He didn’t just arrive in the States, as he told Paulien. He’s been here for four months, long enough to take three courses at the Arboretum School at the Bradley, all of them taught by Ada Bradley: Plant Materials, Soil Science, Cultivated Trees and Shrubs. One in the spring and two over the summer.
He walked miles through the acres of landscaped gardens in Merion and made two site visits to Ker-Feal, the Bradley’s Chester County estate, where Mrs. Bradley has designed terraces of flowers and fruit trees and turned a quartz quarry into a botanical garden. He has no particular interest in horticulture, but he has a compelling interest in Ada Bradley, with whom he’s now on a first-name basis. Actually he calls her “sweetheart” much more frequently than he calls her Ada.
She usually calls him István but sometimes shyly reverts to “dear.” She believes he’s a Hungarian count—yes, Paulien had gotten that right—who always wanted to be a landscape architect but was forced into the family’s massive munitions business. Being a man of the earth, he hated guns and war and hated his job even more. He recently escaped from his family’s clutches. Ada also believes he’s in love with her.
Which is ludicrous. But as the soon-to-be owner of the Bradley, he can’t leave anything to chance. Which means he needs to have an angle in reserve. More than one.
Ada fell in love with him easily, and now he needs her to divorce Bradley. Stripping her of her status as Mrs. Bradley will clear the path for Paulien to inherit without any legal interference from the bereaved widow. And then once he and Paulien are married—how convenient that she proposed the idea herself—the collection will be his free and clear.
“So here’s my deal,” Paulien told him when he first went to her house. “You give me my paintings after you steal them, and I’ll make sure you get the collection. Edwin is old, and he’s not well. After he’s gone, the entire collection will belong to me. If you do what I ask, I’m willing to marry you and then I’ll move back to Europe permanently. I won’t take anything else with me. It will all be yours.”
When he posed a hypothetical and asked what she’d do if he decided to abscond with her paintings, she said, “You want more than my measly seven—you want them all—and I swear if you don’t give mine to me, I’ll do everything in my power to make sure no part of Edwin’s collection ever becomes yours.” He doesn’t believe she can or will do this, but all he needs is for her to believe that he does. Nor will she have him arrested; he controls what she wants, which is more protection than a crooked judge.
He’s optimistic Ada and Paulien will both fall in line; they’ve each taken the initial steps. But he’s less sure of Paulien. If by some long shot, things don’t work out with Paulien, he’ll dissuade Ada from divorcing, and when Edwin dies, he’ll marry her. Either way, he wins.
Obviously, Paulien is his first choice. Gertrude was reluctant to part with the details of Paulien’s situation, and it took him longer than usual to wrest the information from her. But as always when he pours on the charm, the woman succumbed and finally told him everything.
Ashton King’s art forgery scam is moving forward, but he’s surprised by how problematic it is to find artists who are willing to forge paintings. The half-dozen forgers he’s managed to hire, whom he’s using to scout for others, are also having trouble. It seems that even the most poverty-stricken artists feel a moral compunction about copying someone else’s work. Even when it’s explained that the paintings aren’t going to be sold, they still shy away. Misplaced principles make fools of so many.
So he stored his authentic artwork in a warehouse on the outskirts of Paris, blackmailed a man to oversee his forgers, and told his friends and colleagues that Ashton King’s father had just been diagnosed with tuberculosis and that he had to rush back to Australia. And now here he is in Merion, Pennsylvania, of all the godforsaken places.
The Bradley scam is different from his previous endeavors, and he welcomes the challenge. Especially a challenge that includes courting Paulien Mertens. Not only is she more appealing than ever, but despite her family’s tumble from grace, she’s managed to position herself quite well. Heir to the Bradley fortune. He’s got to hand it to her.
Yet Paulien’s standing is more tenuous than he would like. Her fortune is only on paper, and he’s run into more than his share of clever lawyers who would be more than happy—and able—to wrest it from her. Then there’s Paulien’s rumored affair with Henri Matisse, which makes the whole arrangement even less secure. And he’s troubled by Edwin Bradley’s notorious volatility and fickleness. Too many unknowns for his taste, but there have been virtually no initial capital expenditures and the payoff is mammoth, far more than any of his cons have accrued thus far. Hence the new love of his life, Ada Bradley.
He was the perfect student in Plant Materials last spring, his first class at the Arboretum School. He listened carefully, took detailed notes, and, most importantly, smiled and nodded sagely at everything Mrs. Bradley said. After class he approached her and asked probing questions involving the finer points of nomenclature and the intricacies of plant identification. He never skipped a class and he always arrived early. No one doubted his status as teacher’s pet.
Needless to say, there’s the age difference. But as he’d done with Katherine in the Talcott Reserves scam, he added a touch of gray to his hair and told Ada he was forty-eight, which is ten years older than he is and only five years younger than she. By the time he began Soil Science in June, she was too besotted to question his age, and now that he’s completed Cultivated Trees and Shrubs, she’s so agog over him that if he told her he was twenty-five she would believe him. She sees what she wants to see, sees just what he wants her to see.
Fortunately, Ada doesn’t seem interested in sex, although if he pushed she would undoubtedly succumb. He flinches at the idea, but he’s performed more debased deeds in pursuit of his goals in the past. He just hopes it won’t come to that. Paulien, on the other hand, is a whole different ball of wax.
It’s clear she’s never fallen out of love with him. He felt it in that kiss. As much as she tried to fight, there was a give in her lips, a moment of surrendering herself to him. Paulien is caught in his gravitational pull, the way the earth is fixed in its orbit around the sun. And like any planet, she’s tethered to him, unable to go anywhere except where he leads her.
He isn’t bothered by her threats. Frankly he admires her boldness, as he admires her for intuiting his true motives. She’s been studying his methods, learning his moves, considering him a mentor of sorts, a real protégé. A worthy—or in this case, semiworthy—adversary makes the game all that much more fun. Her threat to keep the Bradley collection from him is based in her naïveté and inability to see the whole chessboard, but a few more years of studying at his feet and she might have been able to figure it out. Fortunately she’s a freshman.
Nor does he have any worries in the unlikely event that Paulien has a change of heart. Locked in the safe of his hotel is her letter describing the enclosed map of the Bradley with an X marking the location of each of the seven paintings she wants him to steal.