The Artist's Touch (The Gentlemen's Guild Book 1) Read online

  “Interesting,” Pierce mused, a perceptive smile spreading over his dark face. “You know, you should really stop being so pissed at me. It was an honest mistake what happened. I’m not to blame for the fact that Jack won’t give you the drawing back, although the irony is incredibly satisfying.”

  “No, I think you are exactly to blame,” Tristan countered, his voice rising with his temper.

  It had been a long week – a long week without Ellie. He’d almost caved yesterday, determining to call her last night, but he’d been stuck at the office so late trying to go over the final touches for this Vanguard contract that his exhaustion had worn out and saved him from himself. Today was rough, but the thought of seeing her tomorrow made somehow made it sufferable.

  “Really, Tris, you need to chill the fuck out; it’s only a competition,” Pierce said, slapping him on the shoulder.

  Tristan didn’t care what his words were, his tone implied that it was more than just a competition to the both of them. For Pierce, it was about toying with him, trying to best him and show Tristan that he wasn’t the boss of the rest of them. For Tristan, it was about revenge, and putting Pierce in his place. Recklessness in their business was not acceptable.

  Except for him, just this one time.

  If it wasn’t for Pierce, he wouldn’t have to be reckless in the first place; this wasn’t his fault.

  “Then why are you here? Why have you been snooping around my studio, if its ‘just a competition’? Sounds to me like you are the one who’s taking it a little too far. It’s understandable, I’d be concerned about losing if I were you, too,” Tristan fired back. He really didn’t have time for this. His stress from work and absence from Ellie was making him extremely irritable and apparently unable to control his need to provoke Pierce, instead of just calmly brushing him off.

  Or maybe you’re just irritable not because Pierce put you on the direct path to Ellie, but because of the feelings you can’t seem to control for her?

  “I wasn’t spying,” Pierce said flatly, the instigating amusement dropping from his voice, “Just thought I’d catch a glimpse of the ginger piece of ass that you’ve been tapping. I wonder, is her hair just as red –”

  CRACK.

  Tristan punched him square in the jaw, causing Pierce’s head to jerk to the side, as he stumbled back slightly. For a second, they both stood there in silence, unmoving. Pierce slowly bringing his hand up to his face.

  Fuck.

  He definitely should not have done that. One second Pierce was rambling and the next, Tristan’s vision went red with rage, clearing his fist connected with his friend’s jaw.

  “Ah, fuck,” Tristan heaved with a regretful sigh. Tristan paused as his friend’s face finally rose to be level with his. His eyes meeting the ominous depths of Pierce’s black gaze. He watched as Pierce brought his sleeve up to wipe the corner of his mouth where a small drop of blood had pooled.

  “Pierce –”

  “Fuck you, Tristan,” Pierce uttered, slowly and articulately, his stare deadly as he turned and left Tristan’s office, slamming the door behind him.

  Fucking fuck.

  Tristan smashed his fist down onto his desk with a yell. This was not what he needed right now.

  God dammit.

  He shouldn’t have punched him. It didn’t matter that what he said was completely inappropriate and offensive, he’d only said it to get a reaction from Tristan, to throw him off his game; and Tristan had let him, probably even more than Pierce had bargained for.

  Tristan closed his eyes, trying to control the chaos that seemed to keep spiraling out into his life. First, trying to secure this Vanguard deal was fucking killing him right now, but he knew it was an excellent move and would make him billions in the future which meant that he had to suck it up and put up with all their BS to get it signed. And then, adding the whole issue with trying to get his mom’s portrait back, topped off with his relationship with Ellie. Out of everything, that was what had him on edge the most. He wanted her so badly, and part of him hated himself for it, and hated Pierce for making him question himself and torture himself by being with her. All of that, combined, meant that as soon as Pierce uttered those words, it was the straw that broke his back.

  Pierce could have said anything else, about him, his art, his family…anything… but Ellie, she was apparently off limits. Tristan probably deserved at least half of what Pierce had said to him over the course of their friendship, and vice versa, but this, he couldn’t stomach. He didn’t know much about Ellie, yet he knew her, and he wouldn’t stand by and let anyone talk about her like that. In that second, Ellie was his and no one spoke about something of his in that way.

  It was a terrible way to think of her, but it was the only thing he felt.

  Possessiveness.

  It had set his blood pumping, his body alive and ready to attack – and that’s just what he had done. He’d attacked his deranged and questionably psychotic friend.

  Tristan gripped the edge of his desk with both hands, letting his head hang down in momentary defeat between his shoulders. He was sure that he’d probably said something similar, if not worse, to Pierce in the past; the difference being that Pierce never really cared about any of the women that he’d slept with, so he didn’t care what Tristan said about them.

  Pierce had been through a lot of shit when he was younger. Tristan himself didn’t know all the details. Honestly, he wondered if anyone did. Maybe Sloane; Sloane would be the type of person you could tell – quiet, a great listener, non-confrontational, calm… most things that he and Pierce were not, which is why they just never connected on that level. They were more the ‘bust-each-other’s-balls’ type of friends – close because of their similar personalities, but at the same time, those similar characteristics are what held them apart; each never wanting to admit to a weakness or a fault. No matter their differences, no matter their disagreements, their arguments in the past, they had moved past them and remained friends.

  Maybe not this time.

  Yeah, he definitely shouldn’t have punched Pierce. Christ, what had he been thinking? Not what – who. He’d been thinking of Ellie; he’d let a woman that he barely knew, yet unbearably desired, come between him and one of his best friends, and it was going to come with consequences.

  Tristan needed this competition to be over, so that he could be done with it all, done with Jack Carter, done with competing with Pierce, and done with having his life derailed because of his attraction to Ellie.

  His head throbbing, he stood up and moved back behind his desk, staring out the large windows of his corner office, looking out over the Hudson. He scowled; even the peaceful view before him couldn’t calm the turmoil in his mind. Yanking his desk chair back out, he sat down to return to the contract he’d been reviewing.

  The words on the page jumbled before his eyes, swimming together into a sea of nonsense. He shut his eyes again, pinching the bridge of his nose. Hitting the button on his intercom, he buzzed out to his secretary.

  “Donna, can you get me some Motrin? At least eight hundred milligrams, please.” He hated taking meds, but at this point it was the only thing that was going to allow him to continue working today.

  Keeping his eyes closed to reduce the stimuli to his brain, he waited for Donna to bring him the medication. Unfortunately, or fortunately, holding his eyes shut let his mind drift to its favorite subject, lately – Ellie.

  At first, he recollected the first time that he saw her – awkwardly making a scene during his audition, dropping her clipboard…twice. He felt a smile break out over his face, relaxing some of the tension in his muscles. Briefly, his memory jumped to their dinner, her awe at the restaurant and then the oysters. Watching someone in awe of something was one of the most highly addictive feels that he’d ever experienced, whether it was in his business, or when they first began the Guild, the awe they’d created when the art community realized that someone could reproduce an artwork so accurately; the awe, a
nd the accompanying pride that followed, was better than any drug.

  Except passion.

  If you had asked him a few weeks ago, standing at their last exhibit, he would have said that there was no difference between awe or passion created in someone else; the rush of power was equal between the two. Today, though, today there was no comparison.

  His mind replayed Ellie’s face as she orgasmed, his fingers rubbing together as the nerves remember how her body had felt underneath his touch. This was where his mind always drifted to when his eyes shut, because for Ellie, it had been more than passion that he had given her; it had been power. Tristan groaned.

  Knock, knock.

  His eyes shot open, wincing as the sudden influx of light seared through his head.

  “Mr. Black? I have the pills you requested,” his secretary, Donna, said as she opened his office door and peered inside.

  “Wonderful, thank you,” Tristan replied, motioning her forward. He nodded as she set a cup with the pills on his desk next to a small cup of water, thanking her again quietly as she turned and went back out to her desk.

  Tossing the pills into his mouth, he quickly down the entire cup of water, wondering if he’d had enough to drink today; maybe he was dehydrated. He turned around to face the small fridge behind his desk, having to readjust his erection inside of his pants before he could bend over and open it; he pulled out a small bottle of Fiji water, cracked it open and gulped down half of the bottle before turning back around.

  Tristan adjusted himself again, his pants digging into the sensitive and aroused flesh between his legs. He should have known better than to wear this suit, especially lately. It seemed like he couldn’t go a day without having to deal with his problem.

  He was lucky if it was only once a day.

  He couldn’t keep his mind from drifting to her in those off moments, and once it went there, it went there.

  Fine.

  He caved to his thoughts, unable to fight them with his head throbbing the way that it was.

  Fuck, you’d think he’d been the one who was punched in the face the way that his head hurt.

  Picking up his phone, he scrolled to Ellie’s contact information and opened up a new text message to her.

  - Good afternoon, minx.

  He stared at the screen, willing it to respond.

  ~ Good afternoon, Tristan.

  - How are you today?

  ~ I’m ok. Researching some places that I’d like to travel to at the moment. How is your day going?

  - The only good thing about today is that it’s going to turn into tomorrow.

  ~ I’m excited to finally watch you as you work. I’m always amazed with artists, probably because I have no talent myself, at how they can create something so beautiful with their own hands.

  - I believe you already saw my hands at work during our last meeting, Miss Carter. Or should I say felt my hands at work?

  Tristan smiled to himself, knowing that she would be blushing so hard right now. Although this was not helping the situation going on in his pants, he thought, adjusting in his desk chair again to accommodate his increasingly uncomfortable erection.

  ~ Mr. Black, I would never admit to such a thing through a text message. Not to mention, it would only serve to enlarge your already excessively-sized ego. What time and where tomorrow? I’m going back to my research; stop distracting me.

  Touché, Miss Ellie Carter. Touché. Tristan chuckled at the response from his feisty siren. He knew that what he had said pleased her; he could sense her smile through her words even though she’d attempted a tone of mock propriety. The porcelain skin of her face was still probably tainted with the stain of pink, even though she was biting her lip in an attempt not to smile – that is how he imagined her.

  - Distracting you is my retribution; you’ve been on my mind all morning, but very well, Miss Carter, I’ll see you at my place at eleven.

  ~ See you then.

  God, she had no idea what distracting was, what the thought of her had been doing to him the past several days. Oh, he was going to have to inform her just how far off her definition of distraction was; when he saw her, he was going to show her just how pleasant a distraction could truly be.

  Setting his phone back down, he tried for the third time this afternoon to make it through the jumble of words on the page. Thankfully, his pounding headache had subsided; whether it was from the medication that he had just taken or from the fact that he’d given in to his desire to message Ellie.

  Tristan realized that for the last fifteen minutes, what had just happened between him and Pierce hadn’t even crossed his mind, even though he’d be talking to the very subject of their altercation. He sighed, wondering how just messaging her could have such an effect on him.

  She was just so different than most of the women that he usually came into contact with. Most of the women he knew, or that tried to get to know him, were gorgeous, too, but the difference was that they knew it; they were confident in their appearance and they used it to their advantage. Ellie on the other hand, was the complete opposite, purposefully unaware and unconvinced of her beauty. It was one of her characteristics that perpetually intrigued him. The other thing, the main thing, that seemed to keep him beyond preoccupied with her was the fact that she was in no way preoccupied with him.

  Ok, well that wasn’t quite the truth.

  Seriously, though, she didn’t care who he was. Most women were interested in him for one of two reasons – either because he is Tristan Black, billionaire bachelor, or because he was Titian, famous, mysterious, artist extraordinaire; most women wanted a relationship with one of those two men for basically the same reasons: fame and money. Ellie, though, well, she didn’t know he was Titian, and she didn’t care that he was Tristan Black. For some reason that he couldn’t fathom, his money and power, his success as an investment banker, made zero difference to her. Maybe because her father was wealthy, too? He just didn’t get that vibe from her – the one that says that she is used to wealth and therefore isn’t fazed by it.

  She was preoccupied with him because of how he made her feel – at least as far as he could tell; he doubted she was that good of an actress to cover up something more. That was what made his attraction to her so strong, because hers wasn’t tainted with ambition. She wasn’t using him for money or fame.

  It was incredible.

  Tristan had always lusted over what money and power could bring him. It’s why he worked so hard to build his investment management company to where it was, to the point where he was attempting to take over Vanguard. The influence of money and power dominated a majority of his life; the Guild is where his more altruistic and charitable side had been relegated to, and even that came with a type of power and position all on its own. For so long, it had never bothered him if women wanted to be with him for his fortune or name – either of them.

  Until Ellie.

  That she didn’t know who he was, and yet still wanted him so badly was a type of influence he’d never felt before. The power of passion had spread through him like wildfire and he was struggling to remain in control; something he’d never had a problem with in the past when he knew that the woman interested in him, wasn’t really interested in him, only in what he could offer her. Ellie just wanted him.

  Maybe that’s why he couldn’t help the explosive possessiveness that consumed him when he thought about her.

  If he thought about it, which he rarely liked to do, he’d built himself up and allowed himself to be ‘used’ because it just made everything easier for him. After his mom died, the pain of losing her, of losing the one person who loved him no matter what – good, bad, rich, poor, talented, etc.; that pain had hollowed him. So, he’d built his business, his persona, his artistic alter ego, and let the world fall in love with them, because if they didn’t know him, they couldn’t love him, which meant that there was no risk that he would become similarly attached.

  Until Ellie.

  She didn�
��t know Titian, and she hardly knew of Tristan Black, CEO of Black Box Investing, which meant that her attraction was an attraction to just Tristan.

  She just wanted Tristan.

  The power of that thought brought him to his knees.

  Chapter 14

  Ellie stopped short outside One57, her head tipping back as she looked up to the top of the sky-scraper, a thrill of anticipation shooting through her; she’d been rushing through the week waiting for today. Looking back down at her phone, she realized she was ten minutes early.

  Always early Ellie.

  Her oncology nurses used to joke about it; she would always be early for her chemo appointments, always ready and waiting for the torture that was about to start. Most patients would hesitate, trying to prolong the inevitable by another minute or two, saying that ‘they always make you wait at the doctor’s office anyway,’ but not Ellie. She let the cancer get ahead of her once because she ‘prolonged the inevitable,’ and since then, it was a comfort to be early; it was the one thing that she had control over during that whole ordeal.

  This process, on the other hand, she felt her control slipping out of her grasp every second that she was in Tristan’s presence. Her need to control everything had sprung from her experience with cancer and she was determined to be free of everything that that disease had caused in her life; she’d survived her cancer and she wasn’t about to let her obsession with rules and control kill the rest of her life. She’d earned the ability to be free and spontaneous and, yes, sometimes stupid.

  Which is probably what this was.

  Opening her phone, she pulled up the message from Tristan yesterday; her body tingling as she re-read his words.

  God, you are such an easy target.

  She didn’t care; he made her feel alive, and that, was a feeling that most people couldn’t appreciate like she did. Ellie didn’t just appreciate it, the feeling propelled her, begged her, for more. Tristan wasn’t the first guy that she’d kissed or slept with, even after her hopefully-cured cancer. There’d been a few unsuccessful blind dates, sprung on her by friends that she had made while in the hospital and even after when she went for chemo. They didn’t matter, what did matter is that she had some small basis for comparison.