Private Relations by Nancy Warren

intimate. Putting her food on place mats that he’d helped pick out? Scratch place mats off her list.
    That left a gift for her mother.
    “You know,” she said, hesitating, “I think I’ll get my mother something from the museum gift shop.”
    “Okay. But what about all that other stuff on your list?”
    “Maybe later.”
    He shrugged. “Okay.”
    So she called the limo and they were whisked to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As she went into one of her favorite places on Earth, she wondered why it had been so long since she’d been here.
    “What’s the matter?” Peter asked.
    “Maybe I need to stop working so much. I haven’t been here in almost a year. One of the reasons I moved to Manhattan was so I could go to Broadway and the Met and do all the things tourists dream of.”
    “So what happened?”
    “I turned into a New Yorker. I never have time for any of that stuff anymore.” She sighed. “It’s a tragedy.”
    “Well, today you get to combine business and pleasure. What’s not great about that?”
    She narrowed her eyes at him. “How long have I got?”
    “As long as you want.”
    She shook her head slowly. “You’re not fooling me. How long until your feet start to hurt, you sit on the benches and play with your cell phone, and generally act like a pain in the ass?”
    He gazed around the Great Hall that was currently filled with tourists and way too many parents who didn’t believe in discipline. “An hour, tops.”
    Deciding not to take Piper’s advice and drag him through the costumes galleries or worse, textiles, she tried to think what he’d most enjoy. “French Impressionists?” She raised her brows.
    He looked marginally relieved. “Why not?”
    Being a Saturday, the place was fairly crowded, but she sort of liked the ebb and flow of people. She didn’t protest when Peter took her hand in his. He seemed happy to stop where she stopped, gaze at whatever caught her fancy. As they wandered around the second-floor galleries that displayed the Met’s renowned collection of French and European paintings.
    “She reminds me of you,” he said after they went down the stairs to check out the modern-art galleries.
    She followed his gaze. “The Modigliani, you mean?”
    “Yes. The painting is called—” he stopped to read the sign “—Reclining Nude.”
    “I don’t look a bit like her. She has that elongated face.”
    “Of course you don’t look like her. But the pose, and the way she’s so relaxed in her body, that’s what you were like last night when you lay on that big bed with your arms over your head like that, and your head turnedto look at me.” He leaned closer. “I didn’t know the Met was going to make me horny,” he whispered.
    She shook her head. “You are such a connoisseur of art.”
    “Hey,” he said with a grin, “I know what I like.”
    “Let’s go to the gift shop and get something for my mother.”
    “Okay. I wonder if they have posters of the Modigliani. My apartment’s pretty bare.”
    “As a souvenir to remember this weekend?” she teased.
    He stared at her and his look was so intimate she caught her breath. “I won’t need any souvenirs to remember this weekend,” he said. “And I’ll never forget last night.”
    Her pulse jumped in a combination of unwilling response and alarm. “Peter, I—”
    “So, how is your mom?” he asked, and she was glad he’d cut her off since she didn’t know what to say.
    “She’s fine. Good.”
    “Are they still living in the same place?”
    “Oh, yes.”
    When they got to the gift shop, Peter helped her choose a pair of silver-and-black onyx Parisian Art Deco earrings for her mother. That done, she realized it was time for lunch if they were going to stick to their schedule.
    She loved having the limo at her disposal. The traffic nightmare that was New York was something she would never become accustomed to. She loved being chauffeured. And since she was on legitimate Hush business, she could