Selling Grace: A Light Romance Novel (Art of Grace Book 1) (25 page)

"At least it gives you plenty of time to flirt with me," Carter said, clearly still thinking with a part of his anatomy other than his brain, but I took another step away so that he couldn't tug me back into another embrace.

"Sure, but what it doesn't give me is money - commission, payment, cash, moolah, all of that," I went on. "And right now, I'm barely keeping up on my various bills. I really need to find some way to get more people in here, or at least more people who are seriously willing to buy something."

Carter sighed, his flirtatious smile dropping off of his face. "You know, that's the challenge in businesses like this," he said, his tone more serious. "Same thing happens with real estate. Lots of people come through, but ninety percent of them aren't planning on actually buying anything, and never will. It's a lot of fishing, sorting through all of the little nibbles in order to find someone who will actually bite."

"I don't think that's how fishing works," I said after a moment, frowning at him.

He shrugged. "Come on, Becca, look at me. Look at this suit. Do I look like I go fishing much?"

"You look like an ass, that's what I think," I told him, laughing and dodging aside as he swung a mock fist at me. "By the way, you still haven't told me what you're doing here in the first place, anyway. Aren't you supposed to be off running your own business?"

Carter pursed his lips at me, although he made even that expression look hopelessly sexy. My friendship with Carter only spanned back over the last month, but I already felt comfortable with him, something that often took a considerable amount of time. I didn't know exactly how to define what we had between us, but whatever it was, I liked it.

I'd first met Carter a month previously, when I first started running this art gallery. I claimed that I took over the day-to-day management of the Halesford Gallery as a favor to my uncle, Preston Halesford himself, but in truth I didn't have anywhere else to turn for help out of my desperate situation. Fresh out of a divorce from a greedy, cheating lump of an ex-husband, I needed a quick way to earn enough money to pay for my liabilities from the failed marriage, and I turned to selling art as my last resort.

Somehow, to even my own surprise, I managed to make it work. With only a couple days left before the deadline for making the payment to my ex-husband, I managed to sell a big piece, one with a six-figure price tag, and earned enough commission to buy my complete and total freedom from that crashing failure of a marriage!

Along the way, I'd also struck up a relationship with Carter James, the man sitting beside me and easily driving me half-crazy with all his flirting. Carter worked as a commercial real estate agent, helping rent out buildings in town to various businesses. He bought a fair amount of art from the Halesford Gallery to decorate the spaces that he showed off to clients, so I'd been ordered by my uncle from day one to keep Carter happy.

For some reason, Carter decided that he wanted to sweep me off my feet and try and carry me off to bed! I did my best to hold off his advances politely, but I couldn't deny the attraction that I felt towards him. Despite just getting out of a disaster of a marriage, I let him take me out to lunch, then dinner, and then eventually back to the cute little house that he owned.

Still, I wasn't totally ready to commit to a new relationship so soon after my last one ended, so I tried to keep our interactions late. Carter tolerated my standoffishness, it seemed - but he never missed a chance to slip in a flirtatious comment, if only to make me blush beet red.

Now, Carter just shrugged, still sitting behind the front desk of the art gallery. "I'm waiting for clients to call me," he answered. "It's the best way to run a business - I put out the feelers, wait for a client to express interest, and bam! Reel them in, tug them into my net, and sign a contract. Dinner, all caught!"

"You really need to improve your fishing metaphors," I told him, shaking my head.

"But seriously, maybe you can think of a way to improve the business," Carter went on, sitting up a little. "Here, you're complaining that the problem is that you're not getting much foot traffic, right? How could you fix that?"

I tried to think of some solutions. "Maybe hold some sort of social event?" I suggested after a minute. "Or offer something to people to get them in the door. Some sort of advertising, perhaps? Or feature a new artist, someone who can draw a lot of people in?"

"All good ideas," Carter nodded, but I was already shaking my head.

"Yeah, they're good ideas," I went on, "but most of them won't work without me putting in money - which I don't have! I don't have any extra funds to offer people free stuff, or to pay for advertising. And we haven't gotten a new artist in a while. So there go all my ideas, shot down right away."

I sat back down in my chair, dropping my forehead down until it pressed against the cool surface of the desk in front of me. "Hopeless," I finished, speaking into the stack of papers beneath my head.

After a moment, I felt Carter's hand settle softly on my back. Thankfully, he didn't try any moves on me this time. Instead, he just softly rubbed back and forth with my knuckles across my shoulder blades. It felt seductively good, but I didn't lift my head up yet.

"I'm sure something will come along," he told me. "Besides, when things do start happening, they'll all come at once, and you'll be thinking wistfully back to times like now, when you weren't so stressed. Try and enjoy the peace before the storm hits."

"Thanks for the Zen wisdom," I said sarcastically into the papers beneath my head.

He chuckled. "You know the expression about the ancient Chinese curse, don't you?"

I shook my head.

"'May you live in interesting times,'" Carter quoted.

"And that's a curse?"

"Yep. It sounds like a great thing - up until it happens to you, and all you want is for things to relax, calm down, and go back to boring old normal."

Still with my head down, I considered this proverb for another minute or two. "Nope, I don't see it," I finally said, lifting my head back up and brushing my forehead in case any of the papers decided to cling to my skin. "I would still rather be in interesting times than boring ones."

And as if on cue, waiting for me to speak those very words, my phone started to ring in my purse.

Both Carter and I paused, and exchanged a glance with each other. "The curse!" he whispered to me, wiggling his fingers in a manner that might have been intended to appear spooky (although in truth, it reminded me of an attempt at doing "jazz hands").

"Knock it off," I told him as I reached for my purse. I felt around until my fingers closed on the hard, vibrating rectangle, and I pulled it out.

"Who is it?"

I frowned, looking down at the caller ID. "It's my Uncle Preston," I responded.

"As in Preston Halesford, the owner of the gallery?"

"One and the same." I swiped my finger across the phone to answer the call, turned and shushed Carter by holding that finger up to my lips in the universal gesture for "quiet," and then lifted the phone up to my ear. "Hello?" I said.

"Hi there, Becca! How are things going?"

"Um, hi to you too, Uncle," I replied, not sure why he decided to call. "Things are going fine; there's not much new. It's pretty quiet here." Had Uncle Preston heard something bad about the gallery? Was I in trouble? He'd never called me before, so I wasn't sure what might have changed.

"Great, great. So you're not too busy then, are you?"

"No?" I answered, feeling like this might be the wrong response to give. Maybe he was going to give me some unenviable task, like cleaning out the mess of disorganized papers that he'd left behind in the back storage area, or trying to figure out which members of the artists' collective had died and were no longer coming in to pick up their residual checks.

"Great, that's good to hear. I mean, not particularly, but it's good in this case." Preston paused, muttering something to himself.

"Uncle?" I asked. "What's going on?"

"An opportunity, that's what's going on!" he responded. "And as soon as I heard about it, I knew that you were just the right person to put in charge of this new task."

"Oh. Great."

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of Carter raising his eyebrows. "May you live in interesting times," he mouthed at me.

If he wasn't so damn sexy when he smiled at me, I would have punched him...

* * *

Want to see EVERYTHING? I'm willing to bare it all, just for you...

Check out my website to see everything I've written! Get links to all my books, subscribe to my mailing list, and stay up to date on your new favorite author!

http://www.WestlakePublishing.com/

In addition, I've started blogging about my writing! If you want to keep up, and see my most recent posts, take a look at my Facebook page:

Http://www.facebook.com/SamanthaWestlakeAuthor

Keep reading! I've included a bonus copy of another book,

TOMCAT

Read on now!

Chapter One

*

"Admiral" Theodore Whiskers was missing.

Although I didn't want to even consider the possibility, I felt my blood pressure rising as I moved from room to room in my little house. I knew all of his usual hiding spots, but with each place that turned up empty, my heart rate ratcheted up by another ten beats per minute.

"Whiskers!" I called out, trying to keep my voice from cracking. "Come on out, buddy! Where are you hiding?"

Nothing. Not even a meow.

In desperation, I turned to the big guns - the wet food. I grabbed one of his cans of cat food from the cupboard, holding it out in the middle of the kitchen as I pulled on the metal tab to pop off the top. The sound of the seal breaking resonated throughout my little cottage, but I still saw no sign of the large orange tabby.

Dammit, I cursed, trying to use anger to control my rising panic. Now, just when I had so many other problems that I should be addressing in my life, my cat had to vanish.

I set the open can of cat food down on the counter, vaguely hoping that maybe Whiskers would come out and approach it on his own. He wasn't what anyone could call slender or svelte, after all, and he'd grown used to getting his can of wet food in the morning, chowing down while I dosed myself with caffeine. I picked up my still-steaming cup of coffee, taking a sip and hoping that the jolt of energy would bring inspiration with it.

Should I call the police? The Truckee Firefighting Department? I knew that they (firefighters) were the ones to call about cats stuck in trees, at least according to popular myth, but I didn't know what they could do about missing cats. Thank goodness that I didn't have any children, I thought grimly to myself. I couldn't even keep a damn cat without losing him - and then panicking.

Okay, Elaine. You can handle this. Just stay calm.

What would a calm, normal, rational person do in this situation?

I took another sip of my coffee, focusing very hard on keeping my hand from trembling. There we go, I told myself. Just relax. Everything is under control. No need to panic.

A normal person wouldn't bother calling out Whiskers' name, because he never responded to his name. I didn't even know if he knew his name - how could I tell?

So, running around the neighborhood frantically shouting out "Admiral Theodore Whiskers!" was out.

A normal person would first search her house, looking for where her damn cat might be hiding. Check. I'd already checked all of his usual nooks and crannies, with no luck.

Next, a normal person would look for possible escape routes. How could he have gotten out? I normally kept the house on tight lockdown, since he'd previously shown that he was willing to claw through a screen door-

My eyes drifted up, above the sink full of dirty dishes that I'd been meaning to roll up my sleeves and wash for the last few days. They settled on the open window above the sink, my curtains flapping gently in the slight spring breeze that blew into my little cottage from the outdoor world.

Dammit.