One Good Friend Deserves Another (6 page)

Kelly began to realize just how much Dhara was keeping from all of them. “For Pete’s sake, Cole, when did you lose your job?”

“Last June.”

She stilled a moment. Last June was a year ago, much longer than she expected. But she supposed it took a whole year to put an eviction proceeding into effect. Her mind raced in sudden calculation. If he lost his job last June, that was about three months after Dhara broke up with him.

“Is that why you’ve been dodging my calls for so long?” Kelly wondered how much deeper the story went. “Hell, Cole, if it weren’t for you, I’d still be wearing those ratty cheap sneakers from freshman year. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I could handle it.” He paused. “I thought I could handle it.”

“What about your savings?”

He made a short, humorless laugh. “Nothing that could hold that apartment for a year.”

“But—”

“I’d made some bad trades. A couple of big ones. You know, the higher up you get in this business, the bigger the risks. The bigger the failures too. No one outside the business really
gets
that.”

Kelly drew back, stung by his frustration.

“And there was this guy on my floor. Gunning for me.” Annoyance roughened his voice. “He kept shorting me, whenever he could, like he was trying to prove something to his boss.” Cole began tapping his foot, his knee working up and down. “That, coupled with a few bad trades, and my boss started to listen to him. He told me I was risking a date with the SEC.”

Kelly took another sip of tea to hide her surprise. She and the girls never really understood what Cole did. Trading derivatives. Putting short-term bets on volatile stocks. Working overseas currencies in his favor. It was part of what impressed them all at Vassar. He’d started e-trading when he was barely sixteen, using an account he’d opened in his mother’s name. He’d developed a statistical system that worked a half-percentage more than any others he knew of, trading on daily fluctuations in commodity prices first, and, later, on blue-chip stocks, and then still later on some new-fangled thing called electronically traded funds. He’d made enough to pay for his tuition while still managing to financially support from afar his mother’s ever-languishing organic farm. It was this genius that got him an acceptance into Vassar, despite a spotty educational history.

“…the next thing I know, I’m facing disciplinary action. Got all the white-shoes frowning down at me. Do you know how much money I made those guys over the years? They said if I left the firm willingly, they’d let it all slide. No reporting, no blot on my record. And no job.”

And all Kelly heard was
disciplinary action,
and she wondered if that was what sent Dhara away. Dhara was as by-the-book as the day was long. She once raked over the coals a whole room of medical students for playing pranks with the dissection corpses. But surely Dhara would have given Cole every last chance to prove his innocence to her.

Unless he couldn’t.

She watched him now as he chewed on a hangnail, staring blankly at her coffee table. She felt a swell of compassion. She always knew how out of place he felt in his Wall Street firm, a farmer’s son who’d tripped into a fancy school but never really felt as if he fit in. She herself had always felt like a fish out of water, having spent summers working the lines with her father in Gloucester Bay until no amount of lemon could wash the smell of brine out of her hair.

But
cheating?
It just didn’t feel right.

“I shouldn’t have said all that,” he muttered, using his cup to rub the watery ring it had made on the table. “It’s…more complicated. I’d appreciate it if you’d keep this between us. I’d rather not let everyone know what a fuckup I’ve been.”

Kelly’s swelling compassion then spread to Dhara, who’d clearly insisted on protecting Cole—even when he was wrong—even against the friends who loved them both.

“My lips,” she promised, “are sealed.”

“I could use a place to stay too.” He talked more to himself than to her. “I need to get the ground back under my feet. I can day-trade still. I’ve got a few clients. I might get a few more, if I make some calls.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“It won’t take long,” he added. “Once I’ve got a cushion in the bank, I’ll find my own place.”

It took a full minute for Kelly to realize that he was asking to stay here, in her apartment, for an extended and open-ended period of time.

“Oh!” she said. “Oh.”

Cole couldn’t possibly stay
here
. Trey had been coming over, spending whole glorious weekends between her faded sheets. It was all going so well, so swimmingly, so
perfectly
. From that moment Trey had stood outside her office building, leaning up against a signpost with a long-delayed apology on his lips—to the wild tear-off-his-clothes, grinding-naked-on-the-hotel-room-floor of last Friday’s hookup, she’d been living in a hypersexualized bubble of dreamy wonder. It couldn’t stop.

She didn’t want it to stop.

“I’d appreciate it,” Cole said, his gaze on his hands, “if you kept this quiet. You know. From the girls.”

But Cole—Cole!—here!—of all people! In college, Cole had been the one who’d delivered the bad news to her about Trey. Cole had overheard Trey bragging in the cafeteria, outlining to the rugby team his strategy for bagging a redhead. And when she—lost in a sensual haze—had refused to believe him, Cole had dragged her to the computer to show her a chat site for pickup artists where Trey had discussed, in intimate detail, the techniques he’d used to lure the cute virgin off the barstool and into his bed.

“Kelly?” Cole turned to her, his eyes hooded. “You can say no, you know. I’m getting used to hearing that.”

She froze with her teacup halfway to her lips. Cole looked at her with bloodshot eyes. And she was reminded that it was Cole who’d first recognized her as a kindred spirit freshman year—two working-class kids in a sea of preppy, trust-fund babies. It was Cole who’d offered her cash to tutor him in Physics. She didn’t figure out until years later that the trading wiz didn’t really need the tutoring. It was Cole who paid for her plane ticket to Aruba during spring break, claiming he had plenty of frequent-flier miles, just so she could join everyone on one last college fling. And it was Cole who’d fronted her the first and last month’s rent on her very first New York City apartment, more money than she’d ever had in her bank account at any one time.

Kelly scraped her cup across the coffee table. “Of course you can stay.” She pressed her cheek against Cole’s shoulder. “Stay as long as you need to.”

She closed her eyes. A complication was inevitable, she supposed. Her relationship with Trey was clandestine, crazy, impossible, and breathlessly romantic. Something that good couldn’t possibly come easy. Just like in a Bollywood movie.

But she would find a way.

She
would.

If she had to move mountains, she would keep Cole and Trey apart.

W
endy ascended the wide central stairs inside the Haight-Livingston Museum, the clatter of her heels echoing off the frescoed ceiling. Clutching her coffee, she breathed in the morning hush. She’d spent the weekend negotiating seating arrangements for the wedding and now felt like she’d just emerged, blinking, from some wartime bunker.

At the top of the stairs, she came to an abrupt halt. Thick wires snaked along the floor of the Greek and Roman gallery. With growing unease, she followed the path of the extension cords around the bases of the marble statues to where they converged, at a ladder on the far side of the room.

There, in a little oasis of shadow, stood another perfect form, this one warm-blooded—Gabriel Teixeira.

She suppressed an inner groan as she crossed the room, gingerly stepping over the wires. She’d completely forgotten that a major distraction would be working just outside her office today. A temporary amnesia, she figured, brought on by the quarrel she’d had with Parker and the stress of holding the pin in the Birdie grenade.

She summoned her best brisk professional voice. “Good morning, Mr. Teixeira.”

Gabriel poked his head down from the ceiling. He was Brazilian. She’d gleaned that information from his slight accent and the few references he’d made to São Paolo. A Portuguese background would explain the Castilian broadness of his forehead and the sharp cut of his jaw. But those exotic, slanting cheekbones, the slight flattening to the bridge of his nose, and the tilt to the corners of his eyes…well, those she couldn’t place. Native American of some sort, she’d thought. Maybe Guarani.

She took a long, controlled breath. Exotic-looking men had always been her undoing. A series of boyfriends paraded through her mind from the Czech sculptor at Vassar to the Jamaican potter who liked to get dirty to the Greek miniaturist with a secret stash of porn. Thankfully, her awakening libido settled right back down.

Too late. Gabriel had caught her staring.

He gripped the edge of the open ceiling. With a knowing smile, he glanced down at her through the space between his broad chest and impressive biceps. “Two weeks we’ve been working together. When are you going to call me Gabe?”

“It’s an old habit. I’d probably develop a tic if I tried to break it.” Humor, she decided, was the best way to diffuse workplace sexual tension. “It was beaten into me by tough old ladies who wore their glasses on chains at Miss Porter’s School for Girls.”

“Those nuns can be brutal.” He reached deep into the ceiling, blindly searching for something. “They bruised my knuckles but good.”

Wendy didn’t bother correcting his assumption that Miss Porter’s was a Catholic school, and not the most ultra-exclusive private boarding school on the Eastern seaboard. In her youth, she could have used the influence of nuns.

“So,” she said, pointedly glancing at the dust-encrusted wires he tugged from the ceiling, “looks like dirty work today.”

“Getting rid of the old wiring.” He held up a ceramic end, turning it over as if he were examining some artifact he’d pulled out of an archeological dig. “Knob and tube. Ancient circuitry. Probably been here since this museum was converted from gaslight.”

“Please tell me,” she said, thinking of the museum’s lean liability policy, “that they’re not a fire hazard.”

“No.” He started coiling the old wire around his arm and shoulder. “They’ve been replaced. I’m just stripping out the old stuff.”

“Which—let me guess—will take the whole day.”

“Oh, yeah.” He grinned, a flash of even white teeth. “I’ll be interrupting your electrical service, scratching around the ceiling, churning up some dust, and overall making a complete nuisance of myself.”

He looked down at her with a half smile. Wendy tried mightily to return it. Gabriel’s increasingly distracting presence was starting to affect her stress levels. Until his arrival, this museum was her only oasis. Her mother owned her nights and her weekends. And the only things that distinguished a five-star general from Bitsy-on-a-mission were fatigues, hand grenades, and a pith helmet.

Above all, roiling in the back of her mind was that uncomfortable dispute with Parker.

“You know,” Gabriel said, shrugging his shoulder to nudge the gathering coil more firmly against his neck. “I can’t let you get away with this ‘Mr. Teixeira’ stuff much longer. When you call me that, it reminds me of the owners of the coffee plantations in the Paraíba Valley, where I grew up. They were
‘senhora’
this and
‘senhor’
that and padded their names with that of their four grandparents.” He lowered his voice in rumbling mockery. “Gabriel de Bragança e Ligne de Sousa Teixeira.”

“Please don’t make me call you Mr. de Bragança e Ligne de Sousa Teixeira. Not before my second cup of coffee.”

“Sure.” Dust motes drifted to the floor as he continued to pull the wire from the ceiling. “As long as I don’t have to call you Helen Vivien Livingston Wainwright.”

She pinked up, then found interest in the drops of coffee that had slipped onto the lid of her cup. She wondered when he’d figure out that one of her last names was also on the museum. It was an embarrassing truth that one of her ancestors had donated this house and all its contents to the county, and that her mother, because of her birth, was one of the lifetime trustees.

“Ah,” she said wryly. “My dirty secret is out. I really should scrap that nameplate.”

“I thought I was in the wrong office. I went looking for you this morning to warn you I’d be shutting down the electricity. The security guard set me straight. Such a big name for a little blonde.”

Wendy coughed to cover the sound of her indrawn breath. She had been called many things in her life—athletic, healthy, and big-boned. They were all euphemisms for her essentially tall, show-horse figure. She managed through biweekly tennis games to keep herself lean. But no one had ever called her a
little blonde.

“But what I’ve been trying to figure out,” he persisted, “is why everyone here calls you Wendy.”

“It’s a family thing. None of us go by our real names.”

A rumble of laughter echoed in the exposed rafters. “Aliases?”

“Self-preservation. Imagine facing your schoolmates with a name like Jeremiah Warner Livingston Wainwright the Third.”

Gabriel paused as the wire snagged. “Really?”

“We call him Trey. In other ways though, the names just get silly.” Her mind ran over the sweeping cast of characters in her extended family. “My mother is Elizabeth—but we call her Bitsy. I’ve got an Aunt Oatsie,” she added, “a sister Birdie, and a Cousin Boop.”

“You’re making this up.”

“There’s a reason why half my relatives are in therapy.”

She didn’t mention that she and her relatives were all descended from robber barons and governors, and the family tree bent under the weight of senators, shipping magnates, and even one vice president. Since one achingly painful incident in college, she made a point to keep that information under wraps—particularly around eligible men.

“But Wendy is not an unusual name,” he persisted. “It’s from
Peter Pan
.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Her father had called her Wendy for the way she controlled her stuffed animals in the storylines she set up for them.
Off to Neverland again,
he’d say, coming into her nursery to find her in the middle of some complicated plot twist. He sometimes called her brother Peter Pan, but for a completely different reason.

Then her gaze drifted to Gabriel’s toolbox where she spied a tattered copy of William Faulkner’s
The Sound and the Fury
,
the bookmark a little deeper into the story than it had been last week, when she’d first noticed it. Curious. He was a reader, this electrician. And
The Sound and the Fury
was one of her favorite books.

She felt a tingle of curiosity. A sure indication that it was time to move on.

“Well,” Wendy said brightly, turning toward her office, “if you’re going to be working here all day, I’d better close the gallery.”

“Don’t.”

Her shoes scraped against the floor as she halted abruptly.

“The kids like it so much.” He jerked his chin toward the statues. “They get an art and anatomy lesson, all in one.”

She glanced around the room and remembered last week’s group from the local all-girls private high school, who’d stepped into the gallery squealing in a pitch high enough to break glass. But as assistant curator, she had liability issues to consider. “They’ll have to be satisfied with the view from the hallway. I have no choice but to close this gallery. The dust—”

“I’ll keep it contained.”

“—and the wires. They pose a hazard.”

“I’ve taped the wires down good.” He popped his head down for a moment, scanned the room, and then—shockingly—blatantly—her bare legs. “And I don’t think any ten-year-olds will be wearing shoes like that.”

Wendy’s arches prickled. She’d worn strappy red sandals, a bit higher in the heel than usual, but she’d been in that kind of mood this morning. The I’ve-been-worn-down-by-my-fiancé-and-my-mother-so-I’m-going-to-wear-red-heels-and-pretend-I’ve-got-it-all-under-control kind of mood. It clearly wasn’t working. Because when Gabriel’s gaze slipped back up her body, his leisurely perusal felt like a feather tickling her inner thigh.

She took a swift sip of her skinny latte. She really should eat a healthier breakfast, even if it meant not losing the last six pounds before the wedding.

Honestly, she knew exactly what was going on here. She’d known since the first day she’d laid eyes on this broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped hunk of man. She was all too clear about the fundamentals of sexual engagement. She’d been an anthropology major, after all. She’d written her thesis on the courting rituals of the Wodaabe tribe of Cameroon.

Here’s the thing with Gabriel Teixeira: Gabriel was a handsome man waltzing into her life in the vulnerable months before she married. It was no surprise that she would simply and strongly
respond.
Her thoroughly physiological reaction to Gabriel’s knee-melting gaze was an evolutionary impulse. It was her body urging her to take in a variety of genetic material before settling down with one mate.

You know, like a bonobo.

And there it was, categorized and labeled. Now she could put it firmly behind glass.

“I have no choice,” she said, swiveling on one of her slim red heels. “I’ll call downstairs and see about closing the gallery.”

“Wendy, hold on.” He climbed down the ladder, bracing the enormous coil of wire against his shoulder. “I almost forgot. I found something this morning that I want to show you.”

He let the coil slide off his shoulder to fall in a cracking heap on the floor, raising a puff of dust. Then he pinched something off the pile of flotsam near the bottom of the ladder and straightened to hold it out toward her.

She approached, drawn by the sight of a pair of grime-encrusted spectacles. She noted the small circular lenses and the delicate, blue-steel wires. “They look very old,” she murmured. “Turn of the twentieth century, maybe.”

“I found them sitting inside the ceiling on a beam. Probably been there for a hundred years.”

He turned them over in his hands, examining them with the kind of respect she was used to seeing in white-gloved experts of primitive art.

“Can you see some poor worker,” he said, “finishing the ceiling and then, when it’s all closed up, patting his pockets for his glasses?”

“He must have been frantic.” She reached out to wipe some grime from the lenses. “They were expensive in those days.”

She’d leaned in too close. Gabriel was a good head taller than her, so different from Parker, who topped her by only a few inches. More than that, she felt the warmth of him, and his scent of dust and burned wire and an honest man’s labor, and, strangely, the faintest aroma of resin, a perfume that teased the corners of her memory.

She noticed his paint-flecked knuckles and abruptly understood.

She blurted, “You paint.”

She saw the surprise flicker in his eyes. Saw, too, the darkness of emerging stubble on his cheek, a prickly little line of it following his jaw.

“I do paint.” His voice was a rumble. “Not houses. Canvases.”

“Of course.”

She took a step back and felt herself blushing. Not a swift pink tinge to her cheeks, but a full-blown flush rising up from the collar of her silk blouse, the kind of embarrassed glow that would make the skin of her chest, exposed beneath a few open buttons, a complete patchwork of blotches.

“I’m working on a large canvas now.” He returned the dusty eyeglasses to the top of a pile of flotsam by the foot of the ladder and then reached for a rag in his toolbox to wipe the grime from his hands. “In a month, I’m going to have a booth at the Hudson Valley Art Fair.”

Thoroughly unnerved, Wendy thought of the Brazilian artists she knew. She thought of the brilliant colors and the textured street scenes of Sérgio Telles and the Picasso-like nudes of Ismael Nery and the way Antônio Garcia Bento painted water. She thought of the lovely woodscape by Batista da Costa acquired by her Soho art gallery, the one she’d repeatedly failed to sell and so had finally, guiltily, bought for herself.