, his voice heated enough to betray the passion he felt about this. About marketeers and money makers deciding what was art and what wasn’t. What would sell tickets and what wouldn’t. What would make patrons and board members big fat bonuses, and what would cast an artist into the invisible pages of history.
‘Who are these people to control who gets to see these paintings? Why is it up to an art critic or a professor to decide what is art, what is beautiful? Why aren’t these paintings as accessible to everyone, from a child to a grandparent? Why aren’t these incredible pieces of work as accessible to a mechanic and a school teacher as they are to?—’
He bit his teeth together but it was too late.
‘Me and my family,’ Bella finished, unable to hide the hurt in her gaze.
He turned away guiltily. He’d taken his frustration out on her and Bella deserved better than that.
‘You want to show what other people don’t,’ she said, circling back to the conversation they’d had in his office, her voice soft from behind him. ‘In Nayak, you want to show the kinds of art that other galleries won’t.’
He nodded, once. Definitively.
‘You want to give the artists who don’t get wall space a chance.’
‘Yes,’ Chase confessed, pleased that she understood. ‘Not solely. I know Nayak has to garner enough financial and professional attention to make it work as a business, I’m not a complete novice. But I want people to experience what you did when you first came in here. The feeling that you were seeing something that not everyone else gets to see.’
‘Exclusivity,’ she tried.
‘No, not quite that,’ he said, struggling to define what it was he wanted the gallery to be. ‘Something intimate ,’ he tried. ‘Something gratifying, something near sexual, something individual,’ he said, trying to put into words what he’d seen across her face as she’d delved deeper into the warehouse.
He looked to her to see if she understood what he was getting at. There she was, staring up at him with those big grey eyes, a tendril of hair having escaped somewhere along the way, her eyes flicking back and forth between his. He wondered if she knew they did that, eyes moving back and forth as if wanting to capture everything all at once.
His phone beeped, breaking the moment.
While he checked the message from Maurice, he saw her check her watch.
‘Well, I have a better understanding of what you want for Nayak now, so thank you for that,’ she said with a brightness that seemed more determined than real. ‘I should probably get home.’
Chase winced and rubbed the corner of his eyebrow with his thumb.
‘About that,’ he said, somewhat regretfully because he actually did want her to go home in that moment.