: J. Vanessa Lyon
: Lush Lives
: Grove Press UK
: 9781804710678
: 1
: CHF 6.30
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 352
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
For artist Glory Hopkins, inheriting her aunt's Harlem brownstone feels more like a curse than a blessing. But when she stumbles into Parkie de Groot, a savvy auction house appraiser, her unexpected windfall begins to look more promising as they form an immediate but undeniable connection. But complications soon arise: between Parkie's struggle to overcome the heartache of past romances and Glory's all-consuming artistic ambitions, secrets begin to be kept. And the deeper they dig into the mysteries of the inherited house, the more fraught their relationship becomes . . . An evocative love story set in the high-stakes art and auction worlds in New York City, Lush Lives is about smart, driven women unafraid to take risks and fight for what they love.

J. Vanessa Lyon is the author of The Groves (an Audible Original) and Meet Me in Madrid, under the pseudonym Verity Lowell. She is an art historian, former appraiser and occasional curator who teaches at a New England liberal arts college.

Chapter 1


Glory was determined to make it, and she had. The appraisal of at least some of her great-aunt Lucille’s things would happen today, before another week, or month, slid by. Now that she was here, though, taking a seat in the cramped little vestibule felt like a punishment. Like being sent to the principal’s office. Or the Department of Motor Vehicles.

The arrangement of the reception area at the top of the stairs was haphazard. More musical chairs than the first impression a pretentious New York auction house should want to make. Maybe it was always this way, but Glory had a feeling the close quarters were even closer today because it was a “Walk-In Wednesday.” Free appraisals. Drop-ins welcome. Welcome to wedge yourself into a corral of orphaned antiques with a bunch of other hopeful strangers sitting knee to knee. She looked for an indication that the place was worth the wait but found instead, randomly stacked on the hunter green walls behind the mismatched chairs, a dozen ostentatiously framed but indisputably crappy Victorian landscape paintings, each with its own brass plaque and metal-shaded light. The floor, a checkerboard of buffed black and white, seemed to dare her to cross its gleaming surface.

However claustrophobic, the foyer of Madeline Cuthbert Auctioneers LLC was appropriately intimidating simply for being what it was—a gateway to the kind of old Manhattan firm with unpaid interns and tastefully hand-drawn advertisements in the style of aNew Yorker cartoon. A business that sold mostly dead white people’s valuable things to the mostly white people who wanted to buy them. Glory knew she had every right to be there. But even as she was announced by a two-toned door chime, the receptionist, a dark-rooted twentysomething engrossed in her multiple screens, failed to register her presence. She hadn’t even looked up when Glory repeatedly excused herself to take the only open seat in that steerage-like space. There was no choice but to balance the heavy liquor box she’d been carrying on her lap.

Once she was settled, legs together, elbows tucked tight at her sides, Glory cast a furtive glance at the seven or eight other people around her. They might have been nice enough, nodding and rolling their eyes i