I tried to control my expression. “No.”
“Don’t bother lying. You get shark eyes whenever you picture yourself killing me.” He winked. “Or fucking me.”
“I donotpicture myself fuck—”
“Oh, there you are,” came my mother’s voice. “I thought you’d gotten lost.”
I froze, panic racing through my veins. It was too late to back out now. Too late to beg Theo to let me pay him off some other way. Mom had found us, which meant we were doing this,reallydoing this, about to pretend we didn’t hate each other in front of a crowd full of people who’d known me all my life. How was I going to convincingly fake attraction to a man whose touch made me want to vomit? I could practicallyseethe impending disaster heading straight for me like a runaway train, but I was tied to the tracks. There was no escaping.
Theo straightened, turning toward my mom. “It was my fault,” he said, his voice more cultured than I’d ever heard it. The smile he sent her was full of charm, and his eyes shone like they held real warmth. “I wanted a moment alone with Stella before I was forced to share her with everyone else.” His gaze slid back to mine, the warmth in his eyes ratcheting up several degrees, like he couldn’twaitto get me alone again.
Don’t puke, don’t puke, don’t puke.
I stepped out from behind the marble column and forced myself to meet my mother’s inquisitive gaze head-on. “Mom, this is Theo, my,” oh-god-I-couldn’t-believe-I-was-saying-it, “boyfriend. Theo, this is my mother, Georgianna, but everyone calls her—”
“Georgie,” she said, shooting me a warning look.
“What’s that face for? I was going to say that.”
“Excuse me for not trusting you, but you did once introduce me as Bitchy McBitchface.”
“I was sixteen, and youhadbeen acting like a—”
“Theo!” Mom said, interrupting me again as she extended a hand toward him. “So nice to make your acquaintance. I can’t remember the last time Stella brought a sweetheart home to meet the family.”
The last bit was said with a healthy dose of side-eye toward me. Because I hadneverintroduced anyone to my family. I’d liked all my past partners too much to subject them to their scrutiny. Not that Mom was actually a bitch or anything. Well, at least, not an intentional one. She was just overprotective, had high standards, and even after all my troublemaking, no one was good enough for her daughter.
Theo gently took Mom’s hand. “I’m glad I made the cut.” They shook, and Theo made a show of glancing around. “You have a beautiful home. Was that a Morisot I saw hanging back there?”
My jaw nearly dropped.
Mom looked pleased. “It was.”
“It’s a shame she’s not more well-known,” Theo said. “She’s always been one of my favorites.”
Mom slipped her arm through his and led him back down the hallway. “Did Stella tell you the story of how we acquired it?”
Theo shook his head. “I’d love to hear it from you.”
“Well, twenty years ago, we spent a dusty summer in the south of France,” she began.
I tuned out the rest because I could recount it from memory. Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot was a French impressionist painter who wasn’t as celebrated as her male compatriots, despite her incredible talent. Married to the brother of the famed Édouard Manet, she struggled her whole career to be taken seriously as an artist, with most male critics patronizingly praising the “feminine charm” in her work. Both Mom and Ilovedher, and this painting, one of Morisot’s lesser-known works, was the crown jewel in my parents’ art collection. The fact that Theo recognized a Morisot painting that had never been recreated in print was unbelievable.
Literally.
The bastard must have done more spying on my family than I’d realized, and now I was worried at justhowmuch he knew about us. About me.
I joined them by the painting.
“No,” Theo said, sounding appropriately shocked. “It was just sitting in the back of the gallery?”
“On thefloor, if you can imagine, leaning against the wall in a neglected corner of the room,” Mom told him.
“And they had no idea what they had?”
Mom shook her head. “We practically stole it from them. In our defense, we didn’t believe it was real at first. The bottom edge was so thick with dust that only the first few letters of her signature were visible, and even after we had it professionally restored, we thought surely it was a fake. Imagine our shock when one of her biographers told us it was the real deal. She’d found a reference to it in one of Morisot’s diaries, and all the other analyses confirmed her belief.”
“Incredible,” Theo said.
