“Mrs. McKinley will ride the elevator alone except for you and two members of my staff,” Nathaniel said. “I can’t allow her to be trapped in an elevator with people I don’t know.” He was pleased at how readily Caroline agreed. After a bumpy start, the two of them had been cooperating quite well over the past few weeks. Overall, working with Caroline was a joy.

No, that wasn’t quite right. It was better to think of her as a colleague for whom he had professional regard and nothing more. The other feelings that sometimes tugged at the edges of his awareness needed to be ignored.

Which was challenging today. Caroline stood only two feet away from him as they waited for the elevator, and her upswept hair exposed the curve of her neck, making it difficult to concentrate. The elevator arrived, and he stepped inside with Caroline.

“Going up?” the uniformed attendant asked. Nathaniel nodded, making a note to check the credentials of the elevator attendant who would be on duty the day of the event.

The luncheon would be held in the exhibition hall, a cavernous room with a domed ceiling. Their footsteps echoed as they entered the huge chamber.

“Each of the senators’ wives will have a special keepsake from Mrs. McKinley placed at her seat,” Caroline said. “I’ll make arrangements for the gifts to be delivered the morning of the event.”

She continued outlining how the tables would be arranged, the timing for the event, and how the servers would deliver and clear the meal, but Nathaniel’s attention kept drifting to the art on the walls, a collection of Renaissance engravings on loan to the museum for the rest of the year.

Renaissance engravings were his Achilles’ heel. His love of engraving dated back to his art school days in Chicago, when he used every dollar he could save to be trained in the creation of steel-faced copper plates used for making prints. Engraving merged artistic skill with attention to detail, and he loved it. It required hours of exacting concentration to make the plates that could produce designs on a grand scale.

He wandered over to admire Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut of The Prodigal Son. Dürer had perfectly captured the desperation in the young man’s clasped hands as he prayed for redemption. Nathaniel had always longed to be capable of portraying human emotion with such mastery. He was a good artist, but he’d long been reconciled to the fact that he would never compete on this level. Now he simply stared in silent admiration at the work of a long-dead genius.

Caroline came up alongside him. “That man looks like he’s seen better days,” she quipped with a nod to the prodigal son.

“Dürer changed my life,” Nathaniel said quietly.