“The whole day got away from me! Lib gets here in twenty minutes! I have to go ask étienne to pick her up…”
He pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “étienne’s in the backyard having a lively argument with the garden hose.”
Kate giggled. “He wants to set up a sprinkler for Caroline for tomorrow.”
“Fitz and Daisy’s daughter? Is she old enough to enjoy a sprinkler yet?”
Kate nodded vigorously. “She turned one in June and she’s toddling all over the place. She’ll love it!” Then she sighed, looking tired. “I guess I’ll go get Lib.”
“Let me go,” he said.
“You?” Kate, whose belly had just started showing in earnest, looked up at her brother-in-law suspiciously. “Why?”
“Well,” he said, grabbing his keys from his pocket, “I figure it’ll give us a chance to bury the hatchet now that we’re godparents-to-be. We need to figure out how to get along, right? For Noelle’s sake?”
Kate covered her bump lovingly, nodding at him with a cautious smile. “I guess that’s true…”
“So there it is,” he said, his body humming at the thought of seeing Libitz again so soon. He knew there was a good chance she’d be spending Labor Day at Toujours, but he wasn’t positive until now. “I’ll go.”
Kate had leaned forward, kissing J.C.’s cheek again. “Be nice?”
“Of course,” he’d promised, turning back to his car.
And now here he was, with fifteen minutes to kill, waiting for a woman he hadn’t seen in two months—a woman he hadn’t stopped thinking about since they’d kissed at his younger brother’s wedding, a woman about whom he’d become quietly obsessed since the night Jax had shown him Les Bijoux Jolis.
The chance of it happening in his life—an intersection between art and reality—was so unlikely, J.C. had never actually prepared himself for it. Art was his love, his most extreme passion. For the face of Libitz, a woman with whom he’d shared unparalleled physical chemistry in the form of one stupendous kiss, to suddenly appear in a portrait almost eighty years old wasn’t just unnerving; it felt strangely like…fate. Like something bigger and wider and more profoundly unexplainable than mere coincidence. And J.C. wasn’t about to leave it unexamined. He couldn’t, even if he’d wanted to.
He’d asked Jax for the portrait that evening, and she’d happily given it to him, asking if he recognized the model. He did, of course, but told her he didn’t, because he wasn’t interested in sharing his connection to the art, even with Jax, whom he loved and trusted. It felt too visceral to offhandedly comment that the model looked exactly like Kate’s best friend, like it would somehow minimize the devastating effect the portrait had on him.
Returning to Jax’s house the following Saturday, J.C. had stared at the likeness for well over an hour in the dusty quiet of Le Chateau’s attic, tracing the contours of the woman’s face with his eyes, touching the curve of her shoulder with the pad of his forefinger, resting the back of his hand lightly over her exposed breast, the pert nipple reminding him of the one he’d rolled between his fingers so many weeks ago.
He’d packaged up the portrait carefully and removed it to his gallery where he’d carefully examined it before asking Jessica English’s favorite and most trusted art restorer from New York to inspect it. Graves Fairleigh had commented on the flaking and scratching, tsking over a rip in the upper left quadrant and discolored varnish, but promised he could have the portrait restored to its former glory.
When Graves suggested that they package the canvas, however, J.C. found himself unable to let the artwork out of his sight. Instead, he paid the acclaimed restorer thrice his normal wages to work on Les Bijoux Jolis in a small workspace in the back of J.C.’s gallery.
Once it was fully restored, J.C. had considered placing it in the alcove where Atroshenko’s ballerina bid farewell to him every evening, but reluctant to share her, he’d decided on une place de choix across from his desk, over his guest sofa instead, where he could glance up at her a thousand times a day.