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

Chapter 14

14

Monday, 10:12 a.m.

S amantha wished that on occasion journalists, photographers, bloggers, and media people in general would leave her alone long enough that she could forget how much she disliked all of them. She jabbed a finger toward the opposite side of the first jewelry room in the Victorian house. “The exhibit is over there.”

The photographer lowered her camera from her face. “Sorry, but you’re news, too.” Her finger moved, and the shutter clicked again.

Keeping her expression as easy as she could considering that she wanted to toss the camera down the elevator shaft, Samantha nodded. “Okay. If you keep it up, though, I’m going to make sure you’re not invited to the wedding. And considering how few photographers and journalists I actually know, your odds a minute ago were pretty good.”

The camera lowered further. “Really? I kind of need more than you just insinuating things.”

“Give me two of your cards.” Samantha held out one hand.

The woman complied, pulling a pair of cards from her all-purpose photography vest and handing them over. Samantha pocketed one and wrote down her cell number on the back of the other before she handed it back. “That’s me,” she said, patting the pocket of her nice pants where she’d put her phone. “Don’t bug me, but give me a call after the first of the year and hopefully I’ll have a date and location for you.”

“I don’t quite believe you,” Stephanie Freven said, putting the card in a different vest pocket, “but it’s worth the risk. No more photos of you today, except for any official ones.”

“There won’t be any official ones with me,” Samantha returned. “I’m background.”

“You could have given her my number,” Aubrey said from beside her as the woman strolled away. “I’m happy to be a buffer.”

“Are you my wedding coordinator, now?”

He shrugged. “I could be. I’ve been to a great many weddings. Very fancy ones.”

“I’m tempted, but first you have to tell me who’s holding down the office while you’re here.”

“I asked Bobbi Camden and George Narvaez. I figured they could keep an eye on each other.”

She nodded. “I like that they’re from two different teams. Good job.”

“Well, we’ll see when we get back, won’t we? If my filing is unalphabetized, heads will roll.” He nudged her shoulder when she didn’t react. “I chatted with a few hoity-toities,” he commented, thankfully lowering his voice. “One was aware of the Adgerton auction, but nobody seemed either overly interested or evasive. In my opinion, anyway.”

“Thanks for checking. It was a long shot, but we do, on occasion, come up lucky.” Maybe that was the real problem, she reflected; she’d been too lucky in her career for too long, and now all the bad thief karma was about to unload on her like a ton of granite.

As she’d stood aside to watch Anne deliver her presentation to the press and other Sotheby’s honchos and then answer every question like the pro she was, it had occurred to Samantha that this probably wouldn’t be the end of it. Every time she got a job protecting something that Martin wanted or at a location he had a grudge against, he could show up again. She could spend the rest of her new career fighting off her own damned dad.

The solutions to this problem, though, mostly entailed things that she didn’t even want to think about. She’d made a point throughout her criminal career of not getting other people hurt. To turn around now and wish Martin would be crushed beneath a metal door was both icky and wrong. Seeing him back in prison would be more than enough, thank you very much.

When another of the journalists started giving her sideways looks, she patted Aubrey on the shoulder. “Keep up the charm offensive as needed. I’m going down to the security room to hover like a vulture.”

“Anne will appreciate you not letting yourself get put into the spotlight on her big day,” he muttered, smiling at the man as he neared them.

“This is her show. She’s welcome to all the spotlight she can get.” Before Mr. Nosey could aim his cellphone in her direction, Samantha ducked backward, turning left to trot down the stairs to the main floor and then to the back of the house and down the utility stairs to the shut and locked door of the security room.

It opened before she could knock. “Saw you coming,” Rhee said, resuming his seat in front of the monitors and keyboard.

Samantha took the chair next to him. “Everybody behaving?”

“Yep. One of the guys tapped on the glass of one of the displays and the pressure alert went off to alert me to it, but other than that we’re good. I mean, the alert was good, too; that’s what it’s supposed to do.”

“You’ve got Cassie up to speed on everything so you’ll have some backup?” Cassie Veldez was apparently a newbie to Sotheby’s security division, but she had a good eye, and Samantha hadn’t gotten any weird vibes from her. She didn’t read like a Martin plant, anyway.

“I do. And even though they think we’re a bunch of paranoid idiots, I did like you asked and got Sotheby’s to do random checks of the system and display from their office every couple of minutes. If something looks hinky, they can notify the cops from there.”

“Good. The more eyes, the better.”

He sent her a sideways glance. “You know, us getting hit and the black hat getting caught is the only way Sotheby’s will ever spring for this much security again.”

“Yeah, I know. One of the perils of a job where the ideal summary is ‘nothing happened.’”

A yellow light blinked in the bottom left corner of monitor three, and at the same time a two-tone alert sounded. Rhee sat forward, zooming in to the indicated panel of glass to see some random guy’s hand making a stupid handprint all over it. “Same damn guy as before,” he grunted.

Before he could acknowledge the alert and reset it, Samantha shifted. “Wait.”

“In five more seconds, the alert’s going to sound.”

“Let it.”

In five seconds, a loud buzz echoed through the rooms of the Victorian house. “Please refrain from leaning on the glass displays,” an automated male voice said.

The guy jumped, stepping back from the display. In the middle of the room, Anne smiled then explained about the top-of-the-line security system Sotheby’s had installed to insure the protection of all the Adgerton pieces.

“Heh,” Rhee snorted, resetting the alert even though the system was ninety-five percent automated. People-proof, or so Samantha hoped.

“I still think we should have gone with a Darth Vader voice, but that one definitely does the trick,” Samantha observed.

Marv unlocked the door and walked in, a clipboard in his hands. “I ran all the credentials, Sam,” he reported. “Everybody checks out.”

“See? And you didn’t have to frisk anyone.”

The security guard grimaced. “Thanks for letting me test out the wand, anyway.”

“It was a good show. You’ll make the news, and everybody will see that Sotheby’s isn’t fucking around where security is concerned.”

“That Bradley Martin guy, especially. I almost wish he would show up. We’d get this kind of funding for every exhibit if we actually nabbed a cat burglar in the act.”

“That’s what I said.” Rhee seconded him. “Hey, the guy in the blue hoodie’s been leaning in the plaster and ceramics doorway for five minutes, and he’s giving me a partially blocked view of the lefthand corner. See if you can get him to move, will you?”

“You got it.” Marv set down the clipboard and headed out again.

This was all going really well; everything was working the way it should, problems with the angles of the sun and the glass reflections had been minimized, every sensor was green, and Samantha still kept most of her attention on the outside cameras. She knew what Martin looked like. He wasn’t inside the Victorian. That meant he was outside. The only thing was, she didn’t know where, exactly, he was lurking.

So this was how it was going to go; her sitting, waiting, monitoring, and nothing happening—until it did. Or it didn’t. And now, from what Rhee and Marv had said, if Martin and everyone else left the place alone, Sotheby’s would think Anne had overspent on security, and one Sam Jellicoe had overdelivered at an exorbitant price. So neither outcome looked particularly good for her.

That was Martin, though, wrecking everything within arms’ length to make one of his stupid “I’m better than you” points. And he had the remarkable ability to do it remotely. Nope, he didn’t even need to show up at all for her future Sotheby’s job prospects to go down the drain. Jerk.

He could ruin Jellicoe Security the same way. Call in a vague threat every time she got a new contract, and Samantha would overdo it on the security. She knew she would, because Martin pushed all her damn buttons, and extreme security was the only way to keep him out—wherever he actually happened to be. Her good reputation would slowly change to mention her paranoia, her excessive reliance on expensive, cutting-edge technology, and in that final stab of irony, the way nothing ever happened, despite her dire warnings.

Maybe she needed to focus on stolen-item recovery, after all. At least that way other people knew something had happened, and she just needed to show up with the missing whatever-it-was. No fuss, no muss, and she could bust windows and bad people’s alarm systems to her heart’s content.

Sure, security installation was a better long-term career option, but if she was going to have to factor in Martin Jellicoe every time she went to work, she wasn’t so sure it was what she wanted, after all. There had to be an easier way to stop him than dropping an anvil on his head, Wiley Coyote style.

* * *

“Okay,” Anne said, reviewing her to-do list one last time, “catalogs printed. Maps printed. Auction date set, notifications posted and placed in catalogs. Tickets printed. Staffing arranged for. Employees screened.” She glanced up. “What am I forgetting?”

“Parking validations?” Sam suggested, squatting to pick up a stray piece of paper from the floor of one of the exhibit rooms. She examined it, crumpled it, and dumped it into her pocket.

Neither of them seemed willing to leave anything to chance. Not even suspicious pieces of paper. “We have those, too. And the restroom’s been checked, and we have fresh toilet paper and hand soap.”

“It all sounds good,” her daughter commented, leading the way down the stairs. “I’m still tempted to sit here on the landing all night, just in case.”

“You and me, both. He didn’t used to be a tease, you know. If he said he was going to do something, he did it. But that was back when he was Bradley. Maybe he’s learned patience.”

“It’s not patience. He’s already set the date and the time he’s going to try to break in. The rest is about running us as ragged as possible until then so we make mistakes. All it takes is one, if you’re any good. One mistake somebody else makes, and bam, you’ve got a Picasso under your arm.”

Anne paused in the foyer. “But you can’t plan on mistakes. He must have a plan to get in regardless, yes?”

“Oh, I’m sure he does. But I think I blocked every way he could get in unless he’s a human mole now and can dig underneath the building. But I put sensors in the floor, too, so we’d know as soon as his mole head popped into view.”

“In that case,” Anne commented, still reluctant to leave the house to its electronic protection alone, “would you be interested in joining me for dinner? I’d like some non-work time for the two of us to just…chat.”

“I’d like that, too, but as far as we want Martin to know right now, we’re just coworkers. After the auction, maybe.”

That hurt a little bit—okay it hurt a lot—but she did understand Sam’s reasoning. Some obvious reluctance at turning down the invitation would have been nice, though, instead of what she was coming to recognize as her daughter’s standard direct approach.

“Definitely then,” Anne said aloud. “May I ask what you have planned for the rest of the day?”

“Aubrey bought me a guide to getting married, so I may look through that. Or burn it. I haven’t decided which, yet. And I need to check back in with a couple of people to see if they’ve figured out anything new about Martin’s plans, or his target.” Sam gave a small grimace. “You?”

“I thought I’d give my mother a call,” Anne answered. “I haven’t told her about you yet. Still trying to figure out how to do that without giving her a heart attack.”

“I have a grandma? Wow. It never occurred to me to ask. What about a grandpa?”

“Your grandfather died about twelve years ago. Lung cancer. He could not give up the cigarettes.”

“I’m sorry. You know, I kind of remember chasing some big guy with a beard around a yard and yelling at him to drop the cigarette. Maybe I dreamed it, though.”

Good heavens . “No, that was real. He’d go outside to light up, and you’d chase him until he gave it up, though I actually think it was because you liked the piggyback rides.”

Sam smiled. “That’s cool, then. I do remember something.” A horn honked outside, and she turned to look through the nearest window. “And that’s my ride. I’ll see you about half an hour before opening tomorrow, right?”

“Yes. Definitely. You and Rick have a good evening.”

“Thanks. You, too.”

They headed outside together, and Sam looked over her shoulder as she locked the door and made sure the alarm was set. This was it. No more fiddling, no more alarm tests, no more practices. Everyone interested in anything Adgerton had ever collected would be coming by starting tomorrow at nine o’clock. “Should we post a photo of Bradley by the ticket booth and in the security room? It just struck me that you may be the only one who might recognize him.” She might, as well, but it had been twenty years—and for some reason she kept imagining him making his appearance in a trench coat with a fake moustache.

Sam shrugged. “He talks a big game, but I doubt he has the guts to just stroll in. I've warned him that the next time I set eyes on him, I’m calling the cops. He might think I’m bluffing, but he probably also wonders if I’m not.”

Anne looked at her daughter for a moment. “Are you?”

“Nope.”

Abruptly that struck her as being very…sad. What a life this woman had known. A life nothing like the one her mother had intended for her. “I’m sorry to have you in the middle of this.”

“I’m not. It was bound to come down to a him or me situation, and I’ve got backup now. Plus, there’s you. It’s all his loss, as far as I’m concerned. He didn’t have to do the things he did; he chose to do them. People can change. I know that, because I’ve done it.”

“I really want to hug you right now.”

“That’s some good wine, isn’t it?” Sam said, grinning as she headed to the edge of the sidewalk.

“Yes. A very fine vintage.” Now they were at code words and turning in people’s fathers, and the exhibit hadn’t even opened yet. The next few weeks were going to be a hoot.

She lifted a hand to hail a cab. As one pulled to the curb, she opened the back door and slid in, giving her address. At this moment, the thing that kept her from tearing out her hair and running away, screaming, was the idea of after. After this was finished, Martin would somehow or other be gone, and she would still have a daughter back again. The holidays were coming up. Thanksgiving. Christmas. She had no idea what someone gave to a young woman who could acquire anything she wanted practically by thinking it, but she looked forward to the challenge.

The after had family gatherings, at least one wedding, laughter, and a hundred other things she’d just begun to imagine. The idea that Bradley Martin had both caused the separation and the reunion didn’t make her look on him with any sort of kindness or forgiveness, especially when he could theoretically continue to create problems for Sam, but she couldn’t help wondering if some small part of him felt bad for what he’d done and this was his twisted, horrible way of making amends.

Her phone jangled in her pocket, and she jumped. “Mr. Pendleton?” she said, pulling it free and tapping on the little green phone image. “Are you trying to reach Sam?”

“No,” his soft, cultured drawl came. “I was hoping I could have a word or two with you, Miss Anne, if you have the time. Is there somewhere we could meet?”

“Um, sure. There’s a deli around the corner from my apartment. Will that work?”

“That would be lovely.”

She gave him the address. “Say twenty minutes?”

“I will be there with a hot cup of coffee for you.”

Hm. Aubrey Pendleton was a fine-looking man, if a bit…overgroomed. Not that she was after another relationship. She’d been avoiding those for the past two decades. But a cup of coffee? That, she could manage.

* * *

“If I promise to bid on something, can I be there on opening day?” Richard asked, wondering when he’d last asked permission to do something. Mutual consent was one thing, but even if he felt like an idiot asking her, he did not want Samantha resenting his presence.

She unbuckled her seat belt as Benny pulled up outside the hotel’s main entrance. “You will attract attention.”

He got out of his side of the Mercedes before Benny could come around and open the door for him. “I’m not the only one. This is a well-known collection. Other big names in buying things—or their minions—are going to show up. Are you going to stop them at the door, too, so they don’t distract the staff?”

She blew out her breath, nodding as Vince opened the lobby door for her. “Thanks, Vince. Hey, do you know who Lewis Adgerton is?”

The beefy concierge narrowed his eyes. “He’s the dead rich guy, isn’t he?”

Ha . “See?” Richard put in. “Everyone knows.”

Samantha kept walking toward the elevators. “Fine. But you can’t just bid. You have to buy something.”

“Like we’re at a PTA bake sale?”

Snorting, she grabbed his hand as the doors slid open. “That’s right. Mom has to sell her stuff, or she’ll think people don’t like her baking.”

“Very well,” he conceded. “I will buy something.”

“Then you can come.”

“Thank you.” The elevator doors opened on their small, private foyer, and he stepped in front of Samantha, shoving her backward even as he caught sight of the dark, hooded figure standing by the apartment door. With his free hand he reached into his coat pocket for the butt of his .45. Jesus .

“Wait!”

“It’s me, it’s me,” Walter Barstone said on the tail of Samantha’s protest, reaching up to push the hoodie off his head. “Hey, there.”

Taking a deep breath, Richard let go of the pistol. “That’s it. Vince is supposed to inform us when we have people lurking for us.”

“Vince? The lobby guy? Don’t blame him. I came in the back way. Spent an hour sitting in your living room until I decided that would be creepy and I came out here to wait.”

Richard brushed by him and pulled open the door. “It’s still creepy,” he stated, walking into the apartment.

“Yeah, but less creepy.”

“Okay, Stoney,” Samantha took up. “What are you doing here?”

“We need to have a chat. A face-to-face one.”

That was never a good thing. Walter Barstone never meant anything good for Samantha, however much credit he deserved for at least keeping her from turning into her father. Richard took a breath. Perhaps the fence wasn’t so bad, then, all things considered. “Then you should come in,” he said. “Wine, beer, or diet Coke?”

From Samantha’s expression his acceptance of this newest bit of chaos surprised her, but hell, he’d known her for a little over a year. Chaos followed her like a crazy, rabid dog. He was becoming accustomed to it.

“Beer,” Walter said, making his way to the living room.

They’d intended to go out for dinner tonight, so Andre hadn’t come by to cook for them. Another best-laid plan now gone astray. “Should I order a pizza?” Richard asked aloud, pulling out his phone. “Mexican? Chinese? Indian?”

“Can I get a salad with some chicken or something in it?” Walter asked. “I’m trying to eat healthier but not starve myself.”

Beer in one hand, Samantha stopped in her tracks, turned around, returned to the kitchen, and reemerged a moment later with a bottle of water and her ever-present diet Coke and no beer. “Why are you eating healthier?” she asked, handing the bottle of water over to the fence.

“Really, Sam?”

“Your DNA is eighty percent tacos, Stoney,” she returned, dropping onto the couch and curling her legs beneath her, catlike. “And twenty percent beer. Explain the salad.”

They were family, Richard reminded himself. To him, Walter was an annoyance. To her, he was closer to her than her own father, and she certainly trusted him more than she did Martin—and with good reason. When something changed, she noticed it. And she worried.

“I just had my annual checkup, is all,” the big man commented, opening the water and eyeing it like he worried it would bite him. “My cholesterol’s creeping up. Therefore, three salads a week, a walk every morning, and fewer beers.”

“And you’re sure that’s it? You don’t secretly have consumption or something?”

Snorting, the fence downed a swallow of water. “Nope. Or the Black Death plague.”

“Good. What the hell are you doing here, then? Yesterday we were talking about…vacations from each other.”

“Amicable separation,” Richard amended, placing an order for pizza and a chicken Caesar salad and then texting Vince to let him know it would be arriving in thirty minutes or less.

“I remember,” Walter answered, sending a glare over his shoulder at Richard. Their mistrust was mutual. “Started daydreaming about that villa in France I always talked about. You know, the one where you lived on the next hill over?”

“With the little donkey path in between? I remember.”

Richard folded his arms over his chest. She wanted a villa in France? Well, he could do that. And he could buy her some donkeys. That would take a lot more maneuvering than a move to New York, but the effort was beside the point. Why hadn’t she ever mentioned a villa to him?

“Yeah. I was daydreaming myself out there on the veranda, sipping some wine in the sunset, and then my damn phone rang. Martin.”

“Shit.” Samantha straightened. “What did he want?”

“He wants you to be a librarian.” Still looking like he expected a crocodile to be swimming in his bottle of water, Walter took another swig.

“Come again?”

Richard walked into the kitchen, pulled two beers out of the refrigerator, and returned to hand one to Walter. “This seems like an alcohol sort of story.”

“Amen to that.”

“Stoney.”

“Sorry, Honey. I need a drink first.” Unscrewing the cap, Walter tilted the bottle back and took a long drink. “There we go. Much better. So yeah. He wants you to stop dipping your toes into his world. To stop throwing fences up in front of him, because he swears he will jump them each and every time to keep proving that you’re not better than he is. Which you are, but which he would never admit.”

“Did he actually say librarian?”

It seemed like a frivolous detail to him, but Richard was well aware of how her little crime family operated, with their code words and seemingly throwaway phrases that actually meant things that were likely to give him a heart attack later. “Does that mean something?” he asked aloud.

“He said librarian or piano teacher.”

Samantha sat back. “He probably got that out of The Music Man movie. He thinks that’s what ‘normal,’ quote unquote, women do. Unmarried women, that is. Jackass.”

“Well, sure they did, a hundred fifty years ago. In movies.” Richard sat beside her and unscrewed his own beer. “Not that I would ever say anything to credit Martin, but perhaps that’s his way of saying he wants you to have a normal life.”

“Nah,” Walter countered. “It’s his way of saying that Sam’s ticking him off and he wants her to get away from his business.” Clearing his throat, he took another drink of beer. “And the reason I booked a flight here as soon as I hung up with him is because I had the feeling that he’s planning on lowering the hammer on you, honey. A ‘lesson you won’t forget’ type of thing.”

“You’re choosing sides, then.” Samantha sat forward. “And you know what that’ll mean.”

The fence looked at her for a long couple of seconds. “You asked me to walk you down the damn aisle. I can’t do that if one of us is in the slam. And Martin said if you turn him in, he’s going to start talking about you. Give you all the credit you deserve, plus the blame for some of the shit he pulled, probably under Interpol’s nose.”

“Maybe you should have started with that, Walter.” Fuck . That had been the sticking point all along—that if they did stop Martin and managed to get him arrested, he would turn around and provide all that pesky missing information about Samantha that had kept her well under the radar for the past ten years. “Would he, really?”

“To get himself back in good with Interpol or shave a couple of years off a sentence? In a heartbeat.” Slumping back again, Samantha took a drink of her soda like she wished it was gin.

Richard brushed his fingers across her cheek. “Then you leave this to me,” he murmured.

She slapped his hand down. “Why? So you can kill him? You’ve got a temper, Rick. I’ll give you that. But you are not going to murder anybody and wreck your own life. There are like, hundreds of people who rely on you for their livelihood.”

“I am not—” Richard stopped, swallowing hard. Jesus, he couldn’t even say the words aloud. “You are not going to prison. I am therefore giving you three choices.”

“Oh, you’re giving me choices? When did—”

“Stop.” He glared at her until she closed her mouth. “One, you can shut off the alarms and let Martin take whatever the hell he wants. Two, you can stop him however you planned to and take the consequences, at which point we will move permanently to Brunei or Austria or France, because they—”

“No extradition treaty with the U.S.,” Stoney cut in. “We’ve got all those countries memorized.”

“Yes. No extradition. Or, three, you let me deal with Martin, and we proceed as planned.”

“All I need to do is keep him from getting in there,” Samantha stated, her jaw clenched. “I’m doing that. I’ve done it. Short of slamming a trash truck through the building, he’s not getting in.”

“And what about your next job?” he asked. “Do you really want to go through this every time you contract with somebody to provide security?”

“No, I really don’t,” she snapped. “That doesn’t mean I want to jump over the Grand Canyon of idiot ideas to murder, though.”

“Neither do I. It’s my worst-case scenario. No, my second-worst. The worst is you going to prison.”

“Wow,” Walter commented from his seat in the chair. “Not even I was thinking about offing Martin, and I’m the bad guy in this trio.”

“I will protect Samantha,” Richard insisted. “No matter the consequences. But I am ready to hear other plans that leave Martin permanently out of our lives and unable to implicate her in any crimes.”

Yes, it sounded violent, and yes, he did have a mean streak that had last showed itself when he’d found his ex-wife in bed with his ex-friend and he’d hung her out to dry with the lawyers—after filling her apartment with dirty mattresses up to the ceiling. This wasn’t anger over betrayal, though; it was fear, about what prison would do to his Samantha, and about what not having her in his life would do to him.

Samantha’s phone rang, and she glanced down at it. “Vince,” she said, accepting the call. “The pizza’s here already?” She listened for a second, then uncurled from the couch and stood. “Send ’em on up.”

“Who?” Rick asked. “We’re in the middle of something here.”

“I know that.” She walked to the door, her attention on Walter. “Sorry about this, Stoney. In my head we did this over dinner somewhere nice, and you would be wearing a tie.”

The fence scowled. “Wha—”

She pulled open the door and stepped backward. Anne, Aubrey Pendleton on her heels, walked into the apartment. No one had wine this time, Richard noted as he rose. Old-fashioned or not, an English gentleman always stood when a woman entered a room. Especially one that would shortly be his mother-in-law. “Anne,” he said, nodding. “Aubrey.”

“Rick. Hi, Sam.” Anne started forward, her arms lifting, until she caught sight of Walter. Immediately she stopped. “I forgot the wine,” she said, in a tone that would have alerted anyone within a ten-block radius that something was suspicious was afoot.

“That’s okay. Anne, this is Walter Barstone. Stoney, my mom, Anne Hughes.”

Walter shot to his feet, nearly dropped his beer, set it on a side table, and shook droplets off his fingers as he came forward. “Very pleased to meet you, Ms. Hughes,” he said, wiping his hand on his pants before he stuck it out to her.

Anne shook it. “Mr. Barstone.”

“Stoney, please. I mean, we’re kind of family.”

They both glanced at Samantha. “I suppose we are,” she said with a quick smile. “But we’ve got some trouble.”

“Yeah, we do.” Samantha returned to her seat and curled up again. “It occurs to me that I should’ve become an adventurer cryptozoologist who free dives after man-eating squid. That would’ve been more sensible.”

“You don’t like seafood,” Stoney observed, resuming his seat across from Samantha.

“As if disliking calamari would be the main reason not to dive into a man-eating squid’s tentacles.” Samantha watched as everyone took seats and Rick wordlessly upped the pizza and salad order to account for additional people, being civilized even if he had just suggested offing Martin Jellicoe.

Samantha had on occasion seen Rick’s temper, like when he’d ripped apart her emergency go-bag and tossed the contents into the pool at Solano Dorado. But it had always been a controlled, pointed anger, with enough thought behind it to figure out how and where to do the most damage. Not the smack-you shit, ever, because she wouldn’t have tolerated that, but more the I’ll-ruin-you-and-your-entire-company-for-lying-to-me-about-your-actual-net-worth shit.

Kill Martin? Sure, she’d thought about how much easier her life would be now without him in it, but Rick only knew the bad stuff. There had been the odd spaghetti dinner and a beer before she was old enough to drink it, the way he’d taught her things she’d been able to use later on her own that had saved both her and the heist from going sideways.

“Okay,” Anne said, accepting a glass of wine from Rick and handing a second one over to Aubrey. “I’m not quite sure how to start, here.”

“Maybe Stoney should go first,” Samantha suggested, gesturing. “He flew in with news.”

She sat back as her surrogate dad, a Ving Rhames stunt double in slacks and a neat pink-and-blue dress shirt with short sleeves now that he’d shed the black hoodie, recounted what he’d already told her and Rick. As she watched, a couple of things occurred to her: first, while she’d talked around enough things to give Aubrey an idea of her past, he didn’t look the least bit surprised at hearing details; and second, what he did look was seriously worried. And he never looked worried. Smooth and amiable were his superpowers.

Him together with Anne didn’t make much sense, either, because while he was a distinguished-looking older man, she’d always had the feeling that he was gay. Rick disagreed, but she’d been around her office manager far more than he had. Aside from all that, none of this had date vibes.

When Stoney finished, everybody needed a drink refill. Rick obliged, again being the perfect host even while he was probably still thinking of the best way to off Martin and get away with it. If this was the Upside Down, Manhattan version, Samantha didn’t much like it.

“Aubrey,” she said, accepting a second can of soda from Rick, “we’re trusting you with some stuff here. I know you probably knew, but now it’s official. I hope you’re okay with getting the whole story.”

“What she isn’t saying,” Rick took up, sitting beside her again, “is that you now know some things that could have consequences for Samantha. Unpleasant ones. We should have asked where you stand first, but you’re in it now. And we’re trusting you.”

The sometime social-events-escort gulped down the rest of his wine like it was water. “I can’t sugarcoat this,” he stated, looking over at Anne.

“Let me start,” she countered, “and we’ll take it from there.”

“No. It’s too late.” Aubrey faced Samantha, his ruddy face pretty pale for a guy who tanned professionally. “I know who you are, Miss Samantha. I’ve known for nearly ten months, now.”

That would have been about the time they first met. “Did I say something that tipped you off?” she asked. What was so horrible about that, she didn’t know. If he’d been keeping her secret for more than nine months already, she owed him a steak dinner. A couple of them.

“Yeah. ‘Jellicoe.’ Miss Samantha, I’m with the FBI.”

A couple of things happened at once. Rick, one hand diving into his pocket, stood and put himself between her and Aubrey; Stoney stood up so fast he knocked his chair over backward; she started choking on the mouthful of diet Coke she’d just tried swallowing; and Anne put both hands over her face and sank deeper into the couch cushions as if she was trying to hide.

Samantha noted all of it in a second, at the same time pounding herself on the chest and fighting the weirdest thought that she wished she could be an old-fashioned fainty woman and just black out and wake up after somebody else had taken care of everything.

Aubrey moved his hands away from his sides. “Hey, we’re all friends here. Nobody get any crazy ideas,” he said, his drawl deepening and his gaze on Rick’s pocket.

“Careful,” Stoney warned, still ducked behind the tipped-over chair. “Nobody say anything but ‘lawyer.’ Don’t answer anything, don’t admit to anything.”

“Everybody take a breath,” Aubrey advised.

“Lawyer! I want my damn lawyer!”

It all began to sink in. FBI. The FBI. In her house, in her office, in her life. How the fuck had she not known that? She liked Aubrey Pendleton. She trusted him. “Is Aubrey Pendleton even your real name?” Samantha asked when she’d coughed the rest of the soda out of her lungs.

“Yes, it is. And before you arrived on everybody’s radar, I was ratting out old ladies who stole jewelry and old men who stole from their own banks. I was good at it, too.”

“Stop talking,” Rick growled. “Walter, there’s some climbing gear in the left bedroom closet. Get the rope.”

“Yep. I saw it earlier.” Looking very happy to be leaving the room, Walter rolled to his feet and took off running across the living room.

Samantha stood up, moving slowly and deliberately until she stood beside Rick. “Take your hand out of your pocket.”

“No.”

“I get it,” Aubrey said, despite Rick’s warning. “You put a samurai sword through a guy’s shoulder because he threatened Miss Sam. You protect her. Think about it, though. There’s a reason it’s me sitting here, and not a bunch of guys with bulletproof vests.”

Rick stared at him. “You’d best have a very good story,” he finally said in his crispest British accent, blowing out his breath. He pulled his empty hand from his pocket. Samantha knew he had a gun in there, though. Nobody was getting shot on her watch. Not if she had anything to say about it.

“Don’t try to be charming, Aubrey,” she suggested. “Just tell me what the hell is going on.”

“Okay. But that guy you put a sword through, Rick? I burned down his house. So give me a minute to say a few things, if you don’t mind.”

Samantha blinked. “Y—That was you?”

“He was creepy,” Aubrey supplied, as if that was sufficient. It did make her think about a few things, though, so maybe it was.

“Okay,” she said, keeping a hand on Rick’s arm. “Talk.”

The story he told, about going from small-time white-collar criminal-finder to being assigned to stalk her, made Samantha’s hair stand up on end. For nine months the FBI had been actively investigating her, and she hadn’t had a clue. She’d always prided herself on being alert, being one step ahead of whoever might be after her, but this time the lack of handcuffs had nothing to do with her or her actions.

“I don’t get why you haven’t given them enough to put me in the slam, yet.” Samantha picked up Rick’s discarded beer and took a swallow. A good buzz would have been nice, but the wiser part of her didn’t like giving up that much control, so she set it back on the table.

“That’s the part that’s been bugging me, too. And them.” Aubrey took a deep breath. “You’ve mentioned bits of things, enough that I could look up unsolved heists and figure out to which one you were referring. But…you came out of the shadows, Miss Sam, when you didn’t have to. You were literally a blank page with a whole bunch of question marks on it. And since you stepped out, you haven’t done anything wrong. Hell, you’ve even caught a couple of bad guys and turned them in.”

“You admire my style of vigilante justice?” she suggested, ignoring Rick’s unamused growl.

“In a sense, yes. This…I mean, I watched you in real time. You gave up the life. A very lucrative life. I don’t know if you feel like it’s your penance, or you just changed your point of view, but you stepped away and you haven’t slipped. Not once. Sure, you’ve done a couple of shady things, but those were to help people.”

“Just get to the point, will you?” Rick finally snapped. “What is it you want? Because you’re not taking her out of this room.”

“He’s been stalling the FBI,” Anne finally said. “Looking for a way to keep everyone happy without putting you in prison, Sam. When you told him about Martin, he thought your father’s presence could be…useful.”

“It won’t be.” Stoney had picked up his chair, but he continued to stand, the bulk of the furniture between him and the door and the rappelling rope in his land like a lasso. For him to even stay in the room with an FBI agent surprised Samantha; he reacted to the law the way some people reacted to walking into a spiderweb. “Martin’ll rat Sam out if he ends up in jail over this. He told me so. Which is why I flew up here.”

“The way I see it,” Anne countered, her voice taking on a matter-of-fact mom tone that Samantha remembered hearing from Katie Donner when she’d had it with her kids, “we have a trap set. We have a rat. And we have a rat catcher. Don’t tell me there isn’t something we can figure out to get Martin far away from here and not endanger Sam. Think, people.”

Stoney glanced from her to Samantha. “Jesus,” he muttered. “You are related.”

“So you won’t turn me in?” Samantha asked, sitting down again to lean her elbows on her knees and putting all of her attention on Aubrey Pendleton. “Or you won’t turn me in if you can get hold of Martin, instead?”

“Neither one,” Rick stated, his jaw still clenched. “Both end with you in jeopardy.”

“Stoney, is there anything that would keep Martin’s trap shut?” Samantha continued. Rick’s white knight thing was cool, but right now he was a roadblock to any thinking, in or out of the box.

“You mean like did he ever kill someone and only tell me about it? No.”

“Is there a job, then, that if anybody knew he did it, would get him in bigger trouble than what Interpol or the FBI could threaten?”

“No,” Stoney answered. A second later, though, he set his second bottle of beer on the side table. “Hold that. Let me think for a minute.”

Rick faced her and grabbed her hand. “It doesn’t matter what we might speculate about,” he muttered, catching and holding her gaze, “because it is too much to risk.”

“Look,” she returned, keeping her voice low, too. “I’m freaked out. I nearly jumped out the front window when Aubrey said those three letters I won’t even repeat because they give me hives. But if he’s looking for a way to keep me out of trouble when I’m already on the white hats’ radar, I’m going to try to help him find it. So go call Donner or something, because right now you are not being helpful.”

He blinked, then took a step backward. Good as he was at hiding what he was thinking, she saw this one plain and clear. He was pissed off. And hurt. She tried reaching for his hand, but he moved out of the way and stalked to the main bedroom door, walked through, and slammed it shut behind him.

“Sam,” Anne whispered, shifting over to take his place.

“Yeah, I’m going to pay for that one later,” she muttered.

It occurred to her that he might have just decided she wasn’t worth the trouble that seemed to boil up around her, and that he was on the phone with Donner, arranging to have her excised from his life. That she’d pushed him too far. That he’d realized what a fucking mistake he’d made in falling for her in the first place.

Vince rang the buzzer with the pizza, and Anne got up to take it from him. That was good, because Samantha wasn’t sure she could move. Everything felt cold and frozen as a block of ice, and however much she needed to be thinking of a way to get herself out of this mess, every bit of her stayed focused on that door at the far end of the room.

What had she done? Crap . Taking the private plane tonight to France or Austria with Rick wouldn’t be so bad. In fact, it could be pretty awesome. Of course he’d get all of the assets he hadn’t already moved in case of this emergency frozen, the aunt and uncle and cousin he’d just reconnected with after ten years would start pretending neither of them existed, he’d be booted off all the executive and charity boards he currently sat on, and he’d lose the bulk of the art he’d spent his life collecting, and never be able to do legit business anywhere outside the country where they landed ever again. But hey, they’d be together, right?

Stoney went into the kitchen and pulled down some plates, and she shook herself. “Did you open every cabinet and drawer?”

He shrugged his broad shoulders. “Pretty much. I got bored waiting for you.”

Making herself stand, she put two slices on one plate and a single on the other, picked them up, and headed for the bedroom. “Keep thinking,” she said over her shoulder.

The door wasn’t locked, at least, and balancing both plates on one arm, she turned the knob and stepped inside, shutting the door again before Rick could bellow at her to get out or something.

“‘I’m not helping’?” he repeated, turning from the far window. “ I’m not helping. After everything I’ve done to keep you safe and to allow us to stay together if something ever—”

“You went right to DEFCON one,” she interrupted, beginning to think she should have taken another beat or two to figure out exactly what she was going to say. “The thing is, I want to stay. Here. With you. With Stoney and Anne and even all the Donners but Tom. With your plan, yeah, we’d be safe, but we’d also be fugitives and everything would be ruined for you.”

“I don’t c—”

“I know you don’t care,” she cut in again. “Or you say you don’t, which is nice. But I happen to like this life, now. The one I have with you. Therefore, if we can scrounge together a fifty-one percent chance to salvage the situation without murder or me getting arrested or us fleeing to parts unknown, and if it maybe involves just a little mayhem and subterfuge, I am going to take that risk. So stop jumping straight to planetary destruction mode before we check out all the other levels of peril. Okay?”

He stared at her, his Caribbean-blue eyes shadowed in the half dark of the bedroom. “My plan stays on the list,” he finally said. “It can be at the bottom of the list, but it remains our DEFCON one option. Is that clear?”

Samantha exhaled, not remembering when during the conversation she’d begun holding her breath. They were still a thing. She hadn’t wrecked it. “I would definitely choose you and France over FMC Carswell. That’s the women’s prison in Texas where they keep the highest escape-risk inmates. Which would be me.”

“I know what it is. Federal prisoners aren’t allowed conjugal visits. That’s unacceptable.” He tilted his head a little. “The pizza’s here?”

“Yeah.” She held out the plate with the two slices. “You get it, right? I don’t want to have to run for it.”

He took the plate, and her hand. “I get it. I don’t like being told that I’m not helping, but I get it.” Slowly he tugged her closer. “You want to stay in this life. With me.”

Setting her pizza on the bed, she lifted up on her toes and kissed him, tangling her free hand into his black hair. “Yes, I do,” she breathed, leaning her forehead against his.

“Then let’s find a damn way to do that.”