Stolen Heat

by Elisabeth Naughton

  “Ex,” Pete said. “She’s on leave right now, helping out with her family’s business in Miami while her father’s ill.”

  “What business is that?”

  “Hotels.”

  Slade’s eyes widened as obvious links fell into place. “Hailey Roarke? As in, daughter of hotelier Garrett Roarke, of Roarke Resorts?”

  Pete nodded. Sometimes it was even hard for Pete to grasp. The Roarke name had become as well-known as Hilton over the last few years. And Hailey—as unreal as it was to believe—was an heiress.

  “So what now?” Kat asked, pulling Slade’s attention back to them. “We all know Minyawi and Busir weren’t the ones behind all this. What happens next?”

  “We monitor the borders and send out a notice to the Egyptian authorities about Busir’s actions here,” Slade said, refocusing. “But without proof of a higher-level involvement, the other person you say you heard in that tomb walks away.”

  “That’s not right,” Kat stated emphatically.

  “Right and wrong don’t matter much in international politics,” a dark-haired, dark-skinned woman dressed in a black suit said with a Middle Eastern accent as she stepped up to the group. “Unless, of course, you can positively identify that third party.”

  They all looked at the newcomer.

  She nodded to them as a whole. Her features were sharp and striking, and there was an air of authority about her everyone caught. “I’m Agent Tiya Hawass with INTERPOL. The apprehension of Aten Minyawi has been one of our top priorities. We’ve lost several good agents because of him, including Dean Bertrand, whom I’m told you met in Philadelphia.”

  When Pete and Kat exchanged glances, she said, “Minyawi popped onto our radar about six years ago. He quickly rose in the ranks of the Egyptian Liberation Army, though we suspect he was with the organization a lot longer than that. He served in the Egyptian military for a short stint in his late teens, but his expertise was antiquities, which explains how he got involved with the artifact ring.

  “Several years ago he switched focus, however. We’re not entirely sure why, but he became one of their leading hit men. He often operated outside the ELA, like we think he did in this case because of a personal vendetta, but his association with their organization as a whole is wellknown and well-documented. We know from surveillance that Hanif Busir has been smuggling archaeological treasures out of Egypt for years—they’d be sold for a hefty profit on the black market, and a portion of the proceeds were funneled back into the pockets of the ELA, thereby funding their cause. What we’ve never been able to prove is the link between the artifact black market that exists throughout Africa and Asia and Europe, the SCA that governs archaeological research in Egypt and the ELA.”

  “Until I came along,” Kat said quietly.

  “Until you came along,” Agent Hawass repeated, nodding her way. “Which is why we took a backseat and monitored Minyawi’s movements these past few days here in the States. When it came to my attention that you were in fact alive, we hesitated to become involved, hoping you could provide the evidence we needed. However, when we realized Bertrand was operating on his own, we were ready to step in. The incident in the park was unfortunate, and had you not rushed out of there so quickly, we could have ended this then and taken you into protective custody. Of course, that didn’t happen.” She glanced between them. “So now it all boils down to evidence. And from what I understand, there is none.”

  Kat looked at Pete with creased brow as Agent Hawass turned to Pete. “Because of the international implications of this case, Officer Slade has agreed to let me sit in on your questioning. Your cooperation will be noted when your case is prosecuted.”

  “It’s about time, Kauffman,” Slade said. “We need to go.”

  “Wait a minute,” Kat interjected. “I’m not sure what’s going on here, but I have proof—”

  Pete’s chest tightened. Yeah, their happily ever after had just crashed and burned.

  “Can you give us a minute?” he said to Slade and Hawass.

  The two exchanged glances, then nodded and stepped back to the door.

  Kat turned wide, confused eyes up to his. “What’s going on?” she asked with a hint of panic in her voice. “Pete, what questioning are they talking about?”

  He took both of her hands in his and squeezed them, feeling the warmth of her skin against his own. “I want you to do me a favor.”

  “Anything.”

  “When you leave here, I want you to go see my friend Rafe Sullivan. Hailey knows how to get in touch with him. He’s got something for you. In Florida. Trust him like you trust me, and don’t give him a hard time about this.”

  “What do you mean by ‘this,’ Pete?” She tightened her grip on his hands and searched his face for answers to questions he guessed she was already figuring out. The blanket around her shoulders fell to the floor. “Tell me what’s happening.”

  “Maria can’t find your necklace, Kat.”

  “But—”

  “I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my life. I stayed ahead of most of it, covered up my tracks, didn’t care who was hurt as long as I got ahead. I was careful, and I was smart. And I made sure it wouldn’t ever come back to bite me in the ass. There’s never been anything in my life I’ve believed in enough to make me change my thinking. Not until you.”

  She darted a look at Slade near the door, then back at Pete’s face. “What did you do?” she whispered.

  He lifted his hand and rubbed his thumb over her soft cheek. “I did exactly what you would have done. What you did. And I don’t regret it. Not even for a moment.”

  “No, no, no,” she whispered. “Pete.” She didn’t try to hide the tears. They just spilled over her sooty lashes and slid down her cheeks. “Tell them you changed your mind. Tell them—”

  “It’s already done, Kat.”

  Her words fell silent at that revelation, but her tears continued to fall, and her hands tightened on his as if she didn’t want to ever let him go.

  In the silence between them he fingered the medal at her chest. “You were wrong, you know. About this. You’re not a lost cause. You never were. And you were wrong about what happened. You didn’t ruin my life, Kat. You saved it. In the best possible way.”

  He let go of her hands, cradled her face in his palms and kissed her ever so gently.

  “Please don’t do this,” she whispered, grasping his forearms. “I can’t live without you.”

  He rested his forehead against hers and drew in a long breath, her words warming the coldest corner of his heart. “Yes, you can. God, Kit-Kat, you can do so much better than me. I want that for you. I want you to have everything.”

  “Pete, please.”

  Letting go of her then was the hardest thing he’d ever done. Harder than hearing of her accident, harder than going to her memorial service, harder still than living with the belief she’d been dead. But he forced himself to do it. As he reached the door where Slade stood waiting to take him into custody and turned to look back at her, he knew her grief-stricken face was going to stay with him forever.

  Just the way it should.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Florida

  Three weeks later…

  Kat sank down to the end of the bed and stared in stunned disbelief at the thank-you card in her hand. She’d picked it up when she’d been downstairs getting coffee this morning and had brought it and a few other pieces of mail back up with her while she got ready for the day.

  She thought she’d cried herself dry weeks ago when Pete had made his deal with the government and been taken into custody. Obviously, she’d been wrong.

  She reached up to rub fingers over her medal and read the last line of the letter one more time.

  …We cannot begin to tell you what your donation means to us here at St. Thomas’s Orphanage. You truly are a gift from God. May the Lord watch over you always.

  Sister Mary Francis Gilbert

  Six million dollars. Ever
y last proceed from Pete’s auction in New York City had been donated to St. Thomas’s Orphanage outside Seattle. Her orphanage. After reading the letter, Kat had called Pete’s lawyer and discovered the arrangement had been made two weeks before the auction. Two full weeks before he’d even known she was still alive.

  A tear slipped down her cheek and landed against the paper in her hands. In a blur she looked up and scanned the bedroom of the house she’d been staying in since coming to Miami.

  Pete’s bedroom in Pete’s big house in Miami Beach, with its leather and mahogany headboard, dark woods, sleek lines and masculine colors. She hadn’t heard from him since that morning at Maria’s apartment, and no one was giving her answers. And she was dying inside not knowing what was happening.

  She’d been heartbroken when she’d met his friend Rafe and he’d told her of the deal Pete had made with the government. Then shocked speechless when Rafe and Pete’s lawyer had shown her the papers transferring his assets into accounts with her name on them. But the clincher, the one that had her picking her jaw off the floor and wiping the gush from her eyes whenever she thought of it, was when she’d realized he’d turned Odyssey over to her.

  In that one act she knew he didn’t think he was coming back. Not anytime soon. He’d made that deal and given up everything. For her.

  That pressure returned, right beneath her breastbone. Every time she thought she was doing better, that breathing wasn’t such a monumental feat after all, something happened—like getting this thank-you card—that brought her world spinning back down again.

  She closed her eyes tight, unsure how she was ever going to be able to go into Odyssey today and pretend to run a gallery she had no clue how to operate. Even with his sister Lauren volunteering to help, it was more than she could handle. The thank-you card slipped from her grasp and floated to the ground.

  Being here was tearing her up. Seeing everything he’d built and envisioning him in this house surrounded by all his things was slowly eating away at her insides. Imagining where he was now while she sat on the end of his bed, wearing one of his Turnbull & Asser designer dress shirts like she’d done every night since she’d been here, was slowly killing her.

  “I can’t do this much longer,” she whispered into the stillness of the morning.

  “Do what?” a voice asked from the bedroom doorway.

  Pete dropped his duffel at his feet and tried to steady his racing heart as he watched Kat lift her head and turn his way. Those molten chocolate eyes of hers, damp as if she’d been crying, focused, then widened in shock.

  “Pete!”

  She launched herself at him and took him down to the floor before he even realized he was off his feet. He landed half in the hall, half in the bedroom. But that wasn’t what got his attention. It was her mouth closing over his in a hot, greedy kiss that tore a groan from his chest and sent blood pounding right to his groin.

  Her hands were everywhere, her mouth wet and demanding against his own. She took exactly what she wanted and didn’t give him a chance to say yes or no or anything in between. And thank the stars above for that. In seconds she had his pants undone and pushed down to his thighs as she continued to kiss him, and then all rational thought slipped from his brain when she hiked up the dress shirt she wore, straddled his hips and took him deep inside her steaming wetness.

  “Kit-Kat.” He groaned and thrust up to meet her, as frantic as she was to get to him. And when they both reached the peak together moments later, he was gasping for breath like he’d just run the Chicago marathon.

  She dropped her face against his neck. Pressed one hand to his shoulder. Her medal fell against his shirt, and her heart raced in time to his as he blinked up at the hall ceiling.

  Now that was a homecoming.

  She fisted his shirt into her hand and breathed deeply. “I’m so mad at you, Pete.”

  He drew in two slow breaths and tried to regulate his heart rate. “If this is you being pissed at me, then I’m thinking we definitely need to fight more often.”

  “That’s not funny,” she said against his neck.

  “I don’t hear anyone laughing.”

  She pushed up on the hand she had braced against the floor and looked down at him. “Oh, Pete. Please tell me this is real.”

  He smiled up at her and brushed a lock of hair back from her temple. “It’s real.”

  She moved off him so he could sit up, but she didn’t go far, easing back on her heels so he could pull up his slacks. “I don’t understand. What happened? I called every day. No one would tell me anything.”

  “That’s because they couldn’t.” He fixed his shirt. “Two days after I was taken into custody, Maria found your necklace.”

  Kat’s eyes widened. “She did?”

  “It had been sent back to Greece already. And you were right. The proof was all right there on the camera card. Minyawi and Busir in the tomb that night before Minyawi went back to get you. Busir and some other guy plotting what they were going to do to you and to Shannon if you didn’t cooperate.”

  When her face paled, he added, “The other guy, the third one that you said you never saw? Dr. Omar Kamil. Director of the Cairo Museum.”

  Kat’s eyes grew even wider. “He’s with the SCA. No wonder my complaints never went anywhere.”

  “He’s also a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has links to the ELA. Ramirez—Minyawi—whatever you want to call him was his inside man. Somehow they got Latham involved—blackmail, it looks like. But together they were making a butt-load of money skimming pieces coming out of there and selling them on the black market. Latham left notes in that journal we got from his wife. Notes, Kat,” he said, still unable to believe it himself, “which prove how small time he really was. Busir was their go-to guy.”

  When her eyes slid closed, he knew what she was remembering—the horror in that tomb, what she’d done in Maria’s kitchen. He closed his hand over hers in a tight grip. “It’s over, Kat.”

  “Do they have Kamil?”

  “They do now.”

  Her eyes popped open. “What do you mean now? Why do I get the feeling—”

  “The evidence on the tape was inconclusive. There was never a clear shot of Kalim’s face. But as soon as Maria saw it, she knew it was him. She had dinner with him the night we went to her apartment. He was the man we passed getting on the elevator in her building. That’s how Minyawi knew we were in New York.”

  “So what happened?”

  “My lawyer cut another deal.”

  She eyed him warily. “I’m starting to dread your deals, Pete.”

  He laughed and reached for her other hand. “It worked out, didn’t it? I’m sitting here with you now.”

  “I’m still not sure how that happened. And why you couldn’t call and tell me any of this was going on. I’ve been worried sick about you.”

  “I know. But I couldn’t because I’ve been in Cairo the last few days, Kat.”

  “What?” Those almond-shaped eyes of hers widened again until he saw the whites all around her mocha irises.

  He shrugged and tried to downplay the situation. “Turns out INTERPOL, in conjunction with the CIA and the Egyptian government, was more concerned with nabbing Kamil and closing down the ELA’s link to the SCA than they were in holding me. In exchange for helping them set up a sting to get Kamil and his few remaining accomplices—one of which was the guy who was shooting at us in Raleigh—I got a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

  He grinned, but she continued to gape at him like he’d grown a second head. “You what?”

  He tightened his grip on her hands, fearing her trust in him was once again teetering on the edge. “Don’t freak out. I haven’t dealt with any of those guys in a long time, but I still know some contacts running underground. It wasn’t as difficult as one might think to set up a deal and lure Kamil in.”

  “And you did.”

  “Not all on my own. I just…helped.”

  She stared at him wi
th big, unreadable brown eyes. “With a man known to be linked to a violent terrorist faction.”

  “Yeah,” he said hesitantly, because she was looking at him now like she suddenly didn’t know him anymore.

  “Without telling me what you had planned,” she added way too calmly.

  “Yes.”

  Her jaw clenched.

  Okay, she was mad. And she had every right to be. But he hadn’t wanted her to know. Though it hadn’t been as difficult as he’d thought to arrange it all, it had still been dangerous. And if it hadn’t worked out, he could have wound up right back in jail. Or worse, dead.

  “You could have been killed,” she said with narrowed eyes.

  “But I wasn’t.” He leaned forward and tried to kiss her.

  She eased back out of his reach.

  “Come on, Kit-Kat. It’s all good now. I’m safe. You’re safe. Everything’s back the way it should be. We’ve got this great big bed.” He nodded into the bedroom and lifted his brows, hoping to lighten the mood. “Be a shame to waste it right now when I’ve been gone all this time. You know I didn’t get any conjugal visits.”

  “If everything’s back the way it should be,” she said, cocking her head to the side and ignoring his joke, “I suppose that means you want your gallery back. And the house and everything else.”

  “No,” he said, choosing his words carefully because he didn’t want to risk screwing anything up at this point. “It means I love you, and I just want you back. None of the rest of it means anything to me if you’re not a part of it.”

  That did it. Her eyes softened, just enough so he knew he had her. “If you want a job you’re going to have to apply for it.”

  He barked out a laugh and pulled her tight against him before she could move out of his grasp.

  “And if you plan on staying in this house, no more hiding the truth from me, Pete. Ever.”

  “Deal.” He was smiling as he moved to kiss her, but she turned her head so all he got was her ear.

  “And,” she went on, hands braced against his shoulders, “while I appreciate the generous…gifts…you gave me, my new lawyer—”