The Setup Read online

  “You’re allowed, you know,” Sylvie whispered against his ear.

  There it went again. Her breath, skimming along his skin. This time, it made the hairs on the back of his neck rise up. There was no point in trying to talk himself out of it. He was definitely attracted to this woman.

  “Allowed?” he echoed, turning to look at her. He wasn’t sure he followed her meaning. Right about now, he understood what Alice must have experienced after falling through the rabbit hole and meeting up with a host of creatures that seemed to come from another world.

  “To disagree with her,” Sylvie explained.

  That seemed a little general, he thought. “About what?”

  She spread her hands wide, as if to encompass the entire area and everyone in it. “About anything. And with anyone,” she added. “That’s what this evening is all about, Jefferson. To get people with different points of view, from different walks of life gathered in a room. You present them with the same kind of stimuli and then have them share their reactions.”

  Cocking her head, Sylvie studied his expression and decided that she was not getting through the way she wanted to. He became her challenge.

  “Okay, for instance…” Taking Jefferson by the arm, she drew him over a little way so he could see the far wall more easily. “Take those three paintings over there…” She pointed toward them.

  Having her pressed against him like this made it difficult for Jefferson to keep his mind on the conversation and not the soft curves that were making an impression on his body, in more ways than one. He did his best to focus. “Yes?”

  Sylvie looked at him for a reaction. She had deliberately hung a Jackson Pollock painting in between the two very subdued pastoral scenes she had contributed from the gallery. Since Jefferson appeared almost impassive, she prodded. “How do they make you feel?”

  He was by no means a critic. He knew what he liked and what he didn’t like, without being able to attach a name to the period, style or, except for the most famous, artist.

  “Feel?” he echoed.

  Sylvie was nothing if not patient. She felt a little like a shepherd, guiding a sheep to a field of clover. “Yes, seeing them grouped like that. How does that make you feel?”

  Jefferson was quite sure this was not what she was after, but he gave her the only answer that came to him. “As if there’s too much art in one small space.”

  Sylvie looked at him for a moment, her expression unreadable. He could only guess what was going through her mind. That she’d made a mistake agreeing to come with him and that she was going to bale at the first opportunity.

  And then, to his surprise, she laid her forehead against his shoulder and laughed.

  “Honest. Good.” When she raised her head again, she looked up at him. “But it doesn’t evoke anything else? In here.” Lightly, she tapped her fingers against his chest. “You don’t feel something?”

  Yes, he was feeling something, but it wasn’t because of the paintings. It was the effect of her close proximity. Because she was sharing the same air as he was, perhaps even the same breath. And because she was stunning, both to look at and to be with.

  “Yes,” he told her quietly, so quietly that she had to lean in even closer to hear him. He could smell her shampoo, something light and herbal. It didn’t surprise him. “I feel something.”

  Her eyes meeting his, Sylvie caught her breath. For a moment, just a single moment, time felt as if it were standing still. A very unusual occurrence for her. For most of her adult life, she’d been accustomed to feeling that time was zipping by on a motorized skateboard.

  Something was happening here. What, she wasn’t sure, but it was a nice something. That was good enough for her.

  Sylvie’s smile began in her luminous eyes, reaching her lips less than half a heartbeat later. Taking him prisoner without firing a shot, he thought.

  “Maybe I do, too,” she replied.

  The moment was gone when a man came up behind them, laced his arm around Sylvie’s waist and nuzzled her neck before declaring, “Knew I’d find you here, Sylvie. Can’t have an event like this without Sylvie Marchand.”

  Something oddly primitive raised its head within Jefferson’s chest. He felt strange and uncomfortable, both with himself and the situation. He disliked the man instantly, even though he was not given to snap judgments or hasty reactions. A desire arose—to place himself between Sylvie and this guy, whoever the hell he was.

  He felt, Jefferson realized with a start, territorial. He looked down to see if his arms had suddenly lengthened, causing his knuckles to scrape along the ground.

  The sound of Sylvie’s voice had him looking up again.

  “Bryce,” she was saying, “this is Jefferson Lambert. He’s a high-profile criminal lawyer back in Boston,” she announced cheerfully.

  Because he had a poker face, Jefferson managed to keep the fact that Sylvie’s introduction had completely floored him a secret. High-profile criminal lawyer? Where had she gotten that idea?

  He was just about to correct the description when he felt a hard poke in the ribs. Glancing to his left, he saw the look in Blake’s eyes. His friend had elbowed him with the clear intent of silencing him.

  “We went to college together here,” Blake told Bryce as he extended his hand to him. “Tulane. I’m Blake Randall.”

  “Are you a criminal lawyer, too?” Bryce asked.

  “Why, do you need one?” Blake countered.

  Bryce laughed heartily, not realizing that Blake was leading him away.

  Looking over his shoulder, Blake gave Jefferson the okay sign. The look in Blake’s eyes urged him to continue the charade.

  Jefferson had never been comfortable lying. And now that he knew Sylvie thought he was a criminal lawyer, he wondered if there were other things about him that had been misrepresented.

  Suddenly, the evening, the performance art event, all began to make sense. He was going to have a very long and serious talk with Emily when he got back. Good intentions only bought you so much grace. He knew she’d probably tried to make him sound more with it and cool, but that had wound up matching him up with someone under false pretenses.

  The next moment, Sylvie was grabbing his arm and guiding him away. “I’m glad your friend ran interference for us. Bryce would have wound up monopolizing the whole evening.”

  “Somehow,” Jefferson said, looking at her, “I sincerely doubt that.” The woman clearly could hold her own, and in a duel of wits, he was beginning to doubt that she had a close match.

  Sylvie took his words as a compliment and laughed softly.

  Despite the noise, the sound traveled straight to his gut, rooting there.

  Maybe that talk he was going to have with Emily didn’t have to be such a long one after all, he amended silently.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “DO YOU DANCE, Jefferson?”

  Jefferson turned to look at the woman at his side. He wasn’t quite sure if he had heard her correctly.

  For the past forty-five minutes, he’d allowed her to take the lead, which she’d done with enthusiasm, going from one grouping of paintings to another. Each had a cluster of people before it, discussing, sometimes rather passionately, the meaning behind the arrangement.

  The whole process left Jefferson cold. As far as he could tell, the paintings had been placed in particular groupings for no other reason than to tease the minds of those who searched for some kind of hidden meaning in every shadow that crossed their path and every raindrop that fell.

  He kept his thoughts on the matter to himself, however. He had no desire to get into a debate with Sylvie. It wasn’t as if they were laying down the foundations of a future life together. This was only one evening—granted, a unique evening—in his life, and when he looked back on it months from now, it would undoubtedly stand out as one of the strangest.

  At the same time, it was one of the most interesting evenings he’d ever spent. Sylvie Marchand was definitely one of a kind, and spending
time with her was not without its merits.

  So when she’d turned to him suddenly, just as his mind was in danger of glazing over after listening to a very opinionated little man whose manner was as pretentious as the toupee he wore, and asked him a question out of the blue, Jefferson was not sure he’d heard her right.

  Stalling a second as he tried to refocus his attention, he cleared his throat. “Excuse me?”

  “Dance,” Sylvie repeated, turning her body so that she deliberately blocked out Harland T. Baker, the critic from Art Today magazine who’d annoyed her because he hadn’t allowed another person to get a word in edgewise. “You know,” she elaborated, her amusement growing, “move your feet in time to music, whether from some sort of inner melody or from an outside source.”

  “I know what dance means.” Ordinarily, he might have taken offense that he was being poked fun at, but there was something about the way she looked at a man, something about the southern lilt of Sylvie Marchand’s voice, that took the edge off and made him want to smile in return. “I just wasn’t sure I heard you correctly, that’s all,” he explained. He glanced around the immediate area. Driving through the country, he’d encountered towns that had less people than were crammed in here tonight. “This isn’t exactly the reading room of the Boston Public Library.”

  She’d noticed his slightly pained expression when she turned toward him. He hadn’t said a single word in the past forty-five minutes. Not about any of the paintings nor the people who wanted to discuss them.

  “What’s the matter, Jefferson? I thought you liked art.” His application had said that he enjoyed, among other things, modern art and stimulating conversation. The performance event they were attending offered both, and yet the man looked as uncomfortable and out of place as a shepherd at a presidential inaugural ball.

  “I like art,” he told her mildly, not adding that some of the things he’d seen tonight did not come under that heading as far as he was concerned. “I just don’t like arguing about it.”

  She was leading him somewhere again, he thought. But where? At least that pompous windbag wasn’t following, he noted. The man with the bad toupee was still holding court at the last grouping.

  Sylvie seemed to have a destination. This time, she was drawing him over to one end of the gallery where several other couples were dancing—if you could call it that, Jefferson thought. From what he could ascertain, the couples were more or less hanging on to one another in one spot, occasionally moving their feet as if to keep time in case anyone was paying attention.

  In his book, that wasn’t dancing, but at least the music was slower now, without that relentless beat.

  “Not arguing, exchanging opinions,” Sylvie countered as she turned around to face him. “Dance with me?”

  She’d obviously taken the answer to her earlier question to be yes, he thought. Maybe dancing was something Emily and Blake had listed as one of his interests on the application. Either way, he felt more at home here than he had standing in front of those paintings.

  Jefferson slipped his arm around her waist and tucked her hand beneath his, bringing it up against his chest. He began to sway with the music. Her hips shadowed his, moving with the rhythm. He found it almost primal. Something within him came to attention and then went on red alert.

  Sylvie smiled up at him. “I can feel your heart beating,” she murmured.

  “Good, that means I’m still alive.” He guided her past one of the couples. “Nothing kills a party faster than a dead guest.”

  She laughed, and he could feel the sound rippling up through his chest. “You know, you’re nothing like your application.”

  He could readily believe that. Emily was nothing if not creative. He should have thought of that before going along with her plan, he realized. “That could be because my application was written by a sixteen-year-old.”

  Sylvie cocked her head. Most men wouldn’t have been secure enough to admit that. “Your inner child?” she guessed.

  “My inner daughter,” he corrected, “and I say inner because she’s probably going to be grounded for the rest of her life when I get back.”

  Well, there was something that hadn’t been covered on the dating service’s application, she thought, surprised. “You have a daughter.”

  He couldn’t tell by her expression if that bothered her, or if she was just asking to make sure she’d heard him. “Yes, I do. Her name’s Emily.”

  Sylvie wondered what else hadn’t been put on his form. He didn’t look like the type who cheated, but she’d learned that looks could be deceiving. One of the men she’d been involved with had had a wife and family he’d conveniently forgotten to mention until she’d all but stumbled across them in the park.

  “Do you have a wife to go with your daughter?”

  A sadness stirred inside him. It always did when he thought about his life without Donna. “Had.”

  “Oh.” She heard the sadness in his voice. Was he still in love with the woman? Pining after her? “I’m sorry. Divorced?”

  He laughed softly to himself and shook his head. “If only.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t follow.”

  Jefferson glanced down at the open-toe high heels she was wearing. “Actually, you follow very nicely,” he told her.

  It had been a long time since he’d been on the dance floor. Dancing was one of those activities that he’d always liked, one he’d taken to naturally after his mother taught him the fundamental steps of ballroom dancing just before he entered high school. Aeons ago.

  A fondness warmed him as he remembered dancing with his wife. Donna had been a wonderful partner everywhere but on the dance floor. Her movements there had been stiff and awkward. She’d never known how to loosen up, how to let the music flow through her and take her over. In contrast, the woman now in his arms felt as if she would allow music to take her everywhere.

  “But as to my meaning,” he continued, easily gliding along the limited floor space, “if I were divorced, then I would have an ex-wife, but I don’t.”

  Sylvie looked up into his eyes. And knew. “Your wife died.”

  Funny how that word still managed to take a bite out of him. “Yes.”

  “Recently?” That would go a long way toward explaining things, Sylvie thought, sympathy flooding her veins.

  The smile on his lips was self-deprecating. And sad. “Feels that way. But no, not recently. Donna died in a car accident on the way to work eight years ago. Eight-car pileup. Made all the local papers.” He couldn’t look anywhere without seeing her mangled silver BMW. Without imagining her crushed body within. “She was a lawyer, like me.”

  “Criminal?” Sylvie asked, remembering what was on the form.

  “No, family law.” As he danced with Sylvie, he debated his next words, then decided that he had absolutely nothing to lose by telling her the truth. Lies made him uncomfortable and they also had a very unfortunate habit of growing out of proportion when you were least able to deal with them. He might never see Sylvie again after tonight, but he didn’t want to leave a lie in his wake. “I’m not a criminal lawyer, Sylvie.”

  The admission caught her off guard. “But your application—” And then she stopped and laughed. “More of Emily’s handiwork?”

  She’d been paying attention, he thought. Otherwise she wouldn’t have caught his daughter’s name. “I’m afraid so.”

  She took a breath, processing this newest tidbit. If he wasn’t a criminal lawyer, then what was he? “Was anything on the application true?”

  “Well, I am a lawyer. A corporate lawyer. But as for the rest of it, I really can’t say,” he told her honestly. “I didn’t get to see the application before it went out. I didn’t even know it was going out,” he admitted. “Otherwise—”

  “You never would have let her submit it.” It didn’t take an Einstein to guess that.

  “No.” He reconsidered his words. After all, he was here. He hadn’t been tricked into coming. “But I never
would have allowed her to misrepresent me as some kind of high-profile high roller.”

  Rather than looking disappointed by his admission, she was smiling. Her eyes were smiling, he amended, taken by the sight. Even with the lights changing color every few seconds, bathing them in greens and golds, purples and blues, he found himself captivated by the look in her eyes, the expression on her face.

  He was still holding her. And liking it.

  The band, he realized, had finished playing the slow song, and the next number was wild and frantic. For a second, he stopped moving and stepped back.

  He didn’t know how to dance to this, Sylvie thought. That was all right, it didn’t matter. She liked what he’d been doing before.

  “Don’t stop,” she coaxed, taking his hand and placing it back along the gentle swell of her hips. She slipped back into the pocket of space he had created for her against him. Her hips began to sway again, as if the song they’d just been dancing to had never stopped. The look on her face told Jefferson she was all set to continue slow dancing with him, moving to the music in her head.

  Jefferson paused for a moment longer, letting the rhythm that was now pulsing hard and fast throughout the gallery settle into his system. With a nod, he took her hand and began to dance to the beat.

  Stunned, unprepared, Sylvie stumbled for a second. She stared at him as she fell into step. He’d surprised her. Again. “This isn’t an old dance.”

  “No,” he agreed amiably, “it’s not.” He had no idea what the song was called, or what heading it could be filed under. But he was good at imitating what he saw, and there were people around him dancing. The natural rhythm he’d been born with did the rest.

  Within moments, the other dancers began to back away, giving them room. Watching them with appreciative expressions.

  Sylvie felt exhilarated, improvising and then laughing as Jefferson half twirled, half swung her around the floor. By the time the number finally came to an end, she realized that she was very close to breathless. Was that because of the dance, or the man? She couldn’t say. All she knew was that she felt extremely alive.