Page 79 of Meet Mason, the Billionaire

“What?”

“My paintings. Why are you loading them into a truck?”

“Oh!” I had forgotten everything that was happening in that moment, including the fact we were getting rained on. I took her elbow and steered her under the blue tarp being held up by the tallest interns I could find in the office. “Yeah, well, about that, it was all my fault that you lost your gallery exhibition, so I thought the least I could do was fix that.”

“What do you mean? I’m not sure how you can fix it.”

“Maybe I can’t,” I admitted. “The bullet is out of the gun, the genie is out of the bottle—but I can try to minimize the damage at least, if you’ll allow me to.”

“You still haven’t told me where you’re taking my paintings.”

“To my new gallery.”

She gave me a long, hard look. I could see a turmoil of emotion dancing in her eyes. I gave Megan the time to work through it. At length, she spoke.

“I appreciate the gesture, but if this is about making me not be mad at you, or taking you back—”

“That’s not why I’m doing it,” I said firmly. “This is about atonement. If I had been honest with you, if I hadn’t put my faith in a man I KNEW couldn’t be trusted, this wouldn’t have happened.”

She mulled that over for a bit, her jaw working silently.

“I’m not trying to bribe you,” I said softly, daring to put my hand on her shoulder. “I really am not. And when I tell you that I love you—which I totally do, so much it terrifies and yet exalts me—it’s not to try and get you to say it back. I want you to know everything that’s in my heart and my mind from this moment forward.”

Megan pulled away from me, her lips becoming a trembling, inverted U.

“But I don’t understand why you sicced Brian on me for the portrait anyway. Why not just try to buy it off of me yourself? From the start, instead of trying to romance it out from under me?”

I sighed. “I know that’s how it looks, but I didn’t discover you owned the painting until well after we’d gotten back from Paris. After that, well… I was afraid that you would think exactly what you think right now. That I never cared about you and all I wanted was the portrait.”

I gestured at the much-chagrined red-haired gallery owner across the sidewalk from us. He was glaring at me while pretending to look at his phone.

“I thought I could work through a proxy, and boy was I ever wrong. I wanted to tell you that I loved you only after I’d acquired the painting.” I shook my head in disgust as I regarded the little weasel in the 1990s era Pleather coat. “I told him NOT to pressure you. To make it a low-key sales pitch. Obviously, he went off the reservation, but it’s not his fault. You don’t get mad at a rattlesnake if it bites you when you grab its tail. I have no excuse.”

“No, you don’t,” Megan said, her face darkening with anger. Her expression softened, and I was rewarded with my first initial contact of the day. She rested her hand on my chest and my hopes rose exponentially. “But, I appreciate that you’ve come clean now. The truth is…”

She dropped her gaze to the sidewalk. “The truth is, I love you, too. I was afraid to admit it, even to myself, but I think I sort of knew from the first night that you were the one.”

“I felt that too,” I said, putting my hand on top of hers. “I’ve never found anyone who I could just connect with so well on every level. We’re different, yes, but we’re more alike in the ways that matter. I’d like to think we balance each other out pretty well.”

“I’d like to think that too, Mason.” She lifted her gaze to me at last. “There’s still one thing I don’t understand, though.”

“What’s that?”

“WHY on Earth did you want a portrait of some unknown subject painted by an obscure Greenwich Village artist before you were even born?”

My brow furrowed in confusion. Then it hit me that she had no idea who the person in the portrait was, at all.

Life’s little ironies.

“The man in the portrait,” I said. “Is my grandfather.”

Her eyes went wide and her mouth fell open in a gasp. “Holy shit. Small fucking world, isn’t’ it?”

“What do you mean?”

“The person who painted that portrait was MY grandpa.”

A laugh forced its way out of my throat, and a great deal of tension flew away with it.

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