by Nora Roberts
“We’ve rushed into all this, Max.”
“Sure have.”
“People . . . I imagine people who come together in intense or dangerous situations often rush into things. All those emotions spiking. When things level off, they probably regret following those impulses.”
“Logical.”
“We could regret it if we move ahead the way we talked about before. We could regret rushing into a relationship, much less marriage.”
“We could.” He tapped the spoon on the edge of the pot, then set it down and turned to her. “Do you care?”
She pressed her lips together before they could tremble. There he was, at her stove, all tall and rangy, with those dangerous eyes and that easy stance. “No. No, I don’t care. Not even a little.” She flew into him, rising up on her toes when his arms clamped around her. “Oh God, I don’t care. I love you so much.”
“Whew. That’s good.” His mouth crushed to hers, then softened, then lingered. “I don’t care either. Besides, I just picked this up for you in New York. It’d be wasted if you wanted to start getting sensible on me now.”
He tugged the box out of his pocket. “Pretty sure I remember what you said you liked.”
“You took time to buy me a ring in all of this?”
He blinked. “Oh. You wanted a ring?”
“Smart-ass.” She opened the box, and her heart turned slowly, beautifully, over in her breast as she stared at the square-cut diamond in the simple platinum setting. “It’s perfect. You know it’s perfect.”
“Not yet.” He took it out, slipped it on her finger. “Now it is.” He kissed her scraped knuckles just beneath it. “I’m going to spend my life with you, Laine. We’ll start tonight with you sitting down there and me making you soup. Nothing intense about that.”
“Sounds nice. Nice and normal.”
“We can even bicker if you want.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad either. Maybe before we do, we should get the rest of it out of the way. Can I see them?”
He turned the soup down, opened the briefcase he’d set on the table. The sight of him taking out the piggy bank made her laugh and lower to a chair.
“It’s horrible really, to think I might’ve been killed over what’s in the belly of a piggy bank. But somehow it’s not. It’s just so Jack.”
“A rep of the insurance company will be picking them up tomorrow.” He spread a newspaper, picked up the little hammer he’d found in the mudroom. “Want the honors?”
“No. Be my guest.”
It took a couple of good whacks before he could slide the padding out, then the pouch. He poured the sparkling waterfall in it into Laine’s hand.
“They don’t get less dazzling, do they?”
“I like the one on your finger better.”
She smiled. “So do I.”
While he dumped the shards and newspaper, she sprinkled the diamonds onto velvet. “They’ll have half of them back now. And since Crew’s been identified and captured, they might find the rest of them where he lived, or in a safe-deposit box under his name.”
“Maybe. Might have a portion of them stashed that way. But he didn’t go to Columbus, he didn’t take something to that kid out of the goodness of his heart or a parental obligation. The ex and the son have something, or know something.”
“Max, don’t go after them.” She reached out for his hand. “Let it go. They’re only trying to get away from him. Everything you told me says she’s just trying to protect her child, give him a normal life. If you go after them, she’ll feel hunted, she’ll run again. I know what that’s like. I know what it was like for my mother until she found some peace, until she found Rob. And my father, well, he’s a thief and a con, and a liar, but he’s not crazy, he’s not a killer.”
She nudged the diamonds toward him. “No amount of these is worth making that innocent boy live with the fact that his father’s a killer. They’re just stones. They’re just things.”
“Let me think about it.”
“Okay.” She got up, kissed the top of his head. “Okay. Tell you what. I’ll put a couple of sandwiches together to go with this soup. You can cross-check the diamonds with your list. Then we’ll put them away and eat like boring, normal people.”
She got up to get the bread. “So when do you suppose I can get my car back from New Jersey?”
“I know a guy who’ll transport it down. Couple of days.” He set to work. “I’ll run you around meanwhile, or you can use my car.”
“See, boring and normal. Mustard or mayo on the ham?”
“Mustard,” he said absently, then fell into silence with the dog snoring at his feet.
“Son of a bitch.”
She glanced back. “Hmm?”
He shook his head. “Let me do this again.”
Laine cut the sandwiches she’d built in two. “Doesn’t add up, does it?” She set the plates on the table as Max tapped his fingers and studied her. “I was afraid of that. Or not afraid, really, just resigned. A little short of the quarter share?”
“About twenty-five carats short.”
“Uh-huh. Well, your client would accept, I’m sure, that the shares might not have been evenly divided. That the portions that are left might be just a little heavy.”
“But that wouldn’t be the case, would it?”
“No. No, I doubt very much that was the case.”
“He pocketed them. Your father.”
“He’d have taken his share out, selected a few of the stones, just as a kind of insurance, then he’d have put them into another container—the pig—and kept the insurance on him. In a money belt or a bag around his neck, even in his pocket. ‘Put all your eggs in one basket, Lainie, the handle’s going to break. Then all you’ve got is scrambled eggs.’ You want coffee with this?”
“I want a damn beer. I let him walk.”
“You’d have let him walk anyway.” She got the beer, popped the top for him, then slid into his lap. “You’d have taken the diamonds back if you’d known he had them, but you’d have let him walk. Really, nothing’s changed. It’s just a measly twenty-five carats.” She kissed his cheek, then the other, then his mouth. “We’re okay, right?”
When she settled her head on his shoulder, he stroked her hair. “Yeah, we’re okay. I might put a boot in your father’s ass if I ever see him again, but we’re okay.”
“Good.”
He sat, stroking her hair. There were ham sandwiches on the table, soup on the stove. A dog snoozed on the floor. A few million—give or take—in diamonds sparkled in the kitchen light.
They were okay, Max thought. In fact, they were terrific.
But they were never going to be boring and normal.
Keep reading for an excerpt from
BIG JACK
by J. D. Robb
Available March 2010
from Berkley Books.
New York, 2059
She was dying to get home. Knowing her own house, her own bed, her own things were waiting for her made even the filthy afternoon traffic from the airport a pleasure.
There were small skirmishes, petty betrayals, outright treachery and bitter combat among the cabs, commuters and tanklike maxibuses. Overhead, the airtrams, blimps and minishuttles strafed the sky. But watching the traffic wars wage made her antsy enough to imagine herself leaping into the front seat to grab the wheel and plunge into the fray, with a great deal more viciousness and enthusiasm than her driver.
God, she loved New York.
While her driver crept along the FDR as one of the army of vehicles battling their way into the city, she entertained herself by watching the animated billboards. Some were little stories, and as a writer herself, and the lover of a good tale, Samantha Gannon appreciated that.
Observe, she thought, the pretty woman lounging pool-side at a resort, obviously alone and lonely while couples splash or stroll. She orders a drink, and with the first sip her eyes meet those of a gorgeous man just emerging from
the water. Wet muscles, killer grin. An electric moment that dissolves into a moonlight scene where the now happy couple walk hand in hand along the beach.
Moral? Drink Silby’s Rum and open your world to adventure, romance and really good sex.
It should be so easy.
But then, for some, it was. For her grandparents there’d been an electric moment. Rum hadn’t played a part, at least not in any of the versions she’d heard. But their eyes had met, and something had snapped and sizzled through the bloodstream of fate.
Since they’d be married for fifty-six years this coming fall, whatever that something had been had done a solid job.
And because of it, because fate had brought them together, she was sitting in the back of a big, black sedan, heading uptown, heading toward home, home, home, after two weeks traveling on the bumpy, endless roads of a national book tour.
Without her grandparents, what they’d done, what they’d chosen, there would have been no book. No tour. No homecoming. She owed them all of it—well, not the tour, she amended. She could hardly blame them for that.
She only hoped they were half as proud of her as she was of them.
Samantha E. Gannon, national bestselling author of Hot Rocks.
Was that iced or what?
Hyping the book in fourteen cities—coast to coast—over fifteen days, the interviews, the appearances, the hotels and transport stations had been exhausting.
And, let’s be honest, she told herself, fabulous in its insane way.
Every morning she’d dragged herself from a strange bed, propped open her bleary eyes and stared at the mirror just to be sure she’d see herself staring back. It was really happening, to her, Sam Gannon.
She’d been writing it all of her life, she thought, every time she’d heard the family story, every time she’d begged her grandparents to tell it, wheedled for more details. She’d been honing her craft in every hour she’d spent lying in bed as a child, imagining the adventure.
It had seemed so romantic to her, so exciting. And the best part was that it was her family, her blood.
Her current project was coming along well. She was calling it just Big Jack, and she thought her great-grandfather would have gotten a very large charge out of it.
She wanted to get back to it, to dive headlong into Jack O’Hara’s world of cons and scams and life on the lam. Between the tour and the pretour rounds, she hadn’t had a full hour to write. And she was due.
But she wasn’t going straight to work. She wasn’t going to think about work for at least forty-eight blissful hours. She was going to dump her bags, and she might just burn everything in them. She was going to lock herself in her own wonderful, quiet house. She was going to run a bubble bath, open a bottle of champagne.
She’d soak and she’d drink, then she’d soak and drink some more. If she was hungry, she’d buzz something up in the AutoChef. She didn’t care what it was because it would be her food, in her kitchen.
Then she was going to sleep for ten hours.
She wasn’t going to answer the telelink. She’d contacted her parents, her brother, her sister, her grandparents from the air, and told them all she was going under for a couple of days. Her friends and business associates could wait a day or two. Since she’d ended what had passed for a relationship over a month before, there wasn’t any man waiting for her.
That was probably just as well.
She sat up when the car veered toward the curb. Home! She’d been drifting, she realized, lost in her own thoughts, as usual, and hadn’t realized she was home.
She gathered her notebook, her travel bag. Riding on delight, she overtipped the driver when he hauled her suitcase and carry-on to the door for her. She was so happy to see him go, so thrilled that he’d be the last person she’d have to speak to until she decided to surface again, she nearly kissed him on the mouth.
Instead, she resisted, waved him off, then dragged her things into the tiny foyer of what her grandmother liked to call Sam’s Urban Doll House.
“I’m back!” She leaned against the door, breathed deep, then did a hip-shaking, shoulder-rolling dance across the floor. “Mine, mine, mine. It’s all mine. Baby, I’m back!”
She stopped short, arms still flung out in her dance of delight, and gaped at her living area. Tables and chairs were overturned, and her lovely little settee was lying on its back like a turtle on its shell. Her screen was off the wall and lay smashed in the middle of the floor, along with her collection of framed family photos and holograms. The walls had been stripped of paintings and prints.
Sam slapped both hands to her head, fisted her fingers in her short red hair and let out a bellow. “For God’s sake, Andrea! House-sitting doesn’t mean you actually sit on the goddamn house.”
Having a party was one thing, but this was . . . just beyond. She was going to kick some serious ass.
She yanked her pocket ’link out of her jacket and snapped out the name. “Andrea Jacobs. Former friend,” she added on a mutter as the transmission went through. Gritting her teeth, she spun on her heel and headed out of the room, started up the stairs as she listened to Andrea’s recorded message.
“What the hell did you do?” she barked into the ’link, “set off a bomb? How could you do this, Andrea? How could you destroy my things and leave this mess for me to come home to? Where the hell are you? You’d better be running for your life, because when I get my hands . . . Jesus Christ, what is that smell! I’m going to kill you for this, Andrea.”
The stench was so strong, she was forced to cover her mouth with her hand as she booted open the bedroom door. “It reeks in here, and, oh God, oh God, my bedroom. I’m never going to forgive you. I swear to God, Andrea, you’re dead. Lights!” she snapped out.
And when they flashed on, when she blinked her eyes clear, she saw Andrea sprawled on the floor on a heap of stained bedclothes.
She saw she was right. Andrea was dead.
She’d nearly been out the door. Five more minutes and she’d have been off-shift and heading home. Odds were someone else would have caught the case. Someone else would be spending a steaming summer night dealing with a bloater.
She’d barely closed the last case and that had been a horror.
But Andrea Jacobs was hers now. For better, for worse.
Lieutenant Eve Dallas breathed through a filtered mask. They didn’t really work and looked, in her opinion, ridiculous, but it helped cut down on the worst of the smell when you were dealing with the very ripe dead.
Though the temperature controls of the room were set at a pleasant seventy-three degrees, the body had, essentially, cooked for five days. It was bloated with gases, had voided its wastes. Whoever had slit Andrea Jacobs’s throat hadn’t just killed her. He’d left her to rot.
“Victim’s identification verified. Jacobs, Andrea. Twenty-nine-year-old mixed-race female. The throat’s been slashed in what appears to be a left-to-right downward motion. Indications are the killer attacked from behind. The deterioration of the body makes it difficult to ascertain if there are other injuries, defensive wounds, through visual exam on scene. Victim is dressed in street clothes.”
Party clothes, Eve thought, noting the soiled sparkle on the hem of the dress, the ice-pick heels kicked across the room.
“She came in, after a date, maybe trolling the clubs. Could’ve brought somebody back with her, but it doesn’t look like that.”
She gazed around the room while she put the pictures in her head. She wished, briefly, for Peabody. But she’d sent her former aide and very new partner home early. There wasn’t any point in dragging her back and spoiling what Eve knew was a celebration dinner with Peabody’s main squeeze.
“She came back alone. If she’d come back with someone, even if he was going to kill her, he’d have gone for the sex first. Why waste it? And this isn’t a struggle. This isn’t a fight. One clean swipe. No other stab wounds.”
She looked back at the body and brought Andrea Jacobs to life
in her mind. “She comes back from her date, her night out. Had a