Artistic License

Artistic License

A contemporary romance

© Elle Pierson 2013

Chapter One

Picasso would have loved his face. It was all brutal planes
, the long blade of nose, the sharp jut of bone in cheek and jaw, the thin slashes of brows and lips, no angle of which sympathised with another, as if he’d been at the end of the line when features were assembled and forced to scramble together what was left. Sophy had never in her life seen a walking, breathing human quite so like a Cubist painting.

His face was
wonderful
.

Her fingers paused against her sketchbook, midway through the sweet curve of a baby’s thigh and the contrasting sharpness of his mother’s pink-painted nails. The pair stood over by the Henry Moore nude, both appearing more interested in the prospect of lunch than the expensive labours of long-dead artists. She turned slowly to a new page, absently transferred the charcoal smudges from the side of her palm to the skirt of her dress, and began to draw again. It was a geometry exercise: an acute angle as upper lip was overtaken by nose, an obtuse angle where oddly perfect ear merged into razored jawbone – a fascinating challenge. She had always been a disaster with math. She drew from memory for some minutes, resisting the urge to look up. She wanted to look. She wanted to
gaze
, actually. His own cool stare had surveyed her for seconds only, clearly weighing her potential for making trouble before moving on with equally rapid dismissal.

It was still long enough to make her blush and duck her head, her standard response when encountering strangers for the first time. It made no difference whether they were muscled behemoths of security guards in leather jackets or freckle-faced checkout boys at the supermarket with adolescent Adam’s apples jutting out like a bad case of goitre. Making eye contact with anyone was always a conscious effort, at least until she’d known the person long enough to have a few conversations, share a joke or two, add them on Facebook, see them without their makeup. She was good at loving friends, useless at making them. Usually, however, she forced herself to be polite and raise her head after the knee-jerk desire to hide under the nearest table. Impossible in this instance, although it was the response of a child playing hide-and-seek or a cat behind a curtain:
if I can’t see him, he can’t see me.

Sophy might be a bit of a lost cause socially, but her survival instincts were perfectly functional. She was pretty damn sure that the man with the beautiful face and intimidating body would not be happy to see himself reproduced in smudgy charcoal.

She had been sketching attractive people since she was eight, filling in time at bus stops, in waiting rooms, during the lunch hour at school when it was most problematic to be shy and alone, between classes,
during
math class. It never stopped feeling a bit voyeuristic. She kept her sketchbooks private as a matter of principle, had never taken one on campus and primed marble and chisel without the permission of her model. The books, pads, folders of random sheets of paper, napkins and turned-over receipts were stacked in her bedroom, all capturing moments of laughter, frustration, affection, creases of smiles, tongues tucked between teeth in intense concentration. Those sketches were the only diary record of her life. And the fact that it was a record of what she had observed in other people rather than of personal experience was all a bit typical, really.

A stiletto heel scraped against the polished parquet, and a muffled swear word drew Sophy’s attention to the Pre-Raphaelite section, where a well-preserved blonde in a six hundred dollar jacket had leaned too close to a Burne Jones canvas and lost her footing, stumbling against the velvet partition. The incident drew the full attention of another pair of eyes, shrewd and dark – brown? Grey? He wasn’t close enough for the minute details and the colour was artistically irrelevant, at any rate, for a sketch.

She still wanted to know.

Taking advantage of his preoccupation elsewhere, she narrowed her focus to his mouth, where the dark pebbling of stubble edged softer pink skin and dipped into a deeply cleft chin. Her fingers moved swiftly. She had no idea how long it had been before her gaze drifted upward and met a direct, rather irate stare. There was an almost palpable sense of collision as her world grew silent with horror.

Oops.

The man’s left brow inched higher as his eyes flickered from her burning cheeks to the pad and pencil clutched in her whitened knuckles. It dropped only to slam together with the right in an impressive scowl. Sophy immediately laid her arm across the work in a ridiculous protective gesture, which did nothing except proclaim her guilt and ruin the sleeve of her favourite vintage cardigan. A thick bicep flexed under buttery-looking leather as her unfortunate victim moved his arm and she almost ducked, then
did
groan. For God’s sake, what did she think he was going to do? Pistol-whip her? He was more likely to kick her out of the building in an understandable fit of pique. In front of hundreds of strangers, a handful of journalists, fellow art students and her favourite tutor.

She might prefer the pistol-whipping.

When a second guard made a timely entrance, a snazzy black device clutched in his hand, and began to speak to his colleague in rapid sentences, her gratitude was such that she would momentarily have given up both chocolate and her future firstborn without a qualm. She observed the tension of their body language with some interest, and cast a surreptitious glance about the room, wondering if she ought to be concerned. There was no obvious sign of fire, impending theft or other interesting catastrophe. 

The exhibition was growing increasingly crowded as people wandered in after lunch, their shopping bags, smart phones and cameras deposited at the reception desk, but the rooms weren’t quite as busy as she might have expected. The William Ryland art collection was one of the most valuable and eclectic in the world. The British magnate had inherited from a wealthy father some forty years ago, and then increased his holdings with the ruthlessness of a safari lion on the hunt. It was by far the most prestigious exhibition that had ever come to New Zealand, and that it should have bypassed an affronted Auckland and Wellington to come to a small resort town like Queenstown was a huge coup for the South Island.

The Ryland Curry corporation owned several of the biggest hotels in town, including the five-star building in which she sat, and Ryland had arrived at his property in state the week before, accompanied by millions of dollars worth of paintings and sculpture, a manicured wife and numerous black-clad consultants from his global security firm. The publicity had been immense, art lovers thrilled and locals smug. But it had been open for six days and was today competing with a cloudless sky and the opening of the summer festival. When she had passed the lakefront on her way to class this morning, winter-pale tourists had already been flocking to the water and the wine stalls, while swirling flags of colour high around the mountain peaks marked the first paragliders of the day.

Not being nearly important enough to secure an invite to the opening, Sophy had come alone to the exhibition on the second evening. Her cousin and flatmate Melissa had flatly refused all attempts to remove her from the couch for company. Sophy tended to enjoy museums and galleries more on her own anyway, preferring to take her time, look and think and dream without impatient breath huffing down her neck or persistent watch-checking. She didn’t wear a watch and preferred not to have other people’s waved in front of her face. Today’s visit was for school and her various classmates from the Central Otago branch of the Dunedin Art School were scattered about the room, either cuddling up to the barriers, peering and chatting, pulling pencils and paper from security-approved clear plastic bags, or trying not to look utterly bereft at the forced separation from their cell phones and iPads. Don Holland, their tutor, was gazing at a Rossetti portrait in exactly the way another man might look at a centrefold. Sophy couldn’t decide if that was endearing or a bit disconcerting.

The redhead at his side clearly thought the latter, as she cast him a suspicious look and sidled away. Sophy, recognising her by her embroidered bag from an earlier encounter outside the hotel, noticed that she was missing part of an ear under all that glorious bright hair. One lobe was stretched out with a silver disc the size of a two-dollar coin, which always made her cringe a little, but the other drooped in two long flaps as if the second disc had been torn out, which made her physically shudder. As a rule, she liked body jewellery, had gotten her own lobes pierced – and then left well alone – as soon as her mother had given the go-ahead after her twelfth birthday. She’d added the small diamond stud in her nose without parental approval on her eighteenth. But frankly, if a piercing was so large that a person could hang their umbrella from the hole in lieu of an earring, it was a bit much.

She watched as the woman paused in front of the pedestal that held a collection of early twentieth-century ceramics. A gorgeous Clarice Cliff Deco vase gleamed crimson and gold under the glass and Sophy’s favourite piece, the sinuous little Susie Cooper teapot, looked…different. She frowned and unconsciously got to her feet. The colours, which half an hour previously had been glittering like lake water in the sunshine, now looked matte and dull. Thirty minutes seemed a bit brief for such a rapid deterioration. Looking up, she realised that the very impressive, very costly lighting system had gone out. The display rooms were windowless but open at one end to the sun-flooded foyer, so it wasn’t immediately obvious that the power seemed to have failed.

For the sake of her large friend with the prizewinning scowl, she hoped that the breakdown didn’t include the security system. She wasn’t sure what would occur if every person in the room seized the opportunity to bolt with a Constable, but would have been unsurprised had he managed to tackle them all single-handedly. There was a sense of efficiency and competency about him that she had no hope or desire of emulating. His colleagues now numbered four, three men all moderately well-built and uniformly handsome in a way that bordered on banality, distinguishable only by slight changes in hair colour and thickness of muscle, and a very pretty blonde woman. He was the only one not wearing a suit, instead opting for the leather jacket, which she absolutely
did
covet, dark pants and a Henley shirt that was a good two sizes too small. The others looked like escapees from a Tom Ford runway; he looked like henchman number two in an action flick. And they all looked, in an entirely stoic and professional way, as if it was the point in that film where a wise person beat a hasty retreat before the shots and sirens started.

Sophy folded her sketchbook under her arm and looked for Don, who had abandoned his painted lady love and her pomegranates and didn’t seem to be in the British section any longer. She couldn’t see any of her classmates either and started to move toward the partition that screened off the American art. A piercing glance snagged on her movement, and she found herself meeting that dark stare again for three long seconds. Her breath hitched in a slight rattle that sounded all too much like an asthmatic wheeze. That would be an all-time low in a history of mortifying social ineptitude, to actually have to pull out her inhaler because a man checked her body for a concealed balaclava or crowbar.

Apparently there were good reasons why she had spent a lot of time alone with a book during her school days.

In her peripheral vision Sophy saw a vaguely familiar man in a wool blazer withdrawing his hand from his front pocket, fingers gripped around a metallic tube.

The next few minutes seemed both bewilderingly rapid and oddly frozen, as if time had halted in its tracks while mouths and limbs flung into a frenzy of motion. One of the slighter security guards, a baby-faced man with high cheekbones and sandy brown hair, shouted something and grabbed for his holster, the blonde barked into her phone, someone cried out in confusion, and the man in leather lunged forward in a movement that contributed in sheer brute strength what it lacked in grace.

Any doubts that Sophy harboured regarding the state of her reflexes were fulfilled when, instead of pragmatically freezing to the spot or leaping
away
from the nutjob with a gun like a reasonable woman, for some ungodly reason she took a step toward him. The manoeuvre brought her directly in the path of the bulky guard. It was very much a case of irresistible force meeting entirely moveable object. He hit her like the side of a truck as he passed, knocking her to the ground. Her sketchbook slithered across the floor and her breath rushed out of her lungs like steam escaping a kettle. Unfortunately, it had no chance to retreat back through her gasping lips. A sharp crack preceded gusts of billowing white smoke that enveloped the room in a blinding fog.

Her instincts screamed, “Fire!” and encouraged immediate panic. The dregs of her rational mind heard the sound of the explosive and tried to push forward the words “smoke grenade”. Logic was hampered by the sheer terror of being unable to see or breathe while chaos reigned about her. Somebody jostled her, fell over her, stepped on her hand. Voices shouted, ranging from childish sobs to masculine screams to deeper sounds of authority.