BIG: (A Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance) (20 page)

And she hadn’t been. Until now.

Annalesa grabbed her bag as the steps were wheeled over to the Gulfstream door. She was done with the customs office in no time, and in the chauffeur’s car a moment later, pouring herself a coffee. Private flights were way more relaxing than commercial ones.

She sighed. If she could put that horrible meeting room incident aside, the weekend had been perfect. She couldn’t ignore the fact that Ric had gone to great lengths to make their weekend together before the party absolutely perfect. That was a lot of time, commitment and care.

Could she really blame him for needing “proof” that she was on his side? After everything he’d been through? That they’d been through together?

When they pulled up outside her garret apartment, she ran up the stairs, feeling much happier about having made a simple decision.

She
would
do what she had to do to prove it to him—with or without fears.

Ric was going to be hard work, there was no question of that, but she was far advanced in the art of walking on and around eggshells. She’d done it her whole life. So she might have a lot to prove to him, to help him to heal. His body had healed and he had the scars to prove it. Now she needed to help him heal his soul.

And it would be a nice little bonus to prove that Arensen was wrong when he claimed nobody in life could be trusted. She wanted Ric to be able to turn around to his cynical mentor and say, “You know what, there is someone I can totally trust.”

She wanted to be that person for him.

And whatever it took, she was willing to provide him with all the evidence he needed to do that.

Away on a mission, comms will be tough. Will get in touch when I can.

Annalesa stared at the brief text again, as if it might say something different than the last twenty times she’d read it that week. Ric had warned her he would be out of touch—and true to his word, she hadn’t had so much as an email.

Quite a few University friends had posted birthday greetings on her Facebook wall, but the silence from Ric was deafening. It was a little deflating to think she might not even hear from him today, let alone see him.

She sighed and shut down her laptop, her eyes burning from hours of posting pictures of her new apartments on University websites. She’d spent the week furnishing the new properties. It had kept her nicely busy, but not so preoccupied she didn’t snatch her phone out at laser speed each time it buzzed.

Annalesa changed into running clothes, hoping a little fresh air and a few endorphins would take her mind off her disappointment.

She locked up and set off at a gentle jog, her iPod
blaring in her ears, shutting out the rest of the world. The rhythm of running lulled her as it always did these days, when she had too much on her mind, and her imagination returned to the array of images she’d created of Ric being ‘on a mission.’

She saw him approaching a house at a crouch, light on his feet, his Brann Jotun in hand. There would be a mercenary at the door, shocked into dropping his cigarette as Ric slipped up from behind and folded him easily and silently down to the ground with a grip to the neck, incapacitating but not wounding him. The door would be locked, of course, and Ric would silently beckon for cover as he reared back and kicked the door in. And then there would be chaos—he’d thunder through the house, taking the bad guys out of action, grease paint smeared all over his—

Wait—did they use grease-paint for urban rescues? Probably not. That was much more a foresty-thing.

Fine, so he’d be in full tactical gear, an imposing figure in black, taking out mercenaries left, right and center until reaching a room where a terrified woman and default-adorable-toddler cowered beneath a bed. As soon as the house was cleared, the softer, gentler Ric would emerge as he eased the frightened pair out from their hiding place, threw a blanket around the mother and carried the huge-eyed tot to his—

Her music cut out, snapping her out of her Rambo-Ric fantasy and she stopped at the corner of the road, wriggling the jack of the headset in the iPod to get the connection back. It wouldn’t play ball. Sighing, she headed back to her apartment at a lighter jog. At least now she knew what to put on her self-bought birthday list.

As she reached her door, her postman was at the ground floor mailbox, grimacing at the small gap and the board-reinforced 11x15 envelope in his hand. He was also holding a bunch of colorful greeting cards. He nodded at her as she pulled her keys from her sweatpants.

Grinning, he handed her the mail. “Bonne anniversaire?”

“Oui. Merci, Marcel.”

He cast a not-so-subtle look at her backside as she unlocked the door and made her way in.

Back upstairs, she put her little stack of cards on the kitchen table, intrigued by the white envelope. Her address had been laser-printed and there was no return address. It was pretty weighty for a flat package—several ounces, at least. She made a coffee and sat down to examine it more carefully. Inside was a buff, letter-sized archival envelope with a tiny icon in the left hand corner of two swords crossed over a scroll.

It wasn’t an archival brand she recognized, but it looked very Norse.

Very Ric.

A grin took her face hostage and it was everything she could do to stop herself from tearing it open to see what was inside. It was held shut with a ribbon wrapped around a cardboard button—no adhesive. Whatever was inside was clearly precious. She had to stop and take a breath—prepare her work area first.

Annalesa zipped to her room and pulled her materials case out from beneath her bed. She grabbed a spare Tyvex archival envelope, a pair of latex gloves and her iMac, which she booted up at the far side of the kitchen table. At the other end, she laid out a half-meter square of paper towel to protect the envelope contents from surface oils.

Then, finally, she unwound the ribbons.

Two heavy, folded letters slid out on the paper towel. Annalesa lifted the first, which was bound to something beneath by a long strip of white paper, folded over and taped. It was loose enough not to pinch the sides of the delicate, yellowed paper.

The letter was addressed to ‘Camille’ and the top right corner simply read,
Zaandam 1908.

Annalesa’s heart skipped a few extra beats. Claude Monet had lived there in his later life, long after his first wife, Camille, had died. Her hands suddenly felt cold. She breathed out to get a grip and read the first couple of sentences.

Ce sont les missives que j’aurais dû vous envoyer quand je vous ai quitté à Paris. Ce sont les choses que je n’ai pas dites lorsque nous gardions le secret à propos de notre fils à naitre.

“Oh my God.”

She got up, paced, sat again. Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Claude’s letters were only rumored to exist. She’d want to get the letters officially translated, but could make out the gist in those first lines:

‘These are the letters I should have sent you when I left you in Paris. These are things I did not say while we kept our unborn son a secret.’

Annalesa eased the paper strip away from the letter and the heavy paper held beneath it. Like the letter, it was folded. She eased it open and the breath whooshed from her lungs as she saw the tiny oil painting reproduced on the thick sketch paper.

It was a reversal of
‘The Woman in the Green Dress.’
Camille was posed, not away from the artist, as in the original, but pictured from the front, her expression serene. The background, instead of being a brown-black, was a pale blue. There was a tone of hope. It made her breath catch.

Hands shaking, Annalesa picked up the second letter and gently separated its attached painting. This one was a reproduction of
‘The Woman with the Parasol’
—Camille—in a red-flowered field with their son, but in this one, she held Jean on her shoulders and carried the folded parasol in her hand.

The artistry and the stroke style... there was no question that this was Monet, later in his career—at precisely the time date-stamped on the letter. She had
living history
on her table. The untold love story of Claude and Camille Monet, speculated upon time and time again by art historians, authors... even psychologists.

Annalesa felt faint—she’d lived and breathed Camille Monet’s personal story for the four years of her degree, loving every moment of constructing her history. Camille had been a woman made to wait years before she could marry the man she loved. Something Annalesa had been able to relate to, even if she couldn’t admit it then.

It wasn’t even ten a.m., but Annalesa strode through to the tiny living room in her apartment and grabbed the bottle of Amaretto, taking a long, steadying swig. To bloody hell with a glass. Only when she felt softly foggy-headed did she put the bottle back in the cabinet and head back to the kitchen.

The last significant finding about Monet’s work had been in 1947, when a box belonging to Frédéric Bazille—Monet’s long-term friend—had been found in the home of his nephew by a maid. The box contained some of Monet’s early sketches at the time he’d met his future wife. And now she had handwritten letters from him, showing his grief at having to hide their relationship from his family.

Annalesa was both dizzy with gratitude to Ric for the unique gift, and giddy with terror at the responsibility of caring for them properly. Hardly daring to touch the letters again until her shaking had stopped, she snapped a photo of the icon on the archival envelope and airdropped it to her iMac. A reverse image search brought up the website for a Norwegian document-protection service with a completely unpronounceable name. She checked out the manufacturer’s specification for the envelope, beyond relieved to find that it met all requirements for the photo-activity test, maximum levels of reducible sulfur, and limited metallic impurities in the pulp.

She laughed at herself. Yeah, Ric might be insane enough to send a priceless chunk of history through the post, but never in some crappy envelope. She had no idea what she was meant to do with them, other than re-read them a thousand, careful times and soak in their history, but the magnitude of the gift melted away all the anxieties she’d suffered on that trip back from London.

Only someone who really knew her, who truly loved her, could give her something so close to her heart as a birthday gift.

Not expecting him to answer while he was out on ops, she texted him to let him know his gift had arrived. That was the least she could do.

You’re as amazing as you are crazy. You know what I’m talking about!

As expected, Ric didn’t respond.

She kept in touch in an innocuous way by email, saying nothing about the gift, but copying him into the link she sent to Brad and Elsa to show that her project providing student apartments was taking off.

Over the next month, the letters and miniature canvases kept coming. She divided her time between hours spent re-reading the amazingly passionate letters and delighting in each new version of the classic paintings, and panicking about their safe storage. A friendly curator at the Louvre sold her a secure artifact box, and she even had extra dead-bolts fixed to her apartment door to improve her security.