“You rugged undercover types,” Emma said, slipping from his embrace. “I’ll finish up here and meet you upstairs. Don’t fall asleep on me.”
She reached for the faucet, but in one swift move, he swept an arm around her and lifted her off her feet, then up and over his shoulder, potato-sack style. She knew several different maneuvers to get herself back onto the floor in one piece but used none of them as he headed for the stairs. Not that her maneuvers would have worked, anyway. He was strong, in good shape and determined, despite his ordeal.
He didn’t put her down at the top of the stairs. In a few more strides, he had her in his bedroom. It was pitch-dark, the shades pulled, not so much as a night-light on. She had hastily made the bed that morning, but Colin kept any remarks to himself as he ripped back the duvet, just as she had pictured, dreamed about, in the weeks since he’d left Rock Point.
“The sheets will be cold,” she said.
“Not for long.” He wasn’t breathing hard at all as he laid her on the bed. He grinned and gave a mock shudder. “Damn. It is cold.”
“Are you sure about this? You need time to decompress and reintegrate—”
“Exactly.” He fell with her onto the bed, his mouth finding hers. “Nothing’s changed, Emma. Nothing. I want you now as much as I did when I carried you up here the first time.”
“That’s good,” she whispered, her throat tight with emotion and a rush of desire.
Her shirt went first, then his, joining the blankets on the floor. Emma inhaled sharply when he skimmed his hands over her bare breasts, then caught a nipple between his lips. She sank deep into the bed, already warm from their presence. He licked, tasted, teased, even as he smoothed his palms down her sides, over her hips.
Her pulse raced; her skin was on fire.
In another two seconds, he had her jeans off, and she raked at his, until finally they, too, were gone, cast onto the floor.
He came to her, as ready as she was. She’d dreamed of this moment, ached for it, hoped for it. He was her soul mate in the only way she understood soul mates.
“Emma,” he whispered, “stop thinking.”
She could hear the amusement in his tone and drew her arms around him, coursed her palms up his back. “No more thinking. Promise. It’s good to have you here.”
“Glad you put that pie in the oven?”
The man was irresistible, impossible. She smiled, tried to answer, but he shifted position on top of her, eased himself between her legs, and she found that she couldn’t speak. Instead she drew him into her, closing her eyes, lying back, taking in the heat and hardness of him. He thrust deeply and went still, as if to give them both the chance to absorb that this was real, that they were together again, making love on a dark autumn night. Then he drove into her again, and she was lost.
Only later, when her heartbeat had calmed and the cool air chilled her overheated skin, did anything resembling a thought work its way into her consciousness, and it was a good thought. She didn’t want to be anywhere else but where she was right now.
She realized there was only one pillow left on the bed, and they were sharing it, facing each other. Colin kissed her on the forehead but didn’t say a word.
* * *
Colin ended up on the outer edge of the bed, with Emma asleep in the crook of his arm. The milky light of dawn brought out the honey tones of her hair, and he noticed her black lashes against her creamy skin. He’d slept, but not a lot. She was right about the need for decompression and reintegration. They were as important to his work as training, preparation, reports, analysis, experience and instinct. Fatigue bred mistakes. Mental and physical exhaustion put not just his own life in danger but other people’s lives, and it jeopardized the mission. It led to burnout and it frayed relationships.
The problem was, he seldom recognized when he was past the point of no return. His ability to push through exhaustion and fear was part of what made him good at undercover work, but he also knew that it made reentry into his home life—his real life—tricky, even difficult.
What made it even harder was his distaste for lies and deception.
His bruises ached, but not as much as before making love to Emma. Pain wasn’t what had awakened him and kept him awake. His instincts had. He trusted them, and they were hammering at him now, telling him that Emma’s Russian jeweler and her warning about a Russian collection weren’t just some obscure Sharpe matter.
He pictured Pete Horner’s supercilious smile. “I see you’re back from the dead.”
Back, but determined to finish the job he had started when he set out from Maine last month. He wanted Horner, Yuri and Boris in custody. He wanted to find out how they planned to get weapons now that Colin’s stash was no longer an option. Did they have other contacts in Vladimir Bulgov’s old network—access to the same stockpiles of Soviet-era weapons?
When had Horner and his Russian colleagues discovered their turncoat undercover agent had jumped into the Intracoastal? Had they searched for him? Had they tried to go back to the rented house but realized it was crawling with feds?
Had they figured out he wasn’t a turncoat after all?
Were they the type to seek revenge? Did they still think they could force him to help them?
Who was their buyer?
Colin had run the same questions over in his mind for hours.
He didn’t see himself spending the next two weeks kayaking, drinking whiskey and digging bean holes with Finian Bracken.
Making love to Emma, yes.
She and Matt Yankowski both were holding back on him. Did Yank know about this Tatiana Pavlova?
The wind rattled the windows, reminding Colin that he needed to get the house ready for the winter. He could do that over the next couple weeks, too. Caulk windows, stack wood, clean the chimney.
Dwelling on his frustrations and questions in the middle of the night wasn’t helping anything. He looked at the woman lying next to him and put emotion and desire aside. The Sharpes were a family with sixty years of investigations, contacts and secrets behind them. Emma had worked art crimes with her grandfather from childhood—long before she’d become an FBI agent.
Colin didn’t expect to know everything about her in the short time they’d been together, but he doubted even Yank knew what all lurked in the Sharpe family vault of secrets.
She shifted slightly, throwing back a slender arm. Colin held her close, and she rolled over, touched her fingertips to a deep purple-and-yellow bruise on his side. “They did this to you?”
“It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“You could have said something before we—”
“Trust me, sweetheart, I wasn’t thinking about my aches and pains while we were making love.”
“There are more bruises?”
“A few. I heal fast. Being back here helps.”
“They were trying to kill you—”
“Not when they hit me. They were just trying to get me into their car, show me they were in charge. They disagreed on killing me.”
“They knew you were a federal agent,” Emma said.
“By then, yes. They thought I was playing both sides and was willing to sell them weapons at a cut rate.” Colin thought a moment, then said, “Yank is getting the go-ahead to involve the team, but there were three men. Pete Horner, a private pilot out of Florida. He flew planes for Bulgov but wasn’t one of his regular pilots. He wanted to wait to kill me.”
“The other two?”
“Russians. Yuri and Boris. They wanted to kill me right away. Yuri is in his late forties, with short, thinning gray hair and blue eyes. Boris is younger—maybe thirty. Medium brown hair, brown eyes. Good-looking. Yuri’s kind of flat faced.”
Emma sat up slightly. “You’re describing them to me because you think I might recognize them.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“They could be anywhere. They could have split up, or they could still be together. They could have new IDs. An
other boat. They could have had a car or a plane waiting for them. I had to bail too soon—”
“It sounds as if you bailed in the nick of time.”
“You mean before they fed me to the alligators?”
She gave him a faint smile. “Your sense of humor is a coping mechanism.”
He leaned in close to her. “What’s funny about alligators?”
“Do they believe they could force you to get them weapons?”
“Hard to say. They want to be arms merchants. They have contacts, resources, funds—seed money, Horner calls it.”
“Will their buyer be mad at them for not coming through with weapons?”
“Oh, yes. Very mad.” Colin realized suddenly how much he appreciated her approach to a problem. “I made it easy for Horner by turning up with orphaned weapons that I wanted to unload.”
“They knew you didn’t want a career as an arms merchant,” she said. “Just a profit. Everyone has good reason to be mad at you. Horner, the Russians, their buyer. Are they the type to exact revenge?”
Her skin was warm, as soft as anything Colin had touched in a month. “They’d have to find me first,” he said.
“And they don’t know who you are.”
“That’s right, they don’t—unless your source tipped them off.”
“My source isn’t one of them. I can tell you that much.”
“Did you break rules to find me, Emma?”
She let her fingertips drift over his chest. “I would have.” She looked up at him, her eyes as green as he’d ever seen them. “But I didn’t need to.”
“Why not?”
“You’re good at undercover work.”
It wasn’t an answer. Colin saw that she knew it, too, but he didn’t care. Not right now. He kissed her, then let the curve of his hand drift over her smooth, cool skin. “I’m good at this, too.”
6
LUCAS SHARPE SLOWED from a run to a light jog as he entered St. Stephen’s Green, a welcome oasis in the heart of Dublin. The lush greenery, flowers, statues and fountains were dripping as much as he was, if only from the early-morning rain and not a mixture of rain and sweat. He had pushed himself hard on his five-mile run. Nothing like an enigmatic, irritating email from his one-and-only sister to propel him into the Irish rain in sweats and running shoes:
I need everything you and Granddad have on London jewelry designer Tatiana Pavlova and her interest in the Rusakov collection. I’ll call tomorrow.
Btw, Colin is back.
Hope you’re enjoying Dublin,
Emma
She had sent the email at 8:00 p.m. Maine time, 1:00 a.m. in Ireland. Lucas had picked it up when he had awakened at seven in the spare bedroom of his grandfather’s Dublin apartment. Checking messages first thing, before he even crawled out of bed, was a habit he was trying, with limited success, to break. Given the five-hour time difference, there was even less point to diving onto his iPhone at first light in Ireland than in Maine, where at least he could rationalize that he wanted to stay abreast of what was going on in Europe.
As it was, by the time he read Emma’s email, it was the middle of the night on the U.S. East Coast. He would have to wait several hours before he could call his sister for more information.
Was Emma referring to Russian tycoon Dmitri Rusakov?
“Bloody likely,” Lucas muttered, jogging past a curving ornamental pond, ducks grooming themselves in the rain-soaked grass.
He slowed to a walk on a meandering path that led to a gate on the east end of the iconic green. The rain had let up but he was already soaked to the bone. Dublin was quiet so early on a drizzly Sunday morning. He crossed the normally busy street and continued into the heart of residential Georgian Dublin where his grandfather had lived for the past fifteen years.
Three days ago, Lucas had seized on the disruption of the renovations at the Sharpe house in Heron’s Cove as an excuse to fly to Dublin. He had barely had time to adjust to Irish time and get over jet lag before he had received Emma’s urgent message.
Having a sister who was an FBI agent had its drawbacks, but Lucas didn’t doubt that she was as concerned about their grandfather as he was. Ostensibly Lucas was in Dublin to check out the status of the Sharpe Fine Art Recovery office there, but he was also checking out the status of his grandfather. His health, his well-being, his plans for the future.
Easier said than done with an independent-minded old codger like Wendell Sharpe, Lucas thought with a sigh of exasperation.
He came to the narrow brick town house where his grandfather had an apartment. Born in Dublin, Wendell Sharpe had been just two when he had left Ireland with his parents for Boston. They soon moved to southern Maine, where his father had worked as a property manager and his mother as a domestic at large summer homes. Wendell had started out as a security guard at a Portland museum, ultimately finding his calling in investigating and recovering missing fine art and antiques.
His decision to open a Dublin office and return to Ireland had been a surprise, but it had also worked out well. At first, his only son—Lucas’s father—had run the Heron’s Cove office. Then a fall on the ice landed Timothy Sharpe in chronic pain, and bit by bit Lucas took over.
Now in his early eighties, Wendell, a widower for almost two decades, was giving up day-to-day work in the business to which he had devoted his life and edging into retirement, or at least semi-retirement.
Lucas went around back and ducked through a gate onto the terrace and into the kitchen. It was past eight but still no sign that his grandfather had yet rolled out of bed. Lucas was dying for coffee but returned to the small guest room and stripped off his wet clothes, leaving them in a heap on the tile floor. He pulled on a robe and headed for the apartment’s only bathroom.
A hot shower, shave and dry clothes didn’t ease his tension.
He headed back to the kitchen, filled the electric kettle with tap water and plugged it in. He dumped loose-leaf Irish Breakfast tea into an earthenware pot for his grandfather and fresh-ground beans into a glass coffee press for himself. By the time he had tea and coffee steeping, his host entered the kitchen dressed in dark gray wool trousers, a crisp white shirt, black vest and red bowtie.
“It’s Sunday, Granddad,” Lucas said.
“I thought I might go to church. Don’t worry. The rafters won’t cave in. I’ve been going more frequently in recent months.”
Lucas was worried, although not about his grandfather’s churchgoing habits. “I just don’t want you to be depressed,” he said, loading the tea, coffee, plates, silverware and a basket of toast onto a tray.
His grandfather looked mystified. “Depressed? Why would I be depressed?”
“Sometimes there’s not a reason. It just happens. Come on. The rain’s stopped. Let’s have breakfast outside.”
Lucas carried the tray and Wendell grabbed a towel to dry off the chairs and two-person round table on the small brick terrace. The sun broke through the clouds as they sat across from each other. They were both lanky and blue-eyed, but any resemblance ended there. Except for her green eyes, Emma favored their grandfather more than Lucas did.
He watched his grandfather butter a piece of toast with a steady hand. For all his expertise in fine art, Wendell Sharpe lived simply. The only art he owned was by contemporary artists and craftspeople, mostly Irish, whose work appealed to him for whatever reason. He didn’t care about critics, reviews, whether a particular work or particular artist would ever end up in a museum or prized by discerning collectors. He just bought and bartered for what he liked. His lack of snobbery, combined with his knowledge, experience and extensive contacts, made him a formidable, insightful expert in art theft and recovery. He could see, think and feel what others couldn’t or overlooked because of their blind spots and prejudices.
Lucas wanted to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps, but he knew, too, that he had to carve out his own path. And he was just thirty-four. Wendell did have a few decades on his only grandson.
“Do you know a London jeweler named Tatiana Pavlova?”
“No, I don’t, but that’s a Russian name. Why? Who is she?”
“I don’t know. Emma sent an email last night asking about her. She said she’d call today.” Lucas poured his coffee, appreciated its heat. “She also wants anything we have on the Rusakov collection.”
“The Rusakov collection?” Wendell went still, knife and toast in hand. “You’re sure?”
Lucas nodded. “I’m sure. You can read the email if you’d like.”
“No. I don’t need to read it.” He set his toast on his plate and glanced at the sky, the sun back behind the shifting gray clouds. He seemed to give himself a mental shake, then picked up his teacup and focused again on Lucas. “What else did Emma say?”
“Colin Donovan is back.”
“I met him in September when he and Emma were in Ireland chasing that killer. Good-looking fellow. All the Donovans are.”
“I didn’t realize you knew them,” Lucas said, already wishing he’d made more coffee.
“They’d come by the waterfront from time to time, mostly in a lobster boat. I’d wave. They’d wave. That was the extent of it. They were teenagers. I was old even back then. Their father was a town police officer.”
“Did you think Colin would become an FBI agent?”
“No, I thought he’d become a lobsterman. I’m better at figuring out art thieves than I am at figuring out law enforcement officers. They surprise me every time. Look at Emma. You said Colin’s back? Where did he go?”
“Washington, supposedly. I don’t think that’s the whole story. I think he was in trouble.”
Wendell nodded thoughtfully. “I suspect trouble’s a way of life for Colin Donovan. As it’s becoming for Emma, I fear.”
“They’re FBI agents, Granddad. It’s their job to look for trouble. What about this collection? Does it in fact belong to Dmitri Rusakov?”
Heron's Cove Page 6