Pandora stood in a corner of the gallery watching the spectacle. If this was a dream, then she hoped to never wake up.
The chatter of small talk and the clink of glasses filled the gallery as people wandered about looking at her paintings.
Her paintings.
She still couldn't believe it. She used to draw things as a child, and later for her daughter. Never in her wildest dreams could she even begin to imagine tonight's gathering.
Pandora Riley, girl from the poor side of town, in a gallery on trendy Newbury Street being toasted by Boston society.
Across the room stood her friend, Abigail, who owned the gallery. Two men stood with her. The man on her right was her boyfriend, EZ McAllister. Although it seemed strange to call someone almost forty years old a boyfriend. Pandora somehow had found the nerve to introduce herself to him a short while ago.
It was the man on the left who intrigued her. Well over six feet tall, with dark hair and eyes, he seemed to be watching everyone and everything even while carrying on a conversation with the couple as they crossed the gallery. His bearing was almost military in manner, erect and at ease, but ready to spring to attention at a moment’s notice.
The room was filled
with some of the handsomest men in the city of Boston, so what drew
her to this one? The old saying about a moth to a flame sprang to her
mind, or maybe it was the spider and the fly? No matter how you
looked at it, the man seemed
to spell danger.
