“Yes,” Adam echoed, thoughtfully, “but you never know what’s happening inside those nice middle-class homes.”
“Would you like us to keep digging?”
“No.” He’d get to the truth himself. “Put everything into finding the thief. And when you do”—he let himself relish the thought—“don’t call the polizia. Save him for me.”
“Amusing,” Henry said after Adam hung up, “that you, of all people, are out for blood. Things have come full circle. Did your mother never teach you the Golden Rule? Do unto others . . .”
“My mother did unto others every day, which left her precious little time to teach me anything.” He tossed his phone on the desk. “What I learned from my parents, I learned from watching them fuck up their lives. At the end of the day, I can only be glad they ignored me, or they’d have fucked me up too.
“As for your Golden Rule,” he added, “it doesn’t apply. I steal art for art’s sake. The Lady in Red spent a hundred years under a sheet in a dusty French attic. She deserved better than the wall of Akulov’s dacha.”
He paced. “That thug was behind what happened to Rasheed, to his whole family. You know it as well as I do.”
Rasheed was another old friend Adam hadn’t been able to save, like Bridget’s Ian and a handful of others who’d met a bad end before Adam had the means to change their lives. And none had a met harder end than Rasheed. Except Rasheed’s daughter.
“Revenge, perhaps?”
Adam waved that away. “Akulov never believed I stole the Lady. He told me to my face that I don’t have the guts. In any case, an eye for an eye wouldn’t satisfy him. He’d have taken my hands, not my painting.”
“Then it’s personal.”
“It has to be. The thief walked past six paintings as valuable as the Monet, and took only that one. Why?”
“It held pride of place. An obvious favorite.”
“Exactly. Instead of waltzing out with a quarter billion in hand, he took only the painting I prized most highly.”
“So it wasn’t the painting he wanted. It was this.” Henry swept a hand at the groove Adam was wearing in the carpet. “He wanted you to wonder, to worry. To think about him. Hunt for him.” He shrugged again, eloquently. “He wanted your attention, and he got it.”
“Yes, he did. As only someone aware of my interest in art would fully understand.”
“Which makes you look at Maribelle.” Henry shook his head. “She’s too lazy. She wouldn’t risk her soft life. And if she did, if she hired someone to get inside, it would be for profit. The subtlety of stealing only your favorite would be lost on her.”
Henry made sense. Maribelle, his biggest mistake, was interested only in Maribelle. She wasn’t likely to derail the gravy train, even to make a point.
But he wanted it to be her, the one person at the villa he didn’t trust. The others were like Henry and Fredo, people who’d stood by him when they had nothing to gain. He trusted them, and tainting that trust was something Maribelle would savor.
He tried to shake off his black mood. “Any more on the Matisse? Do we know when they’re moving it?”
“A week from tomorrow. I’ll know the details forty-eight hours beforehand.” Henry hesitated. “Perhaps you should let this one go.”
Adam swung around, surprised. “And let Rosales have it? He traffics in children, for God’s sake. He cleaned out the Brazilian orphanage.” One of several operated by Adam’s foundation. “They’ll be in Thailand by now, those kids.”
“It’s bad, Adam. But you take it too personally.”
“Like hell. I’m only taking the man’s painting, not his balls, which would be far more satisfying.”
“Even so, I think you should reconsider. Under the circumstances.”
“Which are?”
“Maddie, of course. I don’t understand why you’re bringing her to the villa, where all your secrets are hidden. The Lady in Red. Maribelle. And your—”
“I’ll keep Maddie occupied,” Adam cut in. “As for Maribelle, tell her to keep to her villa while I’m there. Tell her,” he added with an edge, “that if anyone wanders anywhere that Maddie might go, I’ll hold Maribelle responsible. And she won’t like the consequences.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Vicky: I promise to work with you, to help you achieve whatever you want to accomplish.
Maddie: Unless it’s stupid.
MADDIE WAS UP with the birds, squinting into the mirror at the shadows under her eyes. The tossing and turning was starting to show.
She hefted the bottle of sleeping pills. Through all her troubles, she’d never turned to drugs, legal or otherwise. Even so, she wished she’d taken a pill last night, because sleep might’ve helped her cope with the day ahead.
First, LeCroix planned to drag her into his New York office, allegedly to work, but more likely to find new and imaginative ways to humiliate her now that she’d spurned him.
Ha. If only he knew how she’d yearned to give in, so desperately that it spooked her into doing just the opposite, throwing a sopping blanket over his steamy seduction. Then, when he played the favor card, she’d had no choice but to throw it back in his face. Her brain she’d trade for money or favors, but her body wasn’t for sale.
Turning away from the mirror, she let her shoulders sag.
Sucky as the morning promised to be, the afternoon shaped up just as ugly. Lucy, her favorite person in the world, the sister she lavished her love on, was due after lunch, and instead of scrounging museum passes and lining up show tickets, Maddie was looking down the barrel of an excruciating evening making nice to Crash when what she really wanted to do was go Pitbull on him.
And those were just today’s dramas.
Tomorrow they’d fly to Italy.
Adam had postponed their departure for another day to accommodate Lucy’s arrival, but already dread filmed Maddie’s skin like sweat. Flying reduced her to a terrified child. That Adam would see her like that appalled her.
Then, when they landed—if they landed—the booby prize was a week at his villa, dancing to his tune every day, lusting for him every night, while Lucy, her sweet, innocent Lucy, threw her tender heart away on George Lemon.
The worst of it, what made it borderline unbearable, was that she’d lost control over her emotions. Bad enough was her anxiety over Lucy and Crash. But at least that was perfectly rational.
With Adam, though, she careened from lust to laughter to fury to frustration so quickly and unpredictably that she lost her footing completely.
She wanted desperately to hate him for what he’d done five years ago, for what he was doing now. But inexplicably, she didn’t.
In fact, she kind of liked him.
That was another emotion she didn’t know what to do with, besides keep it to herself.
Along with her hands. She really needed to keep those to herself. No more feeling up his arms. No stroking his chest while his tongue licked over every inch of her mouth.
No more kissing. None.
And absolutely, definitely, no sex. No matter how much she wanted him.
ADAM SUMMONED MADDIE to his office at half past ten.
She arrived with blood in her eye and a stack of papers in her hand. “What? I’m busy.”
“Busy irritating everyone in my legal department,” he said mildly. “My chief counsel asked to have you removed.”
“Your chief counsel’s an idiot.” She waved the papers. “How the hell have you bought up half the free world with that nincompoop in charge?”
He moved away from the door to stand behind his desk, the power position. This office was his turf. She wasn’t going to push him around here.
“You could come to work for me,” he said. “Clean house. Build your own team.”
“Not for a million bucks.”
Now that was an insult. “You’d rather return to the unpleasant Adrianna?”
“At least she’s not a felon.”
His calm demeanor went out
the window. He jabbed a finger at the second, much smaller, desk in the room. “Dyan sits there when I require her presence at a meeting. You’ll find it has everything you need.”
Her eyes slitted. “I’m not working in here with you.”
“Oh yes, you are. You’ve pissed off everyone in the building. There’s nowhere else for you to go.”
She crossed her arms, tried to wait him out, completely unaware that her outthrust lip just begged to be bitten, that her hipshot stance tempted a normally civilized man to drag her off to his cave.
For a moment, just a moment, he pitied Michael Warren and every other man she’d seduced and then dropped. Well, damn it, she wouldn’t use him the same way.
“Sit,” he barked out, making John Doe jump up from his bed.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” she growled, all but daring him to spank her.
Enough was enough. Circling his desk, he scooped her up, all five-foot-nothing of her, and dumped her in the chair.
The look on her face was priceless. “You . . . you . . .”
“You asked for it,” he said, walking back to his desk.
His phone rang. As he answered it, he shot her a no-bullshit glare that said to keep her smart mouth shut. “Yes, Dyan? Put him through.” And swinging his chair around to face the fifty-story view, he got back down to business.
HE’D MANHANDLED HER, that’s what he’d done. Picked her up like ninety pounds was nothing at all.
Well, no kidding. With arms like that, he could bench me like a barbell.
Yes, but he’d moved her against her will. Taken her from one spot and put her in another.
And wouldn’t that be fun in bed. He could toss me around, tie me up.
Whoa. She shoved that picture out of her head. Bondage wasn’t something Maddie dabbled in unless she was the one doing the binding.
Which just showed how dangerous Adam was. He pushed all kinds of buttons that were strictly off-limits.
Her eyes strayed to his desk, a mahogany U imposing enough to dominate even this monstrous office, studded with sleek monitors and a sleeker telephone console.
From a desk like that, he could launch the space shuttle, or World War III. And he looked perfectly capable of doing either, his chair tipped back as he rattled off projections and rates of return. It was gobbledygook to her; a second language to him.
What really sucked about the whole thing, what burned her ass, was that he looked so hot doing it. She wasn’t normally drawn to the bespoke-suit, master-of-the-universe type. A sweaty fireman was more her style. But Adam, damn him, oozed virility. He was the exception to every rule.
He swung his chair around, catching her red-handed before she could quit ogling him. “You can talk to Willis about that,” she heard him say, and then he ended the call.
He kept his gaze on her. Then he said her name. “Madeline.”
She swallowed. “What?”
“Is there something you need?”
I need you naked, pinning me down on that big-ass desk.
“No, I’m good. I mean, not good, since I’m stuck here listening to you wheel and deal. But there’s nothing I need from you. Not a damn thing.”
His brows rose a hairsbreadth, as if he was on to her.
She tore her gaze away, split the papers into two piles. “Like I was saying, your chief counsel’s a nitwit. These insurance contracts”—she slapped a hand on one stack—“have holes in them you could fly your jet through. And these sales contracts”—she slapped the other stack—“aren’t exactly my area, but they’re funky.”
He rose and walked toward her. “Funky? Is that a legal term?”
“It’s a smell.” She sniffed. “I just have to figure out where it’s coming from.”
Her desk wasn’t half the size of Adam’s, but it would have been wide enough to keep him at a safe distance if he hadn’t come around to her side.
Leaning over, he spread the insurance contracts with one hand, scratched John’s head with the other.
Maddie rolled her chair a foot away, giving herself some breathing room. He didn’t wear cologne, but he had his own unique scent. He should bottle it and call it RichPowerfulSexy. He’d make another mint.
“I see what you mean,” he said, skimming the highlighted sections. “What can we do about it?”
“We—I mean you—can try to have the contracts amended. And change the language going forward.” She slid her notepad under his nose. “It should read like that.”
He read it over, then shifted those cobalt lasers to her. “Two million,” he said.
“Nope.” To get some distance, she rose and crossed the room to the credenza, poured a glass of ice water from the Baccarat pitcher.
“Five.”
“Knock it off. You wouldn’t pay me five million even if I’d take it.”
He ambled toward her, hands in his pockets, but his tone was anything but casual. “I don’t make promises I’m not willing to keep. Five million and all the upper-management perks.”
She circled behind the sofa, hating herself for being tempted. But hell, who wouldn’t be tempted by five mil a year?
“Thanks,” she said, “but I’ll muddle along with my two hundred K. Chump change, I know, but it keeps me in chips.”
He closed in, and she hit a dead end, trapped between the sofa and the wall, with him blocking her escape.
He stopped a foot from where she’d made her stand. His eyes, impossibly blue, searched her face. “You’ve backed yourself into a corner. Do I frighten you, Madeline?”
“Pfft. No.”
“The pulse beating in your throat says differently.” He took one hand from his pocket, laid his fingers against her skin. If her heart hadn’t been racing before, it took off like a stallion now.
He moved a step closer, skimmed her jaw with those fingers. “Five million would solve so many problems,” he murmured. “No more worries about money.”
His whisper was a tropical breeze over her hot skin. His fingertip a feather on her lips.
She should pull away, but it felt so good, so paralyzingly sexy. His touch, his nearness, the heat in his eyes, all of it had silvery threads of desire slipping and sliding under her skin.
Then he lowered that seductive mouth, brushed it lightly against hers. “I can take care of you, Maddie. I can—oof!” He doubled over as she sank her fist in his gut.
“I’m not a hooker, LeCroix. You can’t buy me.” She shoved him aside, bulled her way past him. “Find some other way to get your rocks off, because it won’t be by fucking your prosecutor.”
THAT’S WHAT HE got for letting his dick do the talking.
Adam dropped into his desk chair and rubbed his stomach. He’d taken harder shots without flinching, but Maddie had caught him off guard. She always did.
He hit the intercom. “Which way did she go?” No need to specify who he meant. She would have stormed past Dyan like an F5 tornado.
“She tried to take your private elevator. When it wouldn’t open without your thumbprint she, ah, employed some choice language, and then took one of the others.”
He drummed his fingers on the desk. “Did you happen to notice where she went?”
“I checked the security cameras. She got off at forty-eight.”
“Of course she did.” The legal department.
“Oh, and sir? I have Mr. Brady on the line for you.”
“Put him through.” Adam massaged his temple. “What’s the problem, Brady?” As if he didn’t know. Brady was his chief counsel.
“She’s back, that’s the problem.” Brady’s asthma wheezed when he got worked up. “She’s pissing everyone off. Alice just threw a stapler at her.”
“Did it hit her?”
“No, but only because the little imp’s light on her feet.” He wheezed. “Seriously, Adam, she’s got to go.”
Tension drilled a fiery spike between Adam’s shoulder blades. “Put her on the phone.”
A minute passed while Adam stared
out the window. He was looking at the Chrysler Building but seeing Maddie’s face, up close as he’d seen it a few moments before.
It pulled him in, that face, the fine bones overlaid with satin skin, the steely eyes underscored with shadows from a sleepless night. She was beautiful and troubled and mad at the world. How could he not want to protect her?
She blasted his eardrum through the phone, making him wince. “What?”
He took a mild tone. “You’re causing trouble in my legal department again.”
“I’m causing trouble? These people are out of control. Alice just threw a stapler at me. A stapler! You’re goddamn lucky she missed or you’d have a lawsuit on your hands, and these idiots wouldn’t have a clue how to handle it.”
The spike drilled deeper. His tone got sharper. “We’re leaving now.” He’d handle his calls from the penthouse. “Fredo has the limo out front. Go directly downstairs and get in. And for God’s sake, don’t say another word to anyone.”
Hanging up the phone before she could backtalk him, he shoved a handful of folders into his briefcase and cursed her roundly under his breath.
And yet it was his own foolish fault for bringing her along. It was bound to be a disaster. Still, some stubborn part of him wanted her to acknowledge what he’d built, one of the biggest conglomerates in the world.
It would never happen. She couldn’t care less. When she looked at him she didn’t see the man the rest of the world saw. She saw a criminal, and a lecherous one at that.
And perversely, the fact that she was at least partially right only made him want her more.
He found her waiting in the limo, backed into the corner like he was contagious. John Doe hopped up on the seat and flopped his head on her lap. She gave him the adoring look Adam wanted for himself.
Knowing what he had to do didn’t make it any easier. Best to get it done while he had her captive, and while John was there to keep a lid on things.
“Madeline, my offer had nothing to do with sex. I’m sorry if it came across that way. I realize I went too far. Blurred things together, made it sound ambiguous—”
The Wedding Vow Page 12