Scandalous Engagement

She wasn’t thrilled to see him, either.

Fifteen minutes earlier...

It was just another dinner with another client in a swanky restaurant. While he wasn’t a fan of the concept, he’d attended more than a few as an owner of Murphy International.

There was no reason to feel nervous.

Finn Murphy lifted his hand to loosen the tie cutting off his air supply and silently cursed when he realized he wasn’t wearing a tie and the collar to his black shirt was open.

He was not nervous. Stressed maybe, but not nervous. He and his brothers were in the final stretch of preparing for one of the biggest art auctions in a generation and it was his responsibility to ensure every piece auctioned—including paintings by the old masters, impressionists and cubists, negatives by Ansel Adams, and one of the best collections of Jade in the world—was beyond question and reproach. Every provenance for roughly eight hundred items needed to be checked, verified, collated.

If his nerves didn’t play up when he was falling off three-hundred-foot buildings BASE jumping or flying down black-diamond ski runs, then he had no reason to feel jittery while waiting for the arrival of one of the wealthiest art collectors in the world.

And his wife.

Ex-wife, dammit.

Finn picked up his water glass, put it down again and reached for his glass of red wine, lifting the crystal rim to his lips. He would not look at his older brother, not just yet. Carrick could look past Finn’s devil-may-care attitude to the rolling mess below his seemingly steady surface.

He didn’t want to talk about how the thought of seeing Beah again, even if it was just a business dinner, made him feel nerv—a little tense. They’d once been as close as two people could legally be; now they were little more than across-the-pond work colleagues, vague acquaintances.

“Take a deep breath, Finn.”

Finn narrowed his eyes at Carrick. His oldest brother looked calm and controlled, but amusement flickered in his light green eyes. Finn considered, as subtly as he could manage it, flipping off his brother. At fifteen, when he’d been the biggest rebel and pain in the ass, that might’ve been his reaction. At thirty-three, he was way past acting like a child. Or he should be.

But the urge was there.

“Why are you acting like a cat on a hot tin roof?” Carrick asked, picking up his tumbler of whiskey.

“I’m fine,” Finn replied through gritted teeth. “You know I prefer to be left out of these client dinners. I’m not good at making small talk.”

It wasn’t a lie—he really wasn’t. Carrick and Ronan were able to charm and coerce, to make small talk, but Finn tended to be too terse, too abrupt. His bluntness was legendary throughout Murphy International. There was a reason why he preferred to work alone, why he buried his head in books and texts and research. He was better with art and objects than he was with people. Inanimate objects didn’t talk back, dammit.

He was the company nerd, the brain, the Murphy recluse. He had no problem with any of those descriptions. They were all, to a degree, true.

Carrick’s gaze was steady. “You are here because Cummings wants to meet you. Apparently he’s quite a fan.”

Finn snorted. “He’s a fan? You make me sound like the front man of a boy band.”

“He was very impressed that, despite being blasted by every authority on D’Arcy, you refused to cave when the art world insisted you were wrong.”

This again? Years ago, fresh out of college with a PhD in art history, he’d published a paper suggesting the painting Thief in the Night, by the celebrated French artist, was painted by one of his apprentices and not by the master himself.

He’d been called an upstart and arrogant and worse, but he hadn’t cared then and didn’t care now. He knew what he knew and was rarely proved wrong. It had taken a year, and a series of forensic tests, for the art world to accept he was right. The owner of the D’Arcy, whose painting lost millions because Finn refused to budge, was still not a fan. But as Murphy International’s head of world art, Finn’s responsibility was to the art, not to the owners.

“Anyway, Paris Cummings was impressed by your research and your steadfastness under intense pressure.”

Finn picked up his wineglass and swirled the liquid around the bowl. “I don’t regret sticking to my guns but I do regret the bad PR around that incident.”

His arrogant attitude hadn’t helped. Back then he’d been particularly impressed with himself, thinking his double degree in art and forensics, and his ability to speak a half dozen languages, made him special, and he’d liked his reputation for being something of an art genius. He most definitely hadn’t liked being questioned. Admittedly, he’d been a bit of an ass.

These days, after a failed marriage and a decade to grow the hell up, he wasn’t so quick to tell people he was better, smarter, quicker. He’d come to realize that while he was smart in certain areas—he excelled at anything book-based and was naturally sporty—he was shockingly bad with people.

Unlike his brothers, he wasn’t emotionally intelligent. Concepts were easy; people weren’t.

People, and their sticky, complicated psyches, were a complete mystery to him. He didn’t think that would change anytime soon.

Finn leaned back in his chair and glanced at his oldest brother. His brother and Sadie—the art detective he’d hired to do a deep delve into a painting that might be a lost Homer—were engaged and besotted with each other. The air crackled whenever they were in the same room and the glances they exchanged were blowtorch-hot.