Bartered Betrayal - The Billionaire's Wife 08 Page 3

  Everything? I wondered. "No," I said. "You'd give me money. And I don't want money." Money made life easier a lot of the time, but it sure as fuck wasn't everything. The ache in my chest that had begun to return now that I wasn't wholly focused on my work was enough to attest to that. What did money mean when you just wanted to curl up and cry? What did it mean when you couldn't pick up the phone and speak to someone you cared for? What did it mean when you had no one to trust?

  It hadn't meant anything to Anton, I realized. Anton was one of the richest men in the world, and yet so poor in love that he had to buy a wife because love hurt him so badly he didn't want to feel it again. I pitied him. I wanted to help him. My fingers itched.

  "What do you want?" my father asked. "Tell me, I'll give it to you."

  I looked at him, old and bent and penniless, his greed causing him to overreach so far that he had lost everything. I pitied him, too. But I couldn't help him. And I didn't really want to.

  "Nothing," I said. "Go away. If you come back, I'll call the police."

  I started to close the door again, but he shoved his way inside. "Felicia!" he shouted. "Felicia, you have to help me!" His hands found my shoulders, and he was shaking me so hard my teeth rattled. My father never touched me. Shocked, I let him shake me before snapping back to reality, twisting out of his grip. He was so weak now, so small. He couldn't hurt me any more. I heaved, pushing him away, and ran to my tools. One of my salvaged two-by-fours leaned against the wall, and I grabbed it, brandishing it in front of me.

  "Leave," I told him.

  He started to cry, but I found he couldn't move me any more. I knew what was really important, and it wasn't the past and the damage already done.

  Eventually, he left, and I locked the door behind him.

  With trembling hands I went back to work.

  *

  I stopped sleeping so much. I dreamed about Anton too frequently: his voice, his smile, his surprised laugh. I dreamed about his hands on me, racing up my thighs, his breath on my pussy, his tongue deep inside me, clinging to me wherever he could find purchase, like a man afraid of being swept away. I dreamed of grinding my clit into his face. I dreamed of being tied up, wrapped in plastic, fucked until neither of us was afraid any more.

  Stranger things have happened.

  I made love to my clay. My fingers caressed it, thinking of Anton's skin. I pushed against it with my heels, my back arching, my mind wandering to our couplings. My thighs always rubbed together at inconvenient times, and I would flush as I tried to carve out the patterns of my head into the flesh of my creation.

  It was beautiful, if I did say so myself. Beautiful and dangerous. Everything was there that made me think of Anton. No one who looked at it would think I was speaking of anyone else. It was my greatest work to date. Midday, when I should have been sleeping but couldn't stop thinking about it, I would get up and touch it through the wet towels I'd laid over it, preserving its plasticity until the last moment when I would dry it and fire it. I'd peek at it, and I would see all my hopes and dreams in it. My hands would wander my body, and I would grind my fingers into my pussy, thinking about Anton, but every time I came I never felt satisfied. Release eluded me.

  I chased my memories of Anton, carved them into the clay, and hoped it would be enough.

  *

  In the middle of the third week the major part of my sculpture was done, hollowed out and in pieces, ready to be fired and put back together again. Then I would paint it. In the meantime, I had to get to the rest of it. But first I had to figure out how to get it to the kiln. I have a good friend who owns a great kiln for firing clay, but getting a piece there was usually a product of several friends helping me load it into borrowed or rented trucks. Right now, I didn't want to talk to anyone. My voice was rusty with disuse. I had to go to the only person I knew who could maybe help. Luckily he was right across the street, hanging out in an empty apartment across from mine.

  "Hey, Jake," I said when he opened the door. The smell of take-out Chinese hit my nose, and my mouth watered.

  He smiled at me, a huge predatory grin. Not half as sexy on him as the one that Anton sported. My heart gave a little twist, but I shoved it away. "Felicia!" he said, clearly happy to see me. And why not? I'd probably already made him gobs of money. Good for him.

  "I need help to get part of my work to the kiln."

  "Can I take pictures?"

  I rolled my eyes. "Yes, god, of course. Just give me a hand."

  Within the hour he procured a truck, and together we loaded it in. He stood back and took a few photos as I hauled a couple of the smaller pieces into the truck myself, presumably to send off to the tabloid he'd contracted with, but it didn't take long with his help. Hauling the big pieces downstairs is a lot easier if you have a second person.

  "So what is it?" he asked me as we drove to my friend's studio.

  "It's a sculpture," I said.

  He blew air out his nose, clearly unimpressed with my clever sidestepping of his question. "Yes, I know, but... oh, forget it. Why is it in pieces?"

  "Because it's too big to fire in one piece, duh."

  "I haven't been able to get a good shot of it through the window," he said after a moment.

  "Good," I told him. "You have my butt, though, right?"

  "Yeah."

  "I'm guessing that'll sell better than the final piece anyway."

  His mouth twisted. "Then... okay, seriously. Why are you doing this if you think the final piece won't be worth much?"

  "I said it wouldn't sell for a lot," I told him. "Personally I think it'll be priceless."

  "Artists," he said, disgusted. "Why do you want me to take pictures of you building it, then? Just to show off your ass?"

  No, I wanted to tell him. My ass just gets it where people can see it. Specifically where one person can see it.

  "I'm sending a message," I told him, and refused to say anything more.

  *

  I had to call Sadie. I used Mrs. Andersen's phone, much to her disgruntlement. I actually had to enter her apartment to do it. The place smelled like roses and dust and had a scary amount of WWII paraphernalia.

  "Don't you give me the stink eye," she said as I tried not to stare at her extensive collection of tank helmets. "I salvaged those fair and square."

  "Salvaged?" I said.

  "I was a little girl in Europe in the forties. You don't have to be a soldier to steal boots off dead bodies."

  I decided not to press her on that claim and instead called Sadie.

  "Yeah?" she said when she picked up.

  "I need some glass," I said.

  For a long moment she didn't say anything, and it's probably to her credit that she didn't immediately start yelling at me. "Yeah?" she said again. "How much?"

  I gave her the measurements. "Though I dunno, maybe plexiglass would be better. Actually, yeah. Clear plastic glass. And I need a really big hammer, like a sledgehammer."

  "I'll see what I can do," she said.

  The receiver in my hand cut into my fingers. I was holding so tightly I heard it creak.

  How is Anton? I wanted to scream. Is he okay?

  "Thanks," was all I said.

  "No problem," Sadie told me. "Keep it up."

  She hung up, and I felt a great wieght lift from my chest.

  Keep it up.

  Okay. I would.

  *

  Four weeks after I left Anton's house, I assembled my finished piece in Times Square. I didn't have permission or anything like that, but I figured no one was going to stop me, at least not until I was done and everyone had taken their pictures. The paparazzi had been gathering outside my apartment for days after the photos of me loading the biggest part of the finished work into the truck came out. Jake told me blogs were abuzz about it, all the gossip sites, all the gossip mags, all the gossip tv shows. It's amazing who gives a shit about what you do when you're rich and take all your clothes off. Never in a million years had anyone cared so
much about my work.

  And that was okay. Because in a few hours, pictures of my art would be beamed around the world, bounced back and forth between here and there, until he had to see it. It would reach him without fail. I knew it would.

  It was ninja. Enlisting the help of Sadie and some of our other arty friends, we hopped out of Jake's borrowed truck and spirited the pieces to the middle of the square. I worked under a tarp and I asked bystanders to help me out, like one of those performance artists. People were happy to be drawn into it. Most people had heard about my crazy sculpting, my brokenhearted grief. Jake had given me some of the tabloids I'd appeared in, and much of the story had come out. My mother in particular had taken the opportunity to capitalize on my fame. I suppose that now that my father was broke she had to make good for herself, and she didn't seem to be doing too badly. She'd come to my apartment a few times, but I hadn't wanted to really see her, so I hadn't opened the door.

  I didn't begrudge her using my story to break free of my father. It's what I'd always wanted. And besides, it was a pretty good story, all the same. I knew my mother loved money. I knew she needed it. I knew that's why she had stayed with my terrible father.

  But I didn't want to be like that. I wouldn't.

  It didn't take as long as I thought it would. Those helping me were already taking pictures with their phones from beneath the tarp.

  “All right,” I said when it was ready. “Let's show this thing to everyone.”

  And they lifted the tarp away.

  The clouds had lifted for once, and sunlight fell on my creation.

  People raised their cameras and began taking snapshots. As per our understanding, I'd taken Jake with me under the tarp, and he had been able to scope out the best angles for taking his final photographs. I saw him at the front of the crowd, crouching down, snapping his pictures.

  The sculpture was big—the biggest I'd ever made—and the plexiglass box glittered and shone from the right angles, obscuring the contents. I knew, though, that when you got close to it you could see the thing trapped inside. I had it memorized, and I closed my eyes and saw it in my mind.

  It was a tiger made of water.

  I was incredibly proud of it. When I'd first seen Anton, I'd noted that he moved like a predator or like water, smooth and flowing, and I'd tried to capture that essence in my creation. Bit by bit, a huge tiger had taken shape under my pounding and pushing. It crouched in a puddle of clay, its edges blurred and liquid as it emerged from the water. One paw, claws out, reached over its head, raking at the glass box, too small to contain its huge form. I'd painted it in pale gray and black, and its angry eyes glittered gold as it's snarling muzzle bared huge fangs as long as my fingers. It stared up at the creature atop its box.

  A rabbit. Small, lithe, and ridiculous in the face of those fangs. And yet strong. It clung to the end of a sledgehammer I'd buried in the plexiglass, gluing the bits and pieces of glass that I'd had to saw away to the end of the hammer, suspending other bits from the top of the box with invisible wire.

  So there you have it. A tiny rabbit smashing the glass box containing a snarling tiger. Words are pretty shit to describe it, honestly, so just trust me. It lived.

  “You're kind of simple,” Sadie said as she stood next to me.

  I shrugged. “What use is art no one can understand?” I said. “I think this is pretty powerful.”

  I glanced at her. She was staring at the sculpture, a faraway look in her eye. “So that's how you really feel, huh?”

  I nodded.

  Sadie licked her lips. “It's beautiful, Lis,” she said. “I'm not going to pretend to really understand your relationship with Anton, but if it makes you make art like that...” She trailed off and shook her head.

  I looked back at my piece. Yeah, it still owned. “It's definitely something,” I said. Off in the distance, sirens were blaring. Good old NYPD. Always quick to pepperspray young women making a statement. I looked forward to it. The pictures were taken. I couldn't very well have dumped the sculpture on Anton's doorstep. That would just look desperate.

  “You think he'll figure out that you like him?” Sadie asked me as a cop car pulled up by the curb.

  “I don't know,” I said. “He seems a little dumb in the mooshy feelings department.” We watched as the cops got out of the car and began their investigation—namely, asking who was responsible for this. Fingers pointed at me.

  “Maybe you should have made him a mix tape,” Sadie said.

  “Maybe you should shut up,” I told her, and then I got arrested.

  *

  Okay, it didn't happen quite that quickly. First there were lots of questions and lots of pictures snapped by gawking bystanders, but the bottom line is that I ended up in cuffs when I refused to remove the 'illegal installation,' mostly because I really didn't know what to do next and getting arrested seemed like a good idea at the time.

  Sadie promised to keep my sculpture safe for me.

  “You better,” I told her as they shoved me in the back of the car. “That's what I pay you for.”

  She made a face at me as we pulled away.

  I got processed and put in a holding cell. My bail was set at five thousand dollars. I figured I was going to be there for a while and settled in, staring at the crude yet incredibly creative graffiti on the walls left behind by my fellow criminals. Some of them had been very good artists.

  I was in the middle of scratching out my own contribution to the communal artwork—a loving rendition of a butt in a cop hat—when an officer opened my cell.

  “You're free to go. You posted bail.”

  I raised my eyebrows in surprise. Really? The only person I could think of who would come get me would be Sadie, or maybe my mom. My mom really wouldn't like the idea of me sitting in jail. It would look bad. Worse than marrying for money or your husband losing all your money. Like, you'd just be formerly rich then. Not a filthy criminal. Having a daughter who was a criminal? Well then you would be a bad mother.

  I got up and followed the officer out of the holding cell. They gave me my shit—not much—and told me my court date, and then they escorted me to the front desk.

  Anton stood there.

  I stopped and stared. I hadn't seen him in almost a month. We'd been apart for longer than we'd known each other.

  He was still beautiful. Still magnetic. But he looked tired. His green eyes were lined, and his face drawn. His fluid dancer's stance was stiff, as though he were in pain.

  He watched me, and I watched him for a long moment.

  “Felicia,” he said. Then he seemed to stop, as though he didn't know what to say next. I'm sorry, or come home, or—anything. He knew he should say something.

  Finally he opened his hands, as though to show me he had no weapons. “Sadie told me you were in jail,” he said.

  God, he was such a dork.

  I ran forward and threw my arms around him, and it felt like waking up.

  * * *

  To be concluded in Bartered Surrender: The Billionaire's Wife, Part 9.

  Author's Note

  Felicia's art is based on the beautiful and amazing sculpture of Beth Cavener Stichter. You can visit her website here or view parts of her amazing “Come Undone” exhibition here. Felicia's paean to her relationship with Anton takes heavy inspiration from both The Question that Devours (detail) and The Sentimental Question (detail).

  About the Author

  Ava Lore was raised by wombats and lives to corrupt the innocent. When she's not writing erotic romance, she spends her time thinking about writing erotic romance and drinking enough iced coffee to kill a musk ox.

  Discover more titles by Ava Lore at AllRomanceeBooks.com.

  You can email Ava Lore at authoravalore@gmail.com or catch up with her at authoravalore.com. She yearns for your approval and always loves to hear from fans. Want more BBW? More Billionaires? More aliens? More menage? Something entirely different? Let her know!

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