Read Die in Plain Sight Online
Authors: Elizabeth Lowell
Die in Plain Sight (14 page)
L
acey fidgeted in front of the mirror and wished that Shayla was home to reassure her that she didn’t look like an impostor wearing a chic black dress and a wonderful rope of crystal and ebony jewelry she’d found at an estate sale. But Shayla was on her way to South America to buy local crafts for their store. Lacey would just have to suck it up and be an adult.
“I don’t feel like an adult,” she muttered at the mirror. “I feel like a teen on her first date. And at the Savoy Hotel’s five-star restaurant, of all places. Good Lord. If Mom and my sisters hadn’t been giving me society-child clothes all these years, I’d be screwed.”
Crystal and ebony swung from her ears as she impatiently twitched the neckline of the dress. Some cleavage was okay, but she really didn’t want an outfit that looked like it was going to slide off her nipples the next time she let out a good sigh.
“Oh, the hell with it. The necklace pretty much hides everything anyway.”
Lacey went to her closet and looked for something warm that wasn’t covered in paint. All she found was an old velvet brocade coat with black lamb’s wool around the collar, cuffs, and hem. The coat itself was a deep cranberry color. Like the jewelry, it would have been fashionable in the 1910s or’20s. Unlike the jewelry, it was wool-lined and warm. She pulled out the coat, looked it over critically, and decided that no one would notice the teensy moth holes here and there. Moths had to eat, too, right? Besides, she’d stitched up the worst of them with thread that almost matched the basic material.
She glanced at the clock, sighed, and faced the shoe issue. Not that she didn’t have plenty of shoes. She did. Her mother and her sisters were forever buying pretty instruments of torture for her to wear on her feet. Needle heels and toes to match. Even though the leather was incredibly soft and twice as expensive, her toes cringed at the thought of being crammed together while she tiptoed through an evening. She looked longingly at her scuffed, comfortable sandals, but didn’t reach for them. The coat she could justify on the basis of warmth. There was no justification for the sandals except sullen mulishness.
If it had been a required party thrown by her mother, she might have been a mule. But she didn’t want to embarrass herself—or worse, Susa and Ian—by looking like something out of a church rummage sale. It was grin-and-bear-it time.
“Bother!” Lacey grumbled, grabbing a pair of black heels and glaring at their sleek, uncomfortable style. “Why are there so many useless rules about what to wear to this or that? And why is everything that’s acceptable
un
comfortable? Who decided that women should wear heels, anyway—the Marquis de Sade?” She sighed and hoped Ian would take her straight to the restaurant, where she could kick off her shoes under the table and wiggle her toes.
The downstairs bell rang, telling Lacey that she couldn’t stall any longer. She pulled on the shoes with their lethal heels, grabbed the vintage beaded envelope purse, shoved her arms into the coat, and headed down the stairs. There were just enough shop lights on to satisfy her insurance carrier. In the semidarkness, Ian’s silhouette loomed black in the doorway. For an instant she remembered her first impression of him: big, broad shoulders, and not necessarily safe.
Then his smile flashed through the plate-glass window in the front
door and she felt a giddy kind of happiness bubble through her blood. Only then did she understand how much she’d been looking forward to seeing him again.
You’re getting in over your head,
she told herself.
It’s about time, too. Dating myself is really boring.
Lacey unlocked the door and opened it. “Come in. I’ve got to check the locks and stuff, and then we can go.”
“Not so fast. You forgot something.”
She opened her mouth to ask what and then felt his tongue gliding past her lips. She made a humming sound as she leaned toward him and slid her arms beneath his, getting as close to him as her bulky coat allowed. His arms tightened, helping her get nearer, holding her while the kiss burned like a fast fuse leading to an explosion of unknown force.
After a moment or five, Ian forced himself to loosen his grip on Lacey. He lifted his head slowly, with many tiny nips and tastes that made her moan. She returned the sweetly stinging caresses and bit not quite gently on his lower lip. Then she traced his lips with the tip of her tongue and tasted him again, bit him again, shared the full-body shudder that went through him.
“I want you,” he said.
“Same here. If I could hear my brain above my heartbeat, I’d be scared to death.”
His smile flashed again in the gloom. “Me, too. But I’m not so deaf to reason that I’m going to do what I really want to do.”
“Which is?” she whispered.
“Lift you up on that counter, take off your panty hose, and go so deep into you we both want to scream.”
The small sound she made was more exciting than anything he’d known before.
“Is that what you want, Lacey? Right here? Right now?”
“I—I—”
He gave her a quick, hard kiss and released her. “Lock up. Lock up real tight. I’m having a hell of a time remembering that I’m on duty here.”
“Not here you aren’t,” she retorted, but made sure she was three steps away before she spoke. “You’re not guarding anything of mine.”
He blew out a hard breath and wondered why he couldn’t keep his
hands off a curly-haired artist in a moth-eaten cranberry coat. Then he decided the why of it all didn’t matter. The attraction was as real as gravity and just as hard to ignore.
“We going out the back or the front?” he asked.
“The back.”
“I’ll lock up out here.”
“Okay. I’m going to check upstairs again. I keep forgetting and leaving the bathroom window open.”
Ian turned toward the front of the shop, then frowned. The windows and glass-pane door that faced the street had a thin line of wire around all the panes, but that sure wasn’t much of a barrier to someone who didn’t mind setting off the burglar alarm.
“You ever think of upgrading your security system?” he called out.
“Why? It’s not like I’m selling diamonds or drugs.”
He heard her heels clicking lightly on the wooden stairs as she came back down.
“You’ve got some valuable stuff in here,” Ian said.
“Only to collectors. The average druggie looking for a quick turnaround isn’t going to haul a movie poster or a reproduction Deco lamp to the local pawnshop.”
He wanted to argue but didn’t for the simple reason that she was right. There wasn’t much in her shop that would appeal to a smash-and-grab hype. Still…
“What about you?” he asked.
“What about me?”
“You’re collectible and should be better protected.”
Lacey gave him a sideways look and a sly smile. “Is that why you’re wearing a gun, to protect yourself from being collected by a person or persons unknown?”
He laughed and gave up the argument—for the moment. As he worked deadbolts and slipped on chains, he made a mental list of some basic security upgrades she really should have. He could get her a good price on everything and the installation would be free. He had several weeks of vacation time stored up and no particular reason to use it, until now. And after he was finished with the wiring and such, maybe she’d like to go up to Bakersfield and meet some other Lapstrakes.
When Ian heard his own thoughts, he fumbled the last lock. Then he
reminded himself that while some women had found him sexy, none had wanted a long-term affair, with or without the benefit of marriage. To be honest, he hadn’t wanted that kind of intimacy either—makeup and pink shaving gear in his sink and too much conversation when what he craved was the rushing silence of his small house in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.
“Need some help?” Lacey asked. “One of those deadbolts is sticky.”
“I’ve got it now.”
He slammed the bolt home, followed her to the back of the shop, and waited while she armed the security system—a pathetic one, in his opinion—and shooed him outside during the eight-second grace period before the alarm registered an open door and went off.
“I suppose it’s better than nothing,” he said under his breath.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re not making sense.”
He grinned. “Thank you.”
She rolled her eyes. “C’mon. There’s a pathway between my house and Woo-woo Central.”
“Woo-woo Central? Should I ask?”
“The cosmic calamity next door.”
He looked at the old clapboard building that was barely larger than a double garage and had a bunch of boxes filled with packing material stacked haphazardly around the back and side. Some of the boxes had been wilted by rain. Others were fresh and dry, though torn. All of them came from places like Mystic Crystal of Arkansas or Vortex Stones of Arizona.
“You got something against witches?” he asked, stepping around a pile of shredded paper or straw or whatever that nearly blocked the narrow space between the buildings.
Lacey snorted. “I’m fine with witches. Blessed be and all that. But Lady Marian over there is a real piece of work. Spends her days conning old ladies into her karmic vitamin schemes and then does vodka shooters and smokes wacky tobaccy all night in the back room.”
“I see what you mean,” he said as he nudged an empty half-gallon booze bottle with his toe. “Doesn’t believe in recycling, does she?”
“Ya think?” Lacey asked dryly as she picked her way through the trash that lay between the two shops.
“Don’t see any of the wacky stuff lying around.”
“You sound disappointed.”
He snickered.
“When the offshore wind blows, which it does about all the time, you can smell it when she lights up,” Lacey said. “The wind blows through her place straight to mine.”
He took a deep breath. Brine and something else, something much sharper. “Smells more like chemicals to me.”
“My paint stuff. She doesn’t usually toke up until after nine.” Lacey stepped out onto the cracked sidewalk. None of the vehicles looked familiar. “Where’s the chariot?”
“Half a block down to the left.”
Lacey smiled to herself as Ian took the street side of the walk and then laced his fingers through hers. When he squeezed gently, hot and cold thrills chased over her nerves.
Omigod, I’ve got it bad. Just holding hands with him makes me want to laugh and skip like a kid.
She looked up and saw him watching her, smiling. The simple pleasure in his eyes made her toes curl.
Ian kissed the flyaway curl on her temple and kept walking. It was that or drag her back to the shop and head for the nearest horizontal surface. The realization that he was hard and ready to go—and had been for some time—irritated him. He wasn’t used to taking orders from his dick. Advice, sure. Urgent suggestions, sometimes. Orders? Not since he was fifteen and found out that his dick was seriously stupid.
“Whoa, that’s a grim look,” Lacey said.
“Just thinking.”
“About what?”
He keyed off the locks and opened the passenger door of the truck. “About being fifteen and so horny I’d screw the crack of doom.”
She laughed and choked at the same time. Then she went absolutely still when she saw the intensity in his dark eyes.
“But I’m not fifteen,” he said. “I know all about itch-scratch-itch. If I thought it was that easy with you, we’d be back in your shop and I’d be hip deep into you, and we’d both be loving it. But it’s not that easy, is it?”
She opened her mouth, closed it, tried to get a grip on her scattering thoughts. “I don’t know. I’ve never…” She touched his mouth with her fingertips. “Whatever it is, I don’t want it to go away.”
“Does that mean you trust me?”
“Yes.”
Ian leaned over and said against her lips, “I’m holding you to that, Lacey January Marsh Quinn.”
He had her inside the truck with the doors locked before she realized that the words could be a promise or a threat.
B
arefoot and still in the black dress she had worn to dinner, Lacey paced restlessly in the apartment above her shop. She considered painting and rejected it. All she wanted to paint right now was Ian Lapstrake. Stark naked.
“Damn.” She groaned.
She raked her hand through her hair and threw the fat hair clip into the corner, letting her curls spring free. Maybe she should have had more champagne. Or maybe she should have dragged Ian inside when he said good night, instead of letting him drive Susa back to the hotel where they were staying.
Being on duty twenty-four/seven really sucked.
Lacey looked at the single bed in the corner and knew she wouldn’t sleep. She looked at the empty canvases waiting for her. She could paint. The result might be colorful garbage, but she could still paint the hours away until she was tired enough to sleep—or until she saw Ian again.
Itch-scratch-itch. But it’s not that easy, is it?
Right now she was willing to risk finding out. Too bad he wasn’t. The good-night kiss he’d given her had been worthy of a younger brother.
With an irritated swipe of her hand, she turned on the CD player. From speakers as small as fists, Etta James’s husky, worldly wise voice poured out, filling the apartment with dark words about breaking hearts, crooning a deceptively simple blues song, lamenting what might have been.
Perfect
Lacey decided she would paint after all. Without a thought for the expensive dress she was still wearing, she pulled on a huge, tattered flannel shirt that served as a paint smock if the nights were cold. When she’d first found the shirt at a garage sale, the hem came way below her knees and she’d had trouble keeping the sleeves rolled up. The hem hadn’t changed, but now there was so much paint on the sleeves that they were crusted in deep folds at her elbows.
No sooner had she started to lengthen the legs of her easel when a knocking sound from the front door made her jump. Cautiously she went to the window that overlooked the sidewalk in front of the shop, opened it, and stared down. The man below turned up his head at the sound of wood creaking against wood.
“It’s me,” Ian said. “Susa kicked me out. Said you needed protecting more than she did. Then she woke up my boss, who told me to do what Susa wanted.”
Lacey started to ask why, but thought better of it. He didn’t sound happy to be standing below her window in the middle of the night.
“Um, everything is fine here,” she said.
“Tell it to Susa,” he retorted.
A gust of wind tugged at the denim jacket Ian was wearing and flattened his jeans against his legs. It wasn’t raining, but it was damn chilly.
“Is there a rule against you coming inside?” Lacey asked.
“It’s either that or freeze my butt off.”
“Gosh, it’s so nice to be wanted for my own sweet self.”
Before he could answer, she slammed and locked the window. Then she padded barefoot down the stairs and through the gloomy shop with its brooding noir posters, and unlocked the front door.
“Don’t forget to lock it behind you,” she said, turning her back on the
very man she’d wanted to see a short time ago. But that was then and this was now, when he looked mad enough at having to be with her to take a bite out of a rabid dog. “There’s coffee and champagne and beer in the kitchen. Crackers and cheese if you’re hungry.”
Ian watched Lacey go back up the stairs like a paint-splattered wraith and wondered what she had on under the huge flannel shirt—if anything at all. The thought had an immediate effect on his crotch, which made his temper take another steep downward dive.
Susa and her damn hunches and her cast-iron will.
The smile lurking around Susa’s mouth hadn’t made the orders she gave any easier to take. Neither did the dark, sultry voice of Etta James drifting down the stairs, caressing the words of “Hold Me.” Why the hell couldn’t Lacey have liked retro rap or the new groups that wouldn’t know a tune if it bit them on their tattooed balls?
With a sound of disgust, Ian started shoving locks into place. He wasn’t hungry, didn’t drink on duty, and was too wide awake to need coffee. Turning on his penlight, he stalked down the dim aisles of Lost Treasures Found, looking at the shapes of pre-Columbian gods on modern pottery, the practiced ennui of noir posters, and the equally practiced elegance of Art Nouveau knockoffs from the Roaring Twenties. He paused at an Art Deco lamp whose clean lines somehow reminded him of the open country east of the Sierra Nevadas, where sun and wind reigned supreme.
He flicked the penlight at his watch. Seven whole minutes had gone by. Whoopee. Only three hundred and sixty-seven more to go. By morning he should have the frigging inventory memorized.
“You don’t have to prowl around there in the dark,” Lacey said from the upstairs room. “I’m painting, not sleeping. Lights won’t bother me.”
He didn’t have to ask if she would mind company. If she was painting, he could stand close enough to taste her and she wouldn’t even know he was there. But instead of reassuring him, that irritated him. All in all, he was in one pisser of a mood.
He took the stairs three at a time.
Lacey heard the footsteps swiftly approaching and gripped the easel so hard she almost left dents. With exquisite care she finished opening the telescoping legs so that she could paint standing up. Normally she sat while painting, but not tonight. She was much too edgy.
And having Ian arrive like a thunderstorm looking for a place to break wasn’t helping her nerves one bit.
“I thought all artists worked only in full daylight from north-facing windows.”
“In a perfect world, yes. I don’t live on that planet. Full-spectrum lighting works in a pinch,” Lacey said, waving her hand at a bank of special lights overhead.
With that, she selected a fresh canvas from her file of prepared surfaces and placed the thirty-six-by-thirty-inch rectangle on the easel.
“Is that stuff really canvas?” he asked.
“The best is made of linen. Very expensive.”
He looked at the canvas, frowning. “So that’s linen?”
“No. Can’t afford it, so I’ve adapted my technique to make the most of cotton.”
“Virtue out of necessity?”
“Yeah. Like peanut butter. You’ve got enough peanuts to cover the planet, so what do you do? You mash them so they store better.”
Trying not to smile, he bent over her shoulder and peered at the pale rectangle waiting to be filled with color. “Looks like it’s already got a layer of paint.”
Lacey told herself that she couldn’t really sense the heat of Ian’s body reaching out to her. “Some of my canvases are commercially prepared, so that I don’t have to fill and sand and paint on the ground layer myself. But this is one of a batch that I prepared weeks ago.”
When he didn’t say anything, she let out a careful breath and turned to her paint table. Tables, actually. When she worked in the studio, she liked to spread out. The tables themselves were covered with dribs and drabs of old paint in every hue. The dinner plates she used as palettes were paint-free everywhere it mattered. Same for the brushes she chose.
Ian watched as Lacey put out on a separate, smaller table something that smelled like turpentine, and brushes of all sizes in a surprising number of shapes. All of them had really long handles.
“Why so many?” he asked.
She gave him a wary look as she opened the paint drawer that was part of the table. “Sorry, my mind-reading skills are on holiday.”
“Brushes. And shapes.”
“One color per brush.”
He waited.
“Otherwise I’d be stopping to clean the brush every time I wanted a different color,” Lacey explained. “And I have a separate table for the solvent because I learned the hard way that I knock the stuff over if I keep it near my easel.”
“Brush shapes?”
“This one”—she lifted up a brush with pale bristles—“is flat on the edge with long bristles. I use it for medium or thinner paints.”
“The others are for thick paints?”
“No. This one is for thick paint.” She lifted up a brush with short hair and a flat edge. “It’s called a bright.”
“What kind of bristle or fur or whatever?”
“Chinese pig hair.” Lacey pulled over a smaller easel and set up the field study she’d done while painting with Susa.
“Pig hair,” he repeated.
“Also known as bristles to some folks. The actual breed of pig is called China White. If you want to get really hairy, there are subspecies of the pig favored by some artists.”
“China, huh? Must be expensive to import.”
“They’re more expensive than synthetic, yes, but the pigs they pluck for brushes no more come straight from China than the black Lab down the street came from Labrador.”
“So you only use pig hair?”
She shrugged. “If I was doing portraits or old master style, I’d use sable brushes, or badger, or mongoose.”
“Mongoose? You’re pulling my leg.”
“Nope.” She tested one brush thoughtfully. Clean, dry, ready to go.
“But you’re happy with pig hair.”
“For oils, yes.” She looked from the field study to the empty canvas. “Pig hair is stiffer than the other kinds, and oil paint is stiffer than other painting media. Also, pig hair flags—kind of frays—at the end of each shaft instead of coming to a point like fur.”
“That’s good?”
“Sure. Frayed shafts hold more paint, give more texture. Of course, texture also depends on the canvas and the binder in the paint and the paint itself.” Her voice was absent, her attention on the blank canvas. “I use poppyseed oil paints when I want heavy, fast-drying textures.”
“Is that what you were painting with on the ranch?”
Lacey nodded.
“Are you using it now?” he persisted, enjoying hearing her talk without being wary of him.
“Nope. Linseed oil.”
He watched her uncap a big tube of white paint and smaller tubes of red, green, blue, and yellow. She squeezed the paints as separate globs down the edge of one plate.
He looked at the plates set out on a table encrusted with more colors than he had words to describe. Yet she didn’t reach for any more tubes of paint.
“You mix all your colors out of those five?”
“Four,” she said absently, slapping the long-handled brush on her palm. “Technically, white isn’t a color. It’s the absence of any color, just as black is the presence of all colors.”
“Where’s your black?”
“Don’t use it. Chevreul’s law of color contrast.”
“Come again?”
She shifted, selected a few more brushes, and set them aside before she spoke. “Impressionism at its heart is just that—an
impression
of reality rather than a one-for-one representation. Impressionism is the art of tricking the eye into seeing shadows by using complementary colors to increase contrast rather than using the black shadows and the white light of the old masters.”
“Old masters always looked just plain dingy to me.”
“That’s the result of bad cleaning or no cleaning at all. Or bad art. There was a lot of that going around. Always has been. Always will be. Old doesn’t necessarily mean good.”
“Not if what Susa slogged through Tuesday night was any indication.”
Lacey smiled briefly, but the empty canvas was tugging at her.
“Susa’s paints didn’t come out of tubes,” Ian said.
“She makes her own a lot of the time. So far I’m happy with the effect I get from prepared paints. When that changes…” Her voice died away as she went to work.
He watched while she mixed colors in the center of the plate, added a drop of oil, mixed again, then added a touch more yellow, transforming
the bold colors at the edge of the plate into a pale, almost ghostly shade of blue.
“Looks like you’re making your own paints to me,” he said.
She made an absent did-you-say-something kind of sound.
“Aren’t you?” he asked.
“What?”
“Making your own paints.”
“Blending my own colors. Different thing.”
He took her word for it.
For a few moments there was only Etta James singing “Love’s Been Rough on Me” and the hushed sounds of brush stroking over canvas. The sky condensed on the canvas like a secret sigh. A different brush, a different mix of colors, and the ocean took form. A third brush, more mixing, and the green foreground took shape.
He glanced from the smaller painting she had done at the ranch to the larger painting taking shape before his eyes. Same place, same colors, yet more subtle, somehow more contained. Field study versus studio painting. He could see the difference, yet he couldn’t say which appealed more to him. Each had its own vision, its own strength, its own reality.
“Susa stretches her own canvases,” Ian said. “Do you?”
“I used to.” She tucked the green brush under her chin and picked up the pale blue one again. “Grandfather insisted on it. His most cherished tool was the pliers he used for stretching. I still have them. Don’t use them. Don’t do my own sizing, either. The factories can do it better than I can. Quicker, too.” While she spoke, she put down her first brushes, squeezed more paint onto another plate, mixed swiftly with new brushes, and added the contrasting swaths of color that gave sky and ocean and grass a sense of three dimensions. “He’s the one who taught me to blend prepared paints, even though he made his own with a mortar, pestle, and a hunk of mineral.”
Ian managed to follow the twists in her conversation—he hoped. “Your grandfather?” he asked cautiously.
“Mmm.”
“He was a painter?”
“Mmm.”
“Is that mmm-yes or mmm-no?”
“Huh?”
“Was your grandfather a painter?”
Her brush jerked. With a hissed word she picked up a palette knife, scraped off the mistake, and told herself that she’d better pay attention to the conversation rather than her painting. She couldn’t clean up careless words as easily as careless paint.
“Just mmm,” she said.
“A dabbler?” Ian pressed.
Their earlier conversation echoed in her ears.
Does that mean you trust me?
Yes.
I’m holding you to that, Lacey January Marsh Quinn