The Mastermind by Amy Lane

Author:Amy Lane [Lane, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gay romance
ISBN: 978-1-64405-872-5
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2021-01-20T22:00:00+00:00

Spun-up

DANNY’S APARTMENT was actually three floors below Marnie’s, which made Felix scowl a bit, but Danny had simply picked the first available apartment. Felix had grown up with money. He’d spent a long time trying to explain the nuances of different kinds of rich when they’d been younger, but unless Danny was trying to convince someone he was a lost prince from a long-dead country, he really could not see the difference.

There were the rich who enjoyed their money and lived kindly, and there were the rich who craved their money and lived cruelly. The one type of rich was hands off; the other type was hands most definitely on.

The rest was costume and character, really.

Danny’s apartment was—as Felix had pointed out—so bare as to be almost sterile.

Or it had been before Josh and his friends got hold of it.

Someone had bought or stolen art for almost every corner of the place: cityscapes for the pillars by the windows, country sketches for the softer colors of the tan-tiled, open-air kitchen, and a series of watercolors featuring muted people in the foreground and the streets of Chicago blended into the back, for the bedroom. As Josh and Stirling double-checked the monitoring system and the earbuds from the desk, Danny wandered restlessly around the bedroom, peering at the pictures on the wall.

“Josh?” he asked, puzzled. “Who painted these?”

Josh glanced up and cocked his head. “Wait, Stirling, did Papers do those?”

Stirling looked around and nodded shortly. Stirling didn’t do one word when none would suffice.

“Papers,” Josh said. “He was by this morning when Dad was here.”

“Papers,” Danny said flatly.

“Yeah, you know. The guy who gave us the provenance for all the art we stole?”

“We gave it back,” Danny said, because they had. They’d put every piece back in the secret safe—or, rather, the replicas they’d paid half of Felix’s fortune to have made so quickly while they kept the originals. What Marnie thought were the originals, anyway, since she apparently didn’t know real from fake. The only exception was the Pontalba jeweled comb; they had the original of that one.

But that wasn’t what Danny was looking at now. “He’s really stunning,” Danny said, studying the composition and the originality. “Does he do art forgeries too?”

“Sometimes,” Josh said. “He’s never sold them, though. I think he just likes to count brush strokes.”

“Well, I don’t need to worry about the provenances, then,” Danny said, chuckling slightly. “And I guess I can stop traveling to Prague to get my passport done.”

“Mm,” Josh said, his voice so noncommittal that Danny looked up.

“What’s that noise?” he asked suspiciously.

“You’ll have to ask Dad,” Josh murmured. “Grace, take the tiara off. Talia’s going to be here any minute, and she doesn’t need your thief cooties all over it.”

Grace stopped primping in front of the mirror on the back of the bathroom door. The door was closed. This was a system’s check of the coms too. “I do not have thief cooties.” His voice rang perfectly clear in Danny’s earbud. Grace

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