by Jo Leigh
“Okay.”
Pepper moved closer and lowered her voice. “For forty years, he and Irene corresponded, and the plan was that they would get together when he was finally released from prison. She claims that he’s gone straight, and all the money he used to build this resort was earned legitimately.”
“She’s right,” Cole said. “I checked Butch Castellano out as soon as I’d learned you booked a flight here. He’s evidently a real whiz kid when it comes to playing the stock market.”
Pepper stared at him. Why should it surprise her? After all, she was talking to the man who could give James Bond a run for his money.
“What does all this have to do with the theft of the Monet?”
“I’m getting there,” Pepper promised. “When Butch was released from prison a year ago, he and Irene were supposed to get together and start the life they hadn’t been able to build forty years ago. But then about a month before his release, Butch backed out of their deal. She’s been after him for a year to change his mind, but he’s stubborn. His excuse is that he still isn’t good enough for her. Can you imagine that?”
But Cole didn’t seem to be paying attention. Where had his mind wandered?
COLE WAS IMAGINING QUITE a few things—and not all of them had to do with the Monet. The most vivid image flickering at the edge of his mind was making love to Pepper again in a special place he’d discovered when he’d been exploring the island earlier. It would guarantee more privacy than this stretch of beach.
“Well?” Pepper asked.
Cole dragged his thoughts back to her original question. It was a loaded one. “I imagine he had his reasons.”
“Hmph.” She fisted her hands on her hips. “Well, they didn’t convince Irene. She thinks he’s just trying to be all macho and protect her, so she decided to do something to prove that she’s bad enough for him.”
Cole’s eyes narrowed as the light finally dawned. “Your aunt Irene stole the Monet?”
“She just borrowed it. She says he’ll give it back once he knows it’s stolen. Then I’ll take it back to San Francisco.”
Cole had a strong urge to shake his head to clear it. This was one scenario he hadn’t foreseen. Oh, he’d met Irene at the Rossi Sunday dinners, and he’d been impressed with her. She’d created and sold a highly entertaining local TV show in which she demonstrated how vulnerable homeowners were to theft by demonstrating how easily their homes could be burglarized. Irene Rossi could easily have stolen the Monet. “Where is the painting?”
Pepper’s brow wrinkled. “I’m not quite sure. I lost her in the Miami airport, and she missed the connecting flight here. Gari says there isn’t another one until tomorrow. But perhaps she chartered a flight the way you did. What do you think?”
“You’re sure she just didn’t take off with it?”
“No. Of course she didn’t. She plans on giving it back as soon as she makes her point to Butch. She’s going to present it to him tomorrow on Valentine’s Day.”
Cole studied her for a moment. Up until this moment, he hadn’t thought that Pepper Rossi was capable of lying. Was he wrong about that? “Let me get this straight. You helped your aunt steal the Monet so that she could prove to her old lover that she wasn’t too good for him?”
Pepper considered his summary for a minute, then nodded. “In a nutshell, that’s it. Except that I didn’t know that I was helping her until she broke into the bedroom of the Atwells’ suite. I knew that she was planning on doing something drastic, but not that she’d set her sights on the Monet. That thought only occurred to me when she showed up at the preview party. That’s when I began to get this queasy feeling in my stomach that something bad was going to happen. When I went into the bedroom, she was there. I tried to talk her out of it.”
“You could have given me a chance with her.”
“I—” She raised her hands and dropped them. “I know, but Butch is being unreasonable. And Irene is going to give the painting back. Besides, I followed her just to make sure that Butch doesn’t decide to return to his life of crime and keep it.”
“And you kissed me in the Atwells’ hotel room to distract me.”
“Yes.” She bit her lower lip, then added. “It was the only thing I could think of to do. I knew you’d stop her if I didn’t do something. Plus…” she drew in a breath and let it out “…to be perfectly honest, I did want to kiss you. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but I’d been thinking of kissing you for a while. Even though I knew it would be a mistake. Just like making love was a mistake.”
For a moment Cole said nothing as a flood of feelings washed through him. They baffled him. Pepper Rossi baffled him. The only thing that he was pretty sure of was that she wasn’t lying to him. There was a deep-down streak of honesty in her; it was one of the things that attracted him to her. And in spite of the fact that she was up to her neck in the theft of a priceless painting, he was determined to get her out of the mess. He’d never before had this urgent need to protect a woman. Even if her brothers hadn’t asked him to help them out with the “Pepper Problem,” he would have wanted to help her out of her scrapes.
But right now, the fact that she was in a jam and he had to figure out a way to fix it—all that had become secondary. He couldn’t seem to stop thinking about making love to her again. Perhaps it was the island getting to him, but his gut instinct told him it was the woman.
“Well? Do we have a deal?” she asked.
“Why do you think that our making love was a mistake?”
Her brow furrowed. “For several reasons. First of all, we’re just so different. Second, at work we’re always in competition. And third, now that we’ve made love once, we’ll probably want to do it again.”
“And that would be a bad idea because…?”
“I can’t afford the distraction.” She began to tick items off on her fingers. “I have to find my aunt Irene, then I have to figure out a way to get the Monet back to San Francisco in time for the charity auction, and at the same time I have to keep my aunt from being arrested. Plus, I have to save the reputation of Rossi Investigations. All of which I had pretty much under control until Irene missed the plane from Miami. Now she won’t be here until tomorrow. Plus, I need to figure out why Evan is here.”
“So you agree that his presence on the island is suspicious?”
“Yes.”
“Had you ever seen his companion before?”
“Just on the plane. He took the last seat on my flight, the one I was praying Irene would take.”
“Do you have any idea why Evan would be meeting with Butch?”
“No. So I have a lot to figure out.” She paused to meet his eyes steadily. “I think we ought to treat the fact that we just made love as an isolated incident—something we did just to get it out of our systems.” When he said nothing, she continued, “I have a lot on my plate right now.”
Cole reached out to take the hand she’d been ticking items off on. “Yes, you do.”
They both did. He wasn’t quite sure when he’d made the decision—right then when she’d used the phrase isolated incident or back when he’d first laid eyes on her in Peter Rossi’s kitchen—but he knew that making love to Pepper Rossi was not going to be a one-time deal. He’d known it when he’d been making his plans to come to the island. He’d bided his time for six long months, and he was through with waiting. “The thing is I don’t think we’ve gotten it out of our systems.” He sure as hell hadn’t. “We’re going to make love again. We’ll be just as distracted thinking about it, so we might as well do it and enjoy ourselves.”
Pepper sighed and sat down on the rock beside him. “I figured you’d say that.”
He nearly smiled at her tone. “Maybe there’s a way to work it into our deal.”
Her eyes met his. “You’ll go along with my deal? You’ll let me handle the recovery of the Monet?”
Cole had already decided he could agree to that. After all, he’d be there if she got into too much tr
ouble. “With one added stipulation. Since neither of us is in a position to do much about the Monet until Irene gets here, we’ll have some time to enjoy each other. To explore this out-of-control attraction we have for each other. How does that sound?”
She didn’t say anything for a moment, but Cole heard her breath catch. “You mean we’ll…”
“We’ll be lovers,” he finished. He saw her eyes darken and the pulse at her throat begin to beat frantically. He pressed a finger to it. “Are you always this responsive?”
“I don’t know, I—” She ran her tongue over her lips. “I’ve never felt this way with anyone else. I don’t understand it.”
Cole moved his finger to touch her lips. They were moist and soft. “Let’s not worry about understanding it. There’ll be time enough for that later. The only thing we have to do right now is enjoy it. Deal?”
When he took his finger away, she said, “With one more stipulation.”
He hesitated for a moment, then said, “Fair enough.”
“Whatever happens between us can only be temporary. When we get back to San Francisco, we go back to our previous relationship.”
Cole studied her. If she really believed that they could do that, he wasn’t going to try to convince her otherwise now. Not with words, and not when he could use much more persuasive means. He thought of the need she had to please her family and how she never felt like she quite measured up. The one thing he could do in the time they spent together was show her all the many ways she pleased him. “Our time on the island—no more, no less?”
“That’s the deal.”
“Accepted,” he said.
In spite of his resolve to wait until they were in a more secluded area, he leaned toward her, unable to resist taking a taste of her lips. His mouth was just touching hers when they heard laughter from behind the rocks.
“We have to find some place more private,” he murmured. “Any suggestions?”
“We could go to the bungalow.”
“Good call.” Keeping her hand in his, he scooped up the hamper and together they walked back toward the hotel.
6
Friday, February 13—3:30 p.m.
BUTCH GLANCED AT HIS watch for the fourth time in as many minutes. Then he let his gaze sweep the lobby again. The line at the concierge desk had been three to four couples deep all day. And Renie hadn’t been among them. He’d checked with Tommy himself.
It had been over two hours since she’d checked in and so far she hadn’t gone to her bungalow. Butch pulled out his cigar and stuck it between his teeth. When he and H had checked out the poolside café, they’d come up empty. The waiter, Gari, claimed that no one answering the description he gave had been there. But then maybe his description was wrong. H was right. He hadn’t seen Renie for almost forty years. But her body size couldn’t have changed. She’d been a slender little thing. And fragile. The fact that she was sixty now and not twenty wouldn’t change that. And unless she dyed it, she’d have gray hair, he supposed. But it was hard to imagine her that way.
Butch pulled out a lighter, then shoved it back in his pocket. Where the hell was she? And what was she doing on his island with another man? Ever since he’d learned that she’d been with a man at the registration desk, his brain hadn’t been working right. He thought after forty years that he knew her. She’d always been the sweetest thing. For years, he’d kept her image in his mind. She was so pretty with that short, brown hair and those huge eyes. The first time he’d met her, he’d drowned in those eyes. Picturing her in his mind, knowing that she was waiting for him, had gotten him through those first years in prison. That and her letters. If he hadn’t already been in love with her, the letters she sent would have surely sunk him. He’d learned everything about her in those letters—her hopes, her dreams. In so many ways they’d never been apart.
And he wanted those letters to go on. But he had to admit that the sweet Renie that he’d pictured in his mind so many years ago was different than the woman who’d called him after he’d explained that they shouldn’t be together on his island. She’d sounded royally pissed. But she’d come around. She always did.
When he’d told her forty years ago that she should take her parents’ advice and build a life for herself out in San Francisco, she’d gone along with it. She hadn’t been angry with him. And she certainly hadn’t threatened him. But in the two hours since he’d learned she was on Escapade Island with a male companion, he’d had time to go over their last conversation in his mind. And what she’d said to him certainly constituted a threat. “Listen up, Butch. I’m going to prove you wrong. I let you push me away once. Not again. Just you wait!”
Just you wait. That wasn’t like his Renie at all. He turned to H who was seated behind his desk going over work schedules. “You’re sure she isn’t in the bungalow?”
“Angelo checked the rooms, and there wasn’t any sign that either she or her companion had been there.”
Her companion. Jealousy sliced through him. Butch bit down hard on his cigar. “Angelo’s still there?”
H nodded. “He’s outside the bungalow, keeping it under surveillance. Should I call him?”
“No.” Butch pulled the cigar out of his mouth. The end was chewed beyond repair. It was the third one he’d destroyed since he’d learned that Renie was on the island. Disgusted, he tossed it into a wastebasket. Then he ran his hands through his hair.
“Maybe we should send some men to comb the beaches. Maybe she went for a swim and ran into some trouble.”
H glanced up from the schedule he was working on. “Maybe she’s not as helpless as the woman you’re remembering.”
Butch whirled on him. “What are you saying?”
H shrugged. “I’ve watched her TV show.”
“How? It’s a local show.”
“I asked a friend to tape a few and send them to me in the event that you might want to see one.”
“Well, I don’t.”
H nodded and went back to work.
Butch reached for another cigar, then thought better of it. “You think I was wrong to break it off.” It wasn’t a question. Butch knew his old friend well enough to be pretty sure of what H’s feelings on the subject were.
“Wrong is a strong word.”
“What then?”
H glanced up. “I think you’re still in love with her.”
Butch threw up his hands. “Of course I am. That’s why I broke it off. She could do better than me. She should do better than me.”
“In the past forty years she’s stuck by you. That says something.”
“It says that she needs to be protected from her own stupidity. That’s what I’m doing.”
H’s cell phone rang. He picked it up from the desk and flipped it open. “Yeah?”
A moment later, he said to Butch, “They’ve just arrived at the bungalow. What do you want Angelo to do?”
They. This time, it was more than a stab of jealousy that he felt. It was a punch of pure fury that hit him right in the solar plexus. He drew in a deep breath. “Tell Angelo to wait.” Then he motioned to H to follow him.
On his way past his desk, Butch unlocked the top drawer, removed his gun, and tucked it into the waistband beneath his shirt. “I’ll handle this myself.”
COLE GLANCED AT THE bathroom door as he punched numbers into his cell phone. Pepper was still in the shower. He’d wanted very much to join her, but he’d talked himself into giving her time—into giving them both time.
He’d checked with the Miami airport, but Irene Rossi’s name was not on the list of passengers scheduled for tomorrow’s flight to Escapade Island. Not yet anyway. He’d also checked with the charter companies that flew out of the airport, but Irene hadn’t chartered a flight either, at least not from Miami.
That was worrisome and increased his concerns about where Irene Rossi actually was. He wasn’t going to share his concerns with Pepper yet. But missing a plane was one thing. Missing it while you were transporting
a priceless painting was another.
Then there was the fact that ever since their arrival at the bungalow, he’d had a very clear feeling that they were being watched. If they were, the guy was a pro because so far Cole hadn’t been able to spot him. As a precaution, he’d locked the doors—not that they wouldn’t give under the right pressure—and his gun was on the bedside table right next to the candles he’d lit.
To keep himself occupied while he was waiting for Pepper, he’d set the scene for a seduction. He was a man who’d always known how to get what he wanted. His days of trying to figure out what to do about Pepper Rossi were over. He was going to use every amenity that the island had to offer in his campaign to persuade her to give their relationship a chance beyond the time they were going to spend on the island.
Not that he’d had to do much. Escapade Resort was a natural setting for seduction. Impatient that his call hadn’t connected yet, he disconnected and punched in the numbers again. As he waited, he glanced around the bedroom. The interior of the bungalow was a cool and dark escape from the sun beating down on the beach outside. Through the slatted shutters, he could hear the waves hitting the shore. There was a high surf on this side of the island. The bed was draped in mosquito netting that isolated whoever slept there from the outside world. No doubt about it, the people who ran the Escapade Resort knew romance. All he’d had to do was light the candles on the nightstand, pull a split of champagne out of the mini-bar, and pop the cork.
“Tell me you’re on your way back with the Monet.” Luke’s voice on the other end of the call had Cole reining in his thoughts.
“Not yet,” Cole said. “But I have a lead on it.”
“All of our jobs could depend on getting that painting back. If Althea Atwell sues us, we’re going to take a hell of a PR blow.”
“Yeah.”
“Got any idea yet who took it?”