Her eyes go wide. “He told you that?”
“I helped him.” I’ve never admitted that to a soul. Colton and I did a lot of stupid shit when we were younger, and we somehow made it out alive and without any serious convictions. I planned on taking our secrets to the grave, but this is Ellie, and right now, the truth seems so much more important than any risk to my reputation. I shrug. “You never reported it. I knew without him telling me that he was doing it to protect you from Nelson, but I didn’t understand why.” I wait a beat. “And I never thought you knew Colton was involved.”
“He stole them for me, but I didn’t ask him to. I told him about the paintings, and he did what he thought he needed to do to protect me.”
“Why did you want them so badly? Do you know the artist or something?”
She releases a hollow puff of laughter. “You could say that.” She studies the skyline. “Want to go grab a cup of coffee?”
“Whatever you want.”
She points to a little place a few storefronts down. We go in, pay for two cups, and doctor them before returning outside to take a spot at one of the tables on the sidewalk.
She stares into the steam rolling off the top of her cup. “When I was in college, I thought Chicago was the best city in the world. My friends and I would ride bikes along the Chicago Lakefront Trail or wander around Oak Street Beach. I’d go shopping and look at all the beautiful shoes and purses I could never afford. It’s the best of both worlds to have the sand beneath your feet, the big-city skyline at your back, and the expanse of Lake Michigan looking as grand as the ocean across the horizon.”
She smiles at a middle-aged couple walking by, and I wait for them to pass so she can say more. She’s telling me something important, and I won’t rush it.
“When I graduated, I started working with Tate Andrews, an art dealer. Tate’s job is to seek out hard-to-find pieces for eccentric private collectors, and I traveled all around the world with him.” She turns to me, and her eyes are sad. “I grew up poor, Levi. And I don’t mean Mom couldn’t afford the designer jeans the other girls were wearing. I mean she couldn’t afford groceries. She tried her best, but she was raising two girls on her own and she had no education beyond her GED. Some months, making ends meet was difficult. Other months, it was impossible, but I saw how hard she worked for us, and I always promised myself I’d pay her back someday. It wasn’t until I worked for Tate that I had the opportunity.”
“He paid you well?”
She swirls her coffee in its cup. “For my official job, he paid me the same as any assistant, and frankly, he took me around the world to beautiful cities, so I couldn’t complain. But then there were other opportunities.” Putting the cup down, she meets my eyes. “I have an art degree, and while I’ve never been praised for my originality, I have a damn good eye and hand for copying the work of others—paintings in particular, especially in certain styles. I’m like a mockingbird—I have no song of my own to sing, but I excel in mimicking the styles of others.”
“I’ve seen you paint. Don’t believe for a second you don’t have a song of your own.”
She shrugs, as if it doesn’t matter to her. I know better. She might hide her artistic tendencies, but I’ve seen what happens to her face when she loses herself in her painting. “One time when Tate and I realized our wild goose chase to find a painting was just that, Tate joked that he should just have me ‘find’ the piece—in my studio with a canvas and my brush.” She swallows hard. “Tate would never sell a client an obvious forgery, but if the forgery was identical to the original and the buyer would never know? He called that an ethical gray area, though I knew better.
“I bought my mom a car with my cut of that sale, and then I bought myself a Prada handbag and a pair of shoes and felt just like the ladies on the Magnificent Mile. God, I wanted to be them.”
While I get that forgery is a crime, I don’t know the art world well enough to understand its implications. I can see on her face that the decision still doesn’t sit right with her. Maybe it shouldn’t sit right with me either. Ellie and I have been friends for years, and I never would have imagined she’d be capable of breaking the law for personal gain. Maybe she’s more like Colton than I realized. Maybe she’s more like me . . .
“It was supposed to be a one-time thing for a South American investor whom I found loathsome in his business practices anyway.” She sips on her coffee. “But it made me feel dirty. Like I’d whored my talent and let greed rule me. After that, I knew it was time for me to part ways with Tate.”
“Did he pressure you? Would you have done it if it was a simple paycheck?”
She chews on her thumbnail. “I told myself he did. I told myself that if I hadn’t been half crazy in love with my boss, I’d have said no. But then Nelson McKinley asked me to do it again, so my excuse of being young and in love didn’t hold.”
Fucking Nelson. He could manipulate anyone into just about anything. Even if Jake and I are wrong about Molly’s kid, it doesn’t mean Colton didn’t kill his asshole father. He’s wanted to get rid of the man for years just to feel free from his control.
“Nelson said he knew someone who wanted Bauer’s Discovery collection—someone who either didn’t know or didn’t care about the rumors that it had been burnt to ash years ago.”
“I didn’t realize Nelson did art deals. I thought the gallery was just about status for him.” Status and money laundering, but I don’t know if Ellie knows about that, and I don’t want her to know anything that might put her in further danger.
Ellie shakes her head. “I still don’t know if the client was really Nelson’s or if the request came from Tate—they knew each other—but it doesn’t matter. I didn’t want to pass up the payday, so after doing research to be sure the originals would never turn up, I agreed.”
“Were the original paintings destroyed in a fire? Is that the rumor?”
She leans across the table and lowers her voice. “Not just a fire. Asher Logan burned them in a giant bonfire. I spoke with his wife, Maggie, and she confirmed it. The paintings reminded her of a dark part of her past, and Asher bought them all and destroyed them so they couldn’t haunt her anymore.”
“Wow. Score one for the rich rock star.”
She grins. “He was pretty damn dreamy. He treats her like she’s the most precious thing in the world. If I ever get married, I want that.”
And yet you were going to marry Colton, who’d driven you away through months of loneliness. I still can’t think about that fucking ring without wanting to track Colton down and punch him in the face. Maybe he wasn’t cheating, but he didn’t deserve Ellie. “Don’t people create replicas of art all the time?”
“But we weren’t selling replicas. We were passing something we knew to be a forgery off as the real thing.” She pulls her bottom lip between her teeth. “I told myself it didn’t matter. Here I was, an artist who all through school was told I wasn’t anything special, but if I put some man’s name on my painting, suddenly what I created was worth millions. I told myself I was just thumbing my nose at the snobby art world, but the truth is, I knew what I did was wrong, and forgeries by a living artist, like Bauer, are risky. He’d be able to identify it as a fake, even if our buyer couldn’t, and then I’d be implicated in the crime and never have a chance to make a name for myself as an artist. Never mind the legal ramifications of getting caught.”
“What would they be able to charge you with?”