“But you probably knew all that,” I said hastily, and stepped away from him.
He reached for my hand. “I didn’t know any of that, Kennedy. I’ve never been to the Frick before.” His eyes held me, steadfast and serious. “Thank you for taking me.”
We strolled through the West Gallery, which boasted several Dutch paintings. He stopped at Frans Hals’s Portrait of a Young Woman, an image of a stocky, ruddy-looking woman dressed in black silk, with a massive lacy honeycomb contraption that rose up the length of her neck and met her at the chin. A similar collar adorned nearly all the subjects in the Dutch paintings in the West Gallery.
“What’s the deal with the Dutch crumb catchers?” he asked, appraising the paintings. “They’re like these gigantic collars. I mean if you shook them upside down, I bet all this food would fall out.”
I laughed, and next Noah gestured in the direction of a Francisco de Goya painting hanging in the corner. The painting was called The Forge and depicted workers forging metal.
Noah leaned in to whisper. “Do you think Mr. Frick was playing poker with Mr. Guggenheim and they bet this painting? And then Frick won and Guggenheim said, ‘I dare you to hang it up. Yeah, how about in that corner that had the framed Elvis towel before?’”
This time, I cracked up. I liked that he was sort of blasphemous. But mostly I liked what he was doing—he wanted to make me laugh.
“It was probably one of those big black towels,” he continued. “With the King wearing the white leather studded jacket.”
“You must have been a huge fan of his when you were a kid, right? I mean, he was popular back when you were growing up. That was his heyday, I think?” I teased him, waiting for his response.
His smile took over his face and he shook his head at me. “Oh, my, aren’t you so funny.”
We checked out a Turner, then strolled past an exhibit of Fragonards, including The Stolen Kiss painting that was on loan from a museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. In the picture a man plants a kiss on a woman’s cheek.
“I like that one,” he said to me in a low, sexy voice.
Goose bumps flared across my skin. “Me too.”
There was no joking, no teasing, no making fun of the art, or each other.
He reached his hand out to touch my hair, to brush some of the brown strands away from my neck. The slightest touch made my insides flip upside down. “It makes me think of you,” he said, soft and husky near my ear. I shivered all over and closed my eyes for a second to let the feeling race through me. “Then again, most things these days make me think of you.”
I didn’t move. I simply lingered there, with his hand on my hair, his words in my ear, my body so dangerously close to his. I was aware, faintly, of a few museum goers walking by.
“Let’s go the courtyard,” I said, gesturing to the rectangular courtyard in the middle of the house, with a fountain and benches. Soon, we were alone, out of the way of any prying eyes. He tugged at my arm and spun me around so we were face-to-face. His eyes raked over me, his gaze landing on my lips.
“Can I give you a stolen kiss, K?”
My body hummed and buzzed all over. “You don’t have to steal it, because I’ll give it to you freely.”
“Then I’ll take what you’re offering,” he said, and we reenacted the painting. I was on a slow simmer when his lips touched my cheek, and he held there, unrushed, unhurried. It was merely a kiss on the cheek, but I’d never felt this way before. I’d never felt my body want something, someone, so much.
We pulled apart, and the look on his face was dazed. Like a punch-drunk cartoon character. As we sat down on one of the benches, he reached for my hand and wove my fingers tightly into his. Holding hard. I squeezed back.
“What am I going to do with you?” he said in low voice.
“What do you mean?”
“What am I going to do about the fact that I am falling so hard for you?”
Everything in me sizzled. I was alive, electric, turned up high. I was going to need a fan, or maybe a contingent of servants with palm fronds to keep me cool. “I’m falling for you too,” I said, because I couldn’t hold it in any longer.
“Do you think it’s bad that I’m older than you?” he asked, and he seemed embarrassed. But since I was in it with him, I’d be the last person to think his feelings were bad. Even so, I was glad he raised the issue. It would have been weird if he hadn’t brought it up.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. Because I didn’t. His age—and he was only eight years older—didn’t matter to me. It wasn’t a big age difference; it wasn’t even that big a life difference. Many of my friends’ parents had the same or bigger age differences. “Do you?”
I held my breath, hoping, praying, needing him to say no.
“Kind of,” he said. “I mean, I don’t even think this is legal.”
“Actually, it is,” I corrected. “I looked it up. The age of consent in New York is seventeen. I’ve been seventeen since June. So, two months now. Since before I started coming to your office,” I added.
He smiled a small smile. “Look at you. Checking out the facts. I’m flattered.”
“I’m not trying to flatter you,” I said firmly, because the truth was important. The law even more so. Some states labeled eighteen as the age of consent; but God bless New York for marking seventeen. Besides, I was consenting. He was my choice. “I wanted to know. We’re not doing anything wrong.”