Billionaire Brothers 01-04 The Complete Serial Box Set Read online

  Straightening my top and skirt, I checked my posture as soon as I stood up in case someone was watching me from the house. Make a good impression, the schoolmarm advised me solemnly.

  I stepped carefully toward the front door arch, focusing on keeping my posture erect though the crate was a lot heavier than I thought it would be. Still, I didn’t want to arrive without it, and didn’t want to just pull the paintings out one by one, and didn’t want to look exhausted and panicked either.

  Oh my god, calm the fuck down, Margot.

  I rang the bell with my elbow and waited, listening to the musical gong echoing in the space behind the wide, carved door. It was a nice doorbell, serene and somewhat languid. I hoped I was going to get the chance to turn my own doorbell into something so nice before they kicked me out.

  The crate pulled drastically on my arms and I shifted it across my hip, still trying to appear as though it wasn’t too heavy, really. Finally I heard soft footsteps approaching the door and gave a little whimper of relief.

  The handle clicked and the door swung inward.

  “Hey, stranger,” Jackson said, his smile momentarily illuminating the entryway like a blast of lightning.

  I gasped and choked simultaneously, burping out a sound that sounded like my tongue had slid halfway back in my throat.

  “Oh, geez, are you carrying that? Let me…” he said, stepping quickly into the vestibule in his bare feet and taking the crate by its rope handles.

  I gave it to him wordlessly as my brain spun in confusion. Why is he here? Did I know he would be here? How am I supposed to act? Why does he smell so good? Where is his shirt?

  “This is heavy! Wow… Hey are you OK?”

  I fluttered inwardly for a few more seconds before finally nodding with as much confidence as I could muster.

  “Yeah that really was heavier than I thought it would be,” I replied lamely.

  He nodded and smiled. Somehow his expression conveyed a genuine friendly feeling as though we had known each other a long time. It did a little to set me at ease, but not enough to keep my eyes from flickering over the ripples of his chest muscles as they bunched and calmed from the shifting weight of the crate.

  “I’m sorry I kept you waiting,” he said, gesturing with his chin that I should walk ahead of him down the wide hall. The ochre and sienna-colored plaster was soothing and rich, like swimming in a sea of warm honey. On every wall, in every niche, there was a painting or piece of sculpture and I was a little sad we were moving so quickly through it. I was sure I spotted a Modigliani and what looked for all the world like a tiny Vermeer. It was like an intimate treasure trove of someone’s personal taste, played out in artifacts. I wanted to touch everything.

  “I assumed Raul was going to fetch you but then I didn’t hear the door open. I think Eddie’s in the garden. Just bear left across the living room.”

  I tried to walk elegantly and kept nodding like an attentive schoolgirl until I could come up with a better plan. How was I supposed to act in front of the guy I had hooked up with the night before? I had absolutely no idea. I kept my eyes on the walls and shelves, making a personal promise to walk out slower so I could really investigate. Was that a Rembrandt? Holy wow.

  “Eddie?” I asked politely.

  “Well, Edna… Eddie… That’s just what we call her,” he said as we walked through a tall library with floor-to-ceiling shelves stuffed with what must have been thousands of books, most of them paperbacks. There were so many they were arranged vertically and then had layers of horizontal stacks shoved into every remaining space on the shelves. It was a noisy, colorful riot of popular culture.

  Some art school kid could probably get an NEA grant for this kind of installation, I thought sourly then tried to shove the idea out of my mind. Obviously this collector had a different kind of taste, something far and away from novelty and spectacle. By the looks of it, she was really searching for quality, longevity, respect for tradition… Just the sorts of things I prided myself on.

  Jackson led me to a set of open French doors and out into the sunny garden. An older woman in a long, colorful kaftan sat at a small table. She waved her fingers to beckon us over and gave a wide, friendly smile.

  “Oh, Jackson, you don’t have to haul those all over the house,” she chided gently as we approached. “Will you set them up for me in the gallery please?”

  “Sure, Eddie,” he said and leaned in to kiss her chastely on her lined, soft cheek. She wrinkled her nose affectionately at him as he hefted the crate to his other hip and nodded politely at me.

  “Later then,” he said with a grin, and I kept my eyes carefully connected to anywhere north of his washboard abs and chiseled chest and shoulders.

  “Yes,” I said, trying to sound professional and like maybe I had never seen his penis. “Thanks for carrying that for me.”

  “Anytime,” he replied and walked away across the garden while I dutifully did not watch him and focused on Edna instead. She was small and delicate, but with a wiry strength in her quick, self-assured movements. Her eyes glittered with intelligence and wit and I instantly decided that I loved her.

  “Sit,” she beckoned me. “I was just about to have some breakfast. Won’t you join me?”

  “Of course, I would love to,” I cooed even as my inner schoolmarm moaned about the delay. I settled onto the cushion of an antique cast iron chair, crossing my legs as gracefully as possible and smiling openly. “You have a beautiful… an amazing home,” I breathed, unable to contain my excitement.

  “Oh, you’re so kind,” she purred as a man rolled up a trolley with a coffee carafe and trays of berries and small cakes. He set the trays on the table and then gave us each a cup of strong coffee and two small plates with a starter selection of strawberries, poached pears with honey, and small, hard discs of some kind of cheese.

  “This all looks wonderful.”

  “It’s one of the luxuries of Los Angeles, don’t you think? You can eat every meal outside. No mosquitoes, perfect weather… I’ll bet every other house on the hill is dining al fresco even as we speak.”

  I chuckled. “That could very well be,” I sighed, biting into a crimson strawberry and relishing the sweet burst as it slid across my tongue. “This is a lovely garden. The orange blossoms smell so sweet.”

  “It’s small, just enough,” she replied modestly. “Raul and I can’t keep up with much more than this anymore. Oh, try the quince jam… Yes there you go. Raul makes it from our own tree, just over there.”

  She ladled a lump of jam onto a round of cheese and popped it into her mouth with a happy, satisfied sound. Her eyes took in the garden and the view of downtown LA in the valley below, always moving, always squinting at everything as though assessing it. I suspected she didn’t miss much.

  “You’re Winnie’s girl, aren’t you?” she said suddenly, spearing a stack of pear slices onto her plate.

  I nodded. “She was my aunt. You knew her?”

  “Yes, we went way back. We dated co-stars from the same movie in the seventies, and practically had to be on a perpetual double date for the whole six months the film was shooting. I was bored in three. I think Winnie was bored the whole damn time. But you know: PR. That was the way of it.”

  I bobbed my head sagely. Oh yes, PR, I repeated to myself, wondering if dating a movie star involved contracts or what.

  “So then you still live just down the hill?”

  “Yes,” I replied. Then it occurred to me I could probably see my house from where we were, and I scanned the hillside until I spotted the bright blue water of my swimming pool and pointed to it. “Oh, I’m just there… I’ll try to wave to you next time I’m swimming, haha.”

  “That’s a beautiful house,” she mused. “We had such a time there.... such parties! So many memories! Brando cooked dinner in your kitchen, you know.”

  My eyes widened. “What? Marlon Brando cooked dinner in… my kitchen?”

  She waved her hand in the air. “Oh he was a
great cook. I love a man who can cook, don’t you? It’s so delightful to be waited on once in a while. Really treated. And Marlon really knew how to treat a lady. But what a temper! He could be so moody.”

  I found myself nodding like a complete dope. This was a woman who had been “treated like a lady” by Marlon Brando. Who knew what other kinds of saucy information lived in her brain? You really should have Googled her before you came over, I scolded myself.

  “So you kept the house?” she continued as she sipped at her coffee cup, her small plate empty in front of her.

  “Oh I’ve kept it almost the same as she left it to me,” I replied. “Even some of the furniture… it just seemed to go with the decor too much to replace.”

  Oh my god did Marlon Brando sit on my couch? I wondered breathlessly, then tried to push the thought aside for later.

  “That’s been, what… eight years now?”

  “Yes, I was seventeen when she passed.”

  “And you’ve been living all alone in that house since then?”

  “Well… Yes, I guess so, now that you mention it. I had a boyfriend… fiance really… But that didn’t work out.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, cocking her head sympathetically. She really did look like she cared too.

  “Oh, no, that’s all right,” I said breezily. “Being an artist, you spend so much time alone anyway, just wrapped up in your work. It’s just the way of things. I guess I never really thought about it before.”

  “You like it that way then? Being alone?”

  Her bright green eyes settled on me and I got the impression I was really expected to come up with a good answer. Did I like being alone? I didn’t know, but I ended up that way whether I liked it or not. I painted alone, naturally. And when I was in the intellectual working-out stages of a painting I couldn’t really stand too much human interaction or the whole project got off track, so I did that alone. And now that Kevin was in San Francisco, I was alone even during the times when I might prefer to be otherwise.

  But did I actually like it? At that moment, I couldn’t be sure.

  “It seems to be the most productive choice for me,” I admitted finally, watching her closely to see if my answer was satisfactory.

  “Productive,” she echoed. “I have to admit, I admire your discipline. When I was twenty-five, well… I was anything but productive. There was a lot of Marlon Brando around, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh!” I blurted, nearly sputtering into my coffee.

  “And knowing Winnie… well I can see the apple didn’t fall too far from the family tree. It must be an awful lot of discipline!”

  I blushed fiercely. Was this old lady suggesting my Aunt Winnie was some kind of Hollywood hobag? My mind reeled at the thought. She died suddenly when I was a teenager, back when I was still convinced that sexuality was my own personal secret invention. I had never seen her as an individual; she just seemed like my elderly authority figure, remote and unassailable. But she couldn’t have been much past fifty-five years old when she died in a drunk driving incident. She was still young and vibrant, I understood now through adult-colored glasses.

  The images from the pictures above my fireplace flickered through my mind. I had never moved them, but I didn’t really see them anymore either. They had faded into the rhythm of the house years ago. There were dozens of snapshots from her days as a model, on movie sets with some very famous folk, and grinning at casual beachside barbecues and the like. Come to think of it, she was a beautiful, talented woman, and suddenly I wished I had her back so I could ask her about her life. Could it have been her that Brando cooked for? I mean, it seemed preposterous, but could it have been?

  Right on, Aunt Winnie!

  Edna seemed satisfied by my answer, at least for the moment, and I decided not to say anything else on the matter until I had really figured it out for myself.

  Finally she set her coffee down and winked at me. The wind billowed her blousy blue- and green-swirled kaftan over her lap. “I could just sit out here all day,” she confided. “Actually, sometimes I do! But let’s get up to the gallery, shall we? I’m sure you have lots to do today.”

  I smiled in answer and stood up, not too excitedly. She rose with an easy, agile grace and I wondered why she was wearing that frumpy kaftan. From the looks of her, I bet she had a pretty rocking figure under all that fabric.

  As we passed back through the library, I took another look at the multi-colored riot of books on the shelves and asked, “Is this Jackson’s contribution to your collection?”

  “Is this… Oh!” she laughed. “So you know about Jackson’s… soft spot, shall we say?”

  “Yes I caught him the act at the airfield in San Francisco.”

  She paused in front of the nearest shelf, chuckling.

  “You know, there are about a thousand other places he could have brought all this, but somehow he wanted them here. I don’t know if I should be flattered or affronted!”

  She rolled her eyes and continued to the sunlit stairway at the back of the library.

  “Well maybe he thought since you’re both collectors…”

  “Oh Jackson’s not a true collector,” she said briskly as she began to climb the spiral staircase. I hurried to keep up with her.

  “Not a-- What do you mean?”

  She shrugged and picked up the front of her kaftan to keep from catching it on the stairs, then let it down when we entered the large, round gallery. I bit my lip and tried not to gawk like a kid. It was a huge room, lit from diffused skylights above. Every inch of the 15 foot high walls was covered with some kind of art. Paintings upon paintings were mounted all the way up in a dizzying symphony of art.

  “Oh my gosh,” I breathed, wandering closer to the wall, hushed as if I had suddenly found myself in a church. There were paintings from the last 400 years, all together. Baroque masterpieces hung alongside modern Spanish masters, next to German post-impressionists. It was profound and complexly varied, yet somehow it all sort of made sense when seen together.

  “A true collector is ruthless for their collection, selective and uncompromising, whereas Jackson is more of an… evangelist. He’s more of a populist.”

  “That’s funny,” I breathed, distracted and overwhelmed by the desire to see and touch everything. The grasping hand in a painting by some nameless icon painter seem to reach toward the spiral of exultant cherubs in the Bouguereau next to it.

  “Now, Declan,” she continued, “there’s a man after my own heart. He can be absolutely unmerciful, if you know what I mean.”

  “What?” I said, startled out of my trance. “Unmerciful?”

  Her eyes sparkled as she nodded. “He’s an inspiration, truly. You see, a collector is an artist too. Just as you make critical decisions about what belongs and what has to be eliminated for the sake of a painting, we do the same thing for the whole collection. To make it sing, together.” She ended with her hand floating in the air, gesturing toward the whole room as though to illustrate what a successful collection looked like. And she was right; I could barely begin to fathom what it would take to acquire, arrange, and hang all these pieces. The fact that it had taken decades made the process even more impressive, like a slow motion painting on a grand.... impossibly grand scale. It left me breathless to even consider. How would you begin?

  “And Declan?” I stammered, trying to find something stable to talk about as my mind reeled. “What does he collect?”

  Please don’t say human skins, I begged her silently. Please don’t say the hearts of his enemies.

  “Oh, this and that,” she replied unhelpfully. “Companies… investments… talent…”

  Her words trailed away as she cocked her head in concentration and began to walk toward the far side where Jackson had set my uncrated paintings against the wall. I bit the inside of my cheek as I realized they were directly underneath an early Rothko and what looked like a Courbet. The colors sang together with my smaller, detailed still l
ifes and I hoped she thought the same.

  I walked carefully behind her, trying not to interrupt but aching to hear her thoughts. As I tried to see what she saw, I was satisfied: the frames were perfect for each piece and seemed to coordinate with the frames around them. The glossy, lush varnish corresponded to the rock-candy-hard surface of the small Dutch still lifes nearby. My lemons, orange blossoms, and humble silver vessels seemed to fit perfectly with various paintings around this section of wall as though they were the repetition of a musical phrase in a song.

  She slowly advanced from painting to painting, her right hand knuckling her chin in concentration as she took them in for longer and longer periods of time. I waited eagerly at the other end of the line of them, giving her a respectful amount of space as my blood rushed like a tidal wave in my ears.

  Finally she turned back to me, a triumphant smile playing at her lips.

  “This one, I think, don’t you agree?”

  My breath caught in my throat. Slowly I walked to stand beside her and looked at the painting: a collection of purple-black plums and tangerines spilling from a silver charger on a white tablecloth.

  “Thank you,” I said, unsure what else to say. She looked up at me and I realized I was a good five inches taller.

  “That’s wonderful,” she said eagerly, bouncing up a little on her toes. I could see her pulse fluttering in the space between her collarbones. Her excitement was palpable, but…

  “And… the others?” I choked out, trying to control my voice.

  She looked at me, confused, as though my question didn’t make any sense.

  “Well they don’t fit at all, do they,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  “They don’t?”

  She shrugged, her gesture laced with something like impatience. I had the feeling my time here was done and she did not appreciate the extension I was asking for.

  “You’re a fine painter, of course,” she explained. “But this painting is all I need. It says everything about you. The others would be… superfluous.”

  “Oh,” I said, commanding my voice to sound controlled. I tried to smile but only managed a jerky twitch of one corner of my mouth.