Stolen Heat

by Elisabeth Naughton

  Figuring the place looked relatively harmless, Pete gestured to a booth in the far corner where he could keep a close eye on the front door, just in case, and where they had instant access to the emergency exit in the event they might need it.

  Kat slid onto the bench seat, the plastic creaking as she moved. She shrugged out of her parka and reached for a menu propped between the sugar dispenser and the salt and pepper shakers at the end of the table. “I’m starving,” she said with way too much enthusiasm.

  Pete frowned as he sat, dropped the backpack at his feet and reached for his own menu. Just what the heck was up with her? She’d gone from being scared shitless in the park to insanely aroused at the club to perky Paula here, all within a matter of hours? He wasn’t buying it.

  “What’ll it be?” the waitress asked, stopping at their table with a pen and pad in hand. She eyed them with a bored look.

  Pete glanced at his watch. 9:52 p.m. The sign on the door stated the diner was open until ten thirty, which meant the waitress’s shift was coming to a close.

  “Coffee,” Pete said and smiled, though it did little good. The waitress lifted her brows and regarded him over the top of her glasses. “Two.” He held up two fingers.

  “I’ll have to brew it.” She glanced at Kat and sighed. “Anything else?”

  Kat scanned the menu with ravenous eyes. “Let’s see. You’re still serving breakfast, right?” Without waiting for an answer, Kat said, “I’ll have two eggs, sunny side up. With wheat toast, hash browns and sausage links.” While she continued looking at the menu, the waitress rolled her eyes and glanced Pete’s way, ready for his order, but Kat stopped him before he could open his mouth. “Do you have those silver-dollar-size pancakes?”

  The waitress nodded, glanced at her watch and heaved out a sigh that blew her too-long bangs out of her face. Suddenly amused, Pete slung one arm over the back of the booth and watched with familiar interest.

  Kat still had a hefty appetite. That obviously hadn’t changed in six years.

  “Great,” Kat went on. “I’ll have those with blackberry syrup. Oh, and a bowl of fresh fruit if you have it. A tall glass of milk, too.” She looked toward Pete.

  The waitress’s pen paused on the paper as she looked up. “Instead of the eggs?”

  “No, with the eggs.”

  The waitress glanced between them. “Is that for both of you?”

  Pete fought back a smile and closed his menu. “Cheeseburger and fries for me.”

  The waitress looked back at Kat with wide eyes, almost as if she assumed there’d be more, and when Kat only smiled and closed her own menu, the woman shook her head in dismay and finally headed for the kitchen.

  It was a scene he’d witnessed before. He didn’t know where Kat put all that food on her slim five-foot-seven frame, but he figured she had to have some superhuman metabolism to burn off all those calories because it definitely didn’t show on that compact body of hers.

  And yeah, now he knew exactly what her body felt like thanks to that little foray in the strip club’s back hall. How firm her breasts were, how tight her ass was, how hot she was between her thighs.

  He shifted on the bench seat to release the sudden pressure in his jeans at just the memory. He’d had his hands on her back at Slade’s garage, but then he’d been too drugged up to notice the difference he’d clearly felt only a few minutes ago.

  What else was different about her now?

  He watched her carefully across the table. She sat still, her hands folded on the Formica, staring out the window across the room. She wasn’t looking at him, but she hadn’t been avoiding eye contact either, which was another major tip-off something was up. In the park she’d barely been able to look him in the eye.

  He waited until the waitress brought their waters and two steaming cups of black coffee and then walked back into the kitchen before he leaned forward and placed his forearms on the table.

  “That guy in the park wasn’t FBI.”

  She looked his way with clear eyes. Clear and very focused dark brown eyes. “I know.”

  “You see him before?”

  She shook her head, lifted her water and took a sip. “No, but he knew plenty about you and me. CIA maybe?”

  Pete reached for the cream. “I don’t know, but one thing’s for sure. Whoever he was, he definitely knew this guy Minyawi.”

  Kat pursed her lips. “Yeah, but how did Busir and Minyawi know we were in Philadelphia? That was fast, even for Busir.”

  Pete shrugged, stirred his coffee. “Maybe the guy in the park called him after you talked to Slade.”

  Kat’s brow lowered. “Marty would not have turned me in. I refuse to believe that. Somehow the guy in the park knew Marty, which leads me to think he’s somehow connected through the government. But I’m sure Marty didn’t know what he was up to.”

  Pete sat back with a frown, hating the way a quick stab of jealousy shot through his chest anytime she mentioned Martin Slade. Jesus, why did it bother him so much?

  “I don’t think you can assume anything at this point,” he said. “Busir has obviously stayed under the radar all these years because he has high-powered contacts. You said yourself the SCA didn’t or wouldn’t get involved back when your supervisor went to talk to them. We slowed their guy down with the explosion at the garage, but they never lost our trail.”

  He hesitated, then added, “The other guy, Minyawi. You recognize him?”

  Kat shook her head. “I never got a good look at him. But there was something about his voice. I don’t know. It was familiar.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him before, I just can’t place where.”

  Kat’s cup hesitated halfway to her mouth as she glanced at him. The waitress came back with ketchup and Tabasco. She set the bottles on the table and moved away again.

  “Why did you come back to the park?” Kat asked in a quiet voice as she set her cup on the table.

  Pete bit the inside of his lip as he mulled over her question. He’d been asking himself that same thing since he’d jumped on that bike and raced through the trees looking for her. And he still didn’t have an answer he liked. Because the only one that came to mind went against his better judgment.

  “It was the right thing to do,” was all he said.

  Their eyes held in the silence that followed, and then she said in an achingly soft voice, “For whatever reason, thank you. You saved my life.”

  His heart thudded in his chest, a reaction that both confused and ticked him off. “Thank you for saving mine back in New York. I’m still not entirely sure what went on there, but I have a feeling if you hadn’t stepped in, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”

  Emotions he couldn’t read rushed across Kat’s face, and she opened her mouth to speak, but the waitress returned with an armful of plates, interrupting her. It took the woman two more trips before Pete had his burger and the rest of Kat’s order was overflowing the table.

  Kat picked up her fork and looked down at her food. “It was no big deal. Really. I just…surprised them.”

  She didn’t look like she wanted to give details, so he didn’t press. She dove into the food like a woman starved, and Pete almost chuckled as he reached for the bottle of ketchup. Same old Kat. The first few times he’d taken her to dinner in Cairo he’d been shocked by how much she could put away. Then he’d been pleasantly thrilled when she’d spent the remainder of the night working the calories off with him between the sheets of his bed.

  Damn. He shifted again on the bench seat in discomfort. Clenched his jaw at what the memory did to his pants and the little bit of gray matter left between his ears.

  “So Minyawi,” he said as he picked up a fry and tried to forget about his raging libido. “If we go by what this Halloway said in the park, he’s the mastermind, not Busir. And he knows we’re together. It’s possible he’s tracking us with my credit card.”

  Kat swallowed around a mouthful of
food. “I hadn’t thought of that, but I guess it’s possible.”

  “Not likely, though,” Pete went on as he picked up his burger. “The more likely scenario is he’s got someone on the inside who’s connected to Slade, but we’ll use cash from here on out just to be safe.”

  Kat set her fork down, lifted her coffee and took a long sip. Something in her eyes said she wanted to ask him a question but didn’t know how to broach the topic.

  “What?” he finally asked when his curiosity got the best of him.

  She reached up to run her fingers over the medal at her chest. “What happened in Afghanistan?”

  Ah, so that was what the mood was about.

  Pete leaned back and carefully wiped his mouth with his napkin. As he did, he glanced around the restaurant. The cook had come out from the kitchen and was now deep in conversation with the waitress and the man still seated at the lunch counter. The elderly couple who’d watched them with curious eyes earlier was standing to leave. No one was listening to their conversation or paying one iota of attention to them anymore.

  Which was a good thing. Except it left way too many opportunities for intimate questions such as this.

  How much should he tell her? How much did she already know? She’d once accused him of buying and selling on the black market, which he knew wasn’t too far off the mark. So what did it matter if he told her the truth now?

  It mattered, he realized, for the same reason it had mattered back then. Because somewhere inside he didn’t want her to know the whole truth about him.

  “I got delayed,” he said, figuring that was the safest answer he could come up with.

  “What were you doing in Afghanistan in the first place?” She lifted her fork again and resumed eating, but he could tell by the set of her chin she was curious and she wasn’t about to let this conversation drop.

  He went back to his burger and shrugged. “You know I trade in antiquities. Cairo wasn’t the only place I went looking for a deal.”

  “In Afghanistan? I thought the Taliban cracked down on foreign trade after the war on terror heated up.”

  “They did. Doesn’t mean you couldn’t get in.”

  He knew he was giving her the bare bones and that she was growing increasingly frustrated, and out of some strange sense of guilt he heard himself adding, “Look, there was nothing shady about it. I had a contact there who told me of a collector who wanted to sell a few of his pieces. I went to meet with him. It was all on the up and up.”

  Which it had been. That time, at least.

  “So why wouldn’t they let you leave?”

  He lifted his water and took a long swallow. Oh, maybe it was because he had dealt with some pretty slimy characters in the past who had traded on the black market. Or maybe it was because he had turned a blind eye a few times when he’d known the provenance on a piece had been faked. Obviously INTERPOL knew that as well, or else he wouldn’t have been stuck in that Afghani armpit to begin with. Or it could have been because this time—though he’d done it all the right way—he hadn’t been quite as careful about who he told he was headed to Afghanistan in the first place.

  A thought suddenly occurred to him. “Halloway knew about the blue notice.”

  She looked up, brow creasing because he’d changed the subject so abruptly. “What’s a blue notice?”

  “It’s a color-coded lookout INTERPOL sends to its member countries to assist law enforcement in their investigations. A green notice means they’re looking for some kind of dangerous career criminal, a yellow notice is sent out when they want to locate missing persons, red’s issued when they’re seeking the arrest of fugitives, and blue goes out on the wire when they want to locate people in certain criminal investigations.”

  “You seem to know a lot about how INTERPOL works.”

  “When you run with some of the people I have, you keep your ear to the ground and pay attention.”

  Her brow lowered, and she studied him as if looking at a stranger. Then her eyes grew wide, and she held up her hand as she made obvious connections. “Wait. You were involved in a criminal investigation with the International Crime Police?”

  He grimaced at the suspicion he heard in her voice and told himself it didn’t matter, though it stung to know she now thought her original assumptions of him in Cairo hadn’t been too far off the mark. Stung a lot. But what mattered most here was the fact Halloway knew about the notice.

  “No,” he said emphatically. “The blue notice was a watch. It meant the Afghan government could keep me in one place while they checked me out. It meant I couldn’t leave and the U.S. couldn’t do anything to get me out until the notice went down.” He eyed her. “And it did go down, Kat, obviously, because I’m here now. I’ll admit in the past I’ve worked with some people I probably shouldn’t have, but on that trip I didn’t do anything wrong. They knew it, which is why they finally had to let me go.”

  She touched the medal again, and he saw the flash of doubt in her eyes as she thought about what he’d said, coupled with questions she wasn’t sure she should ask. “So why are you surprised Halloway knew that? If he worked for the FBI, wouldn’t he be privy to blue and green notices or whatever you called them? The U.S. has to be a part of INTERPOL, right?”

  “Yeah, they are. There are something like one hundred eighty-six member countries, and the U.S. is definitely a part of that. And if this guy really worked for the FBI, then yes, he’d know. But he said he worked for the Art Theft Crime Team and that they were watching me then.”

  “So? Isn’t that part of the FBI?”

  “Yeah, but the Art Crime Team wasn’t established until after I was in Kabul.”

  Kat glanced around the empty restaurant while she ingested that information. “So he definitely wasn’t FBI.”

  “I’m thinking not. He could have been at one point, but my gut says no. He’d have known when that division was established.”

  “So who was he then? CIA? Why would he play like he wasn’t?”

  “It’s possible he could have worked for Uncle Sam. It’d gel with how he knew Slade, but I doubt it. My guess is he’s connected to INTERPOL.” A breath of excitement rushed through him. “And if so then we just got our first break, because I have a way of finding out.”

  He quickly checked his watch. Too late tonight. But tomorrow was another story. When he popped a fry in his mouth and looked up, Kat was biting her lip and playing with her medal again.

  And Pete stopped eating because that look was back in her eyes. The determined one that said she’d made her mind up about something.

  “What?” he asked again.

  She hesitated, then finally said, “If someone from INTERPOL’s involved in this, they would have been privy to Sawil’s original complaints filed with the SCA.”

  “Yeah, I thought of that. Your list of missing relics might not have gotten out on the wire. And if that person was in on it with someone from the SCA, your complaint never would have gone anywhere.”

  She stared down at her half-eaten plate. “I went back to the SCA that morning before Sawil and I went into the tomb. They brushed me off.” A visible shudder rushed through her, and she opened her mouth to say more, but then closed it suddenly.

  She’d been in the tomb the night Ramirez had been killed. Pete wanted to ask exactly what she’d seen, but he sensed this wasn’t the time or place to do that. He did, however, know she was holding something back.

  “Ramirez must have talked to someone else,” he finally said. “Maybe he was the link to the guy at INTERPOL.”

  “I doubt that.”

  He dipped a fry in ketchup and went back to eating. “Too bad we don’t know who the other person was you said you heard in that tomb.”

  Pete looked up at Kat’s silence. “What?”

  “I…” She quickly reached for her backpack at his feet and scooted out of the booth. “I have to use the rest-room.”

  Frowning at her strange and sudden exit, Pete watched her walk to
the bathroom and had a momentary thought that maybe he should check to make sure that was exactly where she was going. The woman looked like she might just bolt.

  He froze, fry halfway to his open mouth. And nearly lost his dinner.

  She wouldn’t do that to him again, would she?

  He lowered the french fry to the plate and wiped his suddenly sweaty hands on a napkin. He kept his eyes glued to the women’s restroom door, mentally ticking off the minutes she’d been gone. When he got to five, he had a sinking suspicion she’d just screwed him again, and not in the way his body wanted.

  Holy hell. How stupid did he have to be not to see the signs? She’s been planning to bolt since they’d walked out of that strip club.

  Disbelief and a resurging sense of rage he thought he’d clamped down bubbled up in his chest as he gripped the edge of the table and started to slide out of the booth. Just as he was putting his weight on his feet, the women’s restroom door opened and Kat walked out.

  Relief plowed into him hard at the sight of her, and he dropped back onto the bench seat on an adrenaline rush.

  Idiot. Fucking idiot. He raked a hand through his hair and took a deep breath to settle his blood pressure. No way she’d ditch him again like she’d done in Cairo. Whether she admitted it or not, she wanted his help. Otherwise she’d already be gone.

  Gone.

  That thought kicked him in the gut as he watched her walk across the restaurant and slide into her seat again, all long legs and lanky build, dark, tousled short hair and even darker, mesmerizing eyes he’d thought he’d never see again. Somehow he had to figure out a way to put the past behind him so they could work together and live through this…whatever it was.