Chapter Twenty-Three

 

 

 

“Day two of the siege and still no relief in sight,” Cookie said as the two came into the kitchen looking worse for the wear. “Get in here, both of you, and at least get a cup of coffee and a piece of toast and warm up. I’ll have the eggs ready soon.” She turned her attention to Kelly. “Eggs Benedict, because I’m running out of huckleberries until this year’s are ready.”

“She picks her own from a patch out in the woods that she somehow manages to share peacefully with the bears,” Lex said, as he grabbed a hoodie from the peg near the door. Kelly suspected that there were probably hoodies and extra clothes all over the house and his studios for the man, and maybe even strategically placed in the woods and about the grounds too. She wondered how they coped with his night peregrinations in the dead of winter.

“The bears wouldn’t dare interfere,” Dillon said, coming into the room and giving the two a quick look to assess the situation. He had the good grace not to comment. Cookie poured him coffee and mumbled something that sure as hell sounded like Arabic.

“You do speak English, don’t you?” Kelly asked jokingly.

“Better than they do,” the woman said, nodding to the two men. “And breakfast will be late if I don’t break some eggs.”

They all watched her return to the kitchen.

“Where’d she learn to speak all those languages?” Kelly asked.

“Her father was a spy,” Lex said.

Dillon added, “If we tell you who he worked for, we’d have to kill you.”

V buzzed through for another cup of coffee. “Bad night?” she said, clearly not expecting an answer.

“Could have been worse.” Lex flashed Kelly a hint of a smile above his coffee cup, and she felt warmth that didn’t come from a hot beverage.

The eggs were beautiful, as everything Cookie made was, and Kelly was stuffed to the gills and about to head to her suite for a shower when Dillon spoke up.

“Look, Lex, I really hate to press the issue, but you have to make a decision about the models. You have a deadline and I’ve rescheduled their interviews multiple times.”

“Damn it!” Lex glanced down at the watch he wasn’t wearing. “I’m just swamped. Can’t we make it next week?”

“You’re always swamped, and this project is important, so buck up. I’ve already said that if you don’t want to see them and you trust V and me, we’ll do the interviews. We know what to look for.”

“I don’t want another damn model. It’s too risky. There has to be another way.”

“You’ve worked with lots of models and you never had a problem before, Alexander,” V said. “It was purely a fluke. The odds of it happening again are very slim and you know it.”

He shivered and chuffed his arms as though he were suddenly cold. “Well, I don’t like the risk. It was a horrible experience.”

“What happened?” Kelly asked.

When both V and Dillon deferred to Lex, he blushed heartily and told Kelly in terse, jerky sentences the story of Sally Philips.

She shivered for him, seeing the acceleration of his pulse and the loss of color in his cheeks just from the telling. She couldn’t help thinking of what it had been like for him at the gallery. “Can’t blame you for being gun shy.”

“Gun shy or not,” Dillon said, “the man’s a sculptor, and while he has a great imagination, he still needs a muse.” He looked Kelly up and down. “You interested? You’re already here and you definitely have the kind of look Lex is needing.”

“I’m no model, and I’m not about to get starkers for the whole damn world to see.”

“You wouldn’t have to take your clothes off,” Lex said. “Dil’s right, you’re just exactly the type I’ve been looking for. I’ve found most of the models the agency sends are too thin and it’s not easy to find one with real breasts these days.” The blush was back with a vengeance. “Er, I mean… I didn’t mean to imply that yours are… Well, I’ve never actually seen yours, have I?”

“You’re just digging yourself a deeper hole, bro,” Dillon said with a chuckle.

“You modeled for me the other night,” Lex said. He blushed still harder, and so did she as they both recalled where that had led.

“That’s because I didn’t have to get my clothes off,” she replied into her coffee cup, avoiding the interested gazes of everyone else at the table.

“You won’t. I promise I can manage just fine if you’ll just do it for me.”

“Please, Kelly,” Dillon said. “Save us all the horror of model interviews.”

“You are already here,” V added. “It would help you pass the time.”

“I’ll think about it,” Kelly said. She couldn’t imagine how Lex would manage to get any real work done if their last little modeling experiment was any indication, but she wasn’t about to bring that up in mixed company. “Right now, if you’ll excuse me, I need a shower.” More than that, she needed not to be the center of attention when the topic was something neither she nor Lex could think about without blushing.

She was halfway up the stairs when Lex caught up to her.

“Thanks for last night,” he said softly. “I’m sorry I woke you.”

“It’s all right. I enjoy a good camp out now and then.”

“Seriously, though, you didn’t have to stay. But it was nice waking up next to you.” He shrugged. “Well, as next to you as I could get, anyway.”

“It was nice,” she replied, and she meant it in spite of the crook in her neck. “I just wish the circumstances leading up to it could have been a little more pleasant for you.”

“I wish that too.” He turned to face her as they reached the Meadowlark suite. “For both of us.” He left her by her door, but at his suite, he turned back to her. “Can we have another session?”

“Of course we can. Whenever you’re ready.” She might have managed to use her professional voice with him, but the cratering of her stomach as she thought about their last session was definitely not standard operating procedure.

She asked V about the safety issues of Lex’s night wanderings when the woman brought her fresh towels—a job that Kelly was pretty sure wasn’t hers—and a fresh pot of coffee, the truth being revealed in the sharing thereof that V wanted to know what had happened last night. Later, Dillon stopped in for the same reason. His excuse was to update her on the press at the gate—nothing she didn’t already strongly suspect. Both V and Dillon assured her that Lex was never truly alone, but they gave the man his space as much as they could, understanding how difficult it was for him to have to pull people into his situation when there was nothing anyone could really do. Most of the time, if they didn’t need to intervene, they left him to deal with it in his own way. But they reassured her there was always someone watching out for him, though it had clearly pleased them that Kelly had taken matters into her own hands.

 

* * * *

 

It had been a shit day from the get-go. The show hadn’t been one of Gale Ann Spaulding’s best. She should have seen the portents when the heel broke on her very favorite pair of shoes, leaving her to limp into the studio, looking silly in front of the secretaries and the sound technician and serving to put her off balance in other aspects as well. She had stumbled over her own tongue at the beginning of the cast—more than once before she hit her stride—only to have her program for the day fall flat. She had decided to do a show on the overinflated value of the artsy fartsy in Portland when the money could have been spent for something else—though that something was pretty nebulous. She had hoped to tie it all back to Alexander Valentine’s grandiose gesture to help pay for a glorified family planning clinic, but her audience hadn’t quite known what to do with it, and no real coherent discussion had resulted. Though it had been a decent enough program, it definitely wouldn’t go down as one of her most controversial, or one of her most memorable.

She was counting on drinks with Madeline’s cousin to open up some interesting new insights into Kelly Blake, but, at the last minute, the girl had canceled because of an impromptu interview she’d been chasing with a city councilman for the university newspaper. Apparently Jenny Fallon was good. She’d had several freelance pieces taken by local magazines and newspapers, and people, some important people, actually knew who she was, so drinks got rescheduled, and Gale Ann was faced with the prospect of drinking alone at a place it was best to be seen with someone who mattered, or an early evening in her apartment surfing the web. Neither was her idea of a good time.

She stumbled into her flat, tossed her bag onto the dining room table and the ruined shoes in the trash. Clearly, her cleaner hadn’t come today. Her breakfast dishes were still in the sink and last night’s wine glass still on the corner of her desk. What the hell did she pay the woman for? It was late and she was hungry. She’d expected to come home to a clean house. Surely that wasn’t too much to ask. She booted the iMac on her desk with a vengeful punch of her index finger, set the deli salad and the Diet Coke next to it and went in search of a clean fork.

She returned to find her email page up with a message from Madeline marked urgent. Shoving a bite of salad into her mouth, she opened the email, which simply read—

 

I thought you might find these very interesting.—M.

 

That was an understatement! Suddenly Gale Ann Spaulding forgot all about her bad day.

The first thing on the page of a long list of links was an old one from The Oregonian. When she opened it, the headline read Ellen Valentine-Vance Killed in Freak Auto Accident. 10-Year-Old Son Badly Injured.

Madeleine was an absolute genius! Gale Ann scrolled through the pages from her researcher. While there was still no real dirt on Kelly Blake, if she couldn’t get some serious mileage off this new revelation about Alexander Valentine, then she wasn’t much of a journalist, was she? Why had she not seen this? Why had no one seen this? Seriously, could it be more obvious? She finished her salad and drink then made and consumed a pot of coffee, all the while taking notes and reading through the links Madeline had sent her as the secrets of Alexander Valentine unfolded right before her eyes. By midnight, she had called her producer and there was a plan in the works for a program that would, at the very least, get her the national recognition she deserved, and very possibly a Pulitzer.

“Oh, I am going to get some serious mileage off this,” Gale Ann said. In her head, she was already planning a shopping spree after the revelation of who Alexander Valentine really was. She had her eyes on a nice new silver Audi R8, fully loaded. She was due it. She deserved it, and she would deserve it even more when her show got national syndication, and really, as this story unfolded, it was just a matter of time, wasn’t it?