He wandered down the long hall and heard Connie still talking on the phone, her tone harsh and almost belligerent. Blake stopped, stunned, then felt an icy chill run through his blood. He guessed she was in the kitchen, her voice a hoarse whisper as though the conversation was secret. He moved quietly to the end of the hallway and caught her reflection in one of the windows.
Connie was hunched over the kitchen table. Her hand seemed to be cupped around the phone. She was staring vacantly at a wall, her face twisted in an angry frown. Then suddenly he heard her voice become strident, as though incensed.
“Yes, I’ll get the painting.” She hissed.
Blake’s expression became monstrous with betrayal. He felt his heart drop and everything around him began to swirl.
“Yes,” Connie hissed again. “I will, Duncan. I will get them all. I already told you I would.”
Blake felt himself begin to shake.
Connie said abruptly, “Soon!”
And then the anger came upon him, like a black unholy rage. He felt his blood begin to boil, and at the same time a wrenching pain like despair pierced his heart so that he almost folded over and clutched at his chest. He began to shake his head in slow disbelief.
“No,” Connie said into the phone, her tone now derisive and withering. “I did it because I had to, not out of love or passion, Duncan. I just went through the motions to survive – and every single time I was revolted.”
She hung up the phone, threw it down on the table as though it was diseased. Then she buried her hands in her face and began to sob softly.
Blake came around the corner. His eyes were dark and dead, his face filled with loathing. He glared across the kitchen to where Connie sat with his jaws clenched.
“You played me for a fool,” he said, and then stalked back down the hall towards the studio.
39.
Blake was staring out through the studio window when Connie came running into the room. She could see the bristling tension in the rigid set of his shoulders, the ragged draw of each breath, and the bunched knuckles of his fists, heavy at his side like hammers.
Connie paused, suddenly afraid. Her eyes were red, her face stricken with distress. She was shaking her head in numb heartbroken agony. Shock and fear churned in her stomach.
“Blake?” she tried to reach out to him with an aching plea in her voice. “I don’t know how much you overheard of that phone call, but please believe me when I tell you it’s not what you think.”
Blake wheeled round, his mouth twisted in bitterness and excruciating pain. His eyes were black as coal. The lines of his face seemed more deeply etched. The expression on his face was so tortured that Connie’s breath locked in her throat.
“You betrayed me,” he seethed.
Connie shook her head. “No,” she said softly.
He laughed, but it was a hollow incredulous sound. “You wanted my paintings,” he shook his head, for he could not believe how gullible he had been. “And I should have known. I should have realized this whole time you were manipulating me – playing me so you could get your hands on the canvases. I don’t know who you’re working with, and I don’t care. I just can’t believe you would…” the cruel words choked off, and he stared at her with nothing but contempt in his eyes.
For a long time Blake fell ominously silent, then at last the anger seemed to come boiling back upon him. He flung his arms wide, encompassing the room in a careless gesture. “Take them,” he growled. “Take them all – and while you’re at it…” he dug his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans and turned them out so she could see a few loose coins. “You might as well take these too.” He tossed the money down on the floor.
Connie was crying miserably, shaking her head in slow mute denial.
“That’s all I’ve got,” Blake sneered derisively at her. “Now you have everything… including the only two things I ever clung to – that I ever held precious,” he extended his palms towards Connie so that each of them was flat. “My trust, and my secrets.”
Suddenly he slammed his hands tight into fists, as though the things they held had been crushed and destroyed. “I hope you’re happy.”
Connie felt herself sway with nausea. The knot of excruciating agony that burned in her chest was choking her.
“Blake!” She cried out his name suddenly as though it had been gasped with her last breath. She went to him and tried fiercely to bury herself within his arms. She pressed her cheek against his chest, flattened her body against him with desperation. She was sobbing uncontrollably. She felt the world reeling around her and for startled, appalling seconds, Blake did not move.
“Blake, you don’t understand,” Connie wept against him. “It’s not what you think. I swear it to you.”
He seized her shoulders and held her away from him. He was shaking with rage and Connie seemed to sway on her feet. “Get away from me,” the words seemed to scald his tongue. “Take the paintings and get out of this house, and out of my life, before I –”
He let Connie go. There were angry red marks high on her arms from the clench of his fingers. Her face had drained of all color and she was trembling. Her cheeks were slick with tears, her mouth wide open and her face filled with horror. She stared at him, sickened and shaken.
“Blake no!” she cried out. “Don’t say that,” she sobbed. “At least let me explain.”
“Explain?” he snarled, his voice like a whiplash. “There’s nothing to explain, Connie. I heard every word you said about getting the painting, getting them all…” his voice lowered and became filled with acid revulsion, “and I heard what you said about us – about what you had to endure to get them.”
He spun away, glaring back out through the window. He could see his own reflection in the glass – see the clutch of raw pain in his face and the despair in his eyes. He was shaking with rage and hurt, like a wounded beast that had been shot through the heart and was bleeding to death.
He heard Connie’s shuffled leaden footsteps, slowly retreating towards the door of the studio. He didn’t turn. He closed his eyes and prayed that she would go, just leave him alone to drift into his own private sorrow so he could ride the waves of betrayal that washed over him. He felt numb, bereft. At last he heard the door quietly close. He took a deep shuddering breath and turned around, empty and broken.
Connie was still in the room. She was standing with her back against the door, as if she needed its support to stay on her feet. Her head was lowered, her shoulders slumped in capitulation. Her hair hung down over her face and Blake could hear her sobbing softly, each gasp of breath wracked with her own pain.
“That phone call was from a man named Duncan Cartwright,” Connie whispered, as though she were speaking to the floor. “He was my boss at the gallery where I worked,” she lifted her head slowly and the veil of dark hair fell away from her eyes so that Blake could see the hurt of her own memories, “and for four years he was also using me for sex.”
Suddenly the room went very quiet. Blake could hear the rasp of his own breathing, and feel the throb of pulse at his temples. He stared across the space of the room at Connie but did not move. He felt the rigid expression on his face begin to crack and crumble. His hateful expression wavered slightly.
“When I left home and moved to New York it was because I wanted to be an artist,” Connie said. “I had no money, but I had a desperate dream to paint. Duncan discovered me. He groomed me,” she said the words without thinking, then realized how true they were. “He told me I had talent, and encouraged me to keep painting. He paid my bills until I was in debt to him, and then he started seeking repayment… with sex,” Connie said. Shame was swirling in her eyes, but she lifted her chin so that Blake could see the honesty of her words. Her bottom lip was trembling, her face a tear-slicked mask of tragedy as she was forced to cast her mind back over the nightmares that she had tried so hard to forget.
“He would come to my apartment, and use me. I had no choice…” she said softly,
and then admonished herself. A small choke of self-pity constricted in the back of her throat. “I was old enough to know better, but desperate enough to do whatever it took to fulfill my dream.”
Connie had her hands clasped in front of her. She wrung them together as though the pain of the words had become unbearable. “Then he took my dream away from me. He had promised me exhibitions, but he never delivered. One day I woke up and realized that I was too deep in debt to escape, and that Duncan owned me. He had taken my dream and trapped me within it. When he said I wasn’t good enough to exhibit, he offered me work as a dealer for the gallery.”
Connie shrugged. She was looking into Blake’s face, but seeing another time. Her voice had become small and withdrawn. “I had no choice,” she said with a sick little slide of regret and bitterness. “I was too deeply in his debt. He was paying for my apartment and helping with payments to keep my mother in a nursing home. He had bought me as his whore, and I never really realized it until I was in too deep to ever escape.”
Blake felt some of the tension go from his body. His hands relaxed. He was watching Connie, and some of the anger began to melt from his gaze. He felt himself frown in a flicker of sympathy.
“I told you I was in trouble,” Connie admitted. “I used the small painting I bought from Warren Ryan to pay Duncan back and free myself.”
“That doesn’t explain the phone call,” Blake’s voice was gruff but had lost its sting. “What you said on the phone. What I heard you tell him about the paintings… about us…”
Connie shook her head with sudden vehemence. She saw the waver of doubt in Blake’s eyes and her expression became imploring. “That call wasn’t about your paintings, and it wasn’t about us,” Connie said passionately. “I gave Duncan a painting two years ago for his birthday. That call was about my old pieces of art he still has stored at the gallery. He wants them gone, or he is going to burn them.”
“And us?”
She became suddenly sad, as though all she had confessed had left her devastated. Her eyes were like empty sockets. “He asked me whether I missed him. He taunted me about the sex, the way he had wanted me to act in his bed.”
Blake took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He felt a wave of light-headed relief wash over him. She had not betrayed him. Nothing else mattered.
She had not betrayed him.
“I see,” he said thickly. “Why didn’t you tell me this?”
“Because I thought it was the past,” Connie said earnestly. “When I went back to New York and gave Duncan the painting, I thought he was out of my life forever. It was a time I am not proud of, Blake. Something that I wanted to bury and forget. I didn’t call him – somehow he got my new number from the nursing home.”
There was a long silence. They stared at each other across the room. The tension had gone, replaced by relief, sadness, and tenuous uncertainty. Neither of them moved. Connie smudged the tears from her cheeks and looked at Blake with damaged, despairing eyes.
“I should have told you,” she admitted. “You shared your pain and tragedy with me… I should have told you, but I swear, I didn’t think my past would affect our future.”
“So you don’t want the paintings?”
Connie shook her head slowly from side to side and her eyes welled, making them glisten. A single tear spilled down her cheek, and then suddenly she began to weep uncontrollably again. “No,” she said in a tremulous whisper. “I just want you.”
She took a tentative step towards him, and then another. Blake felt his feet moving, and without consciously realizing it, suddenly they were in each other’s arms in the middle of the studio, clinging to each other like desperate survivors of some perilous tragedy that had almost torn apart their lives.
40.
They made love that night with the wounds of their ordeal still fresh between them, so that they clung together with a frantic passion that was borne of their desperate need to re-connect and to heal. Beyond the physical, it was intensely emotional, transforming each touch and caress, each kiss and taste, into a re-discovery that left them ragged and gasping, exhausted in the tangled sheets, but ultimately with the bond of their relationship restored.
It was after midnight, but they still lay entwined, Connie with her head contentedly pillowed on Blake’s chest, his arm draped around her naked waist. The bedroom window was open and the breeze filtered in the lulling sounds of the ocean. Connie exhaled with a deep breath of relief and serenity.
“I thought I had lost you today,” she murmured sleepily, her eyes closed, listening to Blake’s slow steady breathing. “It terrified me. The look on your face… the pain in your eyes. It made me realize how fragile life is, and how precarious happiness can be. I never understood before, maybe because I have never truly been happy until now.”
One of his hands was by his side. She reached out for it and wrapped their fingers together. “I don’t ever want to feel like that again, and I don’t ever want you to have reason to doubt me.”
For a long moment there was silence and she thought perhaps Blake had drifted to sleep, until she heard the rumble of his words as they vibrated in her ear. “Trust takes time,” he admitted. “For me anyhow. I carried my secrets with me for five long years, Connie. And then suddenly you came into my life. But I’m not going to lie – it took a lot for me to open up – to confide in you.”
She lifted her head, turned and looked up into his face. He was staring at the ceiling with his eyes wide open.
“Do you regret it, Blake?” she asked, and suddenly she had to know the answer. “Are you sorry for letting me in?”
He shook his head. “No,” he said after a moment of reflection. “I feel better. I feel like the burden of sadness has been lifted. Maybe I should have sought professional help years ago. Perhaps I should have found some way to assuage my guilt and pain… but I didn’t. I did the opposite, in fact, but it only made the agony deeper, the wounds harder to heal because I never gave them a chance to close.”
Connie nodded gravely. “And I should have done the same,” she lamented. “I realize that now. I should have told you about Duncan and about my past with him, so you would understand.”
She was twisted, leaning against him with her head raised, so that her breast grazed against his chest and the nipple hardened in reaction. Connie draped a long leg over Blake’s thigh and then rolled on top of him, her body still hot from their lovemaking. Their eyes were just inches apart, and her breath on his lips was warm.
“Never again,” she vowed.
Blake frowned. His hands went to her tiny waist and then drifted across the small of her back, but Connie was gazing at him, too earnest it seemed, to take notice.
“No more secrets between us,” she pledged. “No more hiding the truth from each other. Do you agree?”
“I agree,” Blake murmured.
“Swear it to me.”
“I swear.” He meant it.
One of his hands had drifted to the tantalizing cleft of Connie’s bottom and he felt her squirm deliciously against him. Blake lifted an eyebrow in a question.
Connie lowered her face to his, and kissed him with the simmering force of her commitment. When she broke from the kiss, the taste of her was still wet and warm on Blake’s lips. “Okay,” she muttered, satisfied at last with their agreement. Then she rolled onto her back beside him and the look on her face became a sultry invitation. “Now you can have your fun, mister,” she said in a soft throaty husk.
A long time afterwards, when the world was at its lowest ebb and the night was at its darkest, Blake was still awake. Beside him Connie was curled up into a tight little ball, her knees drawn up to her chest, and her cheek resting peacefully in her hand as she slept. He lay in the silence watching her – the dreamy soft smile on her lips and the slow steady sound of her breathing. There was a wisp of dark hair across her brow and he drew it away from her face with a delicate touch of his fingers.
“I love you,” Blake whispered, on
ly faintly surprised that the words would come so easily from his lips, that they did not leave him feeling vulnerable. “I didn’t want to, but I do.”
And then he rolled onto his back and prayed that she would never break his heart.
41.
The next morning at breakfast, Blake declared the painting finished, and then disappeared into the studio with the door closed for forty minutes. Connie could hear the scrape of the easel and the movement of furniture and she smiled at the small vanity. Blake was re-arranging everything in order to show the finished work in the best possible light – from the most advantageous position. She spent the waiting time on her phone, organizing an express courier to pick up her old paintings from the Cartwright gallery and brought north to Maine.
When Blake emerged from the end of the hallway with a blindfold in his hand, Connie’s eyes grew wide with a giggle of wicked mischief.
“My goodness!” she made her eyes wide and innocent. “I didn’t know you were interested in the kinky things – and especially this early in the morning.”
Blake gave her a dry smile. “Do you want to see the painting, or not?”
He led her down the hallway, with Ned trailing behind. Connie walked in short uncertain steps, her hands out before her. Blake guided her through the studio doorway, and then nudged her towards the window with gentle pressure until she was in position, in front of the finished canvas.
“I’m proud of this painting,” he said. “When I started, I knew the kind of image I wanted to create, and I feel the end result is as good as I could ever have hoped for. I think –”
“Blake!” Connie cut across him with bubbling impatience. “Just take the blindfold off and save the speeches. I already know how brilliant you are.”
Blake fell silent, tugged at the knot, and then drew the mask aside. It took an instant for Connie to orientate herself.
And then her gaze fell upon the painting.