Seth stepped into his shorts, zipped up, then paused at Sally’s shoulder as he pulled on his bike jersey. As Arden watched, Sally all but melted. He continued around the circle, looking at each drawing, before turning to Arden.
“Don’t,” she said, blocking his body with hers. His forward momentum carried him into a split second of thrilling full-body contact. The heat from his bare chest seared through her linen tank to her skin, and the shift of his hips against hers sent a deep quake through her lower belly. She drew in her breath in response and the scent of him, the inevitable sweat of a humid New York City summer, warm skin, something deeper and darker she recognized from her study abroad year in Oxford as the grease used to lubricate a bike chain. The scent of the oil lingered long after she’d scrubbed her fingers.
With an innate grace, he shifted back from the balls of his feet to his heels, putting an inch of space between his body and hers. “Okay,” he said, very gently, his gaze searching hers.
It wasn’t defensive, accusatory, but a caress. Arden knew she’d been abrupt, if not rude, but there was a limit to how exposed she could stand to be, and after the events of the last week, she was at her limit, all the time. It wasn’t rational, but a self-protective instinct. She looked up at him, into those green eyes and saw them flick to the thick scar that started just below her collarbone, disappeared into the V-neck of her sleeveless top, then emerged at the ball of her shoulder.
Seth took two steps back, purposely not looking at her easel. “Okay,” he said again, soft, reassuring.
“Same time next week,” Micah said. Arden gathered her pencils into the box.
“Leave your sketchpads here,” Betsy said over her shoulder as she escorted Seth and Micah to the door. “I’ll store them with the easels. No point in hauling them all over Manhattan.”
The door closed behind Micah and Seth. Between them, Betsy and Arden shoved one of the sofas back into place, then collapsed on it. They all looked at one another, then lost it laughing. For a moment the lightness of sheer relief swept through Arden.
“My God,” Libby said. “Where on earth did you find that man?”
“I didn’t!” Betsy gasped. “Micah said he’d arrange for the model.”
“He’ll bring him back, right? Can we request a specific model?”
“He’ll probably alternate,” Sally said. “Men and women, different body sizes and shapes. Crap. Did I really ask him about his tattoos?”
“You did,” Betsy said, lifting her glass to toast Sally.
“I’d love to know the story behind them,” Sally continued, thinking out loud.
“You could just ask him,” Betsy said, eyes twinkling.
Sally opened her mouth, closed it again, then looked at Arden. “It’s nice to see you laugh,” she said.
The mood in the room instantly dampened. “I feel like I’ve forgotten how,” she said, and finally pulled out her phone. She had voice mails and missed calls, but none of them from Garry. Now. To download or not to download? Normally her emails downloaded automatically, but after the news broke, she set the retrieve option to manual so she could handle them when she felt up to it.
Might as well get it over with. She should be inured to the near-constant stream of anger, hatred, and vitriol. She swiped her thumb over the list of her accounts and watched the wheel spin as the phone connected to the servers.
“What’s the latest?” Libby asked.
“I don’t even know how to describe it.” Where the hell was Garry? New Zealand, where it was apparently possible to just disappear off the grid into the mountains.
“Why are people angry with you? You ran the foundation, not the investment side of the house.”
“My name is on the firm. I’m on the board. It’s all about the name. We are MacCarren.” She waited for the emails to finish downloading. Three hundred and eight in the three hours she’d been in Betsy’s apartment. She’d given her assistant paid leave and taken over managing her own email. The sheer numbers were overwhelming, as was the hatred and pain many of them now contained.
“Have you seen your dad since . . . ?”
“Since the FBI raided the house and took him away in handcuffs?” she asked, refusing to mince words. “No. I looked through the evidence, and it’s clear the accusations are true. He and Charles were running a Ponzi scheme. I’m too angry to go see him, or Charles.”
Silence. Arden tried to get used to the fact that no one wanted to talk about MacCarren anymore. Before, it was the only thing people wanted to talk to her about. How did her father do it? Could they buy in or was he closed to new investors? On the surface, she, too, was MacCarren. They got close to her to get close to him, not knowing that she, like the rest of the family, like the rest of the world, was being told a great big lie.
Sally picked up her purse and tote. “I have to work in the morning. Brunch soon?”
“I’ll walk out with you,” Libby said.