He sprinted back to the group and she watched him talk them through the painting, his hands emphasising and illustrating what he was saying. He did her trick of picking someone to come up close to the painting and tell everyone what they saw, and when they said, ‘Some feet on a trapeze,’ he professed complete astonishment, said no one had ever noticed that before. Had them all laughing, had them in the palm of his hand.
She knew that she was in the palm of his hand too.
She followed him round, as he’d done with her on that
first day, and she saw Lilly come into the room and check on them. She seemed disappointed that there was no fighting yet.
Tate carried on talking, laughing, entertaining, but every now and again he would stop and defer to her: ‘Gracie, as the expert, you wanna add anything?’ Once or twice she did and he beamed at her, giving the group the impression that nobody could explain things as well as she could.
He was lying: she knew he was much better at this than she was. He wasn’t hiding behind a wall of reserve keeping everything locked down; he would joke, nudge, and ask people about themselves, get them to trust him.
So, he’d make a good con artist … but a thief? Maybe being a con artist was enough. Distracting people, getting them to open up, relax. She wished her head wasn’t throbbing again – it made it difficult to think this through properly.
At the end, as he said his goodbyes in the courtyard, the group seemed loath to leave. His hand was full of the tips they had given him.
‘Thank you for helping me,’ she said when the last person had gone. ‘You were good in there. Really know your stuff.’
‘Chicago’s a great teacher.’
‘You brought it alive.’
‘I’m a good actor. Like you, Gracie.’ The penetrating look
was getting an outing again and then he did a big sigh, the kind where your shoulders hunch up and then come down and you blow the air out through your lips. ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I can’t go back to this snippy-snippy stuff any more.’ There was a lift of an eyebrow. ‘I gotta keep my big mouth shut and not keep trying to get you to spill your guts and you gotta stop looking like I came in on the bottom of your shoe. Deal?’
There she was saying, ‘Deal,’ and holding out her hand. He put the money he was holding into it and closed her fingers, one by one, over the notes. It should have seemed too clever – a nicely contrived image – but it didn’t; it felt like something delicate and tender.
‘You’ve earned the money, you should keep it,’ she said, but he seemed more interested in keeping hold of her hand. The only way she could get him to let go was by starting to walk. Hard to think when someone was looking at you like that.
As they neared the archway, her mobile rang.
‘Sounds like you just got a signal?’ Tate said. ‘Wanna answer it?’
She juggled getting the money into her purse and getting the mobile out of her bag. It was her father. She moved away from Tate a couple of steps, mouthed ‘sorry’.
There was no ‘hello’ or ‘how are you?’ when she answered
the call; just her father plunging straight into, ‘I need you to do something, Grace. That American lad, you’re with him now, aren’t you?’
She moved further away from Tate.
‘How do you know that?’ She tried to keep her voice down and did what she hoped was a subtle scan to check if there were any familiar figures loitering about.
‘Stop looking, Grace, and just listen. I need you to keep him busy, just for an hour or so.’
‘Dad, what is this? What are you playing at?’
She saw Tate had taken out a pack of cigarettes and flipped open the top. He looked across to her, glanced back down at the cigarettes, seemed to hesitate and then flipped the top of the packet closed again. He couldn’t get the packet back into his pocket cleanly, as if he were fumbling and it made her want to go and help him.
Her father’s tone was wheedling. ‘Just an hour, Grace. Go to the pub, talk about art. You can do that. Just till seven.’
‘That’s an hour and a half.’ An hour and a half in a pub with Tate? She felt her throat tighten at the thought of that.
‘It’s for a good cause, Grace. What if he
is
involved in this robbery lark? That would mean you were doing a public service, stopping any more paintings getting stolen.
You know how you love those paintings. It’s not fair that someone’s going to hide them away in a private collection. Stop you looking at them. Come on, Grace. Just keep him busy while I go and check on something.’
She glanced back at Tate, who had the cigarette packet back out and seemed to be repeating the open, look, hesitate, close process.
‘Will you stop badgering me if I do, Dad? I can’t think properly …’
‘I won’t ask you to do anything else.’
‘All right, all right. Just till seven. And don’t do anything daft. Or dangerous.’
‘Course not.’
‘Trouble?’ Tate said, coming towards her as she put the mobile back in her bag. The lights were shining off his hair. He was like an angel who’d fallen into a theatrical outfitter’s. She saw how people were looking at him, even here in London. It made him seem more dangerous. Not angelic at all.
‘Just my dad.’
He nodded and wrinkled his nose. ‘Yup, dads can be tricky.’
‘Not as tricky as mums.’
He laughed at that and there it was firmly established now – that connection. A bond.
‘So.’ He shrugged. ‘How are you doin’? Can’t believe Al sent you out to do this today. Not sure you should even be back at work. Neck still sore? Head still hurting?’
‘Comes and goes.’
‘Yeah?’ His gaze travelled from her hair, down her face to her neck and then back to her eyes. ‘It’s there at the moment, your head. Looks fine to me. More than fine.’
She walked under the arch and out into the street where the lights were burning up the dark and the traffic was rushing past and Grace wasn’t certain she could go through with sitting in a pub next to Tate and making polite conversation about art. She knew how to argue with him – that was safe – but talking properly?
He stopped. ‘You look like you could use a drink, Gracie, but you don’t drink, do you? So …’
Inside her, the old Grace yawned and stretched. ‘I know a pub that serves really good water.’
He gave her one of his straight-down-the-line smiles. ‘Water it is then.’ His laugh came out like a breath.
They walked away from the worst of the traffic and the worst of the crowds and in the pub he kept looking back at her as he waited to be served, as if he expected her to get up and go. Yet when he brought the drinks to their table, his ‘You mind, ma’am?’ with a nod at the space next to her had a confident, almost demanding, tone to it that
made her think of a gunslinger again – which, she thought, must make her a saloon girl. She felt her sense of caution roll further out into the long grass.
‘Careful,’ he said, as she lifted her glass, ‘I got you fizzy. Sure you can handle it?’ There was a challenging look in his eyes and that awful and exciting something was twisting inside her again. He didn’t seem interested in his drink, didn’t seem inclined to stop looking at her face. She glanced at the clock behind the bar. Barely quarter to six.
She felt stupidly self-conscious and tried to bolster up her resolve by remembering the reasons why her father was suspicious of Tate. He stomped all over her careful thinking with a low, ‘Sorry I’m staring. Couldn’t stop thinking about you this weekend, Gracie. Worried about you. Kept remembering that moment you hit your head. My fault. Pushing and pushing at you when it’s none of my business. Saying all that stuff to Esther. I don’t back off, that’s my problem. One of them.’
She studied him as he talked. A strong, open face. Yes, definitely more of a cowboy than a beach boy, except those green eyes were too cat-like, too willing to take things beyond far. But far enough to steal the very things she loved?
‘I should have seen Esther was getting too … you know.
Should have read that sign:
Handle With Care
. Messed up Gilbert a bit too, maybe …’
He gave her a look to check what she might think about that but she wasn’t thinking about Gilbert; she was looking at Tate’s eyebrows, how they were light brown, and how one of his lips still had a mark where Violet had nipped him.
He caught her looking and she dropped her gaze to his hand resting on the table.
‘You have paint under your nails,’ she said and was surprised that she didn’t feel panicky or sad or angry as she usually did when something reminded her of Bill.
She saw him pull his hand back before hesitating and letting it remain there.
‘Yup,’ he said, ‘just getting some bits and pieces ready for the installation, you know.’
‘Did you find a location? The other evening, with Gilbert?’
‘No, got waylaid. Plenty of time.’
He was so close to her she could feel him all the way down her side. He was looking at her lips. And then something over her shoulder took his attention and he did one of those double-takes she’d last seen when he was trying to understand what the hell Alistair was on about.
She turned to see Nadim at the bar, a pint of orange
juice held to his chest in one large hand, one foot on the brass rail at the bottom of the bar. He was working hard at looking nonchalant – it made him seem as if there was something caught between his neck and his collar.
‘The damndest thing,’ Tate said frowning. ‘That guy …’
She turned back round quickly.
‘I swear …’ Tate started again. ‘Looks familiar. Can’t think where … but I swear …’
She got up. ‘I think I need to go to the toilet. I won’t be long.’
As she passed Nadim, she flared her eyes at him and whispered, ‘Outside.’
He emerged on the pavement, and she harried him round to the side of the pub.
‘What on earth are you doing? One, you’re in a pub – what would your wife say if she knew? And two, has Dad asked you to keep an eye on me?’
Nadim was a jowly man and his mouth made a downward curve.
‘Well, he might have. But now, Grace, he’s gone quiet. Not answering his mobile. He’s left me deep undercover with no operating instructions.’
How had she ever thought her father’s interest in crime was better than an interest in morris dancing?
‘I think you should go home, Nadim. Tate nearly
recognised you back then; he was trying to place you. Go home.’
Nadim was reluctant.
‘Go home,’ she said again. ‘Or I might just tell your wife next time I see her that I saw you drinking vodka and orange. A pint of it.’
She left him professing it was just orange and rejoined Tate. He was fiddling with a beer mat before he saw her, and when he did, he stood up and smiled, his teeth very white in the gloom of the pub.
She really wanted to drink a double Scotch. Just standing there, straight down in one. She could do with a cigarette too. Any kind.
Then she stopped craving anything but Tate, because his smile had become something dirtier, and she saw his gaze do a trip down her body and back to her eyes again.
For the first time she let him look for as long as he wanted. She didn’t cut short his access or pass off the way she was looking back at him as if it was something that had happened by accident. His cocky ‘let me in’ look seemed to melt away the longer they stood there, until it was obvious even to her that what he’d said before she’d got thwacked on the head was true – he wanted her. She saw him shift his stance and the look changed again as if, suddenly, he were unsure of himself.
Without them discussing that they were going, she was lifting up her bag and he was picking up his coat and they were outside. Grace didn’t even care if they found Nadim was still standing there.
Tate was looking at her lips again.
‘Really want to kiss you, Gracie,’ he said, struggling into his coat. ‘If you don’t want me to, better say something now, because in a minute I’m not gonna be able to hear anything but the blood rushing in my ears.’ He was moving as he spoke; she felt his hands find her waist and he was pulling her towards him. Whether she would have said stop if he’d given her the opportunity, she would never know, because suddenly his mouth was on hers and the feel of his lips made all the things she’d tried to keep a lid on force their way into her mind for a few disorientating, gut-churning seconds, before they spiralled away again, God knew where, and she kissed him back. It was a tentative kiss on both their parts and he pulled away after the briefest of time. When she opened her eyes, he was still right up close, his breath seeming laboured.
‘Jeez, Gracie,’ he said, both hands coming up to hold her face. ‘If I kiss you the way I want to, it’s gonna kill your neck.’
He could not have possibly known how much she was
turned on by that – it made her feel desired and precious to him, and when he brushed her hair back off one cheek and lightly kissed her there, the old Grace was awake, prowling around, looking on and saying,
He’s gorgeous. What are you waiting for?
‘It would probably be easier if I was lying down,’ she said, looking at him from under her lashes, and she saw she had surprised him. If anything, his breath seemed more laboured.
‘Cab?’ he said and she almost shouted, ‘Yes.’ He was pulling her to the edge of the pavement, then he was out in the road, waving his hand about.
‘Where to?’ he called over his shoulder as the taxi came to a halt.
‘Wherever’s closest.’
‘Ribbonfield Mansions, Grantham Street,’ he said to the driver and pulled at the door to get her in, leaping in behind her.
Grace had a moment of clarity in the taxi when she remembered that she was still meant to be in the pub keeping him busy and that he might be a thief and, even if he wasn’t, he was absolutely the wrong man for her to be with, and then Tate put his hand on her thigh and she wanted him to kiss her properly. It was difficult to get the angle quite right; she couldn’t turn her head much, but
Tate proved to be both imaginative and determined. Even with the seatbelts on.
He was kissing her in a way that made her realise just his mouth wasn’t going to be enough. When he pulled the collar of her coat aside far enough to allow him to drop kisses at the base of her throat, she felt his blond hair tickle her neck and expected it to stir up memories of Bill, but it didn’t – it stirred up heat and a sweetly excruciating tightness in her belly.