Nights with a Thief

by Marilyn Pappano

  Was there anyone there who would buy stolen art? Of course, starting with their host. Was there anyone who would do the actual stealing? He spotted an occasional accomplice of his, also an occasional rival. He saw a number of people who didn’t like David, who’d lost to him in auctions or business deals, who thought he was obnoxious, his money wasn’t old enough, or he just wasn’t worth their time.

  As Jack reached the last page, he saw one more name. Rather, he didn’t see it. There, beneath the heading of Museum Employees, the Ms were empty. No Malone, Lisette. No lmalone@candalariamuseum.org.

  She’d tampered with the list. Aware of the three men watching him, Jack couldn’t decide if that was a good or a bad thing. For Lisette, maybe it was good. David hadn’t known who she was just this morning. If she stayed in the background, the next time he saw her, he still wouldn’t remember.

  Hopefully, his security people wouldn’t, either.

  He offered the pages as he stood. “They’re all lovely guests, and your collections are safe with them. If I’m going to climb a mountain tomorrow, I need to get some sleep tonight.”

  David gestured to one of the men to take the printout, then nodded to Jack. “Enjoy your climbing. Come back to ski next month. Hey, convince your aunt Gloria to sell those rubies to me, and I’ll put together the most incredible ski package anyone’s ever experienced.”

  Jack lifted his hand in silent acknowledgment, then stepped into the elevator and punched the button for his floor. As the doors slid shut, he noticed the three men continued to watch, all silent, and a faint whisper of worry slid down his spine.

  * * *

  “You’re the only person I know who can eat popcorn, text and watch a movie and never miss a thing.”

  Padma looked up from her phone, gaze sliding to the television, then to Lisette. “We’re strategizing for tomorrow’s games. Those idiots beat us last time, but it’s not going to happen again.”

  “And what if it does happen again?”

  Determination tightened Padma’s jaw. “I’ll have to consider shooting their copter out of the air.” She typed rapidly, then turned the screen to show an image to Lisette. “See? Rocket launcher for sale.”

  “You don’t think that’s a little overkill for a quadcopter?”

  “You’re right.” Padma swiped across the screen to pull up another image. “Rocket-propelled grenade. That oughta do it without too much fallout.” Her phone signaled a new text, and she went to that, typing an answer without losing a beat in the conversation. “Actually, what I would do is hijack the communications and send false positioning data. Then I’d fly it in circles, buzz the morons, land it on a skyscraper, crash it...” Her innocent smile couldn’t disguise the stubborn look in her eyes.

  “You wouldn’t do any of that. First, I bet it’s illegal.”

  Padma tilted her head to give her a long, steady look. “Really? You’re going with that argument when twenty-four hours ago you—we—pulled off a seven-figure heist?”

  “Okay, bad choice. Better one—you don’t cheat. You’re good enough to win on your incredible mad skills, and you wouldn’t be happy doing it any other way.”

  Padma considered the compliment, then smiled before going back to her plotting. “Thank you, sweetie.”

  With a laugh, Lisette curled onto her side, using the sofa arm for a pillow, snagging the quilt from the back and pulling it over her. She’d already changed into pajamas—shorts and a tank top—and the movie was almost over. It would be easy to snuggle in and go to sleep right there, drifting into a quiet, peaceful, soothing nowhere with no worries until morning...

  When her alarm would wake her so she could get dressed, meet Jack—worry number one—and yippee, go climbing with him. Worry number two or, more accurately, Giant Supreme Terror. Sure, he was right that she needed to improve her skills, but why couldn’t they have started with something simple like climbing a flight of stairs or looking down at the ground from a fifth-floor balcony? Why did she have to gear up and climb-belay-ascend-descend-slip-fall-and-die and lose her best chance to reclaim her father’s treasure and fulfill her mother’s dearest hopes?

  She was trying to coax a picture into her mind, any picture that didn’t involve her broken and bloodied, when Padma poked her foot. “That one’s yours,” she said with a nod toward the coffee table.

  Short of oxygen because of her dread for tomorrow—no, damn it, anticipation—Lisette blinked at the phone, then picked it up, her forehead wrinkling when she saw the text from Jack. Of course he had her phone number and probably anything else he could charm from a person. His message, though, surprised her.

  Meet me at the back door.

  What back door?

  Yours.

  Her gaze narrowed. Yep, he’d gotten her address, too. Why wouldn’t someone give it to him? He was a gorgeous man. He was nice. He was Jack Sinclair, for God’s sake.

  It couldn’t hurt to talk to him. It was the polite thing to do, wasn’t it, when someone drove across town and sneaked into your backyard to meet privately with you? Besides, she needed to spend time with him—hence her agreeing to risk death on the mountain. And his would be an awfully handsome last face to see before bed.

  She set her phone aside and slid her feet into her favorite fuzzy slippers. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

  Padma murmured, her head bent over her phone.

  Lisette padded down the hall, stopping at the closet to grab a long black wool coat. She’d given it to Marley a couple of Christmases ago, and faint hints of her mom’s perfume still drifted from the fabric. Wearing it made Lisette feel as if she were wrapped in her mother’s safe embrace.

  At the back door, she undid the lock. A blast of chill made her shiver, but she stepped out onto the porch, where something else made her shiver again. Awareness. A little dread. A little thrill.

  She spoke to the shadow on the bench to her right. “Do you want to come inside where it’s warm?”

  Jack chuckled. “How can you live in Denver if you think this is cold?”

  “I didn’t have a choice. I came here in utero.” She considered turning on the porch light before realizing he probably had reasons for not walking right up to the front door. She closed the door, hugged her arms across her middle, and moved a few steps closer to the bench. Leaning against the railing, she pushed her hands into the coat’s deep pockets and looked at him. “Is there a reason you wanted to talk back here?”

  “Two of them. They were sitting in an SUV outside my hotel, and they both work for David.” The distance between them hummed with tension. “I heard he sent his security guys over here tonight.”

  She considered the news he’d offered so casually. The idea of Candalaria’s thugs watching her would drive her into the darkest corner of her closet, but Jack sounded as if it was nothing, really. “Wow. You do get information. My phone number, my address, my uninvited-guest list. What else have you found about me?”

  “I know your birthday was last month. Belated happy twenty-seventh.” A pause. “I know you’re good at what you do. I know you have great taste in diamonds. I know you’re a pretty good liar because if you aren’t Bella Donna, you must be her younger sister or her—”

  The way he abruptly stopped talking and the aura of surprise around him made Lisette’s throat go dry, and heat flushing through her body made her suddenly warm. Anxiety rolled over her in waves, legs unsteady, hands clenched, heart thundering, while the intensity of Jack’s stare slashed through her.

  “Or her—her daughter,” he finished, his voice barely audible. It dropped even more as he continued. “You aren’t the original Bella. That’s why you were only fifteen when she started. But you were training to step into the role. She was your mentor. She was teaching you to become her.”

  Lisette wanted to lie, to swear that he was as wrong as could be, bu
t her teeth were clenched together. Her brain was tap-dancing for a credible denial, but the denials weren’t credible and anything credible wasn’t a denial. A little help, Mom?

  But Marley’s voice in her head remained silent.

  Jack stood and stepped toward Lisette. Her sight had become accustomed to the dark, enough to see that he wore running shorts, a thin T-shirt and bright-colored shoes. A dark band encircled his left wrist, a larger one around his upper arm—an activity tracker and a heart monitor. Maybe she could borrow the monitor from him to see if her heart was really going to explode. That would solve her problems, wouldn’t it?

  “Come sit down.” He took her arm, pulling until she took the first step, then guided her to the bench. Holding her shoulders, he turned her around and nudged her down onto the wood. He leaned against the rail, studying her.

  Finally her brain found enough words to manage a coherent if totally inconsequential question. “How can you live on a tropical island if you think this is warm?”

  She couldn’t see Jack’s expression, but she knew relief had washed across his face. She could feel it in the air. “It’s not exactly what I’d call warm. After talking with David, I decided I needed to see you, but he’d left a couple of his guys. I’d already found a back way out that was used by the original staff—”

  Lisette did the same thing on every job.

  “—but I figured dressing for a run would give me an excuse if anyone saw me. I’d never get up at 5:00 a.m. to run, but everyone knows I’m more than happy to do it at midnight.”

  Her heart was slowing, her breathing easing slightly. Damn it, she wasn’t going to explode tonight. Just her luck. “Does he suspect you?” She hadn’t intended for that to happen. With most of her jobs, by the time the theft was discovered, she was in another time zone, another country or another continent. She’d planned this job just like all the others: get in, get the art, get out, return the art. This time she’d added an introduction to Jack to her plan but had deemed the subsequent investigation as inconsequential.

  Stupid move.

  “He suspects me every time someone we know gets robbed,” Jack said in an easy tone. “He stumbles around getting the nerve to ask if I was involved. I tell him no and remind him who my family is, and he bites his tongue and drops the matter. This time he also offered me a job, consulting with his security people. You know, who’s better equipped to catch a thief than another thief?” A moment passed, weighted, as if he expected a question from her. When it didn’t come, he answered it anyway. “I told him I have to protect the secrets of my trade.”

  “I knew you didn’t accept,” she said quietly.

  “How?”

  She hugged her coat tighter around her. “Because he’s David Candalaria. Because you’re Jack Sinclair. And because...” You like me. I like you. Hopefully, he did. Sadly, she did. But that wasn’t how she finished. “Because you’re not his kind of thief.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Did you know he offered Mrs. Maier $250,000 for the painting? She said no. He came back with a half million. She said no again. She told him there wasn’t enough money in the world to match Shepherdess’s sentimental value. So he hired someone to steal it.” She scoffed. “It took real courage to steal a painting from an elderly woman whose house has no alarm and whose door locks could be picked by a slightly skilled six-year-old. If the guy had shown up in the afternoon, she would have invited him in for tea and cookies.”

  “Just be grateful he didn’t,” Jack said somberly. “Some people who work for David wouldn’t think twice about disposing of a witness.”

  The thought of her friend coming face-to-face with that kind of thug made Lisette shiver. She wasn’t sure if Jack took that as an invitation or if he’d even seen it, but he pushed away from the railing and came to sit beside her. Though he left space between them, it wasn’t enough to keep her from feeling the warmth radiating from him. It was nowhere near enough to stop the warmth building inside her.

  It was a perk of the job, right—getting hot and bothered and tingly and all that stuff. Her path to the Toussaint collection could have been older, smarmier, eviler, scarier. He could have had a potbelly and gray hair, or no hair at all. He could have had frozen eyes and a dead soul. He could have been married and papa to fifteen little ones.

  Of all the things her mark could have been, Jack was the best possible choice. He was the one she could attract, intrigue and seduce to gain access to Le Mystère, all in a day’s work. No problem, no fear, no stomach-churning or distaste or pure revulsion.

  The only distaste or revulsion she would feel would be for her own actions.

  She forced a thin smile and returned to his last comment. “See? I was right. You’re not his kind of thief at all.”

  * * *

  “So.” Jack half expected Lisette to echo him, but she didn’t. She just huddled in the coat that was too big for her, somber wool, an unexpected look with her frizzy slippers. “David showed me the guest list you gave his guys.”

  She huddled a little tighter.

  “I noticed your name wasn’t on it.”

  She turned her gaze to him, though he couldn’t make out any of her features. Her voice, though, was quiet, calm. “Did he notice?”

  “I doubt it. David knows every detail about the people he needs to impress. An employee at the museum would never matter to him unless, I don’t know, she was dating a really gorgeous guy with a lot of money and a lot of rarely exhibited art at his fingertips.”

  “Then as long as I don’t meet this Prince Charming with canvases and cash, I’m okay.”

  He snickered. “Yet here I sit.”

  “As I don’t date you, I’m okay.”

  There was a part of Jack that wished for enough light to read her expression. Mostly, though, he liked having nothing to focus on but the tone of her voice, the words she chose, the emotion she expressed so drily. “Sorry, Lisette, but I’m pretty sure a meal at Fire counts as a date in anyone’s book. Add in dinner, sort of, tonight and climbing tomorrow...”

  He felt her shudder, heard the tiny whisper of a sigh. “You know I agreed to the climbing in a moment of insanity, right?”

  He grinned. “I often drive people insane. It doesn’t change things. A yes is still a yes.”

  “Do you know how many hours I spend making sure there are alternatives to climbing on our jobs? I’ve changed locations for hits when there wasn’t any other way. I even slogged through three miles of sewer once to avoid a 150-foot rappel.”

  “The more you do, the less scary—Wait a minute. Sewer?” He ran a list of the Malone women’s jobs through his mind, then asked, “London?” It was enough to make him gag...and to increase his respect for her determination. So what if she would never take delight in dangling from skyscrapers the way he did? Traveling through sewers was way higher on the toughness scale in his opinion.

  “A lot of old cities have underground systems. Some of them are very interesting.”

  “And some of them smell like the furies of hell, are overrun with rats, and can collapse and bury you alive at any moment. What would Padma have done without you?”

  “She had a locating beacon—several of them—sewn into my clothes. Luckily, we didn’t need it. However, I did undertake the longest, hardest scrubbing in the history of the world. I swear, I stank for the next six months.”

  Without thinking, Jack leaned closer, his nose almost touching her hair, and took a slow breath. He wasn’t one of those people who could take a sip of wine and wax poetic on its characteristics or identify the ingredients in a dish based on nothing more than a bite. He had no clue whether Lisette’s perfume was floral, green or herbaceous. It just was: sweet, a little exotic, a little earthy, a lot sexy.

  The dog next door barked, its yip making him realize he was about a millimeter a
way from pressing his face into her hair. He forced himself back, to breathe crisp air not filled with her scent. “Don’t worry. The bad smell is gone.”

  “God, I hope so.”

  When a breeze blew across the yard, she drew her feet onto the bench, exposing her legs, then tugged the coat over them again. Resting her arms on her knees, she tilted her head toward him and asked, “Should I have left my name on the guest list?”

  His thoughts were stuck on her legs, long and lean and bare from the tops of her fuzzy slippers to somewhere high on her thighs. What exactly was she wearing under that coat? Nightclothes? Lingerie? Nothing at all?

  She continued to watch him, the weight of her gaze palpable. Reluctantly he shifted his brain into coherent business-talk mode. “I don’t think it matters either way. The majority of the guests were from out of town. They’ve gone back to running their multibillion-dollar corporations or their countries. A lot of them won’t be amenable to answering questions. A lot of them won’t remember anyone...” It was hard to finish the sentence the way he’d intended. It sounded spoiled and entitled and so damn snobby.

  “Like me. The hired help. I know it was obvious even though I wasn’t wearing a uniform.” Lisette’s voice was steady, even light. “There are advantages to being invisible to the rich. It makes my job easier. Will your aunt remember me?”

  “Aunt Gloria remembers everyone. On the way over here, I left a message asking her to keep it to herself. She’s never cooperative with David. She takes great pleasure in being a permanent roadblock on his road to happiness.”

  “Why?”

  He slid down far enough on the bench to brace his feet on the railing. “Let’s just say David isn’t anyone’s favorite person—not even his parents, when they were alive. He’s smug and smarmy and ruthless and thinks we’re all dolts compared to his superior intellect. When his family first put together enough money to start getting invited to a few events, Aunt Gloria tried in the beginning to be nice to him. His parents were idiots, and she was very maternal. He was smart, excelled in school and had tremendous ambition, and she knew what it was like to not be born into that world, having to take acceptance wherever one could find it.