The Novels of Nora Roberts, Volume 2

by Nora Roberts

  “My client had cancer—convinced himself that the relic would cure him. Of course, he’s dead, but he lived nine months longer than the doctors gave him. So who’s to say? Let’s get unpacked.” He patted her arm. “I want a shower, then we’ll get to work.”

  “Work?”

  “I’ve got some shopping to do.”

  “I’m not spending the day looking for Ferragamos for your sister.”

  “That won’t take long, and I’ll need trinkets for the rest of the family.”

  “Look, Boldari, I think we have a higher priority than gathering souvenirs for your family.”

  He infuriated her by leaning over and kissing the tip of her nose. “Don’t worry, darling. I’ll buy you something too. Wear comfortable shoes,” he advised her, and strolled back inside to shower.

  He bought a fluid gold bracelet set with emerald cabochons in a shop on the Ponte Vecchio—his mother’s birthday was coming up—and had it sent back to the hotel. Obviously enjoying the press of tourists and bargain hunters who swarmed the bridge over the placid Arno, he added gold chains in shimmering Italian gold, marcasite earrings, and Florentine-style brooches. For his sisters, he told Miranda as she waited impatiently and refused to be charmed by the tumbling glitter in display windows.

  “Stand here long enough,” he commented, “you can hear every language in the world.”

  “Have we stood here long enough?”

  He slipped an arm around her shoulders, shaking his head as she stiffened. “Don’t you ever let yourself fall into the moment, Dr. Jones? It’s Florence, we’re standing on the oldest of the city’s bridges. The sun’s shining. Take a breath,” he suggested, “and drink it in.”

  She nearly did, nearly leaned into him and did just that. “We didn’t come here for the atmosphere,” she said, in what she hoped was a tone cool enough to dampen his enthusiasm and her own uncharacteristic urges.

  “The atmosphere’s still here. And so are we.” Undaunted, he took her hand and pulled her along the bridge.

  The little shops and stands appeared to delight him, Miranda noted, watching him bargain for leather bags and trinket boxes near the Piazza della Repubblica.

  She ignored his suggestion that she treat herself to something, and giving her attention to the architecture, waited for him in simmering silence.

  “Now, this is Robbie.” He took a tot-sized black leather jacket with silver trim from a rack.

  “Robbie?”

  “My nephew. He’s three. He’d get a big kick out of this.”

  It was beautifully made, undoubtedly expensive, and adorable enough to have her pressing her lips together to keep them from curving. “It’s completely impractical for a three-year-old.”

  “It was made for a three-year-old,” he corrected. “That’s why it’s little. Quanto?” he asked the hovering merchant, and the game was on.

  When he’d finished the round, he headed west. But if he’d hoped to tempt her with the flawless fashions of the Via dei Tornabuoni, he underestimated her willpower.

  He bought three pairs of shoes in Ferragamo’s cathedral to footwear. She bought nothing—including a gorgeous pair of pearl-gray leather pumps that had caught her eye and stirred her desire.

  The credit cards in her wallet, she reminded herself, weren’t stamped with her name. She’d go barefoot before she used one.

  “Most women,” he observed as he walked toward the river, “would have a dozen bags and boxes by now.”

  “I’m not most women.”

  “So I’ve noticed. You’d look damn good in leather, though.”

  “In your pathetic fantasies, Boldari.”

  “There’s nothing pathetic about my fantasies.” He stepped to a storefront and opened a glass door.

  “What now?”

  “Can’t come to Florence without buying some art.”

  “We didn’t come here to buy anything. This is supposed to be business.”

  “Relax.” He took her hand, bringing it up in a sweep to his lips. “Trust me.”

  “Those are two phrases that will never go together when applied to you.”

  The shop was crowded with marble and bronze reproductions. Gods and goddesses danced to lure tourists into plunking down their gold cards and purchasing a copy of a master’s work or an offering by a new artist.

  Patience straining, Miranda prepared to waste another precious hour while Ryan fulfilled his family obligations. But he surprised her by nodding toward a slender statue of Venus within five minutes.

  “What do you think of her?”

  Soberly, she stepped up, circled the polished bronze figure. “It’s adequate, not particularly good, but if one of your legion of relatives is looking for some lawn art, it would do well enough.”

  “Yeah, I think she’ll do well enough.” He aimed a delighted smile toward the clerk, then made Miranda’s brows draw together as he fumbled with guidebook Italian.

  Throughout the shopping spree, he’d spoken the language fluidly, often peppering his speech with casual colloquialisms. Now he slaughtered the most basic of phrases with a miserable accent that had the clerk beaming at him.

  “You’re American. We can speak English.”

  “Yeah? Thank God.” He laughed and tugged Miranda by the hand to bring her closer. “My wife and I want something special to take home. We really like this piece. It’ll look great in the sunroom, won’t it, Abby?”

  Her answer was a “hmmm.”

  He didn’t bargain well this time, either, just winced over the price, then pulled her away as if to hold a private consult.

  “What’s this all about?” She found herself whispering because his head was bent close to hers.

  “I wouldn’t want to buy it without being sure my wife approved.”

  “You’re a jackass.”

  “That’s what I get for being a considerate husband.” He lowered his head, kissed her firmly on the mouth—and only by instinct avoided her teeth. “Promise me you’ll try that again later.”

  Before she could retaliate, he turned back to the clerk. “We’ll take her.”

  When the deal was made, the statue wrapped and boxed, he refused the offer to send it to their hotel.

  “That’s okay. We’re about to head back anyway.” He hefted the bag, then put an arm around Miranda, bumping her with one of the two cameras slung over his shoulders. “Let’s get some of that ice cream on the way, Abby.”

  “I don’t need any ice cream,” she muttered when they stepped outside again.

  “Sure you do. Gotta keep your energy up. We’ve got one more stop to make.”

  “Look, I’m tired, my feet hurt, and I don’t care for shopping. I’ll just meet you back at the hotel.”

  “And miss all the fun? We’re going to the Bargello.”

  “Now?” What chased up her spine was a combination of dread and excitement. “We’re going to do it now?”

  “Now we’re going to play tourist some more.” He stepped off the curb, giving her room on the narrow sidewalk. “We’ll check the place out, get a feel for things, take some pictures.” He winked. “Case the joint, as they say in the movies.”

  “Case the joint,” she murmured.

  “Where are the security cameras? How far from the main entrance is Michelangelo’s Bacchus?” Though he knew, precisely. It wouldn’t be his first trip, under any guise. “How far is it across the courtyard? How many steps to the first-floor loggia? When do the guards change shift? How many—”

  “All right, all right, I get the point.” She threw up her hands. “I don’t know why we didn’t go there in the first place.”

  “Everything in its time, honey. Abby and Kevin would want to see some of the city on their first day, wouldn’t they?”

  She imagined they looked exactly like American tourists—cameras, shopping bags, and guidebooks. He bought her an ice-cream cone as they walked. Because she decided it might help cool the hot ball of tension in her stomach, she licked at the tart, fr
othy lemon ice as he strolled along, pointing out buildings, statues, loitering at shop windows or over menus posted outside trattorias.

  Perhaps there was a point to it all, she decided. No one would look twice at them, and if she concentrated, she could almost believe she was meandering through the city for the first time. It was a bit like being in a play, she thought. Abby and Kevin’s Italian Vacation.

  If only she weren’t such a lousy actress.

  “Fabulous, isn’t it?” He paused, his fingers twining with hers as he studied the magnificent cathedral that dominated the city.

  “Yes. Brunelleschi’s dome was a revolutionary achievement. He didn’t use scaffolding. Giotto designed the campanile, but didn’t live to see it completed.” She adjusted her sunglasses. “The neo-Gothic marble facade echoes his style, but was added in the nineteenth century.”

  She brushed at her hair and saw him smiling at her. “What?”

  “You have a nice way with a history lesson, Dr. Jones.” When her face went carefully blank, he framed it with his hands. “No, don’t. That wasn’t a dig, it was a compliment.” His fingers brushed her cheekbones lightly. So many sensitive spots, he mused. “Tell me something else.”

  If he was laughing at her, he was doing a good job of disguising it. So she took a chance. “Michelangelo carved his David in the courtyard of the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo.”

  “Really?”

  He said it so seriously her lips twitched. “Yes. He also copied Donatello’s Saint John for his own Moses. It would have been a compliment. But the pride of the museum, I think, is his Pieta` . The figure of Nicodemus is believed to be a self-portrait and is brilliantly done. But the figure of Mary Magdalene in the same sculpture is inferior, and obviously the work of one of his students. Don’t kiss me, Ryan,” she said it quickly, closing her eyes as his mouth hovered a breath from hers. “It complicates things.”

  “Do they have to be simple?”

  “Yes.” She opened her eyes again, looked into his. “In this case, yes.”

  “Normally I’d agree with you.” Thoughtfully, he skimmed the pad of his thumb over her lips. “We’re attracted to each other, and that should be simple. But it doesn’t seem to be.” He dropped his hands from her face to her shoulders, skimmed them down her arms to her wrists. Her pulse was rapid and thick, and should have pleased him.

  But he stepped back. “Okay, let’s keep it as simple as possible. Go stand over there.”

  “Why?”

  “So I can take your picture, honey.” He tipped his sunglasses down and winked at her. “We want to show all our friends back home, don’t we, Abby?”

  Though she considered it overkill, she posed in front of the grand Duomo with hundreds of other visitors and let him snap pictures of her with the magnificent white, green, and rose marble at her back.

  “Now you take one of me.” He walked over holding out his snazzy Nikon. “It’s basically point-and-shoot. You just—”

  “I know how to work a camera.” She snatched it from him. “Kevin.”

  She moved back, blocked and focused. Maybe her heart tripped a little. He was such a staggering sight, tall and dark and grinning cockily at the camera.

  “There. Satisfied now?”

  “Almost.” He snagged a couple of tourists who happily agreed to take a picture of the young Americans.

  “This is ridiculous,” Miranda muttered as she found herself posing once again, this time with Ryan’s arm around her waist.

  “It’s for my mother,” he said, then followed impulse and kissed her.

  A flock of pigeons swarmed up with a rush of wings and a flutter of air. She had no time to resist, less to defend. His mouth was warm, firm, sliding over hers as the arm around her waist angled her closer. The quiet sound she made had nothing to do with protest. The hand she lifted to his face had everything to do with holding him there.

  The sun was white, the air full of sound. And her heart trembled on the edge of something extraordinary.

  It was either pull away or sink, Ryan thought. He turned his lips into the palm of her hand. “Sorry,” he said, and didn’t smile—couldn’t quite pull it off. “I guess I fell into the moment.”

  And leaving her there with her knees trembling, he retrieved his camera.

  He strapped it back on, picked up the shopping bag, then with his eyes on hers, held out a hand. “Let’s go.”

  She’d almost forgotten the purpose, almost forgotten the plan. With a nod, she fell into step with him.

  When they reached the gates of the old palace, he tugged the guidebook out of his back pocket, like a good tourist.

  “It was built in 1255,” he told her. “From the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century it was a prison. Executions were carried out in the courtyard.”

  “Apt under the circumstances,” she muttered. “And I know the history.”

  “Dr. Jones knows the history.” He gave her butt an affectionate pat. “Abby, honey.”

  The minute they were inside the principal ground-floor room, he dug out his video camera. “Great place, isn’t it, Abby? Look at this guy—he’s knocked back a few, huh?”

  He aimed the camera at the glorious bronze of the drunken Bacchus, then began to slowly pan the room. “Wait until Jack and Sally see these. They’ll be green.”

  He swung the camera toward a doorway where a guard sat keeping an eye on the visitors. “Wander around,” he told her under his breath. “Look awed and middle-class.”

  Her palms were sweating. It was ridiculous, of course. They had a perfect right to be here. No one could possibly know what was going on inside her head. But her heart pounded painfully in her throat as she circled the room.

  “Wonderfully awful, isn’t it?”

  She jolted a little when he came up beside her as she pretended to study Bandinelli’s Adam and Eve. “It’s an important piece of the era.”

  “Only because it’s old. It looks like a couple of suburbanites who hang out at a nudist colony every other weekend. Let’s go see Giambologna’s birds in the loggia.”

  After an hour, Miranda began to suspect that a great deal of criminal activity involved the tedious. They went into every public room, capturing every inch and angle on camera. Still, she’d forgotten that the Sala dei Bronzetti held Italy’s finest collection of small Renaissance bronzes. Because it made her think of the David, her nerves began to twitch again.

  “Haven’t you got enough yet?”

  “Nearly. Go flirt with the guard over there.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Get his attention.” Ryan lowered the camera and briskly undid the top two buttons on Miranda’s crisp cotton blouse.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Making sure his attention’s focused on you, cara. Ask him some questions, use bad guidebook Italian, bat your eyes and make him feel important.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing if you can’t hold his eye for five minutes. Give me that long, ask him where the bathroom is, then head there. Meet me back in the courtyard in ten.”

  “But—”

  “Do it.” He snapped it out, with a flick of steel. “There’s just enough people in here that I should be able to pull this off.”

  “Oh God. All right.” Her stomach tilted down toward her shaky knees as she turned away to approach the guard.

  “Ah. . . scusi,” she began, giving the word a hard American accent. “Per favore . . . ” She watched the guard’s eyes dip to the opening of her blouse, then skim back up to her face with a smile. She swallowed hard, then spread her hands helplessly. “English?”

  “Sì, signora, a little.”

  “Oh, wonderful.” She experimented with fluttering her lashes and saw by the warming of the guard’s smile that such pitiful ploys actually worked. “I studied up on Italian before I left, but it just gets all jumbled up in my mind. Such a scatterbrain. It’s terrible, isn’t it, that Americans don’t speak a second langu
age the way most Europeans do?”

  The way his eyes were glazing, she deduced she was speaking much too quickly for him to follow. All the better. “Everything’s so beautiful here. I wonder if you could tell me anything about . . .” She chose a sculpture at random.

  Ryan waited until he saw the guard’s focus fix on Miranda’s cleavage, then slipping back, he took a thin pick out of his pocket and went to work on a side door.

  It was easy enough, even dealing with it behind his back. The museum hardly expected its visitors to come armed with lockpicks or to want entrance to locked rooms in broad daylight.

  The floor plan of the museum was on a disk in his files. As were dozens of others. If his source was to be trusted, Ryan would find what he wanted beyond the door, in one of the jumbled storerooms on this level.

  He kept one eye on the security camera, biding his time until a group of art lovers shuffled in front of him.

  Before they’d gone by, he was through the door and closing it softly behind him.

  He took one long breath of appreciation, tugged on the gloves he’d tucked in his pocket, then flexed his fingers. He couldn’t take much time.

  It was a rabbit warren of little rooms crowded with statues and paintings, most of which were in desperate need of restoration. Generally, he knew, those who made their living through or around art weren’t the most organized of souls.

  Several pieces caught his eye, including a sad-eyed Madonna with a broken shoulder. But he was looking for another type of lady altogether—

  The sound of tuneless whistling and clicking footsteps sent him searching quickly for cover.

  • • •

  She waited the ten minutes, then fifteen. By twenty she was wringing her hands on the bench where she sat in the courtyard and imagining what it would be like to spend some time in an Italian prison.

  Maybe the food would be good.

  At least they didn’t kill thieves these days, and hang their corpses from the Bargello’s windows as a testament to rough justice.

  Once again she checked her watch, rubbed her fingers over her mouth. He’d been caught, she was sure of it. Right now he was being interrogated inside some hot little room, and he’d give up her name without a qualm. The coward.