Well, an accountant with a BDSM fetish, maybe. These handcuffs are tight.
“Let’s call them a precautionary measure.” Simon pauses until I lower my wrists again. “Your fingerprints were found at the scene.”
“Of course they were. It’s my house. I live there. I occasionally touch the things inside it.”
“Including the safe?” He tosses a manila folder in front of me, and an arc of photographs of my living room fan out in an artful arrangement. “There seemed to be an awful lot of fresh prints all over it.”
“I don’t know if you remember, but I came in to these exact offices to drop off Grant’s passport last week—you can check that with your security log. As it happens, we keep the passports in the safe. I had no choice but to open it. Mine’s probably still in there, if you guys haven’t already bagged it up and sent it off to forensics.”
Simon looks as if he doesn’t want to believe me—his face screwed up like a child being denied an ice cream cone—but he doesn’t have any other choice. It’s the truth, after all.
“Okay, fine,” he concedes. “You have an excuse for that one.”
“Let me stop you right there—I have an excuse for all of them, and I’m not afraid to use them.” I lift my wrists and shake them at him, the metal rattling like old prison chains. “Take these off, and maybe I’ll be willing to give you information that’ll help your investigation.”
“Do you have information that will help my investigation?”
I cock my head at him. “Did you happen to notice a few restraints on the chair in the living room? The ones that made it look like someone was tied up there for a while?”
“We noticed.”
“Well, that someone was me. I was there when they took the necklace. I saw the whole thing.”
He sits back, clearly surprised by my candor and unsure what to do about it. I should probably be more insulted that he thinks me incapable of telling the truth, but it’s no worse than Grant’s reactions over the past year and a half. I can almost picture my husband in the room with us, leaning against the door, his eyes crinkled in amusement as I make no attempt to fool him.
Something inside my chest snags. Whatever his faults, Grant has always been prepared to accept me for who I am. Lying, telling the truth, wasting precious government resources with wild goose chases…I like to think he takes pleasure in them all.
Then again, I also like to think he’d never betray me when it comes to the important things.
“So you saw the theft take place?” Simon asks.
“Yep.”
“And you didn’t report it right away?”
“Nope.”
He makes a strange grunting noise, not unlike a pig crossed with a crow. “And you have the audacity to ask me to undo your cuffs? It sounds to me like you were an accomplice. You’re not going anywhere.”
I shrug. “Suit yourself, but I think it’s only fair to give me a pass on this one. The reason I didn’t report it is because Grant is the one who stole it.”
Simon’s reaction is immediate. He leans sharply across the table, his face inches from mine. “You lie.”
“I wish. Look me in the eyes. Give me a polygraph. Torture me. It’ll still be what happened, even after you take out your frustrations on me.” I don’t look away from the icy gaze he has locked on me. “I know you don’t like me, Simon. You never have, and I don’t blame you for it. But that doesn’t make this any less true.”
“You were in on it, weren’t you.” He doesn’t phrase it as a question. “You made him do it.”
“No. I walked in on him in the middle of the job—and believe me, I was just as surprised as you are.” Just as surprised, just as outraged, just as hurt. “But he did have an accomplice, if that makes you feel better. Once you finish running the prints, I’m sure you’ll find a match for her.”
“Who is it?”
“Her name is Tara Lewis. That’s T-A-R-A L-E-”
“I know who Tara Lewis is,” he snaps. I can tell the exact moment his brain makes the connection—Tara Lewis and Penelope Blue, related by marriage, bonded by loss—because there’s an almost-human glimmer in his eyes. “It was really her?”
“Oh, it was her. The pair of them had been cooking it up for days, if not longer. They were on pretty intimate terms, if you know what I mean.”
He looks suspicious at that, eyeing me slantwise, but he makes a fastidious motion with his hand that I assume means he wants me to keep going. Unfortunately for him, this isn’t a free-for-all. I’ve learned everything I need to know. The FBI is no more aware of Grant’s whereabouts than I am.
“So, there’s your mystery solved,” I say. “I gave you the names you wanted. Now, will you please let me go? Since you don’t seem to be doing anything to find him, I’d really like to get back to searching for my missing husband. There are a few words I’m saving for his ears only.”
Simon holds my gaze for a moment longer before pulling out his phone and stabbing the buttons. “Shit. Shit, fuck, damn.”
It’s the most discomfited—and human—I’ve seen him, and pity moves through me. He and I don’t have so many differences, after all. We both want nothing more than for Grant to walk in and look us in the eye. We both want to know how something as meaningless and empty as money could have turned him rogue.
But then Simon glances up at me, and I can tell that any human feelings he has aren’t going to last. “I knew this was going to happen. I knew you were pulling him in too deep.”
I brace myself for what’s coming next—the accusations and the fury, Simon pulling out the handcuff keys and swallowing them so I can never walk free again—but I’m saved by a knock on the door. Simon begrudgingly calls for the visitor to enter, and I’m greeted by my lawyer, arrived to uphold my rights.
By lawyer, I of course mean Oz.
He’s in an impeccable costume, as always, a sort of scrambled together, absent-minded professor look, with his button-down shirt untucked on one side and a coffee stain down the front. He fumbles to make it through the door while balancing his briefcase, but his eyes are alert behind wire-rimmed glasses.
It’s so perfect, I almost want to give him a standing ovation. If he’d come in sharp and polished, the kind of lawyer that accomplished jewel thieves are expected to keep on retainer, Simon might have dug in his heels and refused to let me go. But this? It sealed my innocence in ways that a thousand truths could never do.
My friends are seriously the best. I knew they wouldn’t let me disappear into this building for so many hours without sending an extraction team. We could teach Simon and Grant a thing or two about loyalty.
“I’m here on behalf of, ah, Penelope…Blue, is it?” Oz consults one of the papers in his hand, which shakes just enough to give the impression of a drunk who’s not as drunk as he’d like to be. “I’m sorry I’m so late. I just got the call a few hours ago, and the subway was a mess. Is this the right room?”
“It’s the right room.” I cast a meaningful look at Simon. “I’m being unlawfully detained in here.”
Oz blinks at my handcuffs. “Are you? That can’t be right.”
“She’s free to go,” Simon mutters. He scoops up the file with one hand. “But don’t leave the area. We’re not done with you.”
I feel pretty confident they’ll never be done with me, but that’s beside the point.
“Simon—” I call out before he has a chance to leave, raising my hands to show he still has to physically release me.
He doesn’t want to do it—draw nearer to me, be close enough to actually touch my skin—but he pulls the keys out of his pocket all the same.
I use the moment of intimacy, strained though it is, to ask the question that’s nagged me since I walked in here. “Will he be in a lot of trouble for this?”
Simon stops in the middle of turning the key
.
“It’s just…” I bite my lip and try to think of a way to phrase my question without giving anything else away. “I know I’m the last person in the world you want to share government secrets with, but is there something I’m missing? Can you think of a reason he’d go out on his own like this?”
“I might ask the same thing of you, Penelope Blue.” Even though he rhymes as he says it, the phrase holds none of the singsong quality of Grant’s playful tone. He’s stark and cold, and he bites off the syllables like they cause him pain.
He’s not the only one. My heart pitters once, patters twice, and then fizzles to a stop. In that moment, I realize I’m done. With lying, with pretending, with tiptoeing around like I have something to hide.
“I refuse to believe it,” I say. “Not even he’s willing to go that far to find my dad’s fortune. He wouldn’t just throw everything away like that.”
“Are you sure?” Simon yanks the handcuffs from my wrists, the edge of the metal leaving yet another painful mark. “As far as I’m concerned, he threw everything away the day he married you.”
* * *
“Thank you for rescuing me.” I stretch on my tiptoes to plant a kiss on Oz’s cheek as soon as we round the corner and escape the watchful eyes of the FBI building. “Your timing was perfect. I got all I could out of him—it was like talking to a particularly uninformed wall.”
It’s kind of ironic, saying that to a man who is a particularly well-informed wall, but Oz just shrugs it off.
“The worst part is, I’m not any closer to the answers. The authorities weren’t even aware of the theft until I reported it. If they have any idea where Grant is or what he’s doing, it goes a lot higher than Simon’s pay grade.”
“No need.”
“For thanks?” On the contrary, I don’t thank Oz enough. He’s silent and capable in the background, always there when I need him. “There is too a need. I’m pretty sure Simon was prepared to keep me there until Grant himself came to save me.”
“No. For answers. We’ve got him.”
Cryptic though the remark may be, I understand Oz in an instant. There’s no need to continue feeling Simon out for information because the team managed to track Grant down on their own, bless every last one of them. Poor Oz has to physically restrain me as I tug on his arm, peppering him with questions. “Where is he? What is he doing? Can I talk to him? Please tell me Tara died in the crossfire.”
That last one makes him break out in a smile. I was wrong before when I said that Oz has no distinguishing marks. When he smiles to reveal charmingly crooked teeth and a near-dimple in his right cheek, I’d spot him anywhere.
“No one has killed anyone yet,” he says. “We thought you’d want to go first.”
19
THE CHALLENGE
(Sixteen Months Ago)
“You mean he literally helped the old woman across the street?” I released an unladylike cackle and sat back in the corner booth of the Whiskey Room, where I currently held court with Simon and two other agents from their department. “As in, stopped the protesters, took her arm, and escorted her through an armed militia?”
“On my honor.” The smallest of the trio—a techy guy in plastic-rimmed glasses named Nathan who I was developing a minor crush on—held up his hand. “To this day, it remains one of the most surreal feats I’ve seen performed on the job. He was like Moses parting the Red Sea. And I’ve seen some crazy stuff, so you know that’s big.”
I wanted to ask him what some of those feats might be—just out of curiosity—but although liquor had loosened this group’s collective tongue enough to share Grant’s more impressive exploits, they were still a federal-looking bunch. And, yes, people can look federal. It’s all in the shoulders. Even Nathan, who clearly spent most of his time hunched over a keyboard, looked like he could handle himself on the mats.
If their impressive statures weren’t convincing enough, you only had to listen. In all my time among the men in black, one of the things that stood out the most was the way they paused a fraction of a second before speaking, running their entire dialogue through some kind of official internal checkpoint first.
“Okay, but that doesn’t really count,” I said. I turned my brightest smile toward the man on the end—Paulie, his friends called him, though the best I could tell, his name was actually Bernard. He looked more like a Paulie, with a calm air and a Hawaiian shirt I was pretty sure wasn’t regulation uniform. “That’s the kind of story a guy’s friends are prepped ahead of time to tell his girlfriend so she gets all swoony inside. I want to know the dirty stuff. The stuff he wouldn’t want his mother to know.”
“It’s classified.” Simon, who’d been characteristically silent until that point, narrowed his eyes at me. “We couldn’t tell you even if we wanted to.”
I was fast learning that an FBI agent and his partner forged similar bonds to those between a jewel thief and her cohorts. The two men worked together, sparred together, shot at targets together, pitched themselves into life-and-death situations together. They were understandably tight. And protective.
Just as Riker and Grant had never warmed up to each other, so too did I have a hard time sharing a room with Simon without feeling the urge to squirm and check my teeth for diamonds. I had the feeling he knew as much about my life as Grant did…and had about one-tenth as much appreciation for it.
“Well, I already know he’ll abandon a girl out in the sticks of New York the second one of you idiots call.” I smiled to show there were no hard feelings. Nathan, bless his bow tie–wearing heart, blushed. “I know he’s habitually late meeting his girlfriend for dates, and I know he sometimes works for so many hours straight, he actually slurs his words.”
I tapped my chin coyly and tried to come up with more seemingly innocent facts about Grant’s professional life, but they were surprisingly difficult to conjure. Most of the things I knew about his past had been gleaned the unethical way, via Oz and Riker and a search through the deepest, darkest parts of the Internet, and I didn’t care to share the things I knew that weren’t work related.
Call me sentimental, but I wanted to keep the wooing to myself, clutched to my heart and cherished in ways that would have shamed the Penelope Blue of a few months ago. Riker and Oz knew almost nothing about the dates Grant took me on, and Jordan got the blacked-out version, but there was fodder for a hundred journal entries, complete with swirly lines and googly-eyed hearts.
So far, Grant had taken me to eighteen dinners, seven lunches, one long, romantic walk along the docks—the ones of the near-drowning wharf job, in case you were wondering—and spent an entire afternoon teaching me to shoot ducks in a carnival game at Coney Island. I was a terrible shot, a fact that had afforded him infinite amusement, and he solemnly vowed to protect me from any and all future gunfire, since I was clearly useless on my own.
He’d also returned my dad’s record in mint condition, as promised. He’d hunted down the original cover and presented it a few weeks before with a shiny red bow. I didn’t cry or anything embarrassing like that, but I came close when he put the record on and twirled me around my apartment floor, the pair of us dancing beneath tangerine trees and marmalade skies.
In short, he was perfect. Ever since that day at the antique store, he’d been attentive, interested, and not the least bit pushy. It was starting to freak me out. He didn’t push for information about my dad, he didn’t push me to stop stealing things, and he didn’t push for anything more than the occasional knee-knocking kiss before sending me on my way. It was like he was on a lengthy stakeout, and I was the building he needed to watch.
Not enter, mind you. Just watch.
I meant that as euphemistically as possible. There was no entering happening in this building at all—and the building was seriously gagging for it.
I chose my next words carefully. “I also know he’s like a dog at a bone
when it comes to certain cases. Especially cases that have grown blue from being out too long.”
The men’s reactions told me everything I needed to know about them. Paulie nodded, agreeing with me. Nathan looked sheepish in the way of men who always feel they should apologize for the general shortcomings of their sex. And Simon—oh, Simon—he pokered up so much, I was surprised he didn’t turn to stone.
So there it was. Paulie and Nathan didn’t know anything about me beyond the cover story, but Simon was clearly in on the ruse—and he was none too happy about it. I almost felt like I should introduce him to Riker. They’d have so much to talk about.
“There’s nothing wrong with being diligent,” Simon said.
“There’s diligent, and then there’s obsessed.”
“He’s not obsessed.”
“You sure about that? It looks a little like obsession from where I’m sitting.”
Everything that wasn’t already closed up on Simon’s body tightened to black-hole levels of impenetrability. His nostrils became pinpricks, and his eyes narrowed to serpentine slits. “I’d watch myself, if I were you. Don’t presume to understand his motivations—or how far he’s willing to go to get what he wants. You have no idea how long he’s been tracking y—”
His eyes opened again, as if suddenly noticing that we were in a bar and that Paulie and Nathan were looking at him with something approaching concern.
“How long he’s been tracking certain cases,” he amended. Poorly, if you asked me. It seemed that not all FBI agents were the close-lipped professionals they ought to be. Grant would have never let that slip—not even if I did everything I could to provoke him, not even if I started stripping off my clothes in an attempt to break him down.
A strange feeling of pride filled me at that thought. My boyfriend might be killing me with chivalry, but he’s a way better agent than you.
Stealing Mr. Right Page 19