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“Great. Paige is making cookies for the kids. I think she’s eating more dough than she’s putting on the cookie shee
t, though.”
When Gideon first met Evan last year, the guy had been married to Paige’s sister. Evil sister, actually. A more miserable guy than Evan, Gideon had never seen. But his divorce from Whitney was final, and with Paige, Evan was a new and extremely happy man.
Gideon shoved his phone back in his pocket. “Evan wants us to come by.”
“Did he say anything about the painting?” Rosie asked as the boys raced ahead to the car, while he and Rosie kept their eyes trained on them.
“No. He was pretty casual, said Paige was making cookies for the boys. Doesn’t sound like he’s got big news. Maybe it’s not what we thought.” A part of him would be glad not to give up Karmen’s painting just yet and thereby lose his last thread of connection to her. Yet at the same time, he’d feel a great disappointment to lose the chance of making a difference in so many lives with the proceeds from the painting’s sale.
“I guess we’ll know when we get there,” Rosie said mildly, as though it was no big deal.
Even though they both knew it was a huge deal.
The drive to Evan’s home in Los Altos didn’t take long, and the boys were soon piling out of the car and racing up the front walk. As he and Rosie followed, Gideon desperately wanted to hold her hand. As though they truly were a happy family.
And Rosie was truly his.
Paige threw open the front door and gathered the boys into her arms. She was a pretty woman with auburn hair, and her face glowed as she hugged Noah and Jorge close. At the scent of freshly baked cookies wafting through the air, the boys raced into the kitchen, with Paige following, leaving Evan to invite Gideon and Rosie inside.
Like the other Mavericks, Evan was tall, fit, and good-looking, but he’d always struck Gideon as the quiet one in the bunch. Maybe it was the glasses that made him seem more studious. He was the finance guy who likely had a whole host of art appraisers on speed dial, which was why he’d felt like the best choice to bring the painting to, even though Sebastian and Charlie were both artists.
Evan shook Gideon’s hand, then gave Rosie a quick hug. “Come on in.”
The house Evan had lived in with his first wife had been a bona fide mansion. This place, however, was more a home than a showpiece. The rooms were big enough for entertaining, but not overwhelming. Evan took them into the living room, which had been remodeled into a library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Artwork, Chinese vases, and small porcelain figurines were scattered here and there, but mostly it was books—hardbacks to paperbacks, finance tomes to mysteries, coffee table art books to biographies.
“Can I get both of you a drink?” he asked.
“Not for me, thanks,” Gideon said. Whatever they learned about the painting, he wanted to have his wits fully about him.
Rosie shook her head with a smile.
They took the sofa, while Evan sat in a comfortable wing chair obviously used for reading, if the stack of books on the table beside it was any indication. The painting, sitting in the middle of the coffee table, was now wrapped in brown paper and tied with string.
“As both of you know, people like to invest in art,” he began. “It makes them feel good to think they’ve not only got beauty, but also an appreciating asset.” Evan pulled the string out of its bow and opened the flaps of the paper. “My art appraiser looked at it. He had a buddy of his look at it too. And that guy had a guy as well.”
“You haven’t been rushing all over town for this, have you?” Gideon hadn’t meant to put Evan out, or interrupt his busy work schedule.
“Nope, all I did was make a couple of calls. Once the appraisers saw the painting, they were more than willing to drop everything for it.”
Gideon’s stomach did a backflip. Next to him on the couch, Rosie was as still as a cat hunting a gopher.
Evan pushed his glasses up his nose. “As far as those three experts are concerned, this is an original Miguel Fernando Correa.”
“Oh my God,” Rosie said on barely more than a breath.
While Gideon felt the air sucked out of his lungs, without being able to drag in a single breath.
Evan went on, “When Correa was in his seventies, he entered a period where he painted only religious subjects. That lasted exactly two years, almost to the day. No one quite knows why. But that makes his religious works extremely rare.”
“And even more valuable,” Rosie added.
“Exactly.”
Gideon heard Evan and Rosie as if their voices were coming down a long tube. He saw their mouths moving. He heard the boys’ voices drifting in from the kitchen as they begged Paige for another cookie. But it was all from a long distance. It wasn’t that he hadn’t believed Rosie. But he hadn’t accepted the possibility of the painting being a Correa, not truly. It had been more like a weird dream. A crazy, no-way-this-could-ever-actually-happen-to-me-in-a-million-years possibility.
“As I believe both of you also know, the last one of these paintings went for fifty million dollars.” Evan smoothed the paper down around the painting, as if he were afraid to actually touch it. “That was last year. As this appears to be the ninth in the series that everyone always hoped existed but could never actually prove, the interest for it is going to be huge. They think this might go for even more. Of course, they still need to do a technical authentication. But in a situation like this, it will get priority and shouldn’t take too long. At which point, they can take it to auction almost immediately after it’s been authenticated.”
