The Foster Family (12 page)

C
HARLIE
STUFFED
his briefcase on the floor of the passenger side of the car and folded his suit jacket over the back of the seat. Leslie would be meeting with the agent of an up-and-coming new artist this morning, and it wouldn’t do for her personal assistant to show up to that meeting in a rumpled suit jacket, even if all he did was carry her pencils and offer coffee.

He forced down the small squiggle of delight at seeing Kerry, morning rumpled and charmingly pink with embarrassment, pad through the kitchen in nothing but a pair of boxers. He had to think about his work now, and letting himself get sidetracked with thoughts of the young man currently inhabiting his home would only get him into trouble one way or another.

He glanced at his phone when it beeped, and picked it up as he pulled to a stop at a red light. Leslie’s text flashed across the screen in the silent fury of all caps.
WHERE ARE YOU??????!!!!!!

Because that much punctuation was absolutely necessary, of course. Charlie rolled his eyes and tapped the screen to open a text bubble.

Traffic
, he texted back. As the light turned and the line of cars ahead began to inch forward, he set the phone down.

I NEED YOU HERE!!!!

He got to the head of the line as the light flipped back to red.

Coffee, darling?
he punched into the phone.

GET YOUR ASS THROUGH THIS DOOR IN THE NEXT FIVE MINUTES OR FIND A NEW JOB.

Charlie pressed the power button on the phone until the calming chime sounded, then slid the icon across the screen. The phone went blessedly dark and he tossed it onto the passenger seat. He cruised past the Starbucks on the corner and turned into the double-line drive-through of Tim Horton’s on the next block. Thank goodness for the great Canadian spirit. When this place had opened, people had laughed and said that only Canadians would think they needed coffee so badly they couldn’t pry their asses out of the car to get it. Charlie was convinced his northern neighbors were utterly brilliant.

Four bucks got him two steaming, towering cups of black goodness, and he rolled out onto a much-cleared street to arrive at the gallery exactly six minutes before his scheduled start to the workday.

Not that Leslie ever expected him to walk in less than an hour before he was actually scheduled. She
needed him here
, dammit. He sighed and elbowed the front door of the gallery open, consoling himself with the knowledge he was only late because she deemed it, not because he actually was.

“Hey, Mr. Stone,” the young man at the front counter said. He didn’t actually look up from the graphic novel he was reading, and Charlie glanced at the black-and-white artwork. A buxom girl swinging a sword and showing off the lacy gusset of her panties under her short skirt snarled fiercely out of the pages at him.

He pulled in a fortifying breath and sipped his coffee. “Morning, Chad. Everything ready for Ms. Brixton’s meeting?”

“Front Gallery is set up.” Chad nodded and flipped a page. His comic-book heroine was now straining the buttons on her skimpy schoolgirl blouse as she battled—unsuccessfully—something that looked like a tentacled demon on the pages. Charlie had no wish to see where the tentacles ended up when the striving, straining woman lost her fight.

“Refreshments?” Charlie asked, hoping to draw the younger man away from the questionable reading material.

“Coffee is brewed. Kettle boiled. Biscuits arranged just so.” He made a gesture of kissing the tips of his fingers and flaring them outward, and Charlie bit the inside of his lip to keep from snarling something job-threatening at his boss’s nephew.

As Chad reached to turn another page, Charlie dropped a sheaf of papers over the book.

“Hey!” Chad protested and finally looked up at Charlie. “What gives?”

Charlie crunched down on an already tender patch of his inner cheek. “I need two more copies of this, Chad. Please. Scan and send one to my office and one to Ms. Brixton’s printer, and put the original in the filing cabinet behind my desk.”

Chad grinned at him. “Sure thing, Mr. Stone.” He made to move the contract aside and continue reading, but Charlie leaned over the counter and plucked the manga from his hands.

“I’ll leave this in the cabinet. You can come get the key from me once you’ve copied that, yes?”

Chad scowled at him and held out his hand. “I’m sorry, Mr. Stone. I’ll put it away.”

Charlie eyed him.

“I promise. I’ll leave it in my bag.” He nodded to the skull-printed backpack sitting on the floor behind the counter. “Won’t take it out, I swear.”

Charlie relented and handed the book back, then waited until Chad had slipped it into his backpack and replaced the bag under the counter. “Not that I care what you read, Chad, but I promise you don’t want Ms. Brixton to see that in her gallery. I don’t think even being family would save you.”

Chad glanced guiltily at the book. “You’re probably right.”

“Trust me on this one. And I’m kind of in a hurry for those copies.”

Chad grinned once more and nodded. “I’m on it. It’ll be spewing out her printer by the time you get up there.”

“Thanks, Chad.”

“No problem.” Chad picked up the pages and tapped them into a neat pile. “Oh, and Mr. Stone.” He leaned over the counter slightly and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I think she might be on the rag, so—”

“Okay.” Charlie held up a hand. “You and I are going to have lunch one day soon, Chad, and discuss a few important details about respect you’d probably already know if you had any sisters.”

“I do have a sister. Kim. She’s five.” He smiled, wide and proud, and Charlie sighed.

“Poor girl,” he muttered as he turned to go. “Copies!” he called over his shoulder.

“On it!” Chad replied.

Charlie jogged up the stairs to the offices two at a time and entered his own semiprivate sanctuary, then closed the door behind him. A page popped out of his printer as he set his briefcase down, and he glanced over. It was a photocopy of the next page of Chad’s manga and held every imaginable wrongness he’d feared.

“My kingdom for a bucket of mind bleach,” he muttered, glancing out the window of his office that overlooked Chad’s counter.

The young man was grinning up at him as the contract fed through the scanner. Chad waved and gave him a thumbs-up and a leering nod. Charlie took the picture of himself and Malcolm from his desk and held it against the glass for Chad to see, and the receptionist doubled over laughing.

Charlie shook his head and proceeded to ready himself for Leslie Brixton’s wrath. Not that he’d done anything wrong, but dealing with the woman on a good day required the girding of loins.

He was in his office only long enough to turn his phone back on and drop his briefcase. The five hours of slides he had to look through for the show associated with the contract Chad was copying could wait until his lunch hour.

He had Leslie’s schedule pulled up on his phone, a new, blank, standard gallery contract under his arm, and her coffee poured into her ceramic mug with the grumpy cat on it as he pushed her office door open with a foot.

“Morning,” he said cheerily. “Got your coffee, and the contract for the Coulson exhibit should be coming up on your printer right—”

The printer in the corner of her office purred to life, and Charlie smiled.

“—now.”

Chad might have a questionable grasp of gender politics, but he was a godsend to Charlie. Any task Charlie asked of him would be accomplished, no muss, no fuss. The kid might look like a slacker, but he was far and away the best thing that had happened to the gallery in Charlie’s memory. Or, at least, he was the best thing to happen to Charlie’s job at the gallery.

Well. Unless the piece of paper already settled on the printer bed was what Charlie thought it might be. Then he’d have to maybe kill Chad and bury his body out beyond the gazebo. As Leslie reached for the contract flipping lightly into the printer bed, Charlie rushed over, hoping to beat her to it.

“I’ll just get it straightened out and stapled for you,” he said, reaching for the pages.

“I’m not an invalid, Charlie.” Leslie held out her hand imperiously. “Give me my coffee and go downstairs and check everything is ready.”

“Chad took care of it.”

She looked at him over her reading glasses. “Go do something useful.” She plucked the papers from the printer and flipped them over.

Every nerve ending in Charlie’s body screamed at him to make a run for it. Instead, he snatched the papers from her fingers and left her office without a word.

“Charlie?”

“Meet you downstairs in ten!” he called over his shoulder as he hurried down to Chad’s domain.

Chad looked up as he set the pages down on the counter, the nasty bit of manga on top. “This came out of Ms. Brixton’s printer just now,” he growled.

Chad’s face went ashen. “Oh shit.” He quickly checked his computer settings and sank into his chair. “Oh shit.”

“You are lucky I was there to catch it before she saw it, or you would be on the sidewalk on your ear right now, with a sexual harassment lawsuit shoved down your throat.”

Chad nodded dumbly.

“I don’t need this, Chad.” Charlie fought against the heavy sigh that escaped despite his best efforts.

“Charlie!” Leslie called from the top of the stairs. “Charlie, I need the gray suit jacket I brought to the cleaner’s last week. I want it for the meeting. Go pick it up, please.”

Charlie gave Chad a significant look, and Chad scrambled for the plastic “Back in five minutes” sign to place on his desk. “I’m on it.”

“And Charlie”—Leslie peered down over the balcony railing at them—“this coffee is cold.”

Charlie nodded and let out a heavy sigh. “Hurry up,” he growled at Chad, who scurried from behind the desk even as he reached for the dry-cleaning ticket Charlie held out. Chad dashed for the front door and Charlie sprinted up the steps to accept the coffee cup being imperiously held out for him. “Be right back,” he promised her.

The minute and a half it took, listening to the soothing hum of the microwave allowed Charlie to catch his breath, count to ten about a dozen times, and return to Leslie’s office, coffee in hand and smile on his face.

“My suit jacket?” She barely glanced up at him as he set the coffee and stapled contract on the table in front of her.

“On its way,” he assured her. “Front Gallery is all set up just the way you like. Here is the blank contract for the new client, and I scheduled the Coulson walk-through for next Friday.”

“A Friday, Charlie? You know I’m not at my best on Fridays.”

“It’s at eleven. I’m sure it will be routine. They only need to take a few measurements to ascertain if the bigger pieces will need to be disassembled to get them into the small Back Gallery.”

“Reschedule it for Thursday.”

“Leslie, the artist lives in Brussels. She won’t even be in the country until after midnight on Thursday. Eleven was as early as I could reasonably ask her to come to the site.”

“Then give the girl a break and tell her to come in on Monday, Charlie, for goodness’ sake.”

“That doesn’t give them enough time to get everything ready. The opening is Wednesday night.”

Leslie opened her laptop and turned her attention from him. “Friday is just not a good day, Charlie. Richard Karp is one of our biggest donors, and the board positively ordered me to be here when he brings his new—well, whatever the gold digger is to him—to see the show we have now. It’s closing day, and I need you, Charlie.” She turned her attention back to her computer. “I can’t possibly cram placating a flighty artist into that kind of a day. Our donors keep this place afloat. Their visits have to go perfectly. You know that.”

He knew because he’d scheduled the big shot’s exclusive walk-through of the current show. He’d been the one to make sure none of the usual school field trips coincided with the man’s private showing, and he’d arranged for expensive catering for the event. He’d made sure the cleaning staff knew to polish every bit of chrome and marble and to make sure every mirror in every bathroom sparkled. He’d contacted the movers and instructed them not to show up until late that evening to take down the exhibit, and he’d be the one to put out every tiny fire Leslie saw smoldering in her imagination as they watched the old man and his twentysomething bored companion gaze blankly at art they neither understood nor cared about.

Charlie focused on one of the paintings now as he fought to keep his temper in check. It struck him that this particular show was probably a bit racy for someone Richard Karp’s age. It was expressionism with a modern, erotic flavor Charlie appreciated, but he wondered if a straight ninetysomething patron would see it in the same light as he did. He made a mental note to brush up on some of the Masters he’d studied who might be called to mind when the old man balked at the nudes. It wouldn’t hurt to have some ammunition if the guy began to wonder what his money was actually buying.

“Reschedule the girl from Barcelona—”

“Brussels.”

Leslie gave him another look over the gold rims of her glasses. “Reschedule her for Saturday.”

“You don’t work weekends,” Charlie said, heart falling.

“You do.” She smiled up at him. “Thanks, Charlie.”

“I don’t, actually,” Charlie mumbled as he rearranged his own schedule in his head and wondered if he should just sleep in his office Friday night. By the time the old exhibit was taken down, it was going to be a late night, or more probably, a very early morning.

Leslie looked up at him over those damn fake glasses again, lips pursed tightly. “Are you quitting?” she asked matter-of-factly.

Charlie crushed the inside of his cheek between his teeth. “No.”

“I thought not. Is Chad back with my jacket?”

“I’ll check.” He left the office at a slow shuffle, wishing there was a place he could go to vent his frustration. So much for planting the newly turned beds. Following an artist around the gallery on a Saturday was not how he had planned to spend his weekend.