Nights with a Thief

by Marilyn Pappano

  He would really prefer Lisette didn’t know he was no white knight who could save her from peril.

  By the time they reached the Iannucci driveway, Jack’s tension had drained away, replaced by anticipation. It was a lovely morning, he was about to get some climbing in, and he was going to do it with Lisette—his definition of a good day.

  Before they reached the first of two massive electronic gates, they passed four private road and no trespassing signs. Lisette’s brow arched. “Are the people around here a little slow to get the point?”

  “You’d think one or two would be enough to get the message across, but people trespass out here all the time. When the family’s in residence, they have a full contingent of security guards patrolling day and night.”

  “Why don’t you?” She watched out the side window, where the only thing to see besides trees was more trees. There were the occasional large ones, but most of them grew so close together that the best they could manage was spindly height.

  “There are security guards at home.”

  “Why don’t you have them when you travel?”

  He’d heard that question enough times in his life from his parents. He couldn’t remember them ever going anywhere without at least two bodyguards plus their well-trained driver tagging along, and when he was little, his tutor, a former Mossad agent, had been as much protector as teacher. “I don’t need them.”

  She scoffed. “You’re worth a kajillion dollars. You go for runs late at night in strange cities by yourself. You wander around like a common person.”

  He sent a charming smile her way and asked, “How much is a kajillion?”

  “A bazillion times more than a billion. Don’t change the subject.”

  At the first gates, Jack typed in the code, pressed his index finger to the scanner, then rubbed his neck again. “I’ve had bodyguards before, and I don’t want them again. Try kissing a Dutch tourist from the next island over when Hulk and Hulk Too are hanging around. Or dancing with the very hot Princess of Perfect from some tiny kingdom no one’s ever heard of at a club in Paris. Or sneaking away from a party to break into our host’s office to pick up forty carats or so of gems that belonged to his ex-lover. Besides, I’ve been traveling by myself for years, and nothing’s ever happened.”

  Another scoff. “You would be so easy to kidnap.”

  “I’m observant,” he said smugly, driving through the entryway, watching in the mirror as the gate closed behind them. “I pay attention to my surroundings. I can take care of myself.”

  “I’m a thief. I could steal you without any problem.”

  He put on his best leer. “You wouldn’t have to steal me, Lisette. I’d go willingly. In fact, we can do that later, when we’re done climbing. Where do you want to stash me, and what do I need to do to be released?”

  She looked as if she wasn’t sure whether she should appeal once again to his sympathy to get out of the climbing or react to the rest of his words. What would that reaction be? Amusement? Maybe a little interest? Maybe even a real answer?

  Hands clasped in her lap, she settled for a chagrined look tinged with a pout. “You realize if I don’t survive the climbing, there won’t be a ‘later.’”

  “I was going to keep you safe anyway.” He grinned. “Now I just have extra incentive.”

  * * *

  Three hours later, Lisette wasn’t more confident in her climbing abilities. In fact, she would say she was simply less dismayed whether she died while climbing. Every muscle in her body had tensed so often that she had aches everywhere. She’d taken so many deep, calming breaths that her nose was sore, and her teeth had been clenched tightly the entire time to keep an ever-growing list of bribes inside. She was willing to offer almost anything if they could quit while she was still functional.

  Filomena Jane’s home was a perfect playland for kids. The back wall of the house did double duty as a climbing wall, and a zip line was strung from the third floor to the roof deck of the pool house. A line dangled from there for a quick descent to the ground.

  Lines dangled everywhere—from century-old trees and twenty-and thirty-foot stone cliffs. Climbing walls of varying materials and sizes dotted the backyard—though Filomena Jane considered them cheats, since the hand-and toeholds were designed into the surface. When it took every ounce of determination Lisette possessed to climb the first wall and Jack had shared that tidbit, she’d crabbily thought to herself that the kids at school probably shortened the kid’s name to Mean Jane. Then she regretted being jealous of a six-year-old just because she was braver than Lisette.

  A laugh escaped Lisette, drawing Jack’s attention to her. He swiped sweat from his forehead with his sleeve, then raised his brows. “What’s funny?”

  “Nothing. Maybe I’m light-headed because it’s lunchtime, or maybe I’m hysterical because I’m still in one piece.”

  His smile warmed his entire face, and his gaze moved lazily over her body as if confirming the one-piece remark warmed her. “You’re like a dog with a bone. You grab on to some little thing like dying and milk it for all it’s worth. You’re not dead, are you? You’re not even close to it. No bruises, no scrapes, no horrible falls... You didn’t even freeze, not once.”

  He was right, she realized. Sure, they’d worn harnesses and safety equipment, but that in itself didn’t calm her fears. She’d hated slipping off into space, climbing over balconies and up or down lines and trusting her body not to fail her...but it hadn’t. It hadn’t been pretty or graceful, but she’d completed every task Jack had set for her.

  “Huh. Maybe there’s something to this partner thing.”

  Jack came closer to her, invading her personal space but not touching her. Heat radiated from his body, and his hair looked perfectly adorable sticking up in sweat-slicked spikes. His Eau du Rich Guy still smelled incredibly enticing, and his eyes still looked perfectly blue, only serious this time.

  Suddenly her breaths were harder to take, her lungs tougher to expand. Maybe it was the thinner air or a delayed reaction to all the times she should have hyperventilated on taking those first steps.

  Or maybe it was just Jack.

  “It’s not a partner thing. It’s an I-make-you-feel-safe thing. You can admit it. It won’t puff up my ego. I’m used to it. In fact, feel free to show me how grateful you feel. I won’t mind.”

  You be careful just how much gratitude you show him. Remember Le Mystère. The silent whisper in her head made Lisette feel a flush of guilt. “But we’re not done yet. How awful would you feel if I thanked you now and then fell to my death?”

  “Gee, like you couldn’t thank me now, then thank me again later?” he grumbled good-naturedly. “Come on, let’s get down off the rock.” Abruptly, a wicked grin appeared. “And then we can talk about you kidnapping me.”

  They stood atop a rock outcropping that jutted into the air like an arrowhead pointing the way home. Jack had climbed it the hard way, using nothing but his hands and feet, his equipment there just in case. Lisette had come up the easy way, walking a meandering path up a hill that was steep in only a few places. She’d made enough ascents for the day. Besides, in her experience, it was the descents she had to worry about.

  The drop to the ground from one side of the arrowhead was far; from the other side, it was even farther. Jack walked to the southeastern edge, and she followed at a safe distance, keeping her gaze on the rock and not on the empty air at its edge. “Remember,” she said, keeping her thoughts off the inevitable. “I don’t steal for fun and profit. Well, not for profit. I retrieve things. Someone else would have to take you, then I could retrieve you.”

  “Couldn’t we just skip the first step?”

  “Can we skip this last descent?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then I can’t rescue you until someone else kidnaps you.” She dre
w a deep breath. This was for her job—a worthy effort, right? After all, she prayed never to see the inside of a sewer tunnel again. Besides, she’d easily picked up all her mother’s skills, and Marley had climbed like a three-year-old on an epic sugar high. She could manage this, and then she’d be safe. For a while. Until she persuaded Jack to take her to the island.

  “There are rappel anchors here, and the gear’s in good shape,” Jack said, “so it’s up to you whether you want to rappel or downclimb. Either way, the hard part for you is going to be getting started, so I’ll stand by to give you a shove.”

  She smirked at him, even though he was right. Taking that first step was the hardest. She’d done her share of rappelling, but Marley hadn’t given her much experience with downclimbing. Scrambling down a steep slope with shifting surfaces could be a useful tool in her bag of tricks someday.

  “It’s a fairly easy descent. Face out, keep your back to the wall, and keep your weight on your feet as much as possible. There’s a lot of scree, which makes it easy for your feet to slide out from under you. You want to pretty much scoot your way to the bottom. We’re only about thirty-five feet up here. Normally, I wouldn’t use a safety rope, but you should, given your preoccupation with sudden death.”

  “And yours with getting stolen.” She considered leaning forward to check his estimation of the height but thought better of it. “Only thirty-five feet? Really?”

  “Really.”

  “And I bet Filomena Jane has been downclimbing it since she learned to walk.”

  Jack gave her a curious look, but with half a laugh, she waved off the comment. “Okay, let’s get this show—”

  Lisette wasn’t sure what stopped her: a flock of birds taking flight from a grove of distant trees; the sharp report that was slow to reach her ears; or the puff of dust and chips rising from the rock where they stood, close enough to bite into her calves. But the words stopped, and her body tensed, and she jerked around to look for the source of the disruption. Then her feet slid, and she was thrust into her worst nightmare, gracelessly, terrifyingly, rushing toward the ground. Her own mulish insistence was the last thought racing through her mind in the seconds before impact.

  Damn. I really am going to die today.

  * * *

  “Lisette!” Jack flattened himself on the rock and shimmied to the edge on his belly, praying he would find her dangling from a fingerhold that had miraculously appeared exactly where she needed it. No such luck. He crabbed a dozen feet to the right, where a natural scoop in the rock made for the best start for downclimbing, and he slid over the rim, sliding and staggering his way toward the bottom. She had landed about halfway down, sprawled on her side against a mound of stone, and damn it, she wasn’t moving.

  He shouldn’t have insisted she do this descent. Downclimbing was as dangerous as ascents. He should have belayed her to the bottom. Hell, he should have let her walk down the way she’d come up. But this was an easy descent. He’d never thought she might slip.

  Loose dirt and rock shifted beneath his feet, sending him on a precarious slide to where she lay. He crouched next to her, reached out but stopped short of touching her. She was so still, her ponytail spread in curls around her head, her hands splayed as if she’d tried to slow her fall. Careful not to touch her, he leaned forward so he could see a portion of her face. “Lisette? Lizzie? Can you hear me?”

  After an instant of silence, no movement, he leaned closer, and his voice got edgy. “Come on, Lisette, talk to me. Open your eyes and say something. You know, like ‘I told you so.’”

  Seconds dragged out, echoing in his ears, before a tiny, barely-there movement began so slowly he wasn’t sure it was real or his imagination. Then, with a distinct flutter of lashes, she opened one eye and fixed her gaze on him. “You are in so much trouble.” Gingerly, she swiped a clump of curls from her face. “Oh, and I told you so.”

  Relief swept through him, slowing his heart rate to a mere gallop. The trembling in his legs dropped him on his butt next to her, and his breath left his lungs with a huge whoosh. He’d taken plenty of short falls himself, and they were kind of fun when he was all hooked up in safety gear, but in all the years he’d been climbing, he’d never seen anyone free-fall. He hoped to God he never did again.

  With a groan, Lisette rolled over. Jack helped her into a sitting position, his gaze searching her face, arms, legs. She was covered with dust, and a few small rocks tumbled from her curls when she shook them out. There were abrasions on the front of her calves, a couple of them trickling blood, but she was moving okay, and her breathing wasn’t labored. She looked remarkably good for someone who’d fallen ten feet and slid another fifteen.

  “Are you okay? Do you hurt anywhere? How’s your head?”

  She shifted a few times, probably looking for a stone-free place to sit, then leaned heavily against his bent leg before squinting at him as if his questions puzzled her. “I fell off a cliff.”

  “Well, more like a boulder.” Her gorgeous eyes narrowed on his face, and he relented. “All right, a cliff. A huge giant cliff. Where do you hurt?”

  She twisted her neck, rolled her shoulders and flexed her fingers. After doing the same with her legs and wiggling her ankles side to side, she replied, “I don’t think I actually do. I slid mostly on my butt before hitting the rock. I’m a little stiff.” She brushed at her shirt, sending puffs of dust into the air. “I’m dirty, and I imagine I’ll have some bruises tomorrow, but I’m okay.”

  Then she turned to look at him, her gaze narrowing again. “What the hell was that noise?”

  He moved so she could lean more comfortably, her shoulder resting against his, then dragged his fingers through his hair. “I’m no expert, but it sounded like...”

  Abruptly he looked in the direction the sound had come from, where the birds had launched. There was nothing to see now: trees, rocks, thick scrub. It was a hundred feet past the west edge of the manicured lawn, a spot no different from a hundred others around the house, except it had a bird’s-eye view of the boulder above them.

  A bird’s-eye view of them?

  He didn’t know, but damned if he was going to wait to find out. “Can you get up? Can you walk?”

  For an instant she looked as if she was going to remind him again that she fell off a cliff, but after studying his face, she nodded. Scanning the area around the trees once more, he stood, then helped her to her feet, wincing when a groan escaped her. He slid one arm around her waist and lost no time leading her as close to the rock face as the scree allowed. It was a harder path than continuing the route her fall had taken, but in a few yards, the cliff would hide them from view of anyone in the direction of the house.

  “You’re no expert on what?” Lisette asked, holding tightly to his hand while stepping from one exposed vein of rock to the next.

  “More things than you would guess.” He was aiming for humor, but neither of them appeared particularly amused as they neared the point section of the arrowhead. Once they circled to the other side, a person would have to trek through the woods to locate them.

  Which these guys, because there had been two of them in the gray SUV, just might have already done. Might be out there waiting for another chance.

  The cliff sheltered them from the sun when they reached their goal. Lisette sat on a boulder, propping up first one foot, then the other, checking the abrasions and blood on her calves. The small injuries didn’t seem to interest her. After removing the band from her hair, she shook out another cascade of pebbles and dust and put it up again. Then she placed her hands on her hips and faced him. “Did someone shoot at us?”

  “You were thinking that, too, huh?”

  Her skin paled, leaving even her lips a lighter pink than usual. Letting her feet slide to the ground, she bent over at the waist, leaning against the boulder so she didn’t have to support all her wei
ght, and breathed slowly and deeply. Jack watched her, thinking that she’d been in so much more danger before: every time she’d sneaked into a party, trespassed onto an estate, broken into a house, circumvented an alarm, bypassed security guards, and stolen million-dollar masterpieces. She stayed cool through all of that, but the idea of someone taking a shot at them really unsteadied her.

  Aw, hell, it unsteadied him, too. The burglary stuff—that was the known risks of their profession. There was always the chance for things to go wrong and contingency plans to deal with it, but most well-planned heists were executed neatly. This...this was personal.

  Slowly she straightened. “Well, if someone wanted to scare me, they succeeded. What do we do now?”

  Jack grinned at her. He couldn’t help it. It was his go-to response for just about every situation, and she looked so damned dusty and disheveled and beautiful and a whole lot more in control than he was. “You have any suggestions?”

  She left the boulder and sat down with her back to the cliff base. It was a good choice: she could see anyone approaching from the front, and with the overhang, no one could surprise them from above. “Do you think they’re still around here?”

  He sat down beside her, close enough that their shoulders bumped. “I don’t know. I’m guessing they didn’t mean to actually hit either one of us. It was a long shot. Anyone who could put a bullet between your feet could have just as easily put it three feet higher.”

  She nodded, her hair tickling against his skin. He studied the curl that caught on her hoodie, a soft black spiral dusted with dirt. The scent of her shampoo drifted on the air, vanilla and something sweeter, also dusted with dirt. Who knew he could be so attracted to the smell of dirt?