Hot Pursuit (To Catch a Thief Book 1)

by Kay Marie

  He ignored the jibes, something he was becoming all too skilled at. “Art, huh?” He paused, frowning. “We both know you’re not the artist in the family.”

  Jo shrugged. “I’m broadening my horizons.”

  Then she spun on her heels and walked across the atrium, fully aware he had no choice but to follow as she cut through the crowds, swerving between bodies, bumping into one or two. Nate kept his gaze sharp, but he didn’t see Ryder in the swarm. Or any other face he recognized.

  A static fuzz came through his comm, followed by, “You’re surprisingly terrible at witty banter, Parker.”

  “Thanks, Leo,” he drawled. “Very helpful.”

  “No, no, keep at it. We were all in need of some entertainment after yesterday. You’re doing a great job.”

  “I’m turning the mic off,” he grumbled.

  “Don’t even think about it, Parker,” his boss cut in.

  Nate clenched his jaw.

  And then clenched it tighter as a snicker came through the line.

  Great, just great. She’s turning me into the office joke.

  But they were right—witty banter, not really his forte. He lacked the patience and the blasé attitude. Wasting time made his blood curdle. He wanted to cut through the surface, straight to the core. He wanted to cut deep enough to make her pause.

  But how? he thought as he followed her up the steps to the second floor. How to cut through smoke and mirrors? How to cut through the façade and see the real woman underneath? Jo hadn’t spared a moment to glance back, but he had the sense she knew he was right behind her, that she was just as aware of his presence as he was of hers.

  When she eventually came to a stop, the room he found himself standing in was hardly a surprise—the impressionist exhibit. Nate stepped close behind her, leaning down and keeping his voice low as he stared into the painting she’d sought out—a sweeping canvas of pastel brushstrokes, soft and sinuous, depicting crashing waves in the hazy light of dawn.

  “You are your father’s daughter,” he murmured, trying to goad her into discussing something a little deeper.

  Jo jolted and then relaxed, the tension seeping from her frame as quick as it’d come. She shrugged. “Monet was a master.”

  “I’ve heard rumors you’ve been far closer to his work than this,” Nate hinted, fully aware of the intel that Robert Carter had a stolen painting in his possession. “Had your hands on the gilded frame, in the dark shadows of an underground vault, perhaps.”

  Jo kept her eyes on the artwork, though a smile tugged at her lips. “Hearsay doesn’t hold up in court.”

  Her walls were up.

  Reinforced with steel.

  Mentioning her dad wasn’t the way in. At least, not like this.

  Jo wandered to the next canvas, another Monet. A classic water lily this time. Though she stared at the swirls and globs of paint, Nate got the distinct feeling her mind was on something else. Especially as her focus shifted and she scanned the room.

  “Looking for someone?”

  “I already found him.” Jo tossed him a sidelong glance, throwing in a wink. “More like, he found me.”

  Nate sighed.

  They were back to meaningless flirtations. He wouldn’t get anything out of her like this, not that he really thought he had a chance of getting anything out of her at all. But he needed to. The entire operation depended on him. They needed more info. More intel. Anything. Or Robert Carter would slip out of reach yet again, maybe this time for good—and the Russians Nate’s team had spent years tracking would slip away with him.

  Jo walked around Nate and into another room of impressionist paintings. Her gaze darted over a few canvases before settling on one. Nate followed the path of her eyes, trying to see what had caught her attention. A still life with apples, fruits, and an uneaten slice of pie.

  Pie! Of course, pie. Why didn’t I think of that before?

  Nate leaned down, keeping his voice casual. “I should have known.”

  “Huh?” Jo turned to look up at him, honest surprise written across her face.

  He nudged his chin in the direction of the artwork that had caught her eye. “You have an obsession with baked goods.”

  “Obsession?” Jo froze, a thin trace of ire laced through her tone.

  It was Nate’s turn to force back a grin. He was onto something. Finally, after so many meaningless words, he could tell from her voice he’d finally found something she cared about. And he planned to milk it for all it was worth.

  “Yeah, obsession.” He emphasized the word, getting a thrill as her nose wrinkled with unspoken protest. “You’ve dragged me to half the bakeries in Manhattan. Practically tried to force-feed me a cronut and a coopa, or whatever it was you called it.”

  “Coopie,” she corrected, voice clipped, defensive.

  “Huh?” He feigned ignorance, pushing a button he didn’t realize could so easily be pressed, not with the calculated, confident Jolene Carter.

  “Coo-pie,” she repeated, stressing the second syllable as flames gleamed to life in the centers of her eyes, sparks of angry fire. “A cookie in a pie. A coopie.”

  Nate shrugged.

  Her irises flashed brighter.

  The edge of his lip twitched. “Cute.”

  Somehow he knew that single word would set her off.

  He wasn’t disappointed.

  Jo put her hands on her hips and narrowed her eyes so they burned like lasers. At least, he guessed that was the general effect she’d been going for. Instead, he was amused.

  And it’s about damn time!

  She’d had the upper hand for far too long. He’d almost forgotten what it felt like up here, where the air was cleaner, fresher. Nate took a deep breath, soaking in that sweet, cool scent of victory, letting it fill his lungs as the woman before him continued to fume. He straightened his spine, using his height to his advantage as he looked triumphantly down at her.

  “Cute?” she spat with disbelief. “Cute? Mark my words, Nathaniel Parker, the coopie is going to be huge. The coopie is going to take the world by storm.”

  “So that’s the big endgame?” Nate countered, bringing the conversation full circle now that her defenses were down, now that she was, for the first time, edging on vulnerable. “Internationally renowned hacker and wanted criminal turned…baker?”

  Jo blinked and swallowed.

  For a moment he swore, he swore, uncertainty flickered in her gaze.

  Nate pressed the advantage. “Can I ask you a question, Jo? How is that going to work? The Feds will never stop hunting you. We’re not in the habit of letting felons go gentle into that good night. Ride off into the sunset. Live happily ever after.”

  Jo stared at him. Her chest pulsed with heavy breaths, stretching in and out, rising and falling, filling the space between them with something new, something that almost felt the slightest bit like fear.

  “We catch you,” Nate continued, hammering the final nail in her coffin. “And we put you in jail.”

  - 11 -

  Jo

  Jo sucked in a slow breath. He didn’t know, he couldn’t know, that he was dangling her greatest hope and her greatest worry right before her eyes, a careful balancing act that teetered on the precipice of all the things she was too scared to dream of and too scared not to.

  She had to regain control of the situation.

  She had to hit him where it hurt.

  Jo swallowed and tried to wipe the stress from her features, the little cracks in her façade that gave him a view to a place she didn’t want a Fed to have access to—her heart. “Haven’t you ever had a dream, Agent Parker?”

  Good, she thought to herself as the words slipped out, calm and collected and verging on dismissive. Not heady and full of unspoken desires.

  He narrowed his gaze. Those baby-blues darted across her face, trying to dissect every line etched into her skin, the reflective glass of a microscope as it zoomed in. Then he shrugged. “I’m living mine.”


  He answered like she thought he would.

  A gift presenting her with the perfect opening.

  Jo raised her brows and cocked her hip, leaning her weight to one side as she shifted a little closer, getting into his personal space. His eyes dropped to her chest, rose to her lips, then settled on her eyes. Proximity was an underestimated weapon.

  “Ah, yes… Taking after dear old Dad.” She said it like an accusation, making her voice breathy and seductive, reaching for any trick at her disposal to regain the upper hand as her words fired like a bullet straight to the center of his chest.

  Agent Parker’s gaze hardened to cut sapphire as a blaze of pain passed over his irises, quick as lightning, gone in a flash, leaving glass in its wake. “My father was a hero.”

  His voice was raw.

  Hurt.

  The sound made Jo pause.

  She’d known the jab would pinch, but she hadn’t thought it would land as true as it did. Actually, she’d found surprisingly little information about the entire incident, even with her very specialized skills. His father had died twenty years before, killed while on active duty, leaving Agent Parker’s mother to raise her three children alone. But now, staring into his eyes, Jo had to wonder if there was something more—something that had never made the news, something maybe the bureau had helped bury.

  Jo thought of her own mother. Lost to cancer. Just another statistic to an outside viewer, yet a decade had gone by, and the wound still bled. Open and aching. The sort of cut that never healed, no matter how much time had passed.

  Idiot. Idiot.

  Guilt churned in her gut. She never should have said anything. She never should have brought it up. Never should have used that lowest of the low blows against him.

  “I—” Jo started to apologize, but Nate cut her off.

  “At least my father is someone I can be proud of.”

  Jo’s hackles immediately rose. And I was about to apologize to this oaf! “I’m proud of my father.”

  “Proud of a criminal?” Agent Parker scoffed.

  Jo pressed her pointer finger into the center of his firm chest. “Proud of a man who took care of his family in the only way he knew how. Proud of a man who pushed his own grief aside to ease mine. Proud of a man who has done everything within his power to keep the people he loves safe from anyone who might wish us harm, including you.”

  “Me?” He guffawed. “Safe from me? Do you have any idea who your father even is? What he’s done? He’s a bad person, Jo. The worst kind. I’m trying to keep other people safe from him.”

  Something in his accusation made her heart thunder in her chest. The disbelief in his tone. The earnestness. The conviction.

  Why? she almost wanted to ask. What for?

  Her father was a crook, a thief. He stole art. He sold forgeries. He had a lot of money he probably shouldn’t. Sure, he wasn’t the role model of the century, but there were worse people in the world. Dangerous people. Real criminals. He wasn’t hurting anyone. Not really.

  …right?

  Jo licked her lips as her mouth went dry.

  “You and I have different interpretations of the word ‘bad,’” she murmured, trying to brush his accusation aside. But the hoarse tone of her voice was unconvincing, even to her.

  “There’s only one interpretation.”

  “Oh really?” she charged, letting her frustration carry her forward. Anger was so much easier than doubt, so much easier than fear. “A man goes into a grocery store and gets caught stealing a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread, good or bad?”

  “Bad,” Agent Parker answered immediately.

  “Okay. A man who just got laid off from work goes into a grocery store and gets caught stealing a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread, good or bad?”

  He shrugged and again answered easily. “Bad.”

  “Fine. A man who just got laid off from work, who is drowning in debt from his late wife’s medical bills, goes into a grocery store and gets caught stealing a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread, good or bad?”

  Agent Parker swallowed, pausing for a moment. “There are other ways…”

  “Good or bad?” Jo pressed.

  He shifted his feet, but a challenge sparked in his gaze. “Fine. Bad.”

  “Okay. Now a man who just got laid off from work, who is drowning in debt from his late wife’s medical bills, who has three children at home who haven’t eaten a real meal in three days, goes into a grocery store and gets caught stealing a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread, good or bad?”

  “A crime is a crime,” he responded firmly.

  “That’s not what I asked,” Jo countered. “I asked if he’s a good person or a bad person.”

  “The law works in black and white.”

  “Well, maybe it shouldn’t.” Jo shrugged. “Not when the world is awash in shades of gray.”

  Agent Parker threw up his hands as he grunted and shook his head. “What does this have to do with anything we were talking about? We were talking about you. About your father. Not some poor victim of circumstance.”

  “Well, here’s another hypothetical for you,” Jo answered. Deep inside, her better sense screamed at her to shut up, but she couldn’t. Because she didn’t want to be seen as the bad guy, as the villain. She didn’t want him to see her that way. “A fourteen-year-old girl who doesn’t have a care in the world aside from boys and school and her Easy-Bake oven finds out her mother has an aggressive form of cancer and only has a few months to live. Her father chooses the night of her mother’s funeral to come clean about his true profession, asking for forgiveness, asking for love, for loyalty. So she gives it. And she keeps giving it, pushing all her own dreams aside, because they are all each other has in the world. Good person or bad person?”

  Agent Parker’s face softened.

  His shoulders dropped from their tense position around his neck. He lifted his hand, as though to stretch it across the space separating them, and then paused. “Jo.”

  She stepped back and arched a brow, holding on to the challenge in her voice, to the fight, to the fire. This man wanted to lock her in a jail cell for the rest of her life, wanted to put her father away, Thad, everyone she loved. No baking. No friends. No life. And maybe she deserved it. But she had to hold on to the idea that she didn’t—or she would crumble. “Good person or bad person, Agent Parker?”

  His jaw clenched.

  Those stern brows pressed together, hard.

  “Bad,” he answered finally, forcing the word through his lips, making it sound almost like a confession.

  Jo released a sad puff of air as she raised her brows for a moment and held his gaze. “Then I guess we’re done here.”

  She turned.

  And walked away.

  Let him try to follow.

  The museum was a maze of small rooms and open doors and crowded hallways, giving her the obvious advantage as she slipped from one spot to the next. Jo had planned to meet Thad in front of the Monet, one of his favorites, but they’d made eye contact the second she’d walked into the room, and he’d fled immediately. Knowing Thad, he hadn’t gone far. Jo just needed to give him a chance to catch up to her in a place Agent Parker couldn’t see. The meet today wasn’t a long one, just a quick exchange, over with the briefest sleight of hand.

  I only need to lose you for a minute, Jo thought, glancing behind to find Nathaniel Parker in the crowd, eyes sharply focused on her. Luckily, he was tall enough to stand out, making him easy to spot, and broad chested enough to bump into people, slowing him down.

  She grinned and waved.

  Never let them see you sweat.

  Jo turned, kept her head down and pressed on. Cutting through a door. Swerving through another. Drawing confusing circles. Then down a flight of stairs. Through another hall. Into a room. Out of another. Quick. Quick. Quick. Until she reached the spot she wanted to go to, the one she assumed Thad would also gravitate toward—the Temple of Dendur. Practically given
its own wing, the temple stood in the center of a massive vaulted room, surrounded by a shallow moat of water. A two-story wall made entirely of windows looked out at the park. The sheer size of the space made voices echo and carry, and the sheer number of people inside made it ideal. The room was by far the most popular one in the entire museum, an easy place to get lost in the crowd. Not to mention it was close to the exit, which made for an easy way out.

  Jo moved toward the temple, climbing the handful of steps up to the platform. Keeping her head forward, she was careful not to be obviously searching for anyone in the crowd, but also made herself visible enough to be easily spotted. She reached into her purse and found the thumb drive at the bottom of her things, next to a tube of lipstick. She clutched both in her fist. Idly observing the ancient temple, Jo freshened her red lips and then put the makeup back into her bag, discreetly holding the drive against her palm with her thumb so no one would see. To the casual observer, nothing would have looked unusual. But if Thad was there, it was the signal.

  A moment later she felt a presence at her back.

  A warm breath on her neck.

  “Jo Jo,” the softest whisper.

  She breathed a sigh of relief and turned her palm. Thad’s fingers brushed against hers, taking the thumb drive and pressing a small paper into its place.

  Then he was gone.

  Jo slid the paper into her pocket and continued on her merry way, barely having stopped for a minute. Nate caught back up with her while she was waiting in line to retrieve her bag from the coat check, but he didn’t come up to her this time. He waited from the peripheral, watching, always watching. If he hadn’t been so adamant about keeping his distance, he might have noticed that when she handed her ticket over to the attendant, it wasn’t the same number as the one still sitting in her purse. And that when her bag slid across the counter, it looked the same from the outside, but the contents were completely different. As it was, Jo just smirked as she left the museum behind and walked back out to the street, feeling invigorated.

  Where to next? she thought, surveying the scene. Her computer could wait a few hours. The sun was out. The day was young. And suddenly there was a spring in her step that she didn’t want to waste. Jo thought of Agent Parker’s smug face. I know just where to go.