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with a woman named Margaret Lemon. She could add a competitive rivalry, going for the Shaquil e O’Neal/Kobe Bryant sort of thing. Even better, though, would be a competitive rivalry over a woman.
    Hmmmm.
    Cam scanned her memory banks. Surely there had been some woman somewhere who’d been shared by Van Dyck and another artist. Unfortunately most of Cam’s research had been about the man and his work. Sure, there had been the various bits of information about his life, but Cam had used that to flesh out the story of his painting. The sources she’d found had been somewhat dry regurgitations of where he studied and how he progressed to being the chosen painter of Charles I. If she was going to sex this puppy up, she needed something else. She was just starting to clear a path to her keyboard when her cel phone rang. She dug it out of her purse and checked the display. It was Joe. She hit the answer button. “How’s my favorite sibling?”
    “Gee, I’d feel more flattered if I didn’t know my only competition was Stacy.”
    “That’s Anastasia to you, pal.”
    “You guys stil going strong?”
    “You know I can’t get enough. What are you up to?” she asked lightly.
    Joe had lost his wife and son in a car accident ten months earlier. It would be a long time before she’d feel him living inside their conversations again.
    “You know. Same old. I just wanted to tel you I’m making my reservations for Christmas—”
    “Oh, you’re coming up!” she cried happily, and instantly regretted it. The accident had happened shortly after the regretted it. The accident had happened shortly after the holidays.
    “Yeah, I want to do it. I-I can’t promise you a lot of Christmas spirit—”
    “God, if you can just promise to sit between me and Stacy at dinner, that’l be holiday enough.”
    He laughed. “I’m looking forward to it.”
    “Me too.”
    “Gotta run.”
    “Yeah.” His conversations were often cut short by unexpected short waves of tears, and Cam had grown used to al owing it to pass without comment. “Love you. ’Bye.”
    She clicked the phone and cursed the Fates for punishing such a great guy.
    “Is he okay?” Jeanne asked.
    Cam shrugged. “The same. It’l be a while, I guess.” She dropped her phone back in her clutch and checked to see if she stil had that half a Mounds bar left over from breakfast yesterday. Nope. Oh boy. Not a good sign. No wonder those Spanx were getting tighter. With a sigh, she dropped the bag on her desk.
    She pushed the folders off her keyboard, where she found her smashed hot dog. Sighing, she tossed it in the wastebasket. Then she pushed aside her tubes of paint and the little, half-finished stil life of the stapler and pencil cup she’d work on when she wanted to be reminded that she’d once wanted to be a painter and cal ed up Amazon.
    She hated to resort to mass-market research, but if she found something that offered a meaty tidbit, she could count on having the book in her hand by tomorrow. If she ordered it from the library, it might take weeks.
    She typed “Anthony Van Dyck” into the search box and got two hundred forty-one results. Sighing, she began to page through. Most she’d seen before and either passed on or read. On the eighth page something caught her eye.
    Inside the Artist’s Studio: A Glimpse into the Personal Lives of the Greatest European Painters of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries . Wel , that certainly had an interesting ring to it. Cam clicked to open it and read the description. There was no review from Publishers Weekly, which surprised her, since they were usual y al over that stuff, but the first reader review—the only reader review—
    was eye-opening.
    “Everything I wanted to know about my favorites. Reads like Jansen’s History of Art meets Sex and the City . Felt like I was there. Hot, hot, hot.” From a “Madame K” in Sofia, Bulgaria.
    Well, well, well. This will definitely be worth the overnight delivery