by Vivi Andrews
Eighty-five cases in the last three years. The thieves always got away, but the feds always got the goods back. Nate wasn’t sure what kind of angle Ciara was working. He didn’t know why any thief would go to the effort to steal something, only to turn it over to federal custody before it could be fenced, but he was damn sure going to find out.
He might be stuck behind a desk, but he wasn’t a sucker.
And any second now she was going to prove him right.
Chapter Three—Bubble Girl on Tour
Confess…or get naked. If only he’d meant that in a less crime-and-punishment way.
Ciara wet her lips. Confession wasn’t an option. She didn’t have anything to confess to. She could wait him out—he couldn’t possibly have any evidence against her, and Karma would get him yanked off her detail first thing Monday morning—but there was a chance whoever had Princess Grace’s necklace would take it out of the country and away from the FBI’s jurisdiction if she waited until her next handler was assigned to find it.
Which left getting naked.
And what’s behind door number three, Vanna?
She could always try a trace clothed. The fabric against her skin would be distracting, a static dissonance she’d have to try to work through, but if the alternative was going full frontal in front of Agent Smith, she’d rather deal with the extra noise.
Ciara stood. “Let’s get on with the floorshow, shall we?”
Ciara’s pool was about as close to heaven as life on earth got. The renovations had been brutally expensive, but this room was her office and her sanctuary. Floating in that pool was the one time the static noise of the rest of the world disappeared.
Blue and white tiles swirled in an artistic pattern on the curved walls. The tiles on the floor were a pristine white and the pool itself was tiled a deep midnight blue. A skylight directly above the pool filled the room with natural light. The overall effect was soothing and vaguely Turkish.
“Nice,” Agent Smith commented, leaning against the wall. He looked so smug, so certain she was about to break down and confess.
Ciara couldn’t wait to wipe that smugness off his face. She stepped down on the first step leading into the pool, water lapping around her ankles and soaking the bottom of her jeans. She could have stripped down to her underwear, but she wanted to keep as much of her armor on as she could as a defense against Agent Smith’s microscope eyes.
“Satan reserves a special spot in hell for Peeping Toms,” she said cheerfully, as she stepped farther into the pool, the water calm and warm around her hips.
He just smiled—and damned if that quirk of his lips didn’t make her feel warm all over.
She glided deeper until the water lapped at her rib cage and wet the fabric beneath her breasts. She kept her eyes down, pointedly ignoring him, but she felt his gaze on her like a physical touch, a weight on her skin.
Ciara wasn’t used to company. No one else had even entered this room since the renovations were completed. She also wasn’t used to swimming with clothes on. She’d forgotten just how loud the psychic dissonance was.
She took a deep breath, preparing to submerge, and then realized with a jolt that she didn’t know what the hell she was supposed to be looking for. Five minutes with Agent McDreamy and she forgot how to do the most basic parts of her job.
Ciara forced herself to look up and meet his eyes. She immediately regretted it.
He was staring at her like she was a coed at a wet T-shirt contest—and she liked it entirely too much. She ought to be offended by the way his eyes were locked on her breasts, but instead she felt her nipples peaking, pushing against the damp fabric of her shirt. The intense fixation he had for her breasts was thrilling. No matter how loudly her internal feminist shrieked that she ought to feel demeaned and insulted, Ciara just felt womanly and sensual.
She cleared her throat, telling herself she was absolutely not sorry when his eyes left her breasts and made their way up to her eyes.
“I could sue you for sexual harassment.” God, was that her voice? That breathy murmur?
“After you brought me back here and walked into your pool of your own free will? Good luck with that.”
Damn. Did he have to be right? “Can you describe the necklace?”
He waved toward his own neck, as if the necklace were hanging there. “Fifty-carat heart-shaped Burmese ruby set in a choker surrounded by over a hundred and sixty carats of diamonds.”
“Jesus. That’s a big ruby. What’s a rock like that go for these days?”
“In the neighborhood of fifteen million.”
Ciara whistled. “Nice neighborhood.”
Agent Smith shrugged, as if the fifteen mil were inconsequential. “The royal family of Monaco claim the real value cannot be expressed in financial terms. Sentimental currency only.”
“It really belonged to Princess Grace?” Ciara shivered with delight. She’d worked cases with some pretty high-profile names attached. Considering the price tags on the items she found, low-profile names usually couldn’t afford them in the first place, let alone swing government intervention when they were stolen. But she’d never done a trace for an item that belonged to royalty—Hollywood or genuine. Grace Kelly had been both.
“How did the thieves get a hold of it?” she asked.
“Is that any of your business?”
“Nope. Just curious. I’m amazed they got it past the Guard and out of Monaco. Isn’t royal security usually tight as a drum?”
“You know this from all your vast experience breaking into royal households?”
Ciara rolled her eyes. “I know this from all my vast experience watching heist movies. I’ve also learned not to try to rob casinos or museums, unless you have a team of extremely good-looking men, in which case you are sure to get away with it. And that all the best thieves are stealing from safe deposit boxes these days.”
“You have a serious fiction addiction.”
She shrugged. “It’s a hobby. Are you sure I can’t convince you to step outside? Just for a minute. You can search the room for hidden cell phones before you go.”
“Why don’t you just confess? Save us both the bullshit of playing psychic. We can go grab a nice lunch, my treat, and you can tell me all about your life of crime. I promise not to judge.”
“Oh, yeah, you’re the picture of forgiveness. If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll stick with my psychic bullshit. Thanks.”
“Suit yourself.” His eyes raked down her and he smiled wolfishly. “Nice shirt.”
Ciara flushed and dropped down so the water covered her breasts, but that wasn’t much help in the modesty department. Her shirt was clinging to her like a second skin, outlining every curve in graphic detail—and rustling against her senses like crackling tissue paper.
Whenever she touched an object, any object, there was a static hum, like a radio just out of tune, but when she engaged her gift, surrounded in the water that acted as an amplifier, the volume on that radio would be cranked up to a shattering decibel. Tracing the necklace with her clothes pressing against her skin was going to be flat-out painful, but she was too stubborn, and Agent Smith made her too nervously aware, to consider taking it off.
She’d just push through the pain.
Ciara dropped back and drew up her legs to float in the water. She closed her eyes and tried to let the peace of the water wash away the rest of the world, but each rub of denim and cotton against her skin was a static explosion inside her mind. She forced herself to focus on the necklace as Agent Smith had described it.
A vision flashed behind her eyelids, but it was blurry and disjointed, like an old television set, improperly tuned. The more she tried to bring it into sharp focus, the worse the pictures got. Fuzzy and choppy, the images flashed in her mind: slot machines…a long, wide boardwalk beside a rough gray ocean…pedestrians in brightly colored shirts posing in front of a statue of an elephant.
The dissonance from the fabric against her skin tur
ned into a burn. She knew it was just in her mind—knew it—but that didn’t make it seem any less real. She was being painted in acid and each brushstroke made her stomach churn. I’m going to be sick.
Ciara burst up out of the water, yanking the clinging shirt away from her skin and dragging in great gulps of oxygen. “Atlantic City,” she sputtered. “It’s in Atlantic City.”
Agent Smith started toward her, then seemed to stop himself. He leaned against the wall and arched a brow, looking utterly unimpressed. The bastard. She’d just painted her skin in acid for him and he looked like he was a breath away from yawning in her face.
“You got anything more specific than that? There are more than a couple places to hide a necklace in Atlantic City.”
“No, I don’t got anything more specific than that,” Ciara snapped at the ungrateful prick. “Because someone wouldn’t leave me the hell alone long enough to get a better reading. I told you I can’t work with things on my skin.”
“So strip.”
“Leave and I will.”
“Sorry, sweetheart. As soon as I leave, you’re gonna be on the phone to your jewelry-fence boyfriend, tipping him off that I’m on my way to Atlantic City.”
“I don’t have a jewelry-fence boyfriend, you paranoid prick.”
“No? How about a brother? Or some guy you went to school with? Or girl. I’m sure criminals are very into women’s lib.”
“I am helping you,” Ciara grumbled, climbing out of the pool, “and you’re accusing me of criminal activity. If you would just leave me alone for five minutes, I could give you the exact location of the necklace. Exact.”
He shook his head. “Not gonna happen, sweetheart. You’re stuck with me.”
“Only until Monday,” Ciara muttered.
His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What happens on Monday?”
Ciara smiled sweetly up at him as she grabbed a fresh towel off the rack on the wall. “My boss calls your boss and you go away. Poof.”
His face darkened. “Is that a threat? Are you threatening a federal agent?”
“I thought you’d be happy. You obviously don’t want to work with me either. I’ve already spoken with Karma. She’s going to get it all straightened out on Monday.” Ciara wrapped the towel around her shoulders. Her clothes had stopped feeling like acid, but she still wanted to get them off her skin as soon as possible. Agent Smith looming over her didn’t give her much hope that as soon as possible would be very soon.
“You honestly thought I would run off on some wild-goose chase to Atlantic City? How dumb do I look?”
“I’m not going on looks, Agent Smith, I’m going by your behavior, which, so far, has been pretty damn dumb.” To be honest, she couldn’t blame him for doubting her. She’d probably have doubted too, but she wasn’t feeling terribly forgiving with the memory of her acid-wash jeans still fresh in her mind.
“You want me to believe the necklace is in Atlantic City, then you’re coming to Atlantic City with me to find it.”
Ciara laughed. “I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. And you will.”
She started shaking her head and found she couldn’t stop. It just kept swinging back and forth in a pendulum of denial. “No, I can’t. You don’t understand. I don’t leave this house. Ever. I can’t.”
He frowned. “Are you phobic or something?”
“My skin,” she reminded him. “I can’t touch people without horrible psychic backlash and even just touching foreign objects, being surrounded by them, the static noise is unbearable. I just can’t handle it.”
“A Psychic Bubble Girl.”
“Sort of. Yeah. Sure. Exactly.”
His brows rose high above his deceptively warm chocolate-brown eyes. “Do you have a note from your doctor?”
“Of course not. It’s not like I’m trying to get out of gym class.”
“Then I guess you’re coming with me.”
Ciara’s head started shaking again. No, no, no. “You can’t make me. I’m an American citizen. I have rights.”
“You certainly do. But you’re also a person of interest in eighty-five different unsolved robberies.”
“I solved them,” she insisted. “I found the jewels.”
“But not the jewel thieves. Very convenient, that.”
“I can only locate the stolen items, not the people who took them.”
“That’s a real shame. If we’d caught a few more of the actual thieves in the recovery, I wouldn’t have reason to be suspicious of you. You say you aren’t a crook. You say you’re psychic, but you can’t prove it. That’s a real shame. It kind of makes me wonder what else is going on at Karmic Consultants that might be of questionable legality. It’s a very fishy company. So-called psychics and mediums. Who do you think would be most interested in investigating Karmic Consultants? The feds in charge of organized crime or the ones who investigate confidence schemes?”
Ciara’s heart stopped. Karmic Consultants was the best thing that had ever happened to her. Karma was more than her boss. She was family. Ciara would be lost without them.
The threat against them was more potent than any he could have leveled against her personally. In her personal life, she had very little to lose, but Karmic was everything.
She stared across the pool at the adamant federal agent. “This is blackmail.”
“Nonsense. It’s a choice. As I see it, you have three options.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “One, you confess. Two, you and your buddies at Karmic Consultants submit to a thorough up-the-ass investigation by the Bureau to ensure you’re operating one hundred percent on the right side of the law. Or three, you come to Atlantic City and show me where that necklace is. Your call.”
Ciara was trapped, pure and simple. She couldn’t confess, because there was nothing to confess to, and she couldn’t put Karmic Consultants through an up-the-ass federal investigation because she wasn’t entirely sure KC was one hundred percent on the right side of the law—she’d been asked to find some very odd items in the course of her career with them. She didn’t question Karma’s morality for a second, but the legality was a bit iffier.
Which left option number three. Atlantic City. Leaving her house, her comfort zone, and going to America’s Playground with a man who thought she was either a nutcase, a criminal or both. A spark of excitement kindled in her heart.
If the situation weren’t quite so ridiculous, it might actually be an adventure.
Chapter Four—Nudists & Man Love: America’s Playground Under Siege
Ciara wandered with Nate down the Atlantic City Boardwalk, dodging tourists. Over the last few days as they searched for the necklace, an easy rapport had slowly built between them. She could almost think they were a normal couple on vacation—if not for the fact that she was more or less his hostage.
She hadn’t been able to get in touch with Karma and her boss couldn’t contact her since the only phone she had was the landline back at her house. If Nate had been replaced on her detail, he certainly wasn’t letting on. She was stuck with him, at least until they found the necklace and he allowed her access to a phone again.
On the plus side, being in Atlantic City wasn’t as torturous as she’d imagined it would be. The psychic noise wasn’t nearly as deafening as she’d expected. She kept a light shawl wrapped around her arms and shoulders at all times to protect against casual contact, and so far she’d managed to avoid brushing up against any strangers, with only a couple acrobatic maneuvers required. As a first attempt at the real world, it was a remarkably successful one. She could handle the psychic dissonance so much better than she’d been able to when her abilities had first developed. It was almost fun, getting out of the house, seeing the sights.
Now if only she had the first clue where the damn necklace was.
Nate had secured them a crappy little motel room, miles off the Boardwalk, courtesy of the FBI, while they were searching AC for the necklace. Unfortunately, their luxurious accommodations didn’t
even have a bathtub for Ciara to float in. She’d tried a couple traces in the shower, but the tile burning through the soles of her feet had been too distracting and she hadn’t been able to get a clear image. She kept getting useless, static-filled flashes of a casino floor—which didn’t really narrow it down much in Atlantic City.
She was getting to the point where running naked into the Atlantic Ocean was starting to seem like a pretty good idea. At least then she would have something to tell Agent Control-Freak every time he asked her if she was ready to confess yet. The man redefined stubborn.
If he weren’t also gorgeous, funny and considerate at the oddest moments, it would have been easy to hate him. Unfortunately, she kept forgetting she didn’t like him.
Ciara looked up at the impressive façade of the Trump Taj Mahal, not watching where she was walking and automatically measuring her stride to match Nate’s limp. “I think Donald Trump did it.”
“Watch out for the Griswolds.” Nate caught her arm, careful as ever to touch her only through the fabric of her shawl, and steered her out of the way of a family of overenthusiastic tourists. “Donald Trump did what?”
“Stole the Heart of Monaco.”
Nate snorted. “I see. And what is this hypothesis based on?”
“Well, he’s loaded,” she said reasonably, “but who’s to say his gains aren’t ill-gotten? Maybe he started out life as a cat burglar but had to give it up because he was shedding all over the crime scenes and leaving bits of that manly Trump-fro behind to implicate him.”
“Not all rich people are thieves.”
Ciara shrugged. “I saw the elephant statue outside the Trump Taj Mahal in my vision. His elephant, ergo his shameful life of crime.”
“I’m supposed to get a subpoena with ‘it’s his elephant’?”
“Come on, it’ll be fun. Arrest the Donald.”
“I don’t arrest honest businessmen.”
“Isn’t honest businessman an oxymoron?”
“Drop it, Ciara.”