by Jo Leigh
When they reached the far side of the cluster of rocks, Pepper withdrew her hand from his, waded into the water and sat down on a large flat rock. He watched her shrug off the duffel she’d slung over her shoulder, fold her hands together, and look out to sea.
She was withdrawing, and he wasn’t about to let her do that. After slipping out of his shoes, he waded out and sat down on the rock next to her. “We have to talk.”
Though she stiffened, she didn’t move away, but merely turned to face him. “I wish you wouldn’t sit next to me. I find it difficult to think when you’re this close.”
Her words sent a thrill shooting through him, and giving into impulse, he ran one finger down one hoop at her ear. “It’s a mutual problem. But we’re both going to have to adapt. Perhaps we’ll even indulge some of the feelings we have for one another. I’m not going away.”
The sudden heat of desire that he saw in her eyes nearly had him losing focus. But he managed not to touch her.
“I’m going to stick to you like glue until I have the Monet back in San Francisco.”
She studied him for a minute. “What if I told you that I came here to take it back?”
“You stole it, and now you’re going to take it back?”
She frowned. “I didn’t steal it.”
His brows shot up. “You may not have personally carried it out of Atwell’s suite, but you kissed me to distract me long enough for your partner to steal it.”
She lifted her chin. “And you know that because…?”
“You kept your distance from that day we met in your father’s kitchen—despite the obvious attraction between us. I thought it was because of Evan. Then suddenly two nights ago, out of the blue, you ask me to kiss you.”
The way her eyes had darkened and the frantic way her pulse had begun to beat at her throat distracted him. He could kiss her again right now. He could taste her again—have her. Need sharpened until it was an ache, and once more he had to clamp down hard on his control.
“I didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to put it together. You kept me busy while someone else got out of the suite with the Monet.”
She winced slightly, and then swallowed hard. “Yes. Okay. Maybe I did kiss you to distract you. But it’s not what you think. At least, it’s not exactly what you think. It’s…it’s complicated.”
“Good,” he said. “Because I was figuring it was pretty simple. That you’d helped your ex-lover Evan Atwell steal his own painting.”
4
Friday, February 13—2:00 p.m.
PEPPER JUMPED UP from the rock. “You think that I helped Evan steal the painting? That’s not true. Evan’s not involved in this, and I’ve already told you he was never my lover.”
“You dated him exclusively for three months. You’re friends enough with him to continue seeing him even though you claim you’ve broken things off.” Out of simple curiosity, he asked, “Why didn’t you become lovers?”
A hint of color rose in her cheeks. “There was no chemistry. I liked him. He liked me. We had a lot in common. But that was it.”
“You could have figured that out on the first date. Why did you go out again?”
“It seemed to please my father that I was dating Evan.”
Of course, it would, Cole thought. Peter Rossi was planning a run for mayor in the next election, and the Atwells were a very well-connected family in San Francisco.
“Luke and Matt thought it was terrific. So did Evan’s mother. We just sort of got carried along on the waves of approval.”
“Ah.” Cole thought he understood. If Pepper had married Evan, then that would have solved the “Pepper Problem” for Luke and Matt.
She met his eyes. “I know Evan. He would never steal the Monet.”
Cole stared at her as feelings streamed through him: admiration for her loyalty and jealousy of the man who inspired it. She’d denied that Evan was her lover, but that didn’t seem to matter. Her relationship with Evan still rankled him. Pepper Rossi had been able to push emotional buttons in him from the moment that Luke had shown him that photo six months ago. Luke had been so proud, bragging that his sister had agreed to move to San Francisco.
Oh, Cole had been attracted to women on first sight before. But never to a photo. One look at Pepper and he’d decided to take Luke and Matt up on the standing job offer that had been on the table since they’d thought of opening their office. The warning bells had jangled then, and they’d reached the pitch and volume of a five-alarm fire alert that first Sunday in Peter Rossi’s kitchen.
With a sigh, Pepper sat back down on the rock beside him. “I have to admit it looks bad. But there has to be some explanation.”
Right now, he wanted nothing more than to put his arm around her and tell her that everything was going to be all right. But he couldn’t—not until he found out what connection she had to the disappearance of the Monet.
“Two heads are better than one.” He opened the wicker basket he’d been carrying. “Why don’t we have something to eat and pool our information?”
He tamped down his impatience while he spread a small cloth on a nearby flat rock and opened containers of cold chicken, fruit and buttered rolls. When he’d dished up two plates, he opened the Thermos and filled two plastic glasses. Handing her one, he said, “They do a nice job here.”
She turned and looked out at the sea.
He took a sip of his drink and let her mull over her next move. Because that was what she was doing as she sipped her Island Fling. He could almost hear the wheels turning in her head.
He glanced at his watch and was surprised to see it was only a little after 2:00 p.m. Minutes seemed to slip by more slowly here on the island. Glancing back at Pepper, he studied her profile, taking in that lifted chin and the way she tightly clasped her drink. He’d interrogated reluctant people before. Instead of letting her push his buttons, he should be pushing hers.
With an inaudible sigh, he put down his cup and plucked hers out of her hand. Then he handed her one of the plates he’d filled. “You need to eat something before you have much more of that Island Fling. I don’t want you fading on me.”
When she’d taken a few bites of a chicken leg, he said, “Why did you decide to leave Philadelphia and move to San Francisco?”
She placed the chicken back down on the plate and turned to him. “You’re trying to distract me.”
He shrugged. “You don’t want to talk about the Monet—so I thought I’d widen the scope of our conversation. Luke and Matt told me about how they’d been separated from you when your parents split up years ago. I don’t have any family. If I suddenly learned that I did, and that they’d known where I was but hadn’t contacted me for most of my life, I’m not sure I would have packed up and moved across the country to join them.”
She broke off a piece of her roll. “I wasn’t going to at first.”
“What made you change your mind?”
She began to shred pieces of the roll. “I wasn’t happy in Philadelphia. I never quite got the knack of being a Pendleton. Plus, the Rossis are persistent.”
“Tell me about it,” he said and had the pleasure of seeing her lips twitch.
“My father was the worst. He kept calling, and finally, Luke and Matt came to plead their case in person.” Her mouth curved slightly as she met his eyes. “They can be persistent and persuasive.”
Cole thought of Luke and Matt, who were as different as two brothers could be—a computer genius and an ex-cop, respectively. What they had in common was incredible charisma, no doubt inherited from their father, Peter. “I always thought they could sell the Brooklyn Bridge again if they put their minds to it.”
She met his eyes then. “Why did you come here?”
It was the first personal question she’d asked him. A small sign of progress, he thought. What would she say if he told her the simple truth? A truth he still wasn’t comfortable with. He’d moved to San Francisco because of a photo of a woman. Instead, he told
her a truth he was more comfortable with. “I wanted a change from the kind of work I was doing. Your brothers had been after me for some time to join their firm.”
She stiffened. “Yes, I suppose they were.”
“But you still haven’t answered my question. Why did you finally give in to them and leave the life you had in Philadelphia?”
“They convinced me that they wanted me.”
The sudden trace of pain in her eyes had him frowning. Did she still doubt that they wanted her? One thing he knew for certain was that her brothers loved her. Whatever mistakes their parents had made all those years ago, he was convinced that Peter and his sons wanted Pepper with them now. His first impulse was to try to set her mind at ease on that score. But then he remembered why he’d started this little interrogation. He needed information. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that Evan Atwell was involved somehow in the theft. And she was still protecting him. He needed to subtly work the conversation around to that.
“It must have been hard knowing that you had a family who didn’t contact you all those years.”
“They could have,” she said flatly. “In fact, Irene did. Oh, I know that they thought they were keeping a promise they’d made to my mother on her deathbed. I’ve tried to understand that.”
She set her plate on the rock. Then she pulled off her wig and ran fingers through her damp dark hair until it stood up in little spikes. “I still get angry if I let myself think too much about it. At first I blamed all of them. But I especially blame my grandmother.”
“Why?” Cole asked.
She whirled to face him. “Because once my mother became ill, my grandmother was the one who orchestrated everything. She even admitted to it. More than that, she was proud of herself.” She pushed up from the rock and began to pace back and forth in the ankle-deep water. A waiting seagull flew out of her way.
“What exactly did she do?” he asked.
“My parents’ marriage was always volatile. Peter says that he and my mother had split before. He claims that they loved each other very much, but my mother could never quite get used to the life of a cop’s wife. They’d have these arguments, then my mother would return to Philadelphia for a while and eventually they’d reconcile and she’d move back to San Francisco. The last time my mother left Luke and Matt with Peter because they were in school by then. She took me with her because I was a baby. Then she got ill. Cancer.”
Cole watched her pace back and forth in the water. There were wounds there that hadn’t completely healed.
“Peter says that they would have reconciled again. But when my mother learned that she was dying, my grandmother got involved. She got my mother to make my father promise that he would leave me with Grandmother and that he wouldn’t try to contact me until my twenty-fifth birthday. In return, I would be raised as a Pendleton, sent to the best schools, and given everything that money could buy. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I can understand why my mother went along with the plan. She was dying and she wanted the best for me. Besides, my father had the two boys to worry about. She probably felt he had enough on his plate. Intellectually, I can understand it all, but emotionally…”
Cole watched her as she continued to pace. He could see temper and frustration building. The sun beat down on her from behind, waves lapped at her ankles. With her damp spiky hair and those huge almond-shaped eyes, she might have been some sea sprite, sprung from Neptune’s court. She looked magnificent as she kicked water out of her way.
Then she whirled to face him, and Cole’s mind went blank as he stared at her. Seconds, perhaps minutes ticked by before he realized that he’d totally lost the thread of what she was saying. Something about her grandmother.
She was looking at him as if she expected some kind of comment or reaction. He gave it his best shot and nodded.
“Exactly!” She threw up a hand. “I’ve tried to understand her. Really I have. But Grandmother could have released my father from that promise. The thing is she didn’t want him to contact me. And she lied about my mother too. All my life, she held my mother up to me as a paragon that I could never measure up to. It wasn’t until I talked to my father that I learned she wasn’t a paragon at all. She failed at becoming a Pendleton just as much as I did.”
“How so?” Cole asked.
“At seventeen, she ran away with my father. Both families were appalled, but Luke was already on the way. My grandmother has never forgiven my father. I think that’s why she kept me with her all those years—as a kind of revenge. Tit for tat. You took my daughter and now I’ll take yours.”
Once again, Cole found himself clamping down on the urge to reach out and touch her. Not until he learned what he needed to know. “Revenge is a powerful motivator. What about your dad? Why do you think he never went back on his word and tried to get in touch with you earlier the way your aunt did?”
She met his eyes, and he saw a flash of hurt. “It’s pretty obvious. He just didn’t want me.”
“So stealing a Monet and discrediting Rossi Investigations would be a way of getting revenge at last.”
For a moment she simply stared at him. “You think that I—that I would do that to my family? How dare you?” She flew at him, grabbing fistfuls of his shirt. His plate of chicken went flying as he struggled for balance and lost. Wrapping his fingers around her wrists, he twisted his body so that he took the brunt of the impact when they tumbled into the shallow water. Then, anticipating her next move, he rolled with her until he could scissor his legs and trap hers between them.
The struggle was brief. He was bigger and heavier, but she was stronger than he’d expected. When she finally stilled beneath him, they were lying in the shallows with the water lapping against them, staring at each other. Cole could feel that their bodies were already reacting: his own was hardening and hers was growing impossibly soft. She looked like some kind of pixie mermaid staring up at him defiantly.
He’d interrogated witnesses before, but never quite like this. If there’d only been murder he saw in her eyes, he might have had an easier time of it. But he saw the same hot lick of awareness that he was feeling. And he felt the heat, ricocheting from him to her and back again. How often had he fantasized about what it would feel like to have these soft curves, this strong, slender body beneath his? Already his mind was imagining once again what it would feel like to take that hot slippery slide into her.
He held himself perfectly still and tried to keep his brain on task.
“Since you won’t tell me the truth about why you stole the Monet, I’ve had to come up with theories. If you don’t like that one, try this. You resented me from the first day I joined Rossi investigations. For some reason you seem to think we’re in competition.”
“We are,” she hissed through clenched teeth. “Now will you just get off?”
“Not yet. I haven’t finished, and this is my favorite theory so far. You conned someone into helping you steal the painting so that you could recover it and kill two birds with one stone. In one fell swoop, you make me look bad, and you look good. Your brothers fire me and make you a partner.”
She bucked under him, then bit out, “You’re not even close.”
He hadn’t thought he was. “Then set me straight. What are you really doing on this island? Who stole that painting and where is it?”
“I don’t know.”
Anger and frustration rolled through him. They had no place in a good interrogation. But this one hadn’t been going well from the get-go. And he was finding it harder and harder to concentrate. She’d set a fire in him from the moment he’d seen that photo, and what had happened in the Atwells’ penthouse had fanned the flames almost beyond his ability to control them. “Okay. If you’re not going to tell me what’s going on, let’s try this.”
He brushed his mouth over hers. Her lips parted immediately, and without another thought he plunged in.
THE HEAT OF THE KISS exploded inside of her in one glorious wave. It was as if no time at
all had elapsed since they’d kissed in the Atwells’ suite. His mouth was hot and hungry, and every hard line, angle and plane of him was pressed tightly against her. All she knew was that she wanted to dive into that heat-filled wave—and to hell with the undertow.
When he cut off the contact and raised his head, she nearly cried out in protest.
“If you don’t want to finish what we started the other night, you have to say so now.”
Every single cell in her body wanted it, wanted him. Desperately, she tried to gather her thoughts. “I—”
He tightened his grip on her wrists. “The truth. I’ll know if you’re lying.”
She tried to draw in a breath, but her lungs were still burning. And she could still taste him. “I want to, but we shouldn’t. There are complications enough without—” She lost the thought and the rest of the sentence when she saw triumph flash into his eyes. And heat.
“This is simple enough,” he said. “I want you and you want me. And I’m tired of waiting. Let’s deal with this part first. Just ask me to kiss you.”
His mouth was a breath from hers when he said the words. She simply couldn’t resist. “Kiss me.” Then she moved to close the small distance between them, and her mouth was as hungry, as desperate, as his. She felt that instantaneous explosion of greed that she’d experienced before. Here was the speed that she’d dreamed about, that she’d craved. Even as the thrill of it poured into her, she pulled her arms free and wrapped them around him.
The worries and fears that had haunted her for the past two days—ever since she’d come to grips with the fact that she’d actually helped her aunt steal that Monet—evaporated. There was no room for them in the floodtide of feelings that he was bringing her.
In between kisses, she said, “Don’t stop. This time, don’t stop.” She’d wanted to shout the words, but they came out on a whispered moan.
“I won’t.” He traced a line of kisses along the line of her jaw.