Date with the Devil (Crimson Romance)

by Jessica Starre

  “Dare isn’t the right word.”

  “Yeah,” she said after a while. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”

  He gave her a slight smile. “You say that like it’s a weakness. It’s not a weakness, Victoria.”

  She wouldn’t meet his gaze.

  “Do you remember the first time I met you?” He did. The memory seared, vivid and strong. The fire had been there from the beginning, white hot and urgent, without regard for time or place or differences.

  He leaned toward her. She didn’t flinch or move away. His breath feathered across her cheek, but she held her ground.

  “You almost gave me a heart attack,” she said.

  “From the beginning, I wanted to protect you. Not because you were a woman or because you were my lover. But because you were someone I cared about. I wanted to show you that you could trust someone. You could trust me. That I would always be there for you.”

  He reached out and touched her face, his thumb stroking her jaw, his fingers sliding through her hair. Her hand trembled as she touched his hand with hers.

  “You never saw it like that,” he said. “You thought I was trying to take your power away. That I thought you were incompetent and incapable. But all I wanted was for you to trust me, and to know I would always be there for you.”

  He reached out with his other hand, cradling her face in his palms. The sharp edge of desire tugged low in his belly. She closed her eyes before he could read her thoughts.

  He leaned closer.

  “But it never meant anything to you,” he said. “And when you were betrayed —”

  She flinched.

  “You automatically assumed that I had done it.”

  He paused for a moment, to give her a chance to jump in with her reasons and her excuses and explanations and defenses. But she didn’t say anything. He was right. He had shown that she could trust him but she hadn’t.

  “Do you trust me now?” he asked, his lips on her throat. He stopped, jerked his head up. “Are you crying, Victoria?” Even to his own ears, his voice sounded shaken and shocked. “Don’t cry,” he said. “Please.”

  And then she was kissing him. About damned time, too. Then he was whispering her name and gentling her into bed and making love to her as if they were both fine and precious and too tender to cause any hurt.

  Chapter 21

  “Let’s run it down again,” Victoria said. It was Tuesday morning and she was putting her shoes on while sitting safely on the other side of the room. Magical moments were all well and good but she’d never finished a recovery lounging naked in bed. “Someone — Kevin or call him X — brought that Byzantine candlestick in for appraisal. And what happened next?”

  “The appraiser notified the FBI arts and antiquities team.” Michael looked lazy and boneless on the bed but at least he cooperated.

  “You said we were betrayed seven years ago, by an agent who had it in for you. My natural assumption was that you took care of business.”

  “I did.”

  “But you never recovered the missing jewelry,” she said, verifying. He would have mentioned it last night if he had. He shook his head no, which meant there was a fortune in jewels still missing … but that was a problem for another time. “So where are we?”

  “When I married Alexis, I transferred off the team. She was gunning to head it up and she didn’t always approve of my methods.”

  “Imagine that.”

  “So in the interest of marital harmony, I’ve been running down terrorists for the past five years. I’ve been out of the loop.”

  “Until now,” she said.

  “Until now,” he agreed.

  “So our work here is done,” she said. “We got the perp. We got the treasure. Not, unfortunately, the treasure we were looking for, but it’ll have to do.” She didn’t mind giving up the Baroque to Vlad. She hadn’t been hired to recover Baroque pieces.

  Michael looked at her. “You think Vlad will take that trade?”

  “I can handle Vlad.”

  He gave her an appraising look. “Don’t get killed,” he said. Which was at least better than be careful.

  “I’ve got reflexes,” she said. “Unlike some people.”

  “What are you doing to do?”

  “You don’t want to know,” she assured him.

  • • •

  “Good afternoon,” she said to Andrew when she met him at the dry cleaners that afternoon. While Michael had slept off a dose of pain pills, she’d taken her things and gone. She didn’t look back. She was never looking back again. She would just walk away. Forgive herself the momentary weakness of making love to him. It had only lasted three hours or so. Forget the tenderness of his body against hers. Stop comparing it to the white hot urgency they were also capable of. Quit wanting another round of the white hot urgency in order to refresh her memory and make the comparison valid. Sure. She’d forget in time. Just like she had before.

  Andrew eyed her suspiciously.

  “Need some help,” she told him.

  “No,” he said positively.

  But that always his opening bid.

  “Why must you always call on me?” he demanded.

  “Because you understand me,” she said.

  “No, no. No. I do not understand you.”

  “Okay, then. I understand you.”

  “You think all I want is money,” Andrew complained.

  “No,” she said. “I think you want power and your father won’t give it to you.”

  He was silent.

  “I have a project that will help.” He lifted a curious brow. He stopped complaining, always a good sign. She described the project to him.

  A beatific smile blossomed on his face. “It will create much trouble,” he said.

  “That’s the idea,” she said.

  • • •

  Thursday morning when she called Vlad, he sounded almost disappointed to hear from her.

  “Can we accomplish the trade without anyone getting scarred, hit, or shot?” she asked. She was sitting in a car Andrew had borrowed for her, hoping no cop ran the tags until she was out of it. She had specified a “rental car” but only later realized she should have specified a rental car that was rented rather than a rental car that was stolen.

  “I’ll try to restrain myself,” Vlad said dryly. “If you’ll do the same.”

  Hours later, she entered Vlad’s living room, having survived the gauntlet of bodyguards. A fire roared in the fireplace, though it was late spring and the air conditioning was on. Rosemary sat next to Vlad on the sofa, drinking a glass of wine and smoking a joint. He’d laid an arm casually across the back of the sofa. You couldn’t have squeezed a sheet of paper between them. The sight stopped Victoria in her tracks.

  Then she forced herself to move. She handed Vlad the certified check from Donald’s mother. “You spotted me fifty large,” she said.

  He nodded, glanced at the amount, then tucked the check in his pocket.

  “We’re even,” she said. Might as well get the argument started.

  “On that account.”

  Then she heard one of the guards grunt behind her and she stepped out of the way as he and another guard humped the heavy wooden crate she’d brought with her into the center of the room.

  A warm smile lit up Vlad’s face and he leaned forward eagerly, indicating that the guards should open the crate. Rosemary put a hand on Vlad’s shoulder and they shared a warm smile.

  Not even Rosemary would be that insane, would she?

  “Rosemary?” Victoria said, her voice unsteady for the first time.

  “I’m fine,” Rosemary said. “Vlad treated me fine.”

  He’s a vicious, murderous drug lord, she wanted to remind her sister but fel
t the wisest course would be to not voice that thought out loud right now. For a brief disorienting moment, she regretted that Michael wasn’t here to back her up.

  One of the guards handed a candlestick to Vlad. His smile disappeared and he transferred his gaze to her.

  “What is this trash?” He tossed the candlestick back into the crate.

  “Rosemary and I are going now, Vlad,” she said. Rosemary got to her feet, slowly, reluctantly. She leaned over to crush out the joint. Vlad put a hand on her arm and they looked at each other.

  I have got to find a new line of work, Victoria thought. This one is too damned dangerous.

  Then Rosemary brushed Vlad’s lips with her own.

  Well, damn.

  Rosemary was just unbalanced enough to fall in love with a deranged criminal. Not just any criminal but one who went by the endearing nickname of Vlad the Impaler. Victoria should have guessed she’d be susceptible. Rosemary probably thought she could change him. She might have been the one who was psychic but Victoria was the one who could see exactly how this was going to turn out.

  “You didn’t fulfill the terms of our agreement,” Vlad said. Rosemary stopped, glanced over her shoulder at him.

  Victoria sighed. How had she known he would say that?

  “Here’s the deal,” she began.

  “You are in no position to make deals, Victoria,” Vlad said ominously.

  His cell phone rang.

  “You might want to get that,” she said.

  Vlad glared at her, then picked up the phone and flipped it open, his eyes never leaving her face. “Yes?” he said. He listened carefully. His face did not change. He did not flinch, he did not go pale, his eyes did not narrow, his jaw did not tighten. But even so she felt the ice cold chill slide down her back. She wasn’t tough enough to take him on. But she knew people who were.

  “I see,” Vlad said, and flipped the phone closed. He rubbed a finger over his lips, his eyes still boring into Victoria’s. “No more than five people know that I have a son studying at Julliard.”

  Andrew had grabbed the kid not as a favor to her but because he was interested in pushing Vlad’s buttons. She was glad he enjoyed button pushing but she hoped to be far away when the fallout started. Because Vlad would figure out who’d done the snatch and then he’d deal with Andrew and it wouldn’t pay to be in the line of fire then. Though it wouldn’t be Andrew, specifically, who Vlad went after. It would be Andrew’s family, his father, and that was exactly what Andrew wanted. He wanted his father brought down. He thought he could step into the breach afterwards. She had no problem with a fight between the families. With luck they’d both go down.

  “Your son for Rosemary,” she said.

  Vlad assessed her, his eyes unblinking.

  “That was not our agreement,” he said.

  “You want the Byzantine collection,” she said. “I understand that. But sometimes you have to fold when the stakes get too high.”

  Vlad considered her some more. She could see that he subscribed to the clear mind, correct action school of thought. The think before you act approach. But his lack of action was scaring the shit out of her. Finally, he got to his feet, stepped away from the sofa.

  “I don’t like people who threaten my family, Victoria,” he said.

  “Then you know how I feel,” she said. “Come on, Rosemary. Let’s go.”

  Chapter 22

  “You stay put,” she told Rosemary once she’d unlocked the hotel room door. It had taken a couple of tries because her hands shook so badly. To think she used to enjoy the work. Get off on the surge of adrenaline, feel alive because she had escaped the lion’s den unscathed, or at least with survivable injuries. God, she’d been crazy. “Are you listening, Rosemary? No running back to Vlad, no — ”

  “Tory, I’m not a child.”

  “You know, it would be a bad idea to think Vlad is anything but what he is.”

  “I know what you think he is,” Rosemary said, going to one of the beds and plopping herself down. “But you see the surface. Whereas I see beyond. I see inside him.”

  “Sure,” Victoria said. “It’s all warm and fuzzy in there.”

  “Don’t push me, Tory, okay? Did I tell you not to sleep with Michael?”

  Rosemary had a good point there.

  “And knowing who he is, flaws and all, does not stop you loving him,” she said.

  “I don’t love him.”

  “Sure,” Rosemary said.

  This was not an argument Victoria had any chance of winning, so she let it go. Dumping the contents of her backpack on the bed, she pulled the reliquary she’d gotten from Kevin’s house out of the pile. She turned the silver box over in her hands. She believed it was Byzantine. If she could get the appraiser to confirm it — well, it wouldn’t tell her where the Byzantine treasure was, but it would tell her the Byzantine treasure existed and that Kevin had touched it once.

  “Where are you going?” Rosemary asked.

  “To see a man about a reliquary.”

  “That’s not how the saying goes,” Rosemary called after her.

  • • •

  Victoria took a cab to midtown, not wanting to waste any time. Twenty minutes later, she’d paid the cabbie and looked up at the façade of the building: Bonida Galleries. Where it had all started. She wondered if the appraiser regretted the phone call he’d made to the FBI at the start of all this.

  A minute later, she knew he had. He was just finishing up bleeding to death in the back room. There was nothing she could do for him, so she left him there and hustled back to the hotel room she shared with Rosemary. Flinging open the door, she demanded, “What was the name of the man who founded the organization to restore Simonis’ convent?”

  “What?” Rosemary asked.

  “Put the joint down,” Victoria snapped. “You read me a news release quoting a man who had founded an organization —”

  “Oh, yeah, right.” Rosemary gave a jaw-cracking yawn. “My notebook’s around here somewhere.”

  You could never make Rosemary go faster than she was capable of going, Victoria reminded herself as her sister dug through her shoulder bag.

  “Got it,” Rosemary said, holding a notebook aloft. She paged through it. “Here it is. Man named Gregory Zirov. Lawyer. It says he —”

  “Thanks, Rosemary,” Victoria said. If she’d asked Rosemary that at the beginning, how many fewer people would be dead?

  Not without misgivings, she called the devil, still recovering in his hotel room here in the city. “The appraiser was just killed,” she said.

  “Well, Kevin didn’t do that,” he said.

  “It’s Gregory Zirov,” she said. “Listen to this.” She read the quote from the newspaper article. “Zirov has a Simonis obsession. The appraiser was shown photos of everyone else involved, like Kevin and Connie. But I doubt anyone ever showed him Zirov’s photo. Or it could have been Zirov’s hired hand who brought it in. Possibly the guy who attacked me. He’s dead, now, too. So there can be no blowback against Zirov.”

  “Run it down for me, Victoria.”

  “Nadine,” she said. “She gets dumped by the priest, right? They all got dumped by the priest sooner or later. But she was still working for him, so she was in a position to hurt him. How can she do it? Steal the collection. But she doesn’t want to get caught. So she decides to make a trade, leaving the Baroque pieces in the safe. When he eventually discovered the trade, what would he be able to do? How could he prove what happened? Zirov probably wasn’t lying when he said he wasn’t Nadine’s boyfriend. He was just her former employer. She knew he had resources.”

  “So she brings Zirov in,” Michael said. “And he has the candlestick appraised to be sure it’s worth the effort. Then he obtains Baroque pieces that generally match the des
cription of the objects listed in the inventory. Now he needs a tool. Not Nadine, because she lives in the house and has ready access to the safes, so she has to stay above suspicion.”

  “Kevin. Who loses his cool, kills three people, and doesn’t make the substitution as planned. Now Zirov has a problem. Nadine may have threatened to go to the police — murder was never on her agenda.”

  “So Zirov kills her and the accomplice who beat you up. We take care of Kevin for him. All that’s left is the appraiser and he has a clean sweep,” Michael said.

  “Exactly.”

  “The bastard.”

  “What now?”

  Michael made no comment. Her heart leapt in her chest. She knew what he was going to do. “Wait for me!” she shouted into the phone. “Don’t you try this by yourself. Dammit, Michael —”

  But he was already gone.

  • • •

  Zirov would be in his office this time of day, Victoria knew. She had her backpack in one fist and her cell phone in the other. She grabbed a cab and told the driver the address of Zirov’s office building. On her cell phone, she called Gerard.

  “It’s Victoria. The collector is Gregory Zirov. Your buddy has decided to go take him down. He’s gonna get killed.”

  “I know. I’m on my way,” Gerard said. “Stay put,” and then he was gone.

  She dialed Andrew’s number next. Her hands shook enough that she had trouble stabbing the buttons. All she could see was Michael drowning in a pool of blood because he had to close the goddamned case. Think. Make a plan.

  “Andrew,” she snapped when he came on the line. “I need a high-powered rifle and backup.” She was strapping on her climbing harness as they spoke. The cabbie avoided looking at her in the rearview mirror.

  “What the hell?”

  “Michael is going to try to take a player down. But he’s injured, nowhere near full power. And he’s not thinking clearly. He’s pissed. The player killed his wife.”

  “Call the cops.”

  “You have any idea how long it takes to mount a tactical operation in this city?” she demanded. “He’ll be dead by then.”