He took two slow strides toward her, moving into her personal space and forcing her back until the doorknob pressed into her spine. He was over six foot, lurking over her and making Lucy feel extremely petite at her five-foot-four-inch height. He leaned down close, studying her face with such intensity she couldn’t breathe.
Oliver paused at her lips for a moment, sending confusing signals to Lucy’s brain. She didn’t think Harper’s arrogant older brother would kiss her, but stranger things had already happened this week. Instead, his gaze shifted to her eyes, pinning her against the door of the apartment without even touching her. By this point, Lucy’s heart was pounding so loudly in her ears, it was nearly deafening her during his silent appraisal.
“We’ll see about that,” he said at last.
When he finally took a step back, Lucy felt like she could breathe again. There was something intense about Oliver that made her uncomfortable, especially when he looked at her that way.
As though nothing had just happened between them, Oliver stuffed his hands into his pockets and started strolling casually through the gallery and into the great room. Lucy followed him with a frown lining her face. She didn’t understand what he wanted. Was this just some psychological game he was playing with her? Was he looking to see if she’d sold anything of Alice’s? How could he even tell after all these years?
“So, I stopped by today to let you know that my attorney filed a dispute over the will this morning. I’m sure Phillip explained to you that all of Aunt Alice’s assets would be frozen until the dispute is resolved.”
Lucy stopped in the entry to the great room, her arms still crossed over her chest. Harper was right when she said that her brother would likely be the one to start trouble for her. “He did.”
Oliver looked around at the art and expensive tapestries draping the windows before he turned and nodded at her. “Good, good. I wouldn’t want there to be any awkward misunderstandings if you tried to sell something from the apartment. I’m fairly certain you’ve never inherited anything before and wouldn’t know how it all worked.”
“Yes, it’s a shame. I was just itching to dump that gaudy Léger painting in the hallway. I always thought it clashed with the Cézanne beside it, but Alice would never listen to reason,” she replied sarcastically. Calling a Léger gaudy would get her kicked out of the Yale art history program.
Oliver narrowed his gaze at her. “Which painting is the Léger?”
Lucy shelved a smirk. He thought he was so smart and superior to her, but art was obviously something he didn’t know anything about. “It’s the colorful cubist piece with the bicycles. But that aside, I was just kidding. Even if I win in court—and I doubt I will—I wouldn’t sell any of Alice’s art.”
He glanced over her shoulder at the Léger and shrugged before moving to the collection of cream striped sofas. He sat down, manspreading across the loveseat in a cocky manner that she found both infuriating and oddly intriguing. He wore his confidence well, but he seemed too comfortable here, as though he were already planning on moving in to the place Lucy had called home for years.
“And why is that?” he asked. “I would think most people in your position would be itching to liquidate the millions in art she hoarded here.”
She sighed, not really in the mood to explain herself to him, but finding she apparently had nothing better to do today. “Because it meant too much to her. You may have been too busy building your computer empire to know this, but these pieces were her lover and her children. She carefully selected each piece in her collection, gathering the paintings and sculptures that spoke to her because she couldn’t go out to see them in the museums. She spent hours talking to me about them. If she saw it in her heart to leave them to me, selling them at any price would be a slap in the face.”
“What would you do with them, then?”
Lucy leaned against the column that separated the living room from the gallery space. “I suppose that I would loan most of them out to museums. The Guggenheim had been after Alice for months to borrow her Richter piece. She always turned them down because she couldn’t bear to look at the blank spot on the wall where it belonged.”
“So you’d loan all of them out?” His heavy brow raised for the first time in genuine curiosity.
Lucy shook her head. “No, not all of them. I would keep the Monet.”
“Which one is that?”
She swallowed her frustration and pointed through the doorway to the piece hanging in the library. “Irises in Monet’s Garden,” she said. “You did go to college, didn’t you? Didn’t you take any kind of liberal studies classes? Maybe visit a museum in your life?”
At that, Oliver laughed, a low, throaty rumble that unnerved her even as it made her extremely aware of her whole body. Once again, her pulse sped up and her mouth went so dry she couldn’t have managed another smart remark.
She’d never had a reaction to a man like that before. Certainly not in the last five years where she’d basically lived like her ninety-year-old client. Her body was in sore need of a man to remind her she was still in her twenties, but Oliver was not the one. She was happy to have distance between them and hoped to keep it that way.
* * *
“You’d be surprised,” Oliver said, pushing himself up from the couch. He felt like he was a piece on display with her standing there, watching him from the doorway. “I’ve been to several museums in my years, and not just on those painful school field trips. Mostly with Aunt Alice, actually, in the days when she still left her gilded prison. I never really cared much about the art, but you’re right, she really did love it. I liked listening to her talk about it.”
He turned away from Lucy and strolled over to the doorway to the library. There, hanging directly in front of the desk so it could be admired, was a blurry painting, about two and a half feet by three feet. He took a few steps back from it and squinted, finally being able to make out the shapes of flowers from a distance. He supposed to some people it was a masterpiece, but to him it was just a big mess on a canvas that was only important to a small group of rich people.
Even then, he did know who Monet was. And Van Gogh and Picasso. There was even a Jackson Pollock hanging in the lobby of his corporate offices, but that was his father’s purchase. Probably Aunt Alice’s suggestion. He didn’t recognize the others she’d mentioned, but he wasn’t entirely without culture. Aunt Alice had taken him to the museums more times than he could count. It was just more fun to let Lucy think he didn’t know what she was talking about.
When she blushed, the freckles seemed to fade away against the crimson marring her pale skin. And the more irritated she got, the edges of her ears and her chest would flush pink as well.
With her arms crossed so defensively over her chest, it drew her rosy cleavage to his attention. In that area, she had the cute barista beat. Lucy wasn’t a particularly curvy woman—she was on the slim side. Almost boyish through the hips. But the way she was standing put the assets she did have on full display with her clingy V-neck sweater.
“Irises are my mother’s favorite flower,” Lucy said as she followed him into the library, oblivious to the direction of his thoughts.
Or perhaps not. She kept a few feet away from him, which made him smile. She was so easy to fluster. It made him want to seek out other ways to throw her off guard.
