Page 117 of Now That It's You
Instead, Kyle just felt empty.
“It’s incredible,” Chase said, circling the piece from the other side. “Even better than it was in the photos. The grace, the beauty, the lines?—”
“I know,” Kyle said. He should probably be more humble, but he was long past that point now. He had a billionaire TV mogul standing here next to the thrift-store sofa he’d never gotten around to replacing. Humility was beside the point.
Spotting a dirty paper napkin on the end table, he leaned sideways and grabbed it. He tried to crumple it into a discreet ball, but Bindi trotted over, ready to fetch. Kyle shoved the ball in his pocket while the dog whined and pawed at his pants.
“I have to admit, I was surprised to get your message,” Chase said. “All that talk about how you’d never sell this piece?”
“I know,” Kyle said. “I still won’t. Not for money anyway.”
Chase nodded, looking at Kyle with practiced patience. He turned back to the sculpture, grazing a palm over the bare thigh, and Kyle had to tamp down the inexplicable flare of jealousy in his gut.
“You know I can’t make any promises,” Chase said. “If she sucks in the screen test, there’s nothing I can do about that.”
“She won’t,” he said. “You saw the clips. The one of her on the Today show, and that interview with the local TV station?”
“Yes, but what you’re talking about—” Chase shook his head and dropped his hand from the sculpture. “It’s different.”
“So is she.”
Chase barked out a laugh. “She must really mean something to you.”
“She does.”
“You want a word of advice from a guy who’s been married four times?”
Kyle opened his mouth to reply, not sure whether a guy who’d been married four times was the best or the worst person to dole out relationship tips. Seeming to read his thoughts, Chase waved a hand in front of him.
“Look here, this is a nice gesture. What you’re doing with this deal. But you’ve gotta talk to her about it. You can’t go sneaking around behind a woman’s back pulling the puppet strings and trying to make her life turn out the way you think it ought to. Even if you’re well-intentioned, that shit will bite you in the ass.”
The words hit him like a punch to the gut. Kyle just nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
“Manipulating the pieces of someone else’s life?” Chase shook his head, and Kyle got the sense this was a lesson the man had learned the hard way. “No good can come from that.”
“I know,” Kyle said with a grimace. “Believe me, I know. But just this one last time. To make up for what I did before.”
Chase nodded and turned back to the sculpture. Kyle looked around his living room again, wishing he’d at least run a dust rag over the horizontal surfaces. A sketchpad lay sprawled on his coffee table, its pages marked with pencil. A totally normal thing to have in an artist’s home, if not for the doodles of cat faces and cubes. This was clearly the work of a man whose inspiration had left the premises.
“What did you say the name was?”
“Meg,” he said, then realized Chase wasn’t asking that at all. “Oh, the sculpture? I didn’t.”
“So what is it?”
“Si Seulement.”
“French?”
He nodded. “France is where she did her culinary training.”
“She,” Chase repeated, not looking surprised. “And what does si seulement mean?”
A thick lump filled his throat, and Kyle struggled to swallow it back. “If only.”
“I see.” He touched the statue again. “Are you sure about this?”
“About the statue or the girl?”
