Jordan’s hand on my arm stills me from saying more. “What did you do?” she asks.
Well, for starters, I was born. From there, it’s a choose-your-own-adventure of mishaps and questionable choices.
But she isn’t talking to me.
“Riker,” she repeats gently. “What did you do?”
The quiet internalization is done. He stands up with a twitchy jerk of his legs, and his eyes cast over the room—couch and table, lamps and chairs, anywhere but the three of us. “It’s Pen’s fault. It was her decision. Her choice.”
I want to get up and start twitching myself, but I’m not sure my arms or legs will work the way I’d like them to right now. There’s too much going on inside my body—cold and hot, foreboding and anticipation. All of it jumbles up and renders me immobile. What, exactly, is going on here?
“None of this would have happened if she’d just grabbed the necklace when she had the chance. I gave her the opportunity. I told her we could make a run for it.”
The fact that he’s talking about me in the third person, as if I’m not here, isn’t doing much to make me feel better. Then his gaze zeroes in on mine, making me the complete focus of his attention and anguish, and I realize that I much preferred the Riker who couldn’t look me in the eye.
I’m not sure I’ve seen him this angry before. At me, at himself, at a world that doesn’t seem to care what becomes of us.
“I told you I had a buyer lined up for that necklace—I told you he was keenly interested in that particular piece and that he was willing to pay so much, no questions asked.” His voice rises in pitch. “You didn’t ask any questions, either. Remember that?”
He’s mad at me because I trusted him to tend to the details? “I don’t understand.”
“I do,” Oz says, though he doesn’t bother to fill in the gaps.
“It was supposed to be a surprise, Pen. I didn’t want to get your hopes up, because I know how much this means to you, but Blackrock offered more than money for that necklace.” He winces, and a similar pain clenches my heart. “I told you he’s powerful. He is. He’s also connected. And he knows things—about the failed heist, about your dad, about you…information no one could possibly have access to.”
Oz’s grunt of confirmation is the only thing that pulls me back from the swirling black in my periphery.
“He told you about my dad? He knows what happened to him?”
“It looks that way. When I cut the deal, I made that information part of the payout. All we had to do was hand over the necklace, and he’d tell us everything he knew.” Riker swallows heavily. “There’s no way Grant could get anywhere near Blackrock on his own, not even with the necklace, but with you or Tara to grease the wheels…”
My world isn’t black now so much as it’s an explosion of colors—blocks of red and orange. I’m on my feet, dizzy with outrage, tempted to tackle Riker to the floor and demand justice.
I thought, a few hours ago, that I couldn’t feel any worse than I did when my husband betrayed me.
I was wrong. Grant is my enemy, my foe, and I’ve always known that our life together has an expiration date. It’s the only reason I’ve been able to stay married as long as I have. Knowing he’s going to leave, knowing he’s only on loan to me until life inevitably rips him away, is all that’s saved me from losing my head and my heart.
But Riker? He’s my friend. He’s my family. He’s the one constant in a life that’s been anything but.
“And you never told me? You never thought that might be something I’d want to know ahead of time?”
It’s hard for me to make sense of everything right now, but the underlying cadence is loud and clear. Your father, the failed heist, your father, the failed heist. It’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted—to discover what happened, to understand how things fell apart so tragically.
Riker knows that. He knows, and he was in the same room with someone who has answers, but his need to be the Man in Charge is so strong that he didn’t even mention it to me.
“You bastard. You selfish, single-minded, goddamn—”
“No.” He whirls on me, and I can tell that his anger doesn’t just match my own—it exceeds it. “You don’t get to be mad at me for this, Pen. You had the necklace, you had the opportunity to take it, and you decided not to sully yourself with what I had to offer. And now Grant gets to sell the necklace instead. He gets to find the answers in your place.”
“Riker, maybe now isn’t the time…” Jordan attempts to intervene, but not even her diplomacy can save us. There’s no coming down from this moment. Not even if you tossed us into a bomb shelter and let us finish each other off once and for all.
I cross the room in a flash, and my hands are against his chest—hitting, shoving, trying to make a dent that equals the one inside my chest. “You had no right to keep that information from me. You did it on purpose. You wanted to hurt me. You hate that I might have found happiness without you.”
Riker grabs my wrists—the poor wrists Grant has already weakened—and I’m forced to stop. He pulls me close, within hugging distance, but this embrace contains no affection. His rigidity equals my own, his anger intertwined with mine.
“No. I stepped back and let you choose, just like you asked me to. It was the necklace or your fancy new life. It was me or him.” His voice is so quiet that I have to strain to hear him over the rush of blood through my veins. “But you picked him. You always pick him. You always have.”
He lets go so suddenly that I catapult backward and hit the floor with a thud. I’m dizzy with the fall and emotion, with outrage and something more. But Riker doesn’t make a move to help me up, and neither does Jordan or Oz. For over a year and a half now, I’ve chased Grant in the pursuit of answers, and this is what happened. I’m broken down. I’m alone.
I rub my wrists—more in a symbolic gesture than actual pain—and Jordan softens. She extends a hand.
“Oh dear,” she says. “What do we do now?”
Neither Riker nor I are able to look at each other, which is just as well, because there’s nothing I could possibly say to him that would capture a fraction of what I’m feeling. Because even though I’m mad at Riker—furious, actually, more than I was when Grant tied me to a chair—I know he’s right.
I did pick Grant. I did turn my back on our friendship. And, if given the same opportunity again, I’m not sure I’d choose differently. Even with Grant just on loan to me, even with our lies the only thing holding us together, I’ve found more contentment in the life we share than in all my wanderings with Riker.
I always wondered if Riker was aware of it. Now, I’m sure.
I slump to the couch again, no longer feeling the clouds’ embrace. The couch is just fabric and wood and cushions, perfectly ordinary materials lumped together to hold me aloft. For the first time, I can see everything that way. Not as metaphors and wishes, not as what-if scenarios and dreams. My life is exactly what I made it.
A mess.
Silence threatens to hold us in place for hours, but none of us makes a move to break it. Which is why it makes sense when Oz is the one who finally speaks up. The man who rarely speaks is the only one who can.
“I don’t see what the big deal is.” He shrugs. “There’s information to buy and a necklace to buy it with. All we need to do is steal the necklace back.”
16
THE COUCH
(Seventeen Months Ago)
Riker’s favorite place to plan a heist was on the outer decks of the Hudson River Ferry. I never knew if he was afraid of being bugged or if he just really liked boats, but nine times out of ten, we conducted our plotting on the familiar waterway between New York and New Jersey.
Most of the time, I didn’t mind. I liked a fresh river breeze as much as the next claustrophobic girl, and I was long since used to accommodating Riker’s whims. But on
a day like this one, with a bitter fall wind whipping along the water and a sky so overcast that the clouds weighed heavily on our shoulders, Riker’s whims weren’t at the top of my priority list. I mostly wanted a blanket.
“The job should be straightforward after that.” Riker spoke directly into the wind, which meant Jordan and I had to strain to hear him, even though we brushed shoulders. Oz was, as usual, hiding somewhere in the distance. I figured he had equal chances of being the man reading the newspaper just inside the window or the captain of this vessel—they both looked enough like him to pass. “The key will be rigging the rooftop explosion in perfect alignment with the delivery driver’s schedule.”
“And we’re sure Pen can make it up the laundry chute in that amount of time?” Jordan asked, glancing at me.
“I can’t feel my face,” I replied.
Jordan wrapped her hand around her ear and leaned closer. “What was that?”
“My face,” I repeated, louder this time.
“What about it?”
“I can’t feel it.” If you’ve ever wondered how difficult it is to hold a conversation in forty-degree wind and sideways rain, the answer is very. “It’s numb. Are my lips moving right now? It’s hard to tell.”
Jordan hid her smile behind a discreet hand, but Riker turned to me with a scowl. “No one cares about your stupid face. Can you or can you not handle your part?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure? Because the last time we tried to use a laundry chute, you slipped two stories—”
“I’ll get a pair of those grippy socks. No big deal.” I wasn’t as confident as my tone indicated—they must oil laundry chutes to try and make them unnavigable—but if we didn’t wrap this up, Riker would make us ride the entire length of the river again to hash out the details. Not only was my body temperature unamenable to this plan, but I didn’t relish the idea of reaching the terminal looking like a drowned rat. “We’re about to dock. Can we finish this later? Somewhere with heat or a roof, maybe?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Is my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to steal a Civil War coin collection getting in the way of your comfort?”
“She has a date,” Jordan informed him and turned to me to adjust my windblown hair. I wished her luck with that endeavor. I’d spent quite a bit of time that morning attempting to make myself more presentable than usual—lipstick and everything—but I doubted there was much she could do to salvage me now. “Grant’s picking her up at the terminal.”
I didn’t have to look at Riker to know he wasn’t pleased by this information—he was so hot and angry, my hair practically steamed flat again. “Oh really? You’re meeting your FBI boyfriend at the place where we regularly conduct business? How nice. Would you also like to give him a list of the crimes you’ve committed in the past year?”
“I’m ninety-nine percent sure he already knows,” I said. “I told you before—it’s not us he’s after. It’s my dad’s fortune.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Call it a woman’s intuition.”
“I’d rather call it a woman’s infatuation.”
That, too. “If you’re so convinced I don’t know what I’m talking about, why don’t you come with me?”
Riker jolted so much, he almost pitched himself over the side of the ferry. “Come with you? Like, on your date?”
“Sure. Why not?” I shrugged with a nonchalance that was largely faked. I wanted Grant and Riker on a date with me the same way I wanted to dine with a bear and a wolf at the same time, but I wasn’t sure what else to do. Riker wasn’t going to be happy unless I made him see for himself that I could handle Grant.
Our guard dog was clever, yes, and he knew things about us that indicated months—if not years—of careful surveillance. And, okay, any more of those dangerous kisses from him and I was likely to give up the whole show, but I was taking just as much as I gave away. Riker wasn’t the only one who could plan a perfect deception.
“You obviously don’t trust my judgment, even though he’s met Jordan and refrained from slapping her in irons,” I said. “So come along. I’ll introduce you. You can buy furniture with us.”
As usual, he latched on to the least important part of that statement. “He’s buying you furniture already? Let me guess. It’s a bed.”
I glared at him—ineffectively, I might add, as my eyes stung from the rain. Not only was Riker being offensive, but he was putting an innuendo on my relationship with Grant that didn’t belong there. To need a bed, Grant and I would have to participate in activities of a carnal nature. Unless you counted the unholy thoughts that made up basically all of my waking—and sleeping—hours, Grant and I had done nothing of the sort.
Oh, we’d kissed plenty. I could tell you exactly how he preferred to hold a woman while his lips devoured hers, describe in detail the way he tasted when he was at his most demanding. I knew the contours of his body through his clothes so well, I could draw him from memory—and let me tell you, my memory liked what it saw.
Even though I’d always known Agent Grant Emerson was a strong man, nothing could have prepared me for the strength of his resolve in stopping each kiss before it got too heated. He licked and nibbled, taunted and teased, groped and groaned. But he never, ever took a bite.
He was a gentleman through and through. It was killing me.
“It’s not a bed, Riker, and he’s not buying me anything. He’s just taking me to a store where I can trade my own hard-earned cash for worldly possessions. I’m thinking about getting a lamp.”
Riker’s scowl was replaced by a normal, everyday frown. “A lamp, Pen?”
I blushed despite the numbing cold. Riker could lay out all the insults he wanted without affecting me, could yell and scream and bluster until he lost his voice, and he never hurt me in the slightest. But that simply worded question spoke volumes.
See, my apartment wasn’t a sad, empty space because I was broke. The reality was that I’d never felt an urge for furniture ownership before. I didn’t want roots. I didn’t want ties. I didn’t want to grow attached to anything that could be taken away from me again.
To most people, a lamp signified nothing more than a convenient way to see after dark. To me—and, in many ways, to Riker—a lamp was a heck of a lot more. It was investing in the future. It was paying down on a life you weren’t sure would be there the next morning.
“It’s dark inside my apartment,” I said and left it at that.
As was often the case between us, Riker understood perfectly. He nodded once and turned to look out over the water. “Okay. I’ll come. But you’d better go inside with Jordan and have her do something with your hair first. You look like a drowned rat.”
* * *
Years ago, I took a class on manners. A finishing course, the fancy people of the world called it—one of those weeklong affairs where young ladies go to learn things like which fork to use and how to walk around with books on their heads. We’d been running a job that required me to make it through an entire five-course meal at a political fundraising dinner, and Riker was certain I’d do something to give away my roots, like shovel food in my face with both fists—which, let’s face it, was a real possibility.
I don’t remember much about the class except that I wasn’t very good at being a gracious lady. For one, a gracious lady wouldn’t have pocketed the silverware before she left. For another, a gracious lady would have walked away knowing how to skillfully manage the introductions between two men predisposed to loathe one another.
I only got as far as, “Grant, this is my good friend, Riker. Riker, this is Grant,” before I ran out of things to say.
“It’s nice to finally meet,” Riker said stiffly and extended a hand. “I’ve heard so much about you.” Most of the people standing around the glass-paned terminal could probably tell he was lying through clenched teeth,
but Grant stepped up with all the good breeding and manners that no finishing class could ever give me.
He took Riker’s hand in his own giant paw and shook, his smile deep and seemingly genuine. “You have the advantage of me there. I haven’t heard anything about you, but any friend of Penelope’s is a friend of mine.”
What a liar. But a cute liar.
“Riker and I sort of grew up together,” I offered. “I don’t have any official family for you to meet, but he’s as good as the real thing. Better, probably. We used to date.”
Once again, I appeared to have caught Grant off guard with the truth. His startled gaze flew to mine for the briefest of moments before appreciation settled over his expression. Riker’s startled gaze, on the other hand, stayed intensely unappreciative.
“I didn’t care for her sense of humor,” Riker said. Grant had yet to relinquish his hand, so they stood at an impasse, clutching one another as crowds of people streamed by. “In case you were wondering why we broke up. She thinks it’s hilarious to pitch her friends into uncomfortable situations against their will.”
Right. Because he never pitched me into uncomfortable places. Like boxes. Or laundry chutes.
“She does seem to have an unusual levity about her,” Grant agreed. “I can see how that might get exhausting after a while.”
“Hey, now—” I started.
“She’s also surprisingly ambitionless,” Grant continued. He finally released Riker’s hand, turning so they walked shoulder to shoulder, leaving me no choice but to trail ineffectively behind. “You’d think a woman with so many talents would want more out of life.”
“I want things out of life,” I said. “Lots of things. Lunch, for starters, wouldn’t be a bad idea.”
“She’s always been like that,” Riker said, ignoring me. He still sounded sullen, but I could tell he was warming to the idea of discussing my flaws with an understanding ear. “You try to give her something nice—a present or a compliment or an opportunity—and she immediately wonders what the catch is. It’s kind of sad.”
Stealing Mr. Right Page 16