“Forgive me if that doesn’t make me feel any better,” he grumbled. With a breath he walked to the closet to find a clean shirt and a power tie. “Whatever you said to the detective didn’t seem to sit too well with him. He’ll be looking for you to make a move, my love.”
“He can look all he wants. I’ll be standing outside a lawyer’s office listening to how innocent I am, and then I’m having Chinese.”
Since they seemed to have made up, he let it go at that. In the back of his mind, though, he couldn’t help noting that she still hadn’t answered his question of where the hell she’d been last night.
“Boy, we’re a sorry pair of losers, aren’t we?” she noted after a moment, as she slipped into a pretty sleeveless Luca Luca silk dress with orange and brown diagonal stripes.
“Mm-hm. I doubt we’ll ever amount to anything.”
He reached out one hand and took her wrist. When she didn’t pull away, he tugged her against him. Samantha wrapped her arms around his waist and hugged him hard.
“We’ll find out what’s going on,” he said, lowering his face to her hair. “And we’ll find out who took my damn painting. When we do, I am going to demand a personal apology from Detective Gorstein, and I’m going to make a bloody example of the thief. Because maybe you used to be one of those, but you aren’t now.”
And that still occurred to him every time someone was arrested for a crime. That thief had once been Samantha. That might have been Samantha.
Abruptly she pulled away. “Okay. Let’s get out of here and do this before I change my mind.”
He gave a brief smile. “You won’t.” Because he couldn’t help himself, he put his hands on her cheeks, tilted her face up, and kissed her.
As her arms slipped around his shoulders, the mobile phone in his pocket rang. Reluctantly he broke the kiss and flipped it open. “Fuck,” he muttered.
She tilted his hand to look at the screen. “Great. Patricia. I should never have said her name out loud.”
He pushed the talk button. “Addison.”
“Richard, I just heard what happened,” Patricia Addison-Wallis’s refined London voice came. “If there’s anything at all I can do for you, please—”
“We’re fine, Patricia. I’m a bit busy at the moment, however. So goodb—”
“You might at least have told me you were coming to New York. I live here now, you know.”
“I know. I found the apartment for you. And I paid for it.”
“At the least you should have called me so we could go out to dinner, then. Really, Richard.”
His ex-wife sounded pouty and triumphant at the same time. Of course she would, though, since he’d ignored her and Samantha had been dragged off to jail. “I’m here on business. I’ll talk to you later.”
“You brought Jellicoe here for business? Yours, or hers?”
“Are you doing reporting for the Enquirer now, Patricia?”
“Oh, please. It’s a perfectly logical question.”
“Hey, Patty,” Sam called in a carrying voice, “can you call back? We’re right in the middle of having sex.”
Patricia gasped. “That woman is the most—”
Richard hung up the phone. “You really shouldn’t antagonize her like that,” he said mildly, leaning down to finish their kiss.
“She started it. And I still don’t know why she hates me so much. You divorced her nearly two years before we met.”
“She hates you because I love you.”
Samantha pursed her soft lips. “Well, aren’t you just the grand Poobah?”
“Apparently. Five minutes.”
“I’ll be ready.”
With that he headed back to the office next door. If Patricia had one positive quality it was that her presence immediately shifted Samantha over to being on his side. On the negative end, Patricia Addison-Wallis knew that he and Samantha were in Manhattan. With her apartment only two miles from the townhouse, he had to anticipate that nothing good would come of any of this.
Rick’s kiss left Samantha breathless; possessive, aroused, still angry—a little bit of everything. He might be all up in arms, but he wasn’t the only one.
As for the rest, she knew what Martin would say—that she was playing Rick like a mark, getting his considerable wealth and power to back her up while she went about doing exactly as she pleased. If only it were that simple.
As soon as Rick closed the door behind him, Samantha dove over the bed for the phone. She tried her Palm Beach office first, and rolled her shoulders as she waited.
After three rings, the phone picked up. “Jellicoe Security,” a warm, masculine voice drawled. “We’re here to help.”
“Hey, Aubrey,” she returned, stepping into her tan sandals. “You should add that we’re here to help for the right price.”
“Miss Samantha, first we reel them in, and then we tell them the price.”
“Right. Is Stoney there, by any chance?”
“He is. Hold on, sugar.”
The on-hold music was soft Dixieland; obviously Aubrey had won some sort of contest over Stoney, who preferred the collective works of Enya. A minute later, the man himself answered.
“Did you get my e-mail, honey?” he asked. “I wanted you to check the figures before I send it to Locke. The—”
“Can you talk?” she interrupted.
She could almost see his eyebrows lift. “Hold on. I’ll close the door.” Silence. “Okay. What’s up?”
“I need you to get on a plane and get your butt to Manhattan,” she said, lowering her voice even with the bedroom door closed; the office was right next door.
“Why? If you and Rick are fighting or something, then it’s none of my—”
“I think—I know—I saw Martin last night.”
That shut him up. In fact, the silence on the other end of the line was almost deafening. “Honey,” he finally said, in a voice usually reserved for invalids or insane people, “Martin is dead. You know that as well as I d—”
“He was at Sotheby’s casing the place,” she pushed, verifying reality for herself as much as for him. “Really interested in a newly discovered Hogarth that Rick ended up buying. I slipped him a note to meet me, and while I was out last night for the rendezvous somebody broke in and swiped the damned thing.”
“But—”
“I know, Stoney! It’s absolutely friggin’ nuts. But he’s here. And I think he played me to get that painting.” Samantha cupped the phone. “You’re the only one who can help me with this. I can’t go to anybody else, and you know it.”
More silence. “Does Rick know about any of this?”
“No. All he knows is that I went out last night, his alarm went off, and then the cops busted me—me—for the robbery. I spent a fucking hour in handcuffs. And I am not—” Her voice broke, and she took a moment to regain her balance. She was not going to fall apart over this. Not, not, not. “I am not going to let that happen again. And I’m not going to screw my life or Rick’s life up any more until I know what’s going on.”
“I’ll be on the next flight,” he said.
“I really don’t want Rick to know anything about this. Not yet.”
“Okay. I’ll phone Delroy. He’ll set me up with a place to stay. I’ll call you when I get in.”
“Thanks, Stoney. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Hey, honey, that’s what family’s for. Busting ghosts and shit.”
She wiped a grateful tear from her face, surprised to see it there. “What are you going to tell Aubrey?”
“Twinkle toes? I’ll just tell him I’m taking a long weekend, and that he can catch me on my phone.”
Samantha smiled into the receiver. “Rick says Aubrey’s not gay, you know.”
“The billionaire’s just jealous ’cause Aubrey hasn’t hit on him. I’m running home to pack, and then I’m on my way. Hang in there.”
“Okay. Thanks again.”
Thanks didn’t seem adequate, considering
that Walter Barstone was the only person in the world she could count on to both be able to verify that the man she’d seen was actually Martin Jellicoe, and to not call the cops on him. And whoever had taken the Hogarth, whether it was Martin or not, she needed to take steps to get it back.
As soon as she hung up the phone she began feeling like a dirty rotten traitor. Rick was in the other room reading over a press release stating their innocence in all of this. And there she was, sitting around with a pretty good idea about who’d pulled the job, and bringing in secret help to investigate behind Rick’s back.
She told herself that once she knew something for sure she would let him in on it, but that wasn’t necessarily true. If her father came into the picture, she didn’t know how she could possibly tell Rick without risking losing him. Whether he trusted her or not, putting Martin back into the equation changed everything. She might have retired, but it was looking like Martin hadn’t. And rich as he was, Rick Addison couldn’t afford to have a thief in the family.
The phone in her hand rang. Startled, she nearly hurled it across the room before she got enough control over her nerves to hit the talk button. “Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” a crisp male voice returned in a British accent. “John Stillwell calling for Richard, Lord Rawley.”
“Hold on.” Carrying the phone, she went next door to the office and rapped.
“Come in.”
She pushed open the door and bowed. “Lord Rawley, a John Stillwell is on the phone for you, Your Royal Immenseness.”
Rick grimaced at her. “Damned Brits,” he grumbled, taking the phone as she tossed it to him. “I must have left the house number for him by mistake. Apologies.”
If Rick was giving out his private number for the house instead of the office one, he was frazzled. And that was her fault. “No problem,” she said aloud, swallowing her annoyance at him, at least for the moment. “He sounds very well pressed.”
She left again, closing the door behind her. With finally a minute alone in the hallway, she walked to the rear window. Rick probably found it suspicious that the burglar had gone in the same way she had earlier in the day, but any cat worth his or her salt would have evaluated the location and made the same decision.
Thank God she’d at least had enough sense left to wear gloves when she’d broken in. If not, she would probably still be in that interrogation room with Detective Gorstein.
Samantha scooted the low hall table out of the way and crouched in front of the window, being careful not to wrinkle her dress. The fresh silicone she and Wilder had used to repair the casing she’d broken was in still-damp blobs on the floor. Fresh scratch marks marred the sill where the alarm wires had been rerouted.
Hm. Whatever implement the cat had used was longer than the nail file she’d carried—from the shape of the scratches it was probably one of those old rolled copper measuring tapes. Those things were great. The actual tool, however, wasn’t as significant as the fact that the cat had bypassed the alarm on the way in. Therefore, the alarm had been triggered on the way out. Which left her with the question of whether it had been on purpose or not.
If, as she suspected, her father was the cat, then there was no way in hell that he would set off an alarm that simple and straightforward by accident. And if he’d done it intentionally, she had a whole new set of problems.
“Be careful about fingerprints,” Rick said from behind her, as he crossed into the bedroom to replace the phone. “The police have already dusted for them, or whatever the devil they call it, but they might be back.”
“I’m not touching anything,” she said, not moving from her squatting position. “I’m just looking.”
“See anything interesting?”
“Lots. Whoever it was came in exactly the same way I did. Exactly.”
“But you didn’t set off the alarm.”
“Not on the way in.”
He stopped in the middle of the hallway. “Then it tripped on the way out. On purpose?”
Samantha stood, dusting off her hands more to stall than because she’d touched anything. “He, she, they, came in, bypassed the alarm, walked down the hall and down the stairs, found the right painting—since I assume they would want the new Hogarth—went back upstairs and out. I’d bet that the alarm wasn’t an accident.”
“Which means I probably missed whoever it was by a minute, at most.”
A cold sweat started beneath her hair. Martin and Rick—what would they make of one another if they ever met? Not much, she suspected. She hoped it would never happen. “I’m making some calls to get this place rewired,” she said, moving past him.
Rick put a hand on her shoulder. “Why wouldn’t they take both paintings?”
She shrugged. “I would have. I mean, jeez, it’s all wrapped up already. Maybe they only had a buyer lined up for one of them and didn’t want to store the other. Or didn’t have a place to store it.”
“I would think for a cut of five million dollars you could rent a storage locker somewhere.”
Samantha looked sideways at him. “I thought you were turning me straight, not that I was making you into a cat burglar.”
With a brief smile he tightened his grip on her shoulder and drew her around to face him. “As you’ve said, our worlds at times aren’t all that different.”
They held where they were for a long moment, standing a foot apart, his hand the only connection between them. Any other day in the past five months, Rick would have kissed her. Today, though, he let her go as Ripton emerged from the office.
“Ready?” the attorney asked.
With a deep breath she took Rick’s hand, and they headed downstairs to the front door. And she would stand there while Phil read a statement she knew to be a lie, because she did know something about the robbery, and they weren’t doing everything they could to cooperate with the police.
In the old days, that would have been a good thing. She knew her dad’s rules, the ones that Martin had drummed into her head all through her childhood. Protect yourself, only give up information when someone else had already figured it out, look after yourself first. Here, with Rick, she’d begun to think that not only could she set aside some of the rules, but that a number of them were just stupid and selfish and didn’t have a place outside the shadows. The shadows seemed to be closing in around her again, but at the moment she could deal with that. And the reason she could was holding her hand despite the fact that she wasn’t being honest with him, either.
Not only did Rick already know enough about her to put her away for a very long time, but if she was forced to flee into the night, thanks to him she wasn’t certain she would be able to go back to her old way of life. He’d made her see what she liked about herself. Before Rick, she’d only been able to be the real, actual Samantha Elizabeth Jellicoe on the most fleeting and rarest of occasions. She still thought like a cat burglar; she knew that. But not all the time, now. Her life felt…expanded. She spent less time looking over her shoulder, and more looking in front of her. That was still new enough that it felt precious and fragile.
Had Martin’s plan been to force her back into his life? Considering that she’d thought him dead until last night, his methods didn’t seem very fair. Martin had always been a Machiavellian kind of guy, though. His profits always justified his methods.
Samantha drew a deep breath. At the moment, however this turned out, she didn’t see that it would be anything other than bad. Bad for her freedom, bad for her health, and bad for her heart.
Chapter 8
Wednesday, 9:18 p.m.
“That sucked,” Samantha said, scooping a chopstick’s worth of Chinese noodles into her mouth and pointing at the television. “They didn’t even show the part where Ripton said we want the painting back.”
Beside her on the couch, Rick filched another piece of her mushroom chicken. Any other time she would have questioned why he’d bothered to order broccoli beef if he was only going to eat her dinner, but at the
moment it was kind of nice that he—they—felt easy enough to share.
“They’re a celebrity newsmagazine,” he commented, gesturing with one of his own chopsticks. “They don’t care who did it, as long as we keep talking about it.”
“But we didn’t talk about it.”
“We did show up, however. That’s the only requirement, sometimes.”
“Then why did we show up?”
“Because the newsmagazine is secondary. We’re trying to impress the police.”
“This is a new low.”
“An unavoidable one.”
She glanced at the grandfather clock in the corner. After nine o’clock. Stoney should already be in New York and staked out on Delroy’s couch by now. Sneaking out for the second night in a row didn’t seem the smartest thing to do, but she needed a face-to-face with him.
“I’m surprised Walter hasn’t called you,” Rick said abruptly, making her wonder if he could read minds. “This had to air in Palm Beach.”
“He watches Jeopardy! and Wheel.”
“You haven’t called him, then?”
“I did. While you were in with Ripton. He thinks I’m an idiot and should run off to Paris.”
“Oh, really?” Rick sat forward and scooped another mound of chow mein onto his plate. “And your reply was…?”
“Springtime in Paris is no fun alone.” She grinned briefly. “Is all this going to hurt your hotel deal?”
He shrugged. “Someone stole from me. That affects how I’m perceived. It gives the impression that I can be taken advantage of. At the moment I would imagine that Matsuo Hoshido is probably having a good laugh, adding a million or two to his price, and putting in a few more conditions that will not be favorable to me.”
Samantha blew out her breath. “I know some people here in the city,” she said slowly. “I could ask around.” Sitting there wouldn’t get her anything but insane, and she needed an excuse to get out of the house. And it wouldn’t even be a lie.
“Right. That’s a fine idea. You go and let yourself be seen with known art thieves or fences.”
“Who says I would let myself be seen, smart ass?” She set her plate on the coffee table. “The way I see it, you need the painting back. I need the painting back. How it gets back is secondary.”
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