A Kiss in the Dark (Sam and Rick #2)

Chapter 11

11

Saturday, 8:42 a.m.

I t was surreal, Anne thought, the way an off-center photo of a lovely piece of art could make her stomach tie itself into knots, her pulse pound so hard she thought she could be on her way to a stroke or a heart attack, and her throat close up so she couldn’t pull in enough air.

She looked at the photo again, gripping Sam’s phone so hard she was surprised the cover, with its illustration of Godzilla on the back, didn’t crack and fall off. “Who did this?” she forced out, her voice a wavering hiss.

“That’s what I’m going to find out.” Sam glanced over her shoulder as security and Sotheby’s employees filed in and out of the elevator or climbed the stairs with smaller items in tow. “I’m probably going to exceed my authority in a minute, so either back me up or stop me now. And no mother-daughter shit. Martin can’t know that we know.”

No mother-daughter shit . With what she’d just seen, that comment should have just passed by her brain to be absorbed later with everything else, but it caught her attention and demanded to be looked at, front and center. “I’ll back you up,” Anne said aloud.

Sam was mad. It didn’t take any great empathy or insight to get that. Somehow Bradley or Martin or whatever the hell his name was had gotten around her, and Sam didn’t like it. It wasn’t just that, though. Sam and her father had gone from partners to rivals, and now to enemies. That angry streak, the dislike over being shown up, the hatred of having to admit an error—Anne recognized that. “This is not about your ego, you know,” she said aloud, belatedly wondering if she’d just ended any chance at reconciliation with her daughter.

Sam stopped mid step and turned around again. “It’s about me doing my job,” she stated, her jaw stiff. “And one of these guys is getting fired today for taking enough money to make him think sneaking some photos was worth the risk of losing his job. Or her job, but I’d bet it’s one of the guys.” She took a breath. “If it was my ego I was trying to satisfy, I’d be hanging that guy off the roof by his heels instead of firing him.”

Anne blinked. “Sam, that’s—”

“That’s an exaggeration,” she muttered, stalking off again. “In my mind I would be, though.” She put two fingers to her mouth and whistled. “Hey! Everybody within the sound of my voice! In the lobby! Now!”

That wasn’t very subtle, but aside from what she’d been told already, Anne had the feeling that her daughter had moved in the world of thugs and thieves and other dangerous people for a very long time. Certainly being surrounded by fifteen large, muscular men and a handful of very capable-looking women didn’t seem to intimidate her in the least.

“What’s up, Sam?” Jamie asked, on his chest an exploding Death Star and a fleeing X-Wing. For a second she reflected that if her daughter’s obsession had been Star Wars rather than Godzilla, even Michael would have to be brushing up on his George Lucas trivia.

“Phones out, everybody. Screen up, on your palm. Now.”

“Hey, we said we wouldn’t use ’em in here. You can’t take our phones.”

“I’m not,” she stated. “I’m looking at them.”

“What the hell? This ain’t a dictatorship. You can’t make us—”

“You heard her,” Anne broke in. “Phones out, face-up, in one hand.” Why that would help she didn’t know, but she’d said she would back up her daughter. No mother-daughter shit, though, whatever that was.

“Come on, Miss Hughes, we aren’t—”

“Now.”

One by one they produced their phones. When all of them were visible, Sam walked up to the ragged half circle. “A flip phone, Carl?” she said. “You can go back to work.”

“I like my phone,” the big security guard complained, pocketing it again.

She likewise dismissed eight more of them with barely a glance, sending them back to finishing the placement of the Adgerton items. As she walked back up the row, a tall older man with an impressive mane of graying hair stopped outside the locked front door and waved. “Are you expecting someone?” Anne asked aloud.

“Does he look like Colonel Sanders without the moustache?”

Anne looked again. “More or less. George Hamilton, maybe. His suit is blue.”

“He’s with me. Let him in, will you, Anne?”

“Of course.”

While Sam gave the side-eye to the remaining Sotheby’s and security employees, Anne backed up to the door and opened it with her key card. “Hello,” she said, as the man joined her inside.

“Ma’am,” he returned in a soft drawl. “You would be Miss Anne Hughes, I assume?”

“I would be.”

“Aubrey Pendleton, at your service. I work for Miss Samantha. Is she…” He trailed off as he caught sight of Sam. “Ah. It’s at least a ten,” he said in a louder voice.

Without looking at him Sam nodded, then excused four more workers. That left five people, all men. However she’d decided on their innocence, Anne was glad it hadn’t been one of the ladies. Falling for Martin or Bradley or whoever he was had proved to be a painful, scarring experience, and she didn’t wish it on anyone else. Ever.

“Ten what?” she whispered.

“The iPhone model,” Mr. Pendleton murmured back.

“How do you—”

“The reflection of the flash in the corner of the photo,” he went on, obviously anticipating her question. “The camera lens configuration is an iPhone, and a more recent model than 10.”

“That’s impressive. Well done, Mr. Pendleton.”

“It wasn’t me. Miss Samantha spotted it and sent the photo to me to match lenses.” He held up his own phone, and she looked at the picture again.

She might have noticed the slight reflection in the top left corner, but then again, she might not have done so. Not in time to figure out who’d taken the picture, certainly. “Well.”

“She doesn’t miss much.”

“All right,” Sam said, “turn them over.”

“This is stupid,” Drew, another member of the security team, complained. “We have work to do. It’s a damn Saturday, so you’re paying us time-and-a-half for nothing right now.”

“Not for nothing,” Sam answered, stopping in front of him. “Turn over your phone.”

“No. Why do you want to see the back of my fucking phone?”

Before he could close his fingers around it, Sam’s hand darted forward, and she snatched it away from him. Taking a step backward, she flipped it over herself.

“That’s not yours,” he growled, clenching his empty fist.

“That’s a lovely confederate flag you’ve got there.” Sam stayed out of his reach, then slapped the phone against his chest. “You’re a jerk, but you can go back to work until Anne has a chat with your supervisor.”

“Which I will,” Anne added, making a note and then gesturing at Mr. Pendleton to let her look at the photo again. She couldn’t make out anything further in the picture than the multiple out-of-focus circles of the lenses. Ah . That would be the point. A confederate flag would have showed up as a blur of color, anyway.

While Drew obviously didn’t know how to react to all that, Sam jabbing a finger toward the elevator sent him on his way. The amount of self-confidence she wielded simply left most people powerless to do anything but exactly what she told them to. Amazing. With Bradley she had thought it charm, but she could see it now, though less arrogantly, in Sam. She knew what she was doing, and other people responded to that.

Four men remained, all of them beginning to eye each other. Sam stepped forward again, looking at the backs of the phones. One had a photo of his kids beneath a clear plastic case, and she sent him back to work as well. The other three were plain black, two cases and one just the phone itself.

“What now?” Anne whispered.

If Mr. Pendleton found it odd that he’d immediately become her confidante, he didn’t show it. “I have no idea,” he whispered back. “This is the part I think might be magic.”

She couldn’t help her abrupt grin. At least she wasn’t the only one baffled by all of this. Sam didn’t seem to be, but she was also facing down three men, all of whom were taller and broader than she was. Anne supposed the Sotheby’s security team would come to the rescue, but it would take a moment for them to realize what was going on and another second to decide whether they wanted to get into a brawl or not.

“What now?” One of the three, Something Stefano, kept his phone out in front of him, but he didn’t look happy. None of them, though, looked happy.

Sam lifted her walkie-talkie. “Rhee, which of these three was on the third floor between noon and two o’clock yesterday?” She glanced over her shoulder at Anne. “Angle of the sun.”

Of course Sam had noticed the angle of the sun. And the reflection of the camera lens, and the reflection of the phone protector. For a second Anne had a flash of thought about what Christmases would have been like, with Sam no doubt guessing the contents of every gift the moment they went under the tree.

“That would be Albert Stephano,” the security specialist returned, the sound echoing a little as other walkie-talkies around them picked it up.

“So what?” Stephano retorted. “That’s where I was supposed to be.”

“You know we have all the footage, right?” Sam replied. “You walking up, eyeing the security camera, making sure your back was to it, your arms moving a little, and then you stretching like you’re the most innocent guy in the world before you walk off into the hallway.”

He glared at her, and Anne found herself measuring heights and reaches and relative strength—none of which favored her daughter. “If you knew it was me you were after all along,” Stefano finally rasped, “why go through all this, bitch?”

“Well,” Sam said, putting a finger on her chin, “first, I wanted to know if you had the nards to come forward and save the rest of these guys a scare. Second, somebody knocked the camera in that room off-kilter yesterday, which I imagine was your doing, and I don’t have footage of anything but your feet. So, pffft, you outed yourself.”

“Bitch,” he growled again, his hands folding into fists. He lunged forward.

“Aubrey?”

The man standing beside Anne pulled something out of his coat pocket. A moment later Stefano lay twitching on the ground, wires leading from his chest to Mr. Pendleton’s hand. Anne yelped and leaped backward with what she was sure was a very ungainly motion.

Sam lifted the walkie-talkie again. “Marv? Come on in. And bring your cuffs.”

A handful of seconds later, Marv pounded up from the direction of the security room. “I could’ve done that,” he stated, looking with plain envy at the taser Mr. Pendleton held.

“This way you won’t have as much paperwork,” Sam said, squatting down as the security guard cuffed the hired security agent. “How much did he pay you?”

Stefano sniffed, rolling upright. “Not enough for me to put up with this shit.”

“Hm. Maybe think about that while Anne decides whether Sotheby’s is going to press charges or not and we’re waiting for the cops. And then think about how mad I am that you tried to fuck up my first job with Sotheby’s.”

“It was a photo. Just a damn picture. I didn’t steal anything.”

“See that sign?” Sam pointed over her shoulder at the red-lettered sign on a white background affixed to one side wall. “‘Absolutely no photography is permitted inside this establishment,’” she read without looking at it. “‘Violators will be prosecuted.’ You broke the sign law.”

It abruptly occurred to Anne that the police had been called. She looked at Sam. Sarah. No, Samantha did fit her better. Or she’d grown into the name Bradley had given her, rather. But that didn’t signify, because Sam and the police didn’t belong anywhere near each other. “Why don’t you get back to our item installation?” she suggested, hefting her iPad. “Marv and I can take it from here.” She glanced sideways. “And Mr. Pendleton, as well, since he had the taser, I suppose.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” the gentleman drawled. “I’ll catch up with you when we’re finished here, Miss Samantha.”

Sam nodded, turning to the two guys who remained. “You’re all clear. Thanks for hanging out and helping me catch this guy. Sorry for putting you in the middle of it, though.”

“Are you kidding me?” one of them said. “You guys tased Albert ‘Big Balls’ Stefano. Somebody’s gonna buy me a drink tonight when I tell that story.”

Chuckling, Sam clapped both men on the back and joined them as they walked up the stairs. Good . However ballsy she was, at least she knew to be elsewhere when the police arrived. And now Anne had a moment to worry over why no one had mentioned the camera trouble yesterday. That seemed like something she should have been told.

If that was Sam’s ego getting in the way, they were going to have to have a chat. No one’s ego was allowed to trump the security here. Not while Bradley Martin Jellicoe was slinking around the neighborhood.

* * *

One bad guy, stopped. Samantha took a breath as the next load of items for auction emerged from the elevator. Mad as she was at both “Big Balls” Stefano and Martin, she’d made a mistake, too. It didn’t matter that with big display cases moving in and ladders coming up and down to adjust lights, cameras had been jostled for the last three days. As soon as a misalignment was noticed, it was corrected, but she’d let it go yesterday without investigating. In fact, other than noting that it had taken four minutes for the problem to be noticed and corrected, she’d ignored it.

Martin, with Stefano’s help, had gotten something past her, and she hadn’t even realized it until the photo had appeared on her phone. That was bad, and stupid, and an idiot mistake she would never be making again.

If it were up to her, all these guys would be off the job until after the auction. If Martin had gotten to one of them, he might have gotten to two, or three or five, more. She’d known forever that the weakest link in any security system was the human bits, and she’d still let Sotheby’s decide which of their employees and contracted security personnel would be here at the Victorian house.

Maybe if she’d been raised straight and had hired employees herself who’d only walked on the legal side, she might have felt more confident about doing deeper checks on the people Sotheby’s had hired for this event. She blew out her breath. And maybe they would have accused her of paranoia and overreaching her authority. It wasn’t like she could just fly half her Florida crew out to Manhattan for three weeks, anyway.

“The camera was knocked aside?” Anne said as she topped the stairs, her fingers gripping her iPad really tightly. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“They’ve been getting knocked around since we installed them,” Samantha answered, keeping her voice down. “Yesterday Rhee noted it and sent Marv to reset it. It took four minutes. Today I know it was done on purpose, and as of now we’re installing a half-dozen more cameras with views that overlap the ones we have now.”

Nodding, Anne’s shoulders lowered a little. “It didn’t mean anything yesterday,” she muttered.

For a second Samantha looked at her. “It must be crazy to be you right now,” she said. “Two Jellicoes, a crazy rich British guy, Aubrey with the Kentucky Colonel accent, and three days until people get invited to swarm all over this place.”

“Considering he arrived with a taser and kept you from getting punched, I have no problem at all with Mr. Pendleton.”

Well, maybe he’d kept her from getting punched. And maybe she’d been an inch from introducing Big Balls’ big balls to his own esophagus. “People don’t fool me very often,” she said aloud. “I don’t like when it happens. So yeah, I’m glad Aubrey was here, too.”

“Music to my ears,” Aubrey drawled, entering the room and settling a key card into his newly assigned lanyard. “Most jobs, you don’t have your employer ask you to bring a charged taser into work with you. This isn’t even the first time we’ve had that exchange, though.”

Samantha grinned. “Yeah, but last time it was to check the insulation around some wiring. Today you got to make a guy dance.”

“Happy to oblige. Should I go get the order for those additional cameras going?”

“Yes, please. And then take a walk and tell me if you notice anything else hinky.”

“This is your battlefield, but I may have an opinion or two on the aesthetics.” With a half bow he sauntered back toward the main hallway.

Anne watched him go, then turned back again. “Is he gay?” she whispered.

“I say yes, Rick says no, so maybe. I’ve never seen him with anybody serious.” Samantha eyed her mother. “Do you like him?”

“What? No! I was just asking.” Anne’s cheeks got redder. “He has a very calming presence.”

“It’s the accent. Like a warm spoonful of honey on a sunny summer afternoon. That’s how I like to describe it, anyway. He’s good at reassuring people.”

“He may be handy to have around, then.” With a nod, Anne backed off again. “I’m going down to the security room to oversee.”

“Sounds good. I’ll keep roaming. Any cameras move, tell me first.”

“Will do.” She stood there for a moment. “Just out of curiosity, what is ‘mother-daughter shit,’ by the way?”

Ah, that. After seeing the expression on Anne’s face, she’d figured it would only be a matter of time before it got brought up again. “Stefano is going to jail. I can’t control what he’s going to say, or to whom he’s going to say it—or if Martin’s talked to anybody else around here. We’re keeping us under wraps right now. I don’t want Martin getting even a whiff that we already know about us.”

“Okay.” Anne smiled, nodding again. “Okay. I was just…It didn’t sound good.”

“Yeah, I know. I should have worded it better. Or we could give it a code name.” She considered for a moment. Most of the code words she and Stoney used had something to do with what they represented— “how’s your pillow” was code for “are you in danger” —and other shit like that. “How about ‘wine?’” she suggested.

“So I say, ‘do you want some wine,’ if you say no, that means we shouldn’t talk about…personal things? That works, I think.” She smiled a little. “Is it because I brought wine, the other night?”

“Yes, it is.”

“I like that.”

Whew . One tangle resolved. Checking her phone again to make sure the camera feeds were still up and live, Samantha trotted back down to the rear entrance as the last load of Adgerton bling arrived. Her little reveal of Stefano had gone more smoothly than she’d expected, all things considered, but getting rid of one greedy guy didn’t mean the problem itself had disappeared.

Martin hadn’t just found one guy and bribed him. He’d scouted out a couple of guys, decided this one was the most likely to be bribable, and had been correct about it. But Stefano might not have been the only one. And that was why she’d gone all in for humiliation, tasing, and arrest. Seeing a guy lying on the ground, twitching, was hopefully a much better deterrent than just threatening job termination or other, more nebulous consequences.

She took the list of items from the driver and checked them off herself as they left the truck and entered the Victorian house. Adgerton had had some eclectic taste, but a definite preference for the classics. Samantha appreciated that. She had a soft spot for pre-nineteenth century artists, herself.

As the seventeenth piece came down the ramp, she paused, looking up. A Grinling Gibbons piece from 1683, it depicted an apple tree. Actually, it was half an apple tree, part of a wall panel carved out of lime wood. Apple blossoms, leaves, apples, curved branches, lifted away from the panel with such stunning realism that she still couldn’t quite believe he’d done the carving from one single piece of wood.

The last time she’d set eyes on the “apple panel,” as it had been dubbed, had been five years ago, when she’d handed it over to Stoney for delivery to a discerning client of his, a guy she now knew to be Lewis Adgerton. Before that, well, it had been in the attic of one of the descendants of the artisan hired to clean it during a restoration of Windsor Castle some one-hundred-fifty years earlier. Mr. Fife had declined to return the piece to the castle, instead carving a passable fake that to this day remained on the wall in the south portrait gallery at Windsor.

Hm. She wondered whether Windsor had made a claim to get the panel back, or if Fife’s version had been there long enough to become part of history. If Sotheby’s felt confident enough to add it to the auction, whatever legal mess there might have been had obviously been resolved.

It was still weird to see it again, though. Somebody had cleaned it and had done a nice job with that—scrubbing time grime off the wood and leaving the natural patina of age behind was no easy task. Samantha shook herself. There she was, waxing nostalgic when she had a job to do.

“A wooden apple tree?” Aubrey noted, walking up beside her.

“Mmhmm. It’s about 350 years old. Not the most valuable thing here, but man, it’s pretty.”

“That, it is. You’ve got this place wired up to its eyebrows, Miss Samantha. I know I asked to come out and help, but there isn’t anything I can suggest that you haven’t already installed, together with a separate backup.”

“Thanks, Aubrey. You say the nicest things.”

“I do try.” He looked down for a moment, shifting his feet. “I don’t want to step where I’m not wanted,” he said, lowering his voice and nodding his chin toward the back door, “but I have a question.”

She led the way out to the alley out back. Great . If she’d been transparent enough to broadcast her newfound relationship with Anne to a guy who’d been in New York all of an hour, she needed to retire and go live in an old rundown house somewhere in the woods. Fleetingly she wondered if Rick would go along with that, then shook herself. “Ask away.”

“I get that the bad guy took a photo he shouldn’t have, and that that made you more worried about security. I got to tase him, which was fun. But in order for you to know about the photo he would have had to send it to…you? Or to someone who then sent it to you. That seems more likely, and it’s where I don’t want to barge into anything I shouldn’t, but if there’s anything more…necessary I can do to help, you can trust me, Miss Samantha.”

Back a little over a year ago, she could have named the people she trusted on one finger, and he went by the name of Stoney. Now, a couple of people knew about her and her dad—the Donner parents, Rick, and now Anne. That was still only one hand’s worth of people to whom she’d spilled her guts.

She’d never offered Aubrey Pendleton a job, but he’d just started showing up at her new office and managing it and her team way more efficiently than she could have on her own. So he’d gone onto the payroll and knew everything about her day-to-day at Jellicoe Security. But that was her legit shit.

Okay. Maybe she could edge him in sideways, see how that went, and make the big decision from there. Samantha nodded. “My dad, Martin Jellicoe, was a big-time cat burglar. He got nabbed a couple of years ago and died in prison.”

“So I’ve heard. My condolences, of course.”

“Thanks. Except that he didn’t. Die in prison, that is. He cut a deal with Interpol, with the idea that he would consult on thefts past and present and help them track down bad guys and recover valuable items, like the Monet that mysteriously turned up year before last after going missing for fifteen years.”

“Oh, my. So he… Oh, my.” Aubrey put a hand over his mouth. “I’m glad he’s alive, then, for your sake. And that he’s working to do good.”

“He’s not.” She scowled at the delivery truck as it pulled away, heading back to wherever Sotheby’s stored their delivery trucks. Hm. That would be a good thing to know. She made a mental note. “I mean, he might still be helping Interpol out, but he’s pretty much gone rogue. He’s been lurking around Manhattan, the past few days. I’m pretty sure he’s going to try to hit the exhibit, here.”

“Doesn’t he know you’re in charge of security?”

“Yeah. I think that’s his point—that I shouldn’t try to go up against the old man. And he and Anne had a thing once, which I’m not supposed to know about, and I think he’s being nostalgic or something.”

Aubrey looked at her for a long moment. “He’s the one who sent you the photo, which means Mr. Stefano was working for him.”

“‘Working for’ is kind of overstating, I think, but yeah. He doesn’t like that I’m legit, and so he keeps needling me. It’s really annoying.”

“To say the least. What can I do to help?”

Well, that hadn’t gone too badly. Maybe her good instincts as a thief were transferring over to the light side. “If you have any contacts in the world of anti-theft installation or West Palm Beach hoity-toities, it would help to know if anybody is interested in something Adgerton collected. I can’t see Martin doing this randomly. He'll have picked a specific piece to go after.”

“It’s not the marble hand?”

Samantha had already considered that. “I don’t think so. I could just pull it from the exhibit if I wanted to. My guess is that he wanted me to know that my security isn’t all I think it is. People are always the weakest link, though, so I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. But I was, which makes me feel stupid and want to punch things.”

He smiled. “I’m not exactly a delver into the criminal underbelly of West Palm Beach, but in some places it’s not much of an underbelly, anymore. It’s just right out there, in front of everybody. Ponzi schemes, Russian money laundering, all the higher end blue-collar crime. Now that I think about it, I might know who I could have a chat with.” Aubrey put a hand on her shoulder. “I don’t know much about your dad, but I have a great deal of faith in you, Miss Samantha.”

“Thank you, Aubrey. Hang out here if you want, or Rick found a nice coffee shop just up the street.”

“The coffee shop does sound slightly more discreet. And as you are aware, I am the soul of discretion.”

“That, you are. Thanks.”

Stoney was far more likely to have sources, if he ever meant to cooperate, but it was a big “if” right now, and on occasion Aubrey had come through in some surprisingly helpful ways. Even if he didn’t, it was kind of nice to have allies showing up. It was still her versus Martin, but she had some solid backup.

That abruptly reminded her that her star backup hadn’t called her yet to see how her morning had gone. That was really unlike him. And if Rick had finally gotten tired of all her crap, well, everybody else could just go to hell.

She dialed Rick’s mobile number, but her call went straight to his ultra-professional voicemail. Okay, maybe she was being an idiot. He was at his office. The one he owned. In the middle of Manhattan. He was a famously busy guy. And just because she was having a rough morning, she didn’t get to expect that he would be instantly available.

Shaking her head, she returned to the interior of the Victorian house and went back to hovering over all the cases as the exhibit items were wiped clean again and placed in their safe little nests. Whenever she’d become so…dependent on him having her back, on his being available the second she decided she wanted to vent or ask an opinion or something, the realization that it had already happened bothered her.

Just as she shoved her phone back into her pocket it rang, and she retrieved it again. “Hey,” she said, not disappointed at all to hear “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” and not Rick’s 007 ringtone.

“Hey,” Stoney’s voice came back. “Just checking in. Anything new with Martin?”

“He bribed a security guy to take a photo of one of the exhibit items. I had to have the guy’s ass arrested.”

“For taking a photo?”

“Look, the sign says, very clearly, ‘no photography.’ Mainly that was an excuse to get him off the premises, though.” She took a breath. “Anything new with you?”

“Nope. Crazily enough, nobody’s returning my calls asking about shit that’s none of my business. I just wanted you to know that I am trying, and that your business is putting a serious dent in mine. This is my reputation, because you’re a cat burglar ghost. I don’t say, ‘Sam Jellicoe wants to know something.’ I say I want to know something.”

“I get it, Stoney. I just…You’re my buffer between the light and the dark sides.”

“I know. I’m Switzerland. Except with all these questions, more than a few of my contacts have decided that I’ve chosen a side. And it ain’t theirs. You get it, honey?”

“I get it. Do you want me to stop asking you for favors?” They both knew what that would mean—putting some distance in between her new life and his old one. No midnight calls for advice or information, and even if she never accepted his offers anymore, no more calls ever from him offhandedly mentioning a buyer looking for a Picasso and willing to pay a couple mill to get his hands on it.

The silence on the line abruptly made her want to cry. But he knew where she was headed, and that she’d chosen never to go backward. He was the one with both feet in the shadows, and he was the one who had to decide whether he wanted to stay there or not. She just…Today hadn’t been the day she would have chosen to have this conversation.

“I don’t know, Sam,” he finally grunted. “I need to think about it. I’m just really annoyed this morning.”

“I get it. We will need to decide this, sooner or later. Preferably after you walk me down the aisle, though. If you will. I mean, I was going to ask you, but then this Sotheby’s thing came up, and—”

“Shut up, Sam,” he broke in, his voice abruptly gruff. “Of course I’ll walk you down the damn aisle. Jeez.”

She let out her breath. “Okay. That’s good. We can just leave it right there for now, then. I won’t even ask if you would think about moving to New York if Rick and I relocated here.”

“What the h—”

“Bye, Stoney,” she interrupted. “Talk soon.”

She disconnected the call. Boy, today was shaping up into a beauty. Next she’d probably turn around and Tom Donner would be standing there. Or the FBI or Interpol would be, or something. Cripes . That spooked her, so she deliberately waited a beat before she turned around. Nobody there but Aubrey, talking to Anne.

It was a good reminder, at least, that things could always get worse. And that they probably would.