Disclaimer: I own nothing here and am just doing this to pass the time until Season 3 starts.

Spoilers: None. Set pre-series, about seven or eight years. Nate is married to Maggie and Sam is healthy.

Painting: Franz Kline, 1950, Oil on canvas, 37 3/4 x 34 1/2 inches

A/N: Part one in a five-part series of one-shots focused on three of my favorite things: Nate, Sophie, and art. Special thanks to my brother, an art school graduate, for patiently answering all of my questions and helping me select the perfect paintings for this series. Any mistakes are my own, because as the older sister, it's my birth-right to ignore him sometimes. :)

Nate walked through the corridors of the museum administration building, greeting the familiar faces and commiserating with them over the broken air conditioning. Nate had always hated this modern monstrosity, condemning it as a blight on an otherwise perfectly respectable urban landscape. But since Maggie started working here as a freelance art authenticator a few weeks ago, he'd visited it often enough to develop a true loathing based on its many quirks and flaws.

He was on his way to Maggie's office to wait for her to finish a meeting. He had dinner reservations at that quiet Italian place she loved and two tickets to A Streetcar Named Desire in his pocket. Yes, having Sam had changed their lives in ways both challenging and wonderful. But finding an early education major at UCLA who was also a trustworthy and reliable babysitter had made all the difference in their relationship.

He loosened his tie and undid his top button then turned the corner, which put him in view of the conference room. It was a glass fishbowl at the center of the building, which Nate suspected was the architect's idea of a joke. He could see Maggie in there with another woman, both heads bent over a painting on the table.

Maggie's office was a few yards from the conference room and when he arrived at her door, he could catch the conversation from the meeting. It should've been silent theatre, but both doors were propped open to provide cross-ventilation. Even over the hum of the industrial-strength fan, Nate realized that he recognized both voices.

Maggie's tone was knowledgeable and precise. She was confident, good at her job, and he could hear it in the questions she asked. The second voice... Nate paused, trying to place it. The accent was different than he expected, but her tone, the way she said the words, rolling them out with a little extra spin; he knew that voice.

"Sophie Devereaux," he muttered under his breath, rubbing a hand over his mouth. He stepped into the doorway of Maggie's office, hoping for a vantage point that would allow him to observe them unnoticed. Over the last two years, he'd chased the grifter, usually catching her without the merchandise, which made him suspect that she let him catch her.

"What are you playing at, Sophie?" he asked himself. He could feel anger pushing at the edge of his mind. Why was she trying to con his wife? What was she doing in LA? But he pushed the feelings and questions aside as he focused on the conference room.

Sophie lifted the painting out of the carrying case, holding it so that the bottom edge was supported by the table. Maggie stepped back to get a better look. It was a 1950 untitled Franz Kline, which Nate recognized from supervising the security of a modern American art exhibition that an IYS client had a few years back.

Nate tried to remember what the gallery had called the show. Something about parallels and paths. He thought the painting belonged to a private collector, a boorish NYC hedge fund manager with a bad attitude and a taste for expensive Cuban cigars.

Abstracts usually didn't do much for Nate, but he couldn't deny that this painting was incredibly compelling. He wished Kline had titled it, had opened even a narrow window on what he was trying to achieve. At first glance, it was like any other abstract painting, just splashes of colors and shapes.

But looking at it longer was like watching a photograph develop in a darkroom. He saw two faces: a darker one to the left and a lighter one to the right with a wedge of increasingly gray tones between them and a few black slashes tying them together. The darker side had the whitest spot, right near the eye, and the lighter side had black strewn around haphazardly. Nate liked the idea of everything jumbled together, of contrasts and similarities, of nothing being just one thing.

Sterling would snort derisively if he heard Nate describe the painting as having two faces. They'd been in Budapest once, watching CNN in a bar, when a story came on about people flocking to a Tennessee bakery because the image of Mother Theresa had appeared on a cinnamon roll. Sterling had rolled his eyes and explained how the human mind was wired to look for patterns, particularly facial shapes. "It's not a bloody miracle," Sterling had said, pausing to take a sip of his gin and tonic. "It's plain old evolutionary biology."

Looking at an abstract painting and finding patterns was what Nate found both intriguing and infuriating about abstract art: the Rorschach nature of it. He knew what he saw in the painting said more about him than the art work. And he was able to recognize one of those perfect jokes that life played sometimes, when a perfect juxtaposition in art reflected your current reality.

Nate felt a pull to Sophie that he's never questioned. Different time, different place, different set of circumstances, and he suspected they could have a quite different relationship. But as things stood, he was happy with his time, place and circumstances.

Nate watched as Maggie gestured to the left side of the painting, remarking on the brush technique and color choices. Sophie nodded in agreement, and Nate didn't see any relief in her eyes. The painting must be real. But Sophie was a grifter, not a fence, so she had to be playing some angle that Nate just couldn't see yet.

He went into Maggie's office and picked up the phone. He hurriedly dialed the number for their house, his fingers stumbling over the keypad as his mind raced through the alternatives. The babysitter picked up the phone on the third ring, and Nate could hear Sam laughing in the background.

"Jenny, I need you to do me a favor," said Nate, skipping all social niceties.

"Sure, Mr. Ford," she replied.

"This is really important and I'll pay you an extra $50 if you do it right. Can you do that for me, Jenny?"

She giggled nervously and Nate wondered if he'd overplayed his hand, but he pushed on. "It's nothing bad, just, I need Mrs. Ford distracted for about ten minutes. Start with telling her that Sam lost Mousey and she'll lead you through all the places it might be. Drag this out, Jenny, please?"

"Yeah, I can do that."

"Just don't let Mrs. Ford know that I put you up to this or that it's just a distraction, okay?" asked Nate.

"Got it," she said impatiently. He could practically hear her rolling her eyes on the other end of the phone.

"Good." Nate dropped the phone on the desk and walked out of the office. He approached the conference room with his shoulders slightly hunched. Maggie noticed him as he stood uneasily in the doorway, but he still knocked on the glass anyway.

"Sorry to interrupt," he said, keeping his eyes on Maggie. "Jenny called. Sam's lost Mousey again. I went through some of the obvious hiding places, but, well..."

Maggie gave him one of those smiles she always did when he couldn't find something, then she focused her attention on Sophie, which gave Nate a chance to gauge her reaction to the scene unfolding before her. She was off-balance and surprised, her eyes slightly wider than usual.

"I'm so sorry, Lorenza, but you have to trust me, life isn't worth living if our three-year old son doesn't have his beloved Mousey."

"Please, go," replied Sophie, gesturing to the door.

"I'll only be a minute. Oh, and this is my husband, Nate. Nate, this is Lorenza Abbamonte, she's selling the museum that fabulous Kline. Have a look and tell me what you think."

Maggie left the conference room, pausing on her way out to kiss him on the cheek and straighten his tie, carefully tucking the bottom half under the top.

Nate pulled off his jacket and draped it over the nearest chair, then started to roll up his sleeves. Even with the doors open and fan blasting, it was easily 15 degrees warmer than the hallway.

"So, somehow, you're trying to sell my wife a fake?" asked Nate, unsure how heavy he should play it.

"I had no idea that Maggie was your wife," said Sophie, her voice even and eyes steady. "I'm working with an associate these days. He set up the appointment a few weeks ago, with a Mr. Carlyle. Then I got here and was told I'd be meeting with Ms. Collins-Ford, but it's not like I suspected anything. You never said Maggie was an art expert."

"Mr. Carlyle got hit by a bus. Maggie's filling in for him," said Nate. "Wait a minute... an associate? I thought you usually worked alone."

"I do, but when the price is right..." said Sophie with a vague wave. "Plus, when you meet a brilliant forger, you have to hold on tight."

"Right," replied Nate, rubbing his jaw. He ran his eyes over the setup. "So let me guess how this works. The fake's in a hidden compartment. You're going to use this little interruption as cover. You'll close the case, then when you reopen it, you'll open the fake side, and then distract Maggie so she never notices whatever little details that would prove the painting is a forgery."

Sophie sat down in chair, leaned back and crossed her legs. "Are you ever wrong, Nate?"

"Rarely, Sophie, rarely." Nate sat down next to her, momentarily distracted by the way her shoe dangled down from her foot.

"So how's this going to work then?"

"What's the price?"

"$700,000."

Nate pressed his lips together and nodded. It was a fair price, maybe even a shade on the low side. The black and white abstracts were Kline's best known and most valuable work. This painting was not as celebrated. Although Nate knew that Sophie having the painting probably meant that a brash money man in New York City was proudly displaying a fake in his luxury penthouse overlooking Central Park or bohemian loft in Tribeca. But he didn't care; that was someone else's problem.

"Okay, Sophie... or wait, would you prefer Lorenza?" he asked, amused by how the question needled her.

She gave him an impatient look, urging him to just get on with it.

"You put the real painting on the table now and accept the deal at the agreed price. You can keep the fake, sell it to some unsuspecting private collector or something, I don't care. And, as a special thanks for your cooperation, I'd like to work with you in the future, as a special consultant for IYS, to recover stolen merchandise," said Nate, twisting in his chair to face her.

"Wait. You want me to play your side?" she asked, her tone giving away nothing.

"You have it in you."

"And you know this how? Because you know that you could just as easily play my side?" asked Sophie, as she leaned forward and ran a light, teasing teasing touch over his hand.

Nate shrugged, wanting to dodge the question. "Does it matter?"

Sophie looked at him like she'd discovered a long-lost Vermeer, then her face went cool, leaving Nate to wonder what her second thought had been. "You have a deal. This special consultant job, does it pay well?"

"Obscenely well."

"And I get to spend time with you... well, how could I possibly say no?" She stood up and held out a hand, which he accepted. Her grip was firm and he was suddenly aware of his own hand's sweatiness. He felt like he was standing on the edge of the gym at the eighth grade spring fling, trying to work up the courage to ask Emily Robbins to dance.

Sophie lifted up the painting and set it gently on the table. She efficiently folded up the carrier and placed it on the floor.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?," said Sophie. "A study in contrasts, playing around the edges at near symmetry, nothing exactly as simple or straightforward as it seems." Her eyes never left the painting, but Nate couldn't help wondering if she was talking about something else as well.

Before he could reply, Maggie rejoined them, her face flushed. Nate felt a stab of guilt, knowing he was responsible for the inconvenience she'd been through and any concern or anxiety it had caused her. But he was able to wash the guilt away with justification; he'd just saved her from falling victim to a scam.

"Where was Mousey?" asked Nate with a smile as he stood up.

"In the bottom of Sam's hamper," replied Maggie.

"Ah the story has a happy ending then, I'm glad," said Sophie.

Nate excused himself and retreated to Maggie's office. Part of him wanted to hesitate in the doorway and spy to make sure that Sophie didn't find a way to pull a switch. But the other part of him trusted her, even though he knew what she was capable of.

He thought of the painting, light and dark all muddled together, and knew that taking the risk was worth it.