Mismatch - By Nana Malone Page 0,81
don’t want you eating yourself alive trying to protect me anymore. You should have told Vince as soon as you suspected I'd forged the paintings. You’re putting your career in jeopardy to save my skin. It's like when you tried to claim you’d done the forgeries so it would keep me out of jail. You have to stop.”
Eli flinched. He was exhausted. When the Feds had come to his house to question him and his mother about Samson, it had been a knee-jerk reaction to claim the paintings as his. He’d tried to say they were for a project. He hadn’t counted on the agents testing him. He didn’t have Samson’s skill and he’d failed the test. “I should probably tell you that I'm getting closer to figuring out what's going on.”
“That would be great news if I thought you had some back up. Look, I didn't kick heroine and that other shit just to watch you get taken out by some scum. Did you tell Vince?”
Eli nodded. “He's on it, but I had a run in with Jessica’s step-dad to be. He knows about your past.”
Samson didn’t even flinch. “Any idea how he found out?”
“Not a clue. But the douchebag was suggesting that I might want to start playing nice with him if I wanted to keep my new career. I've got vice pulling his prints now. I know we know him from somewhere. I just wish I could place his fucking face.”
“You’ll figure it out. In the meantime, are we good?”
“We’ll get there.”
“Fair enough. Look, about Jessica. I wasn’t really trying to kiss her. For what it's worth. She loves you, Eli. Not me.”
Pain radiated in Eli’s chest. “Well, up until twenty-four hours ago, she thought we were the same person.”
Sam shrugged before levering himself back onto the couch. “Not exactly. When she came to the studio yesterday, and I tried to get her out of there so I could call you, she knew right away that I wasn’t you. She kept looking at me funny and eventually stopped calling me Eli and started calling me Samson.”
“You’re saying she knew?”
“Not exactly, but she knew something was off. At the very least, she probably thought you had dissociative personality disorder or something.”
Eli huffed out a breath. “Great, she thought I was crazy.”
“Well, crazy or not, she told me and I quote, ‘I love my Eli.’”
Sassy. Shit, the lump in his throat started morphing from golf ball into beach ball.
“You really don't have any idea where she is?”
“I’ve looked everywhere I can think of. There’s always the chance that her friend Izzy is lying, and Jessica is there, but her car isn’t in Malibu.”
Sam raised a brow. “How do you know her car isn’t in Malibu?”
“I had Vince run a GPS tracer on it.”
“Dude.”
“What? It's not like I’m stalking her. She told me she had GPS installed in case the thing ever got stolen. So I had him hack her GPS...” He let his voice trail. “Okay, so I’m a little bit of a stalker.”
“Yeah, I’d say so.” Sam grinned. “It's good to see you like this. Not so buttoned-up”
Eli rolled his shoulders. “I'm not buttoned-up. Didn’t you hear? I’m an artist.”
Sam grinned. “That's right. My brother, the sculptor. I want to commission a piece, by the way, to replace the one you sold out from under me.”
“Bullshit, you put it into the exhibition so it would sell.”
Sam shrugged. “Maybe. But you have to admit that you are an artist. Maybe I got more attention for it when we were kids, but you were every bit as talented. You weren’t nearly as outspoken or brash. You preferred to sit with your clay and quietly build stuff.”
“You ran around the house with a paint brush screaming, ‘look at me.’”
“Hey, we each have our talents.” Sam nursed his soda. “So what are you going to do about Jessica?”
“Find her. Explain. Beg her to forgive me.”
“You really love her, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“You should see the look on your face when you talk about her.”
“She’s something else. I—” His phone buzzed. Jogging over to the kitchen counter, he snapped it up. “Yeah, Vince, did you find her?”
“No luck, buddy, but I might have a different present for you. Those prints you brought over?”
“Yeah?”
“The name Michael Ellis ring a bell?”
Eli frowned and tried to remember where he'd heard that name before. “The name Ellis sounds vaguely familiar, but I’m not sure why.”
“Go ahead and ask your brother if he knows the name.”
“Sam? Uh, yeah,