“That’s not possible. I took care of it. She promised to pick you up and explain everything.”
You didn’t take care of it, I want to cry. You didn’t take care of me.
Suddenly, though, I’m not so sure that’s true. Seeing my dad like this, hearing Tara talk about what went down in those dark days after his disappearance, is like being transported back in time. Usually, I fight that pull as hard as I can, determined to look ahead, only ahead, always ahead. This time, however, I give in and let the memories come.
I can easily picture the hotel room, the check-patterned carpet and silvery wallpaper, the coffeemaker that bubbled and clicked every time it turned on. Less easy but still present is the bewilderment and shock I felt as hour after hour passed with no word from my father. Most difficult of all, I can remember entering the lobby a short time after the failed heist, mostly needing space from Tara, but also on the hunt for any easy marks that might provide a distraction. There was a woman there, older and well-dressed, seething with cold fury as she informed the clerk that she would bring in the police to search every room in the place unless he helped her find what she was looking for. I’d assumed she was after something stolen—maybe something we stole. It never occurred to me that she was really after…
Me.
Oh God. She’d been looking for me.
And I, hearing the dreaded threat of authority I’ve been trained since birth to fear, snuck out a side door and didn’t return until it felt safe again.
“I didn’t know,” I say, dazed. “I didn’t know I had a grandmother, didn’t know she was there for me.”
“Someone has always been there for you, baby doll,” my dad says. “Always. Sometimes, I think you refuse to see it on purpose.”
“But where did you go all those years?” I ask, my voice sharp. His words cut too close for comfort, and I need another distraction. Abandonment has been my default for so long, I’m not sure what to do if that, like everything else, turns out to be a lie. “Why did it take you so long to come find me?”
“I went overseas, tried Prague. After a while, one city is much like the next.”
“And then?” I prompt.
“Does it really matter, Penelope?”
“Yeah, Dad, it matters,” I say. I need to know what he went through. I need to know that I’m the only one who makes mistakes and suffers from them.
He sighs. “For the first year, I was so devastated and humiliated that I mostly wandered around, taking what jobs I could find. To be honest, I don’t remember much from that particular period.” The subtext—that drugs or alcohol or other available vices played a role—isn’t lost on me. I don’t remember much of the first year, either. “After the initial shock wore off, I decided I should probably try to find Tara—at least attempt to explain why I had to leave so suddenly. I found her pretty easily. She’s never been one for keeping a low profile. But she’d…moved on by that time, and I didn’t think it would help either of us to get in the way.”
Oh. I don’t say anything. The last thing I want to do is hear anything remotely sexual related to my father and Tara. If she found herself a man to replace him when he abandoned her, all I can say is: Good for her.
“As for you, well—I waited until you were eighteen to make contact again, per the agreement I made with your grandmother.”
Eighteen. Seven years ago. Almost a quarter of my life ago.
“But you’d disappeared, baby doll. There was no sign of you still living at the Dupont residence, no record of you attending school in New York or abroad, no passport or driver’s license in your name. You were untraceable.”
Yeah. That happened when you lived on the street. People forgot you existed.
“That is, until about a year ago, when I got a hit on a marriage license between a Grant Emerson and a Penelope Blue in West Virginia, of all places.” He pauses. “An FBI agent, Penelope? Really?”
I flush. “It’s complicated.”
“I’ll say it is.” He shakes his head and releases a reluctant chuckle. “I wouldn’t want to go up against him in a fistfight. He took out all four of my armed men without breaking a sweat. I thought I was done for.”
I’m not sure how he wants me to respond. I’ve always known Grant is an amazing agent and an even more amazing man—having proof only makes my stomach feel leaden.
“But that was a year ago,” I say.
“I know. I spent a few weeks in West Virginia trying to track you down, but you two had left by then. I eventually followed the trail back to New York. You were easy to find after that, and I’ve been keeping an eye on you since.”
A blurred memory jars me out of the story. “Wait—were you outside my house pretending to be a gardener a few weeks ago?”
“You saw me?”
“And at the motel earlier—skulking outside the office?”
He nods. “Yes, I was there.”
I cast my memory over all the other times I thought I’d seen Oz over the past year—so many days, so many sightings—and I can only slump back against the vinyl booth in wonder. My dad had been close all that time, watching me, unaware how desperately I missed him.
“I can’t believe you never said anything,” I say.
“I didn’t know if I could. Even with all that watching, it was impossible to tell whose side you were on. Half the time you were breaking the law with your friends, and the other half, you were hand-in-hand with the feds. When I heard that the FBI convinced your grandmother to get the necklace out of storage as part of a sting operation, I saw my chance to put you to the test.”
“You hired Riker to steal it.”
“It seemed a golden opportunity,” he says. “I had to see for myself where your loyalties lay. I was afraid your grandmother had succeeded in turning you against me. I had to know if you wanted to find me as much as I wanted to find you.”
Oh, the irony. If only he knew the lengths to which I’d gone to find out what had happened. But then, seeing me now, seeing the ring on my finger, I guess he did.
He pauses. “You did good, by the way—with the air vent at the jewelry store and finding your way up to my floor. If you got rid of that husband, you could become one of the best thieves out there.”
I can’t help the flush of heat to my cheeks or the sense of pride that fills me at those words. I don’t think I’ve been the best at anything before.
“But what I don’t understand is what happened to the painting,” my dad says. “Even if you weren’t sure who to sell it to, Tara had more than enough connections to set herself up comfortably with the proceeds. What did you two do with it?”
My hands are finally calm enough for me to lift my mug without splashing all over the table, so I take a sip of my lukewarm coffee. It still tastes good.
“What painting?” I ask.
“Are you trying to be funny?”
“Um…no?”
My dad leans over the table, his voice low. “You know what painting I’m talking about, Penelope. The one I invested all our savings in. The de Kooning.”
I end up spilling the coffee all over my hands anyway. “What de Kooning?”
“If I told you once, I told you a dozen times—if anything ever goes wrong, you’ll always have our song. You should have been able to get a hundred million for that album cover.”
The sounds of the diner pick up around me, the volume rising and swelling like an ocean wave about to crash overhead. I let go of the coffee altogether, and the cup drops to the table with a wet thud as my fingers grow numb.
“Are you trying to tell me those scribbles and smears of paint contained your entire life’s fortune?” I ask. It’s impossible. It can’t be. Not even Grant has that kind of audacity. “I assumed I made that when I was a kid!”
He tosses napkins at me, but I can’t grip the paper to help him clean the spilled cof
fee. The rest of my body is growing numb now, too. Numb and cold.
“I swear, baby doll, sometimes you have zero common sense. Of course you didn’t make that—it’s one of the rarest and earliest examples of de Kooning’s gestural development. We studied it at the museum together right before my friend Lionel lifted it. Please tell me the painting is at least still in your possession.”
“No.” I sit back with a thump. My limbs are too heavy for anything else. “No, I don’t have it. Someone replaced that cover as a gift to me. It was one of the happiest days of my life, actually.”
A cough from somewhere above my head interrupts us. I somehow find the energy to peer up at the person who has the audacity to approach now, of all times.
I’m unsurprised by who I find.
“You two didn’t make it nearly as far as I thought you would.” Despite his light words and half smile, Grant’s stance is squared at the edge of my booth seat, making it impossible for me to flee. Simon does the same on my dad’s side of the table. “We expected you to be at the border by now.”
I bet he did.
“You bastard,” I say, my voice a snarl.
Grant’s eyes widen in a flare of surprise, but he doesn’t move or lose the smile. “Well, maybe the border is a stretch. But I did expect you to at least try to escape. We have roadblocks posted from here to Maine.”
Even though there’s no way for me to stand up without brushing against him, I do it anyway. I meet Grant toe to toe and chest to chest, refusing to let those brushes of physical intimacy fill me with anything but rage. It’s much easier than I anticipate.
“You jerk. You son of a bitch. You sneaking snake of a man.”
His smile falls away in an instant. “Look, Penelope, I know you probably have a hundred questions, but—”
I push him. Hands flat against his chest and shoving with all my might, I still can’t get him to budge, but that doesn’t mean I stop trying.
“You’ve known this whole time,” I say. “About my dad, about that painting, about the best way to manipulate me to get your hands on it.” He moves a fraction of an inch backward. “You played me from the very first day. You played me from the very first day, and I let you.”
He tries to grab my arms, but I’m too fast, pummeling against his chest in a way that’s both satisfying and ineffective. I’m like a cat trapped in a corner, hissing and clawing and venting my rage, when he stops me with just a few gentle words. “It’s not what you think, my love.”
I freeze at that endearment. “Don’t you dare call me that. You never get to call me that again.”
He casts a pained look at Simon, whose flat expression displays nothing but disgust for such an obvious show of emotion.
“She’s not wrong. You did play her,” he says. “You played all of us.”
Grant releases a low curse. “I already apologized about leaving you out of the loop. Orders from the director—besides, I had to in order to gain Blackrock’s trust. Do you think you could—?”
“Sure. Now you want my help.” Simon turns to my dad with a click of his heels. “Warren Blue, you are under arrest. Anything you say can and will be used against you…”
It’s my breaking point. I know Grant has to arrest my father and possibly the rest of my team, and that I’m the one who led us into this trap. I also know Grant is a manipulative bastard who will stop at nothing to see justice served. But to have it confirmed before my eyes, to see my father being handcuffed and led away after I finally found him again, is more than I can take.
I do the only thing I can think of in that moment. I hold out my own wrists in a gesture of surrender.
“Congratulations, Grant,” I say, my voice razor sharp. “You win.”
His expression turns pained. “I’m not going to arrest you, Penelope—you or your friends. You can put your hands down.”
His pain, his gentleness, only fuels the red-hot rage pricking at my eyes. Now is not the time for him to try to get back on my good side.
“Why not?” I ask. “I steal. I lie. I hurt people.” The implication of those particular sins forces me into a startled laugh. “Then again, I guess you do those things, too. Did you scratch my dad’s record on purpose so you had an excuse to take it in?”
He shifts uncomfortably. “Yes, but I—”
“And did you know he was still alive?”
“Yes, but we—”
I refuse to soften. “And have you been planning to use me as bait to find him this whole time?”
He doesn’t answer that right away. Whether from fear of retaliation or out-and-out cowardice, he can’t seem to form the words that will rip me in half.
So I do it for him.
I push him aside. This time, he gives way easily, staggering on his feet. I reach up and remove the infinity necklace from around my neck, dropping it to the table in a serpentine coil. “I want a divorce.”
30
THE WEDDING
(Twelve Months Ago)
The bride wore white.
I didn’t want to, of course. I’d always been much more comfortable in black, and to don the color of purity and innocence on a day like this one seemed sacrilege of the highest order. Besides, Grant and I were getting married in a West Virginia county clerk’s office with all of four people in attendance. Going full bridal seemed like overkill.
“Oh, Pen. It’s perfect. You’re perfect.” Jordan put to rest any fears I might have had that the dress made me look like a meringue. She put her hands on my shoulders and spun me, causing the skirt of my short, party-style gown to flare. “I think I’m going to cry.”
“Please don’t,” I said, mostly out of a sense of self-preservation. Weddings had never caused me to start welling up before, but there was something about this one that had me teetering perilously close.
Oh, right. Because it was mine.
The fact that I was standing in a public restroom and my bridesmaid was rummaging through her bag to find a lipstick that wasn’t a plastic explosive in hiding didn’t change any of the surreal factor. This was really happening. I was going through with it.
“Aren’t you so glad I made you get this dress?” Jordan asked as she made a few minor adjustments to my ensemble. Tuck a strand of hair here, wipe a smudge of mascara there—I couldn’t tell if she was keeping busy to distract me or herself.
Either way, she stopped when she hit the cameo brooch pinned to my neckline.
“Holy smokes, that’s gorgeous!” She leaned in for a closer look. “Real shell, from the looks of it. Is it your something new or your something, er, borrowed?”
I laughed. For once in my life, nothing on my person was borrowed.
“It’s my something old,” I said, fingering the delicate carving. “Grant gave it to me a few months back.”
Jordan’s eyes met mine in a look of swift understanding before she lowered them again. Jewelry had never been something we held onto for very long, for obvious reasons. Why wear what you can hawk? A valuable piece like this—appraised at four grand, according to Riker’s best guess—would have gone a long way in helping us plan the next big heist.
“Well, the man has good taste, that’s for sure,” she said. “Though I guess that was never in question. He picked you, didn’t he?”
It was a nice thing to say to an anxious bride-to-be, but there was too much forced joviality to make either of us comfortable. Unfortunately, hiding in the bathroom for the next few hours wasn’t a viable option, and there weren’t any windows to escape out of, which meant my comfort had to take a backseat to reality.
“Is he out there?” I asked.
“Yes, and he’s more nervous than you, if you’d believe it.”
I didn’t believe it, and I was pretty sure she knew I wasn’t talking about the groom. “No, not Grant. Riker.”
Jordan nodded. “Yeah.
He’s right outside.”
“I better go talk to him.” I gave myself another once-over in the mirror, but there wasn’t anything to fix. Jordan had attended to all the details, made sure there wasn’t so much as a smudge of lipstick out of place. Whatever the knot in the pit of my stomach might say to the contrary, I certainly looked the part of the blushing bride.
As Jordan promised, Riker was waiting for me in the hallway. Like me, he looked his role to perfection. Although the ceremony itself wasn’t much—just a courthouse room and the traditional marital vows—our attendants were dressed to the hilt. Grant brought his mom and Simon; I had Riker and Jordan. Just four people in this whole vast world to witness our union, but at least Riker did that tuxedo justice. He looked like a rock star with a hangover.
“Hey,” I said.
He didn’t offer a response, not even a blink at seeing me standing there with a veil.
“Okay, you have five minutes.”
He was slouched against the wall opposite the bathroom, but other than a slight lifting of his head, he didn’t change his posture. “What?”
“Five minutes.” I gestured at the clock above his head. “Say what you need to say. Get it off your chest. I’m giving you five minutes of repercussion-free time to outline why I’m about to make the biggest mistake of my life, and then I have a wedding to attend.”
He pushed himself to a standing position. “No.”
“No?” Was he saying that about the five minutes or the wedding?
“No,” he echoed, clarifying nothing. But then he offered me the crook of his elbow and stood perfectly rigid until I placed my arm on his. “Your betrothed was afraid you might bolt before the ceremony, so he tasked me with the job of making sure you get there in one piece. Lucky me, huh?”
Oh man. That sounded exactly like a challenge Grant would offer…and exactly like a challenge Riker couldn’t refuse.
Stealing Mr. Right Page 29