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She shook her head. “I’ve never been out of California.”
He should have guessed that. Every penny went to raising her son, so how could she have bought a plane ticket to New York and splurged on a couple of nights at a hotel, just to go to a museum?
But he could take her there. He had the money. He could take Rosie and Jorge, book a plane and hotel for them right now if they wanted to go. If only he could suggest something like that without freaking her out, or making her think he wanted anything from her beyond friendship.
Especially because he absolutely wanted more, when he couldn’t stop thinking about kissing her again, whether he deserved Rosie or not.
She tapped the iPad again, snapping him out of his crazy thoughts. “This is the one at the Met.”
The painting was a masterpiece of armor-plated angels fighting Satan and his demons. Though he wasn’t an art buff, Gideon could easily see the similarity in style to the portrait of Diego and Catalina Sanchez and the painting in the Legion of Honor. But w
hat about Karmen’s small painting?
Rosie zoomed and pointed. “See the initials? See how similar the flare of the letters is?” Clearly reading his mind, she added, “I know it seems crazy to think that Karmen’s angels are by an artist so famous his work is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But look at this.” She flipped to another open tab in her browser. “Here’s another one from Correa’s religious period.”
A godlike figure with a flowing gray beard and snowy white robe reached down from his perch on a pink and gray cloud.
“It’s not very big,” she said. “Twelve by twelve, like yours.” Then she scrolled to the headline of the news article: Lost Painting Discovered. “This was just last year.” She lowered her voice to whisper, “This painting sold at auction.” She held her breath one long moment. “For fifty million dollars.”
His stomach felt like it had dropped out of a skyscraper. “Fifty million?”
“I’m no expert, Gideon. You’d have to have someone authenticate the painting. More than one person, probably. But from everything I’ve found online, it looks like Miguel Fernando Correa’s work. And,” she added, pointing at the iPad, “that trademark signature of his looks just like the one on your painting.”
Though he couldn’t argue with any of her research, Gideon could barely wrap his head around it. “Fifty million,” he repeated in a voice hoarse with disbelief.
“While all of his work is valuable, the religious paintings are even more so because they’re rare. He painted eight that are known, though his journal entries pointed to the possibility of a ninth.” She put her hand on his arm. “Yours could be the ninth.”
He shook his head slowly, words beyond him now. For years he’d carried Karmen’s painting around in his pack from one run-down apartment to another. The most he’d ever done for its safekeeping was to lock it in the cabinet of his bookshelf after he’d moved here.
Had Karmen had even an inkling of the painting’s worth? “Why would she have given it to me?” he asked in a hollow voice.
He didn’t need more money. The truth was he had more than he knew what to do with. He’d banked all his re-up bonuses, invested the money. He’d lived on practically nothing since he got out, everything going into investments that he could someday use to help Ari. The truth was he could already afford a fancy car, even a fancy house. Nothing on the scale of Matt’s place, but a damned fine home.
“Maybe she didn’t know what it was worth. Or…” Rosie looked fit to burst as she said, “maybe she knew how many people you could help with it. You could set up scholarships for people who can’t afford to go to college, or build homes for people who need them.” She held her arms wide as if she were holding all the possibilities in the world.
He remembered Karmen’s words: You’ll know when it’s the right time to pass it on.
For so many years, he’d been waiting for a sign. Now, he wondered if what he’d really been waiting for was Rosie. Not only to see the painting and recognize the artist, but more important, to fill him with the kind of hope he hadn’t thought he’d ever feel again.
“I need to call Evan,” he said. “Since art is probably part of a lot of rich people’s investment portfolios, he’ll likely know who to contact to find out if Correa really painted this.”
And if this truly was a Miguel Fernando Correa painting, that would mean Gideon could help foster kids like Ari and Rosie and Chi had once been. He could provide aid to returning vets with terrible injuries, or those who couldn’t seem to fit in anymore, the ones with PTSD. He could help the families of the soldiers who’d never come back.
You’ll know when it’s the right time to pass it on.
Maybe the right time was now, if the painting was worth fifty million freaking dollars.
* * *
Rosie prayed she wasn’t getting Gideon’s hopes up for absolutely nothing. But her gut felt the rightness of it.
She hadn’t wanted to blindside him with the information. But she’d been so over-the-top ridiculously excited about the painting—and all the possibilities it could lead to—that she could barely sleep last night.
Of course, there’d also been the fact that she was lying in Gideon’s bed. The touch of his lips crept into her dreams when she’d finally fallen asleep. And boy oh boy, were they erotic dreams.
Snuggled into his bed, she’d given more thought to how she’d steered clear of men after Jorge was born. She hadn’t wanted Jorge to become attached to a man only to have him turn out to be a creep or a liar or unreliable or lacking in staying power and integrity.
But Gideon was different from any man she’d ever met. He was like the Mavericks—good, strong, caring. So while it had felt right to hit the pause button after their kiss last night, she wasn’t at all sure that she needed to keep holding the button down.
