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I piled the clothes on the bed then turned to the closet, opening the bi-fold door to look for some sort of small suitcase. As luck would have it, there was one just inside the door… in front of a second framed portrait.
Of me.
I ignored the suitcase in favor of the painting, tugging it out of its hiding place gently to bring it out into the light. I sank down on the protesting bed with it still in my arms.
It looked like something that belonged on the cover of one of those bodice buster romance novels. All I needed was a hook and patch. It was practically pornographic, even though I was fully clothed. The look in my eyes… How had she gotten that look in my eyes so right when I had never so much as kissed her in anything but a friendly way until a few months ago?
When had she painted this, anyway? I began searching the bottom corners of the picture, looking for her artist’s signature. There it was, bottom right. She’d painted it over six years ago.
Walking over to set it up against the wall, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. That painting was as obviously a labor of love as the one of Dasha. Only this was mixed with a heavy dose of lust.
Raychel wanted me.
Had apparently wanted me for years, and had kept it completely to herself.
She’d never once, ever, let on that she had feelings for me other than that of a dear family friend. I felt bowled over, and almost ambushed by the knowledge that she’d been in love with me for so long. I also felt stupid for not picking up on it somehow, in some way—not that I would ever have done anything about it. I wasn’t that kind of a man. I had respected Dasha too much to ever go near his daughter. She was off limits. Always off limits.
She should still be off limits but I was a fucking bastard.
But she must have slipped up somewhere along the line, and I missed it. Was I that stupid? Or just that oblivious to anyone’s feelings but my own? I had to admit that it was probably the latter rather than the former.
Money was my life. Power was my thirst. Survival was my focus.
Everyone and everything else was secondary, including poor Raychel, who had obviously sublimated her feelings for me for decades.
No wonder she’d been so adamant about not wanting to get too close to me even after Dasha was gone. It had become a force of habit, and knowing Raychel, she must have been carrying around a thousand times more guilt about her feelings than happiness. She must have been doing penance all this time just because she had lusted after me. I was her father’s best friend. More of an uncle figure than anything… forbidden.
I stared at myself blindly in the painting. I had found out more about Raychel in the past half hour than I’d learned in all the years I had known her combined. This was her life. This was where she lived, this dank little apartment. All alone with her paintings, and very little else.
I didn’t know exactly what I’d thought about how she lived, beyond recognizing the fact that she was poor. The stark reality of her apartment hit me upside the heart like a two by four. I wasn’t the type to snoop deliberately, but I did look in her kitchen—just to see what she kept around to eat. There was a shitload of ramen in her cupboards and some cans of spaghetti sauce. And that was it. Her fridge had some hot dogs and badly shriveled celery. Other than that, it was spotless.
The phone rang just then, and I had to remind himself that it probably wouldn’t be right for me to answer it. But as I was headed back into her bedroom to pick up the suitcase I had packed, a voice filled the apartment from her archaic answering machine. A male voice.
“Hey there, kiddo, it’s Christopher. Are you up? Are you supposed to work today? I can never keep your schedule straight. I tried your cell but got no answer.” The man paused there, as if waiting for her to pick up, then resumed again. “Okay, well, I guess you’re not there. I might be in today for something to eat, but I might not. I don’t know. Depends on how things at work go. I’m on my cell on my way home from a buying trip. I’ll call you from home tonight. Kiss kiss.”
The sounds of the sloppy kisses that man aimed at my Raychel made me want to retch. Instead, I clenched my jaw so hard that a muscle started to twitch along the side. Who the hell was Christopher? I wanted to know. And when Raychel was feeling better, I intended to find out.
