Flowers for Him

Flowers for Him

Flowers for Him

Flowers for Him

eBook

$2.99 

Available on Compatible NOOK Devices and the free NOOK Apps.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers

LEND ME® See Details

Overview

He wanted to learn about beauty. He never expected to learn about love.

Billionaire Chandler Harrison's third marriage is now history, and he's left with his ex-wife's parting barb, 'You have no appreciation of beauty.' Determined to prove her wrong, Chandler hires artist Neil Sweeney to add a mural to his office wall. He doesn't even care what the picture is, as long as it's beautiful.

Neil Sweeney is an ex-tagger, a free spirit, and a bit of a hippie. He's never met anybody as uptight as Chandler, but when it comes to warming up Chandler's cold, stark office, Neil has plans involving more than art.

Chandler begins to find himself strangely moved by the mural developing on his office wall. He's especially moved by the artist himself. Chandler has denied his homosexual urges for most of his life, but it isn't long before Neil begins introducing Chandler to all kinds of new things. As Neil's masterpiece comes to life, so does Chandler's appreciation for art, colour, and the best kind of beauty of all—love.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781781843048
Publisher: Totally Entwined Group
Publication date: 10/05/2013
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 48
Sales rank: 572,312
File size: 200 KB
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Marie Sexton lives in Colorado. She’s a fan of just about anything that involves muscular young men piling on top of each other. In particular, she loves the Denver Broncos and enjoys going to the games with her husband. Her imaginary friends often tag along. Marie has one daughter, two cats, and one dog, all of whom seem bent on destroying what remains of her sanity. She loves them anyway.

Rowan Speedwell avoids dealing with reality as much as possible, but sometimes it finds her no matter how far or fast she runs. She likes angst and drama in books, where they belong, and prefers sunshine, rainbows, and lollipops. She has not listened to pop music since 1984, when she saw the movie The Terminator and was frightened back into her shell.

Rowan lives east of the sun and west of the moon, with her Cat, Kimball O’Hara ('Supreme Overlord of the Wasted Lands'). She doesn’t believe in telephones or television, although people assure her frequently that they do exist.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Chandler

The room that served as both my office and my boardroom was perfect in every way. White walls. White floor. A polished black teak desk against the wall, and a matching table in the middle. The fixtures were all black and silver, as were the chairs.

Streamlined. Practical. Functional. Just the way I liked it.

The only thing out of place was the artist I was paying to destroy it.

This is all Abby's fault.

An uncharitable thought, but it was foremost in my mind as I showed him into the room. He was in his early thirties, younger than I by a good ten years. His ragged jeans and threadbare T-shirt were stained with paint, as were the brown plastic-rimmed glasses he wore. He needed a haircut. I made a mental note to be more specific next time I asked for an artist. No hippies. No freaks.

Too late now.

"This is the wall?" He pushed his hair out of his eyes and stepped back to survey the pristine expanse of eggshell white.

"Is it sufficient?"

"You bet." He turned in a slow circle to glance slowly around the room. "Wow. This is ..." He waved his hand in circles as he searched for a word.

"Clean?"

"I was going to say boring, but yeah. Clean, too."

Definitely Abby's fault. Abby was ex-wife number three. "You're uptight, Chandler, and you're boring!" she'd said when she left me — and my substantial bank account — for an electrician. "You'll never learn to relax."

"I can relax," I'd countered. "I have a pool. I have a Jacuzzi. I have a sauna. I have my own private masseuse! What else do I need?"

She'd laughed at me. "You need to learn to appreciate life. To look for beauty." She'd turned to gesture at the white walls of my office. "Look at this! This is exactly what I'm talking about."

Then she'd left, and I'd sat there, staring at the untainted white walls of my office, trying to sort through it.

Two weeks later, I'd decided to prove her wrong by having a mural painted on the long wall opposite my desk. I'd told my secretary to find me an artist.

"What kind of artist?"

"I don't know," I'd snapped. "A good one."

"Of course, Mr Harrison. But what style? Realistic? Fantasy? Abstract?"

"Not abstract. Definitely no abstract."

And now here I was, staring at this rumpled, paint-stained man. "What's your name?"

"Neil Sweeney." He turned to shake my hand. "Do you prefer to be called Mr Harrison?"

I did, and yet suddenly, I didn't want to admit it. It made me feel old. "You can call me Chandler."

His smile grew bigger. "Great!" He surveyed the wall. "So what exactly did you have in mind? Your secretary didn't seem to know."

"Something beautiful."

He laughed. "I figured you didn't want anything heinous."

"Honestly, I hadn't thought much about it."

"So, you want me to paint a mural, but you don't know what you want it to be?"

"I believe I'm paying you a substantial amount of money for this project."

"You are," he said, suddenly serious. "I appreciate the work, too. Believe me. I just want to make sure you're happy with the finished product."

I could appreciate that, but I still didn't know what I wanted. "Something with trees?" I offered.

"Well, that's a start. Maybe you could show me around a bit. Let me see what kind of art you have now. I might be able to get an idea from that."

I gestured around the office. "It's all like this."

The smile fell from his face, replaced by disbelief. "You must have some kind of art? How about in your home?"

"Not really. Only what my ex-wife bought, but they weren't real pictures. Just boxes and swirls. And she took most of that with her, anyway."

He leant back against the boardroom table, his broad hands resting on its smooth, black surface. Even his skin was stained with paint. "Most murals are landscapes. In the seventies, everybody had aspen groves, but we can do better than that. Maybe a beach, or a mountain scene? Some people like to use them to evoke foreign places, like a vineyard, or pagodas, or a cobblestone avenue from an Italian villa. Or you can go a bit surreal, like seeing Narnia through the wardrobe, you know?"

No, I didn't know. The only thing I could really think about was the handprints he was leaving on my shiny, black table. I'd have to send somebody in to wipe it clean.

"I don't really care." I was beginning to realise what a terrible idea the whole thing was. I'd probably paint right over it again anyway. "I'm not concerned about the subject matter. Just paint something. Please."

A broad smile spread slowly across his face. "You have any idea how many artists dream of a moment like this?"

"It hadn't ever occurred to me, but I'm glad the arrangement will be advantageous for us both. Now, I keep erratic hours. I can't expect you to work around me. I only ask that you work in silence while I'm here. You'll need to absent yourself during our meetings, but otherwise, you can come and go as you like. Sally will see that you have an access code."

"Sounds great, man. I'll get started right away. I have a show in a couple of weeks, but I'll be done in plenty of time to prep for that."

His enthusiasm and his smile unnerved me. He had perfect teeth. Nice bone structure. Gorgeous lips. He'd be extremely attractive, if he just cleaned up a bit.

Best not to think about that.

In fact, it was probably best to leave, before I had a chance to fire him.

Or something worse.

CHAPTER 2

Neil

I'd never seen anything as fucking cold as that office.

There wasn't a spot of colour. Black. White. Chrome. I'd been in freezer cases warmer than that room. Hell, I'd been fucked in freezer cases warmer than that room. I didn't know who'd convinced people stark was elegant. Stark wasn't elegant. Stark was boring. Worse than boring — it was chickenshit. An excuse for lazy people. But this place was worse than boring, worse than stark. It was fucking freezing.

Except for the guy standing in the middle of it.

He wasn't black and white — unless you counted the silver streaks in his black hair. He was grey. Grey suit — that probably cost my annual income, though that wasn't saying much — grey eyes, grey personality. The kind of guy who'd have had me arrested during my tagger days. The kind of guy who probably drove one of the couple-hundred-thousand-dollar cars that were an almost irresistible target in my tagger days.

Well, those days were long behind me. I was more or less law-abiding now.

But God, that place needed colour. It needed life. Something warm. Something hot. Something ...

Tropical.

I started to grin, and he must have been watching, because he said sharply, "What?"

"Just thought of a concept. I'll need to rough out some sketches. I could bring them by tomorrow, get your okay ..."

He waved a hand impatiently. "I told you, I don't care. Just ... do something."

Oh, yeah, Chandler Harrison, I thought wickedly, I'm definitely going to do something.

* * *

Once I had the idea, it came together quickly. I arrived at his office early, drawings and drafting supplies in my beat-up backpack. He was already there, working, his desk piled high — but neatly — with stacks of paper. He had one of those computers with three screens. He glanced from one to another to the piles of paper, seemingly oblivious to my arrival.

But I saw the glint in his eyes, even as he turned back to whatever he was working on. Oh, he knew I was there, all right.

Two could play at that game.

I went over to the wall — my new canvas — and started to work. A primer coat of my proprietary mixture, the recipe for which they would pry from my cold dead hands, then a few minutes to let it dry while I arranged the rest of my equipment. I could feel him watching me, but not in a suspicious way. More of an assessing way. There was something speculative in his gaze, which I caught once or twice out of the corner of my own eye. I chalked it up to curiosity about what I was going to paint.

Some muralists worked piecemeal, finishing one section completely before moving to the next. Others used the classic enlargement process, working with a paper pattern marked with boxes and drawing proportional boxes on the wall to make the wall design identical to the paper version.

I worked free. I saw the design in my head, and though I might do rough drafts, or print pictures of specific elements I wasn't so familiar with for reference, I didn't use a paper design once I'd worked out the basics. I was glad Chandler Harrison was one of those rare types who didn't need to see exactly what I was doing. Too often a control freak would mess up my Zen, and the picture would lose some of the spontaneity I loved in the art. Oh, the client was always pleased, but I rarely was. I hardly ever went back and looked at murals once I was done with them.

This one, I suspected I'd want to see again. I worked fast, but I knew what I was doing, and it was easy to slide into the headspace that I needed. Michelangelo said he only looked for the essence in the stone, then cut away the excess to find the statue within. That was how I felt about painting. It was working the white space with the tools of colour to find the design that was hidden there. And what was hidden on that wall was going to be spectacular.

But as absorbed as I got with the process, I was still aware of what was going on around me. It was a legacy of the tagging — you needed to be alert, to know when you were about to be caught and how long you could work up to that edge. So even as I was painting — the underlayment, the first layers of colour, of light and shadows — I couldn't help being aware of what was going on in that office.

One of the things I discovered over the next few days was that Chandler Harrison wasn't any kind of figurehead. He worked hard — often from before I got in at about seven a.m. or so, and still working when I'd packed up my gear at suppertime. He ate at his desk, sometimes answered two or three phone calls at a time while banging away at his computer, and his three assistants were constantly in and out of the office with stacks of paper and files. A typical type-A personality, you'd think. God knew I'd seen enough of them — I'd done murals for banks and law firms and investment companies — to recognise the type.

But he was kind, and that I wasn't expecting. His assistants came in at nine, they always took lunch, although staggered so he always had coverage, and at five on the dot, they stuck their heads in to say goodnight to him — and, after a couple of days, to me. They didn't look frazzled or overwhelmed or bitter the way PAs did at other firms. They looked ... happy. Busy, but happy. And he never yelled at them, even if he'd just got off a phone call where he was arguing with someone, or if he'd just read an email that made him swear under his breath. If they came in, he was courteous.

I finished the background shadows on the third day, so that the lower part of the wall was all in tones of browns and greys and purples, and was starting to pencil in the shapes of the plants in charcoal. The clicking of the keyboard keys had stopped, and I knew by the prickling on the back of my neck that he was watching me. "So," I said, as I swept a line upward into the lighter-coloured section at the top of the wall, "what exactly is it you do here, anyway?"

"What?" His voice was startled, and I smiled to myself. He had been watching me — he just hadn't expected me to be aware of it.

"Your company. Companies. Harrison Companies, right? So, more than one. What do they do?"

"Um ... different things. The oldest one, Harrison Transportation, is over a hundred years old. My great-grandfather started it." I heard him get up and a moment later, heard the gurgle of coffee being poured from the carafe on the boardroom credenza. Another thing to like about the guy — he got his own goddamned coffee. I didn't hear him walking because the carpet in the room was about three feet thick. I had to use double helpings of craft tape to stick down the plastic sheeting I used because the carpet kept popping it off the wall trim where I had it taped.

"So he was what, a railroad baron?"

"Something like that. Started out on the rails, but ended up owning the railroad. Then he got into mining — we sold that part off early — and hotels. Shipping. Banking. Real estate. Cattle. I don't think there was much old First didn't try out. He settled on hotels, transportation and real estate, though our involvement in those ventures is mostly financial these days. That's where most of our income comes from."

"You own the whole shebang?"

"Technically, the stockholders do, but I'm the majority. We have a board of directors, but they do what I tell them to do. As long as we stay legal, they don't have a lot of wiggle room."

I laughed. "Hell, these days, 'legal' covers a lot of territory." I glanced over my shoulder at him. He was propped against the boardroom table, a wry smile on his face.

"Yes, it does, but I try not to take advantage. Most of our activity nowadays is in the Harrison Foundation, which manages a number of charitable trusts. International charities, educational foundations, AIDS research, that sort of thing. First would have a stroke if he knew about them."

"Why do you call him 'First'?"

"He was Chandler the First. I'm Chandler the Fourth." The smile grew twisted. "At the rate I'm going, there's not likely to be a Chandler the Fifth." Then he flushed and said, "That was inappropriate."

I grinned at him. "That's okay. I'm rarely appropriate."

But he'd got all stiff and formal again. "So what is it?" he asked, gesturing towards the wall.

I didn't want to give him specifics, so I shrugged and said, "Trees. You said you wanted trees."

He frowned. "It doesn't look like trees. It looks like one of those paintings my ex-wife used to buy. Boxes and swirls."

"Hey, boxes and swirls have their place. Houses and flowers are just boxes and swirls."

"But they're not. They have details. They look real."

"This will look real when it's done, too. It'll look so real you'll want to walk right into it. Trust me."

He scowled. "I never trust anyone who says 'trust me'."

I almost laughed. Despite all of Chandler's properness and consternation, he looked like nothing more than a disappointed kid. The sudden thought struck me. He's adorable. Who'd'a thought it — Mister Freeze was cute. Hard on the heels of that thought was another. And he's lonely ... Lonely? The guy could buy and sell half the country. He could hire companionship. And I'd seen pictures of him at posh events, always with some trophy babe on his arm, dripping in diamonds as cold as his expression in the photos. 'Chandler Harrison, CEO of Harrison Companies, and Mrs. Abigail Harrison'. That was the ex-wife — a blonde just as chilly as he was, but apparently not chilly enough. There were other trophy babes, too — actresses, socialites, debutantes, all looking bored.

I didn't think I'd ever been bored a day in my life.

He went back to his desk and we both worked in silence for the rest of the afternoon. He was focused on one of the three computer screens on his desk and ignoring me. Or so I thought — as I turned around to go back to my painting, I caught him giving me a glance out of the corner of his eye. The glance flicked away as quickly as it had happened, but that was when I knew for sure he was watching me.

He might have had a slew of trophies, but I was beginning to suspect old Chandler Harrison was playing for my team.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "Flowers for Him"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Marie Sexton and Rowan Speedwell.
Excerpted by permission of Totally Entwined Group Limited.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews