Lenny grabbed Halsey’s arm. “Oh my God, is this real? Does he have that much money?”
“He’ll need to find more,” Halsey said, putting his hand over hers.
She checked his eyes; he wasn’t joking.
“No?” How was that possible? Cookie Jar had grown up poor, and this was the kind of money only the one percent could afford to throw around on a whim.
“Hell, yeah. The man nationalized an emerald mine and steals the profits. I’ll let him sweat for twenty-four hours, then I tell him there’s a higher bid,” Zeke said.
Halsey took her hand and held it. Zeke made a silly kissy face, which made Halsey roll his eyes and mutter, “Grow up. He’ll assume the other bid is mine, and he won’t like being beaten.”
Zeke pocketed his phone. “We’ll take him for one seventy-five.”
“I think I feel sick,” Lenny said.
All the chatter at parties had just been the warm up. This was the heart of the con, and it was formidable. It should’ve dampened her ardor for Halsey, but it was exciting and did nothing to make her think about backing off. Not yet at least. There were still events to attend that would help her reestablish her presence on the scene. And there was what promised to be great sex to be had.
Halsey’s thumb stroked across her knuckles. She wanted to purr. “The people of Ossovia will be getting a Kandinsky and not a power grid.”
Now she did feel sick, the shadow taste of bile in the back of her throat. Partly because she was enjoying the excitement of this, and that said something about her character not worth examining too closely.
Halsey turned her body to his. “We’re going to get him. We’re going to return all the money and property he stole, remember. Doing this will flush it out from sources that would be difficult to trace. You’ll get to see Ketija sporting a hard hat.”
“You’re so sure.”
He smiled kindly. He knew this was shocking and she needed help to process it. “I could’ve chosen other ways to take his money: women, cards, the track. That would
take longer. I appealed to his ego. He likes to think of himself as a cultured man. Buying art is what a man who has more money than he knows what to do with, and believes he’ll still be around to capitalize on in twenty years’ time, does. It will make him a celebrity.”
“And then, it will make him a laughingstock when it’s revealed he bought a fake,” Zeke said, yanking a dour-looking Rembrandt off the wall and stacking a Mick Jagger Warhol haphazardly on top of it.
“What will you do with the paintings?” she asked, as Zeke packed them in a crate.
“You don’t really want to know,” Halsey said.
“Unless you feel like some soup,” Zeke said, spinning the Campbell’s Chicken ’n’ Dumplings to face her.
She left the gallery with a Marilyn for Fin, who was a huge fan, and a massively conflicted heart. There was no way she should want a man who excelled at deception. There was no way a man expert at deception should be so honest with her. And Halsey was honest. He let her see his anxiety and his pleasure, and there was nothing in their relationship to make her distrust him, from the way he was careful with Mal, to the way he touched Lenny with a kind of heady relief that she gave him permission to do so.
He played it straight with her in every way that counted, and there’d be time later to regret her double standards.
In the three days before she saw him again, she worked. Her picture with Ida and Ketija appeared in Society and Page Six, Cookie Jar came up with the money for the Kandinsky, and Mal made her squirm about Halsey.
“Isn’t it like a bad idea since he’s your accountant?” Mal wanted to know.
“He’s not my accountant anymore. I got a new one, so the power thing isn’t an issue.”
“You’re going to have sex with him.”
No point playing coy since she’d been caught out with Halsey’s hand up her dress and piece of her Hollywood tape stuck to the hair on his chest. “He’s delicious and a nice guy.” The truth was better than a lie. “Yes. I’m going to sleep with him.”
Mal had wanted to high five that announcement, which felt wrong, given Lenny was essentially acting as her parent, and there was nothing more awkward than talking to your parents about sex. It was even more awkward than talking about intrauterine devices.
Unless it was talking to them about how they’d been defrauding half the city and your whole life was a lie. Because that last one was hard to beat.
It was also hard to beat a grudge between two sixteen year olds, and Lenny didn’t feel right about having Halsey stay at the apartment with Mallory hanging on every bump and squeak in the night from the next room. She’d liked Ginny until the girl turned into a cock-blocker.
Hoping for some last-minute best-friends-forever reunion, with a fall back to a naughty, no luggage check-in at a hotel, she set out to seduce Halsey at the Ossovia Green cocktail party where the amazing emeralds that came from Ossovian mines would be auctioned to raise funds for the Heroes League and establish the country’s first university. That was the public’s understanding. In truth, the money was being laundered and would flow straight to Cookie Jar’s Cayman Islands accounts.