Dance Away with Me(35)

“It’s only their best guess. Nobody can say for sure until the autopsy results are in. And even then . . .”

“Don’t do this to yourself,” he said gruffly. “This is on me. I should never have let her come here.”

“That was on her, I think. She could have left anytime.”

“She was pregnant. Pregnant women don’t always think clearly.”

“You know this from your vast experience with pregnant women?”

He shrugged.

She eased onto the arm of the couch and glanced down at Wren to make sure she hadn’t decided to stop breathing. “I still don’t get why were you trying to keep me away from her.”

“Did you ever read The Great Gatsby?”

“Of course.”

“Bianca was like Daisy Buchanan. One of the careless people. Impulsive.” He tucked a thumb in the pocket of his jeans. “She’d latch on to someone—form an intense relationship—exactly the kind I could see her forming with you. Then she’d blow it up over some imagined slight. Afterward, she’d spiral into a depression.”

“You were trying to keep that from happening.” She thought of Wren. “Bianca told me you weren’t happy about her pregnancy.”

“She tended to act impulsively and then lose interest.”

So much of what she’d believed about Ian North was proving untrue. “Did she blow things up with you?”

“Countless times, but it didn’t last long.”

“Why is that?”

He wandered toward the piano. “It’s a long, boring story. Save yourself.”

“Are you kidding? Wren and I live for this kind of thing. Tell me.”





Chapter Eight




“I’m not telling you,” he said.

The baby was beginning to stir. Tess slid off the couch arm and picked her up. “We won’t whisper a word. Right, buttercup? Is there a murder weapon involved?”

“Does self-destruction count?”

“Disappointingly mundane, but we’ll take what we can get.” She cuddled Wren to her breast.

He smiled. Only a shadow of the genuine article, but a smile nonetheless. “I was twenty-five, just out of jail for trespassing, and flat broke.” To her surprise, he sat down. “I’d spent a year in Europe, and I had a good reputation with other artists, but that was it. I wasn’t a kid anymore, and I was tired of being broke, which is ironic, considering how contemptuous I was of my family’s money, even before I was disinherited.”

“Being disinherited sounds so cool. Like something from a Regency novel.”

He cocked an amused eyebrow. “It’s what happens to us black sheep.” He polished off his whiskey, the scar on the back of his hand catching the light. “My work stopped meaning anything. The same with my life. I was drowning in self-pity and punishing myself with drugs. Uppers, downers, coke when I could get it, vodka chasers. I squatted on friends’ couches until I ran out of friends. I kept getting fired from whatever menial job I could find because I overslept after being up all night stenciling electrical boxes or wheat-pasting posters. My father had always said I was a failure, and I proved him right. Are you bored yet?”

“No way.” If she showed any sympathy, he’d clam up. “I love this tortured artist crap. Keep going.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “I didn’t expect this kind of heartlessness from a woman whose conscience won’t let her sell cigarettes.”

“I have a split personality. And your father sounds like a real shit. Tell me more.”

“All I wanted to do—all I knew how to do—was paste up subversive posters and paint murals nobody had commissioned. But sitting in jail was getting old. There’s a thin line between art and vandalism, and I’d lost the stomach for tagging buildings that weren’t already abandoned. I wanted real commissions, and I wasn’t getting any.” He set down his whiskey tumbler and rose to wander toward the old upright piano. “When Bianca found me, it was the middle of winter, and I was passed out in a doorway next to a club on East Thirteenth. I’d hit bottom. But instead of walking by, she loaded me into a taxi and got her doorman to drag me inside her apartment. She shoved me in her shower—clothes and all—turned on the cold water, and left me there until I staggered out.”

Tess held Wren closer. “You could have been dangerous. Why would she take that kind of risk?”

“She was wild, impulsive. She was only nineteen, at the height of her career, and she thought she was invincible.” He rested his elbow on top of the piano, not far from the bell rope that dangled through a small opening in the ceiling. “She had money, an expensive apartment, and the city at her feet. Everything I didn’t have. She was a kid. I, on the other hand, was twenty-five, six years older, and a grown man. But she took me in and saved my life.”

He spun the schoolhouse globe on top of the piano with his index finger. “She rented a warehouse space for me and told me I had two months to get ready for an underground art show. I argued with her, but she wouldn’t back off.” He stopped the spinning globe with his palm. “She bought me paint, paper, canvas, big sheets of acetate for stencils. I had no pride left. I took everything she offered.”