Art of Cunning Read online

  Art of Cunning

  a steamy fox shifter romance

  Steffanie Holmes

  Bacchanalia House

  Contents

  Art Of Cunning

  1. Alex

  2. Alex

  3. Ryan

  4. Alex

  5. Ryan

  6. Alex

  7. Ryan

  8. Alex

  9. Alex

  10. Ryan

  11. Alex

  12. Ryan

  13. Alex

  14. Ryan

  15. Alex

  16. Alex

  Art of the Hunt

  Excerpt From Art Of The Hunt

  Support the Patreon

  About the Author

  Other Books By Steffanie Holmes

  Art Of Cunning

  Crookshollow Gothic Romance, Book 1

  Steffanie Holmes

  NEW EXPANDED EDITION

  7 extra chapters, 15,000 new words

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblances to real persons, living or dead, found within are purely coincidental. All characters are consenting adults above the age of 18.

  All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Copyright 2015 Steffanie Holmes. Second edition copyright 2017 Steffanie Holmes

  http://steffanieholmes.com

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  Created with Vellum

  1

  Alex

  "James Alexandra Kline!"

  I cringed as my full name reverberated off the hallway walls. Through the glass wall in my office I could see Matthew storming toward me, his round face puffed up like a pimple about to burst. Across the hall, Tara – the visiting collections curator – looked up from her desk, her face alight with the promise of intrigue.

  Matthew was mad. Which meant only one thing. He'd found out that—

  "James Alexandra! The Raynard exhibit is opening in two weeks. Where the fuck are my paintings?"

  I sank down lower behind my desk, wringing my hands in my lap. I'd known this confrontation was coming. In my head, I screamed at him that they weren't "his" paintings. Matthew Callahan was the director of the modern art department at the Halt Institute, a prestigious art gallery in the heart of Crookshollow village. He could no more paint an exquisite work of art than he could recognise one. He didn't even really care about art. He had only one trait that made him a competent curator: he was loud and bolshy and could usually get his way. Except, of course, when his assistant curator messed things up.

  The assistant curator being me, although judging by Matthew’s voice, probably not for much longer.

  "Well?" Matthew loomed in my doorway and barked. "Do you have anything to say for yourself, James?"

  "No," I muttered, staring at my knees. I hated it when Matthew used my real first name. He only did it because he knew it made me uncomfortable, and Matthew loved making people uncomfortable. Silently I cursed my parents for naming me – their only daughter – after James Fauntelroy, my famous male ancestor. Who does that?

  But now wasn’t the time to be thinking about my parents, especially since that usually brought up some tough memories. I had a bigger, angrier problem hurtling through my office door.

  A thousand excuses loomed on my lips. It wasn't my fault the paintings were late. The Halt Institute won the contract for one of the most anticipated exhibitions in the entire country. The artist, Ryan Raynard – despite being one of the darlings of the modern art scene (and my favourite English artist) – was a recluse. He lived in his family's crumbling manor not far from my own flat in Crookshollow, but he hadn't been seen outside the manor walls for at least ten years. Despite never having exhibited, never doing press, and never schmoozing with the rich collectors who made the art world go round, Raynard was one of the most sought-after artists painting in the modern impressionist style. Buyers snapped his pieces up as soon as they hit the auction houses. His paintings leached into the market through his secretary, Simon Host, who was the man I had been dealing with over Raynard's first-ever public exhibition.

  Everything had gone well initially, until I needed to have the paintings shipped to the Institute. Despite numerous calls, emails, and even a drunken attempt to smoke signal from the pub last night (courtesy of my flatmate Kylie helping me drown my sorrows) to Simon's office, I'd heard not a single reply about the delivery of the paintings.

  Of course, Matthew didn't care about any of that. All he saw was a big gap in the warehouse where the Raynard paintings should've been, and a staff photographer getting paid to Instagram pictures of his nostrils.

  Matthew leaned against the doorframe and scowled at me. He'd curled the ends of his moustache with wax, so it looked as if he was smiling and frowning at the same time. "Gareth isn't working this weekend. If those paintings aren't here by tomorrow, the photographs don't get shot until next week, which means the advertisements don't get to the printers on time, the Guardian holds back our editorial, and I start wondering why on earth I hired someone so goddamn incompetent."

  I gritted my teeth. "I know all this, Matthew. Raynard’s office is being difficult, but I've got it under control."

  "Tomorrow, then. On your head be it." Matthew shot me a final, deadly stare, and continued down the hall to harass another curator.

  I rose and shut the door, turning the key in the lock so Matthew couldn't walk in again. Across the hall, Tara – another curator – waved at me through the glass. I glared at her and pulled down the shade, hoping she hadn't noticed my red face and shaking hands.

  I slumped back into my chair, rubbing my fingers against my throbbing temples. I didn't need Matthew to tell me that the artwork was going to be late. I knew it was going to be late, if it even showed up at all.

  What I didn't know was what to do about it.

  Two years ago, I'd landed my dream job as assistant curator here at Halt, off the back of a successful kinetic exhibition I’d curated for the Tate Modern. But compared to some of the other curators – who'd been working at Halt so long they remembered when Warhol was just an upstart young commercial illustrator with a canned foods fetish – I was green. I'd been astounded when Matthew shoved a thick file on my desk two weeks ago and announced that it was my job to coordinate the exhibition details with Raynard.

  My astonishment quickly turned to dread when I realised Raynard wasn't going to be easy to deal with. Despite his absurd insistence on an opening only a month away (most of our exhibitions at this scale were planned a year in advance) he refused to even get on the phone to discuss a single detail, and he had a list of demands rivalling that of a rockstar. He knew no gallery would turn down his wishes, and he was clearly a man of some considerable ego. Even though I greatly admired his work and I’d never even talked to the man, I was beginning to hate Ryan Raynard more and more each day.

  Right now, my fear of losing my job boiled that hate over into seething, unadulterated rage.

  Calm down, Alex. You have to think. I wiped my sweaty palms against my wool skirt. Perhaps Simon Host was just busy with other preparations for the exhibition. The exhibition was to be his client’s first public showing in ten years, after all. It was likely Simon was in his office right now.

  I dialled the number I now knew by heart, after calling it twenty times already today. While I listened to it ring, I refreshed my browser. No new emails. The phone rang and rang … ten times … twenty times … Raynard's secretary still wasn't answering, and there was no way to lea
ve a message.

  What am I going to do?

  This was the first major exhibit Matthew had entrusted me with. If I messed this one up, I'd be back to doing administration and running the children's gallery talks. If I had any hope of becoming a serious curator one day, I had to figure out a way to solve this.

  My stomach churned. My pulse throbbed in my ears. I gulped down the urge to throw up. Panicking wasn't going to get those paintings to the gallery. I stared at my car keys on the table. There was nothing else to do.

  I was going to talk to Ryan Raynard and make him hand over the artwork, even if it meant breaking into Raynard Hall itself.

  2

  Alex

  I sped out of the Halt Institute car park, and straight into a line of cars waiting to turn onto the high street. The radio blared out a news report about another hiker who'd been attacked by a rabid fox while walking in Crookshollow Forest. That was the third such incident this month. Must be a global warming thing, I thought, flicking the radio over to the local indie station. Greenies blamed global warming for everything, from unseasonably warm summers to lines at the supermarket.

  I tapped my foot impatiently on the pedal, in my mind seeing Matthew's red face and curly moustache as he chewed me out. It was nearly 4pm, and traffic was starting to pick up for the afternoon, especially now that the tourist season was closing in. I needed to get across town to Raynard Hall as quickly as possible, so I could catch this Simon Host before he left the estate for the evening.

  Like Salisbury and the Fens, Crookshollow Village and the surrounding forest was one of those English landscapes known for its ritual significance throughout history. There were several Neolithic henges and other ancient religious sites scattered across hilltops and hidden in the dense forest groves. Witches used to gather in the trees to dance naked and take part in ritual orgies – that was, until the witch finders swept in and put a stop to that. More than 200 convicted witches had been burnt in the market square at the opposite end of the high street, or at least that's the story they tell at the local medieval torture museum. It's said that the witches left their imprint in the landscape – that they transferred their spirits to their animal familiars, and their magic still dwells within the wild cats and foxes and deer and birds of Crookshollow Forest.

  Growing up in the village, I was thrilled by these stories. They filled my imagination with enchanted worlds of witches and werewolves and fairies, right there in the forest on my own back doorstep. I was the weird loner kid, the strange girl who drew pictures all the time and sucked at playing cricket. After enduring days at school where kids either ignored me or threw things at me, I would take my paints and my camera and hike for miles into the gloom, stopping to draw fantastical scenes of witches dancing by the stream and half-human, half-crow creatures flying between the towering oaks. The forest fuelled my art and held together my soul.

  But small towns were hell for kids like me, so I moved to London as soon as the final bell rang, eager to get away from the bad memories and embrace my art. I studied at the Wimbledon College of Arts, where I spent four blissful years painting and sculpting and attending political rallies and poetry readings and pretending to be a lamppost with eccentric performance artists. I lived in squalor and survived on white rice and kebabs. They were the best years of my life.

  My carefree student days had to come to an end, and not just because my parents were killed in a car accident during my final year. I emerged a fresh-faced artist trying to establish myself right in the heart of the Global Financial Crisis. No one was buying art, especially not from an unknown like me. After six months of slogging my paintings around every independent gallery in London, my landlady threatened me with eviction if I couldn’t come up with the two months’ rent I owed her.

  I had to grow up and face facts: being an artist wasn’t a viable career. I hadn’t even been able to pick up a brush since my parents died. What kind of an artist was I, if I couldn’t even paint through my pain? I had to find a real job.

  Luckily, I was still in contact with my old professors, and through one of them, I landed a paid internship at the Tate Modern, then was offered a full-time position as a professional ass-kisser and errand-girl. I traded my paint-stained trackies for pencil skirts and pumps. My landlady stopped bugging me.

  In the four years I worked at the Tate, I barely created any artwork, and I never hiked off into the wilderness. Even though I had a great job many people would’ve killed for, I felt like a failure. I wasn’t turning into the person I always imagined myself to be. My kind, supportive parents who I usually turned to for advice were now just cold stones in a cemetery.

  Still, the forest had called me back. When Halt offered me the job, I accepted without a second thought, packed up my apartment and moved into the tiny two-bed semi I shared with my friend Kylie, a pudgy calico cat named Miss Havisham and several recalcitrant mice. Our tiny back garden backed onto the forest edge.

  I even started drawing and painting again, although I was woefully out of practice. Even though I lived near my parents’ old house and all their memories, I felt calmer than I had in a long time. Except for today. Today I was so far from calm I couldn’t see it if it were driving toward me in a Panzer tank.

  I leaned on my horn as a woman wearing a kaftan covered with moon symbols stepped out from a candle shop and wandered across the street in front of the car, staring at her smartphone screen and completely unaware of the fact I’d had to slam on my brakes to avoid hitting her. It was all just another summer's day in Crookshollow.

  Because of its significance as an ancient religious landscape, as well as being the site of numerous modern tales of hauntings, Crookshollow was a popular destination with free spirits and new-age pagans, all of whom were apparently on the road at this very moment, taking things as slowly as their pot-addled brains allowed. The centre of Crookshollow was a hodgepodge of occult stores, artisan candle makers, and alternative record shops, attracting a crowd with a particular disregard for traffic rules. The Halt building – a gleaming, modern installation of steel and glass, housing the art galleries, the witchcraft museum and some bank offices – loomed over the quaint high street, a constant reminder that corporate power still reigned supreme.

  Eventually, I escaped the tangle of the high street and was speeding out toward Raynard Hall. Despite being back in Crookshollow for nearly two years, I hadn't travelled out near the crumbling manor since my childhood. I'd grown up in a small bungalow nearby, on Roundoak Drive, and the grounds of Raynard Hall were as familiar to me as my own childhood home.

  Back then, the manor had been in the hands of Alistair Raynard, Ryan's father, who lived somewhere up in the Scottish mountains but kept on a few servants at the manor to maintain the estate. They never did a very good job. Overgrown and decaying, the manor had been a popular place for local kids to play, daring each other to approach the windows and peer in at the drab, empty rooms. Its dark stone façade, high gothic windows and sinister gargoyles lining the edge of the roof made it a popular source for local legends of ghosts and strange sightings. One of the most oft-told stories was of a younger Alistair Raynard – when he still lived in the Hall – hunting deer in the night and coming across a coven of witches in the forest. He was said to have chased them off his land with his rifle before they could complete their ritual and so they'd cursed him with some kind of affliction, and that was why he'd fled to Scotland.

  I pulled into Holly Avenue. Raynard Hall dominated the view – its towering grey turrets and black-shuttered windows casting a dim shadow across the bright townhouses that lined the street. A couple of tourists had parked their bikes at the gates and were snapping pictures of the famous artist's home, but they quickly moved on when they saw my car approach. I parked the car outside the heavy iron gates and stared up at the gothic manor, my breath catching in my throat. I'd walked past Raynard Hall hundreds of times as a kid, even sneaking into the grounds at night and peeking in at the grimy windows to see what gh
osts might lurk inside, but it had never looked so menacing before.

  I sucked in a breath. You've got to do this, Alex. You need to call on all your hidden powers of persuasion and allure, and get inside that house. Or you can kiss your career at Halt goodbye.

  I leaned out the window and pushed the button on the intercom. It buzzed impatiently. My mind went completely blank. What am I going to say? Ryan Raynard hasn't opened these doors to anyone else in ten long years. What will possibly make him open them for me?

  The intercom crackled, as if urging me to speak. I took a deep breath, then said, "Hello, Mr. Host? Mr. Raynard? I need to talk to someone about the exhibition—"

  "Go away," a voice crackled on the other end. "This is private property."

  I bristled. Who did this guy think he was? The haughty tone of Simon Host – coupled with my agitation at having being forced to stand outside the manor at all – made me snap back. "I'm parked on the road, sir, which is not private property at all, so I'd thank you to lose that tone and let me speak uninterrupted. I'm James Alexandra Kline, from the Halt Institute. I need to know when Ryan Raynard's paintings are being delivered. They should have arrived on Monday and we have a photographer waiting—"

  "No one by that name lives here. Go away."

  Now I was getting angry. "Do you think I'm an idiot? We’ve talked on the phone several times already. Besides, who are you trying to fool? Ryan Raynard may be an artistic genius, but he's a idiot if he thinks he's flying below the radar living in a manor that would make the Addams Family jealous. How many gargoyles have you got on that façade? One … two … three …" I counted them aloud. "Fifteen gargoyles. I mean, that's obviously the aesthetic choice of someone who wants to stay hidden away. I'm being sarcastic, in case you can't tell.”