Read Flirting With Forever for Free Online Page B

charge.
    Cam clicked on the “Add to Shopping Cart” button. Her computer made a loud, angry buzz, like she’d given the wrong answer in Jeopardy! The screen didn’t change. The book wasn’t added to her cart.
    Hm .
    She tried again and got the same angry buzz. On the third try, Jeanne looked up.
    “Something I can help you with there?”
    “No.” Cam tried two more times with no change in outcome. She tried exiting the screen and returning. No luck. She tried another book site, but they didn’t have it listed. She went to the website of her local library and couldn’t find it there, either. She even tried the biggest used-book site she knew. No go.
    Crap!
    This book seemed like the answer to her prayers. She tapped her fingers. Wel , there was a “LOOK INSIDE!”
    feature. With a little luck and a hel of a lot of patience, she might be able to find what she needed.
    Cam ran her mouse over the cover of the book and the image of the book changed.
    Now, that’s a little weird.
    What had been a bland detail of a Rembrandt painting became a ful portrait of a red-haired woman in a gorgeous olive satin frock. Cam looked closer. If she didn’t know better she’d almost have to say the woman looked like, wel , her.
    “Wow.”
    “What?” Jeanne asked. “Nothing.”
    Cam didn’t recognize the painting, which didn’t surprise her, though she certainly recognized the artist. It was a Peter Lely, a minor painter of the late-seventeenth century
    —interestingly the successor to Van Dyck as royal portraitist—whom the professors in grad school had only touched on.
    She had to admit, though, the painting—what she could see of it—was exquisite. Like Van Dyck, Lely had had a way of rendering fabric that made it practical y jump off the canvas. But there was something else about Lely that stuck in her head. What was it? Something that made him a bit out of the ordinary in the art world.
    She went to the bookcase and scanned the volumes of art books, looking for the exhibit catalog. And there it was. It had been in the office when she moved in. Painted Ladies: Women at the Court of Charles II. She pul ed the book off the shelf and instantly gasped.
    On the cover was a portrait by Lely. She recognized it now, had seen the original at the Yale Center for British Art a few years back. The young woman, a courtier of some sort, face framed in light auburn ringlets, gazed at Lely with a look of relaxed and bemused understanding, as if she had shared her innermost secrets with him and knew they would be safe. Her frock, if one could cal it that, was rendered in a stunning pumpkin silk that draped in gleaming folds so realistic Cam could almost hear the rustle. In the woman’s left hand was a pale peony, open and tinged with pink. She held it toward the viewer. But the most eye-catching part of the portrait was the porcelain white breast, curving upward to a firm rose nipple that sat unashamedly above the neckline of the silk.
    Cam put a hand to her cheek. “Wow.”
    “You’ve been using that word a lot,” Jeanne observed.
    Taken as a whole, the portrait packed a hel of a punch. A woman of the court, whose hair, makeup and clothes suggested a position of wealth and importance, yet who gazed upon her portraitist with unveiled sensuality, and who, more important, let her portraitist gaze upon her in dishabil e. Even in the licentious court of Charles I , this would have excited the attention of viewers—heck, Cam’s own bel y was tingling. And yet the portrait was not pornographic or leering in any way. It was a masterful y executed study of classic beauty: the proportions of the woman’s face, the gleam of her skin, the delicacy of the blossom, the living, moving silk. But it was something beyond mere craft that provoked Cam’s admiration. It was the trust the artist had built with his subject and the obvious appreciation with which he had portrayed the woman’s assurance.
    Cam found herself wondering with some