Out of Time

by Samantha Graves

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008 by C. J. Barry

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Forever

  Hachette Book Group USA

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com

  First eBook Edition: August 2008

  ISBN: 978-0-446-53797-1

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Praise for Sight Unseen

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  SIGHT UNSEEN

  Discussion Questions

  THE DISH

  A Preview of "Romantic Suspense"

  PRAISE FOR

  SIGHT UNSEEN

  “Wow! Nonstop action and incredible chemistry between the main characters . . . Samantha Graves’s writing is superb. Bravo!”

  —RomRevToday.com

  “Full of twists and turns . . . Samantha Graves has a gift for creating sexual tension and coming up with some great ways to bring her characters together.”

  —OnceUponaRomance.com

  “Get ready for the most intriguing wild ride you can ever imagine . . . I highly recommend this one!”

  —TheBestReviews.com

  “A delightfully well-told story with plenty of action and passion.”

  —MyShelf.com

  “Exceptional . . . Graves keeps the suspense one step ahead of the reader.”

  —FallenAngelReviews.com

  ALSO BY SAMANTHA GRAVES

  Sight Unseen

  This book is dedicated to my fabulous and fearless agent, Roberta Brown.

  Acknowledgments

  My sincere and heartfelt thanks to:

  My terrific editor, Frances Jalet-Miller, and everyone at Grand Central Publishing for helping to bring this book to you.

  Lani Diane Rich for her critiquing skills, for dragging me kicking and screaming into the Will Write for Wine podcast, and for a friendship I wouldn’t trade for the world. My awesome beta-readers, Patti Newel and Jill Purinton. Friends and authors Patrick Picciarelli, Susan St. Thomas, and Rae Monet for sharing their expertise.

  My mom and dad for showing me that life is nothing without a lot of love and a little risk. Chris and Cheri, my two sisters and fellow published authors, for their courage and beauty. Tom, my brother, for his musical talent, dry wit, and unique way of looking at life.

  My cat Oliver for never letting me sleep past 6:00 a.m., and of course, my beautiful family—Ed, Rachel, and Ryan—for all their support and love.

  I am the luckiest person to ever write a book.

  CHAPTER

  1

  Simon had been asleep all of twelve minutes when the doorbell started to buzz.

  Go away, he thought through a fog of exhaustion and slipped back into the peace of safe, sound sleep.

  Bzzzzz.

  He surfaced long enough to register the rain pelting his bedroom windows and the fact that he hadn’t eaten today but was too tired to do anything about it. Should have taken that sexy flight attendant up on her offer for more nuts. Now, there was a good point to go back to sleep. He rolled over, his weary thirty-seven-year-old body grateful.

  Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

  “Sonofabitch.” He tossed the covers aside and looked at the clock. 7:15 p.m. What kind of moron would be visiting at this time of day in the middle of a thunderstorm?

  Whoever it was lay on the buzzer with a vengeance. Simon sat on the edge of his bed and rubbed the stubble on his face. He didn’t need this. For three months he hadn’t been home. All he wanted was one solid night of sleep without worrying about someone shooting at him. Was that too much to ask?

  Simon walked to the security monitor. If it was that old bat next door nosing around in his business again, he’d seriously consider killing her. Okay, maybe a warning shot. But someone was going to pay for waking him.

  The front-door camera showed a lone figure hunched and leaning against the outside wall, his hand pressed against the doorbell. The face was hidden in shadow.

  Hell.

  The good news was the enemy rarely came through the front door. The bad news was it sure didn’t look like the Avon lady.

  Maybe if he waited long enough, the moron would get the hint and go away.

  Then the buzzing was accompanied by the man pounding on the door with his fists.

  Or not. Whoever it was didn’t look like he was leaving any time soon. First thing tomorrow, Simon was ripping that damn doorbell out.

  He grabbed a pair of jeans off the floor and pulled them on. Then he stuffed his gun in the middle of his back and headed downstairs to get rid of whoever it was so he could go back to sleep.

  Thunder echoed down the hall as he made his way through his Tudor-style house, unwelcome adrenaline pushing fatigue aside. A lightning crack rattled the windows, and a stormy haze tinted everything. He pressed against the cold steel front door and peered out the one-way sidelight window. He still couldn’t recognize the visitor.

  He hit the intercom. “Who is it?”

  The buzzing and banging stopped, and a muffled male voice answered, “Jackson. Let me in.”

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Simon muttered as big, bad memories surfaced in a flash. He did not want to face Jackson again. At least not alive. He yanked open the door and aimed his gun at Jackson’s head. “What the hell do you want?”

  The tomb raider stared back, eyes red and weary. Rainwater had plastered short black hair to his head. His face was pale, and a long overcoat hung shapelessly over his lean body. He’d aged twenty years since Simon saw him two years ago, and he smelled like wet dog.

  The hair on the back of Simon’s neck prickled. Something told him this was not a social visit.

  Jackson raised one hand and waved him off. The other hand he kept inside his coat. “I’m not armed.”

  “You’d be surprised how often I hear that and wind up in ICU,” Simon said. “What do you want?”

  Jackson turned his head toward the quiet neighborhood. “I’ll tell you inside,” he said, his voice rough. Then he stumbled past Simon without waiting for an invite.

  Simon kicked the door shut, keeping his gun leveled at Jackson, who gave a painful groan before settling on the stairs in the dark entry. His breathing was labored as he rested his head against the wall and peered up at Simon. “You’re the only one I can trust.”

  Simon gritted his teeth. “Let’s recap. Two years ago, you jumped my single biggest find in South America, and then you jumped my wife. We’re a long way from trust, you and I.”

  “Hey, you poached on my turf. Can�
��t have other raiders thinking I’m soft. As for Celina—” Jackson gave a guttural groan and clutched his stomach.

  What the hell? Simon reached over and hit the vestibule lights. The trail of rainwater that stretched from the door to the stairs was turning bright red.

  “Christ, Jackson,” Simon said, stowing the gun in his jeans. He knelt and ripped open the trench coat. Blood soaked Jackson’s shirt and pants from a gaping hole in his side. “What happened?”

  Jackson gave a weak laugh. “I forgot to duck.”

  “No shit.” And recently, too, Simon noted. The fact that Jackson was still walking meant it had been only a few hours, at most. And as much as he hated Jackson, he didn’t want him dying in his foyer. The cops would be everywhere. “You need to get to an ER.”

  Simon stood up, but Jackson grabbed his forearm with surprising strength for a man bleeding all over his floor. “No. Listen to me. You have to save her.”

  “Who?”

  “Celina. They’re going to kill her.”

  Simon let out a groan. Aw, shit. Why was it every time there was trouble, she was in the middle of it?

  “She didn’t come home day before yesterday.” Jackson spoke fast and sloppy. He pulled a manila envelope out of his coat. “Then I got this in the mail and a text message on my cell phone. Said if I didn’t find some lost treasure, they’d kill her.”

  Simon looked at him incredulously. “Uh-huh. And you believed them?”

  Jackson reached into his pocket and handed Simon his cell phone. “Open it.”

  Simon flipped the cover up. The background was a picture of Celina bound and gagged in a chair. His ex-wife’s tear-stained, panic-stricken face cut through the years of betrayal. Emotions he’d thought long buried rose with alarming speed.

  “Shit,” he said softly.

  Jackson added, “I know you loved her—”

  “Don’t go there,” Simon warned him. “I’ll shoot you myself.”

  “Fair enough,” Jackson said, nodding weakly. “There’s more. Check out the pouch in the envelope.”

  Simon removed a small cloth bag and untied the leather strings. A crystal lens dropped out into his palm. It was perfectly concave and clear. Simon held it up to the light and peered through it, but all he could see was a distorted view of his hallway. “Rock crystal. So?”

  “More than it appears. It’s old. Like prehistory old. And according to these guys, it leads to a legendary find—the Archives of Man—somewhere in Mexico. That’s what they want. Find it. Get Celina back.” Jackson gave a sickly, hacking cough. “You got ten days.”

  Ten days? This was just insane. Jackson was insane. Simon slid the lens into the pouch. “I have to get you to a hospital. We’ll figure this out after that.”

  “No . . . no time.”

  Simon froze at the raw desperation in Jackson’s voice. The rain had stopped outside, and it had become very quiet in the house. The hairs on his neck were standing straight up.

  Jackson was dead serious, and his breathing was slowing down. “There’s a woman. Photo’s in there. I was going to see her, but—” He winced in pain. “Name and details are on the back. You’ll need her.”

  Simon retrieved the photo from the envelope and scanned the professional pose. Charcoal suit, blond hair, blue eyes, nice mouth, and a Mona Lisa smile. “I need her? For what?”

  “They said she’s the key. She knows how to use the lens or something like that. I don’t know. All I know is that you need both to find the archives.”

  Simon tried to think with his sleep-deprived brain. This didn’t add up. If they had the lens and the woman, why wouldn’t they just go after it themselves? And another thought entered his mind. A really bad one.

  “If these guys are so hot to get the treasure, then who shot you?” Simon asked.

  “I’m not the only one who knows about this,” Jackson said, his voice fading out. “Can’t imagine how. I didn’t tell anyone.”

  “Do they know about the woman?”

  “Wouldn’t doubt it. You need to move fast.” Jackson coughed and gave a short, harsh laugh. “You want to know something funny?”

  Simon couldn’t think of anything funny at the moment. Jackson was about to meet his maker, Celina wasn’t far behind, and Simon was getting a bad feeling that he might be next in line.

  Jackson beamed for a brief moment. “I finally did the right thing, and it killed me.”

  Outside, Simon heard a car door slam. He stood up and looked through the sidelight. A tan sedan was parked on the other side of the street behind a green Volvo that Simon didn’t recognize. One very large man in a long coat walked over to the Volvo and peered inside.

  “The Volvo yours?” Simon asked.

  Jackson grunted in acknowledgment.

  The man lifted his head and scanned the neighborhood. He looked familiar, and not in a good way. Every self-preserving fiber of Simon’s being kicked into high gear. “Friend of yours?”

  Jackson replied weakly, “’Fraid not. Kesel.”

  Well, that explained the hole in Jackson’s gut. Kesel was as ruthless and nasty as tomb raiders came. And he was on Jackson’s trail, which just made this entire affair a hell of a lot hotter. If Kesel weren’t so good at killing, Simon wouldn’t be so worried. What have you gotten me into this time, Celina?

  “I take it he wants that lens,” Simon surmised.

  “Yup. It won’t be long before he trails me to your door. You’re a marked man now,” Jackson said.

  Simon gave him a hard look. “You set me up, you bastard.”

  Blood dribbled out of the corner of Jackson’s mouth as he talked, his words slurring together. “Sure did. So for once in your miserable life, do the right thing. Finish this.”

  “You just said doing the right thing killed you.”

  Jackson gave a pained laugh. “But you’re better than me.”

  That was debatable, and Simon had the scars to prove it.

  He looked outside. Kesel was walking toward the house directly across the street. Simon exhaled a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding, but Jackson was right about one thing. It was only a matter of time before Kesel came knocking. Doing the right thing had brought Simon nothing but pain, misfortune, and medical bills. Survival, however, was an excellent motivator.

  He went back to the stairs to collect his Angel of Death. “Time to move, Jackson. You’re coming with me.”

  Icy-cold hands waved Simon aside. “Yeah, okay, okay. Just give me a minute to rest. Get your gear and come back for me.”

  Simon cast a quick glance at the front door and nodded. “Don’t move.”

  He took the stairs two at a time, grabbed his cell phone and the duffel bag he hadn’t even had a chance to unpack yet. Then he heard the front door shut.

  Had Kesel found them already?

  Simon dropped the bag and hit the top of the stairs with his gun drawn.

  Jackson was gone.

  “Shit.” He ran down the stairs and looked out the sidelight in time to see Jackson swerve down the street in the Volvo. Kesel had spotted him and was already running back to his tan sedan to give chase.

  Simon turned and looked at the envelope Jackson had left by the stairs. He checked inside. Sure enough, everything was there—Jackson’s cell phone, the photo, and the pouch with the crystal. Simon considered tossing them all in the trash and forgetting any of this had ever happened.

  For a long time, he stood there trying to come up with a good reason not to get involved. There were plenty—Kesel, death, dismemberment. None of them helped to wipe the image of Celina out of his mind. Jackson might be a bastard, but whether or not Kesel caught up with him, he was a dead man. He’d just spent his last bit of strength giving Simon a head start.

  Because Kesel would be back.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Jillian loved the Linden Museum at night, after all the guests had left and the small staff had shuffled out. By 8:00 p.m. on a Friday night, the place was empt
y and all hers. It was one of the benefits of being the head curator in a small private museum in Harlem. She could be alone with some of the finest objects that history had to offer.

  Her heels clicked over the marble tiles as she made her way through the cases, pedestals, and enclosures. Long shadows prostrated themselves across the floors of every room as if paying silent homage to the treasures within.

  She slowed in front of the eighteenth-century Chinese jewelry exhibit that opened last month. She had personally laid it out in careful detail, every tiny piece meticulously arranged to make the most of the modest collection she’d found packed away in crates in the basement. The research and signage alone had taken weeks. Finally, the jewels had their chance to shine.

  In the six months since she had started working here, she’d uncovered many such neglected treasures in storage. After more long weekends and late nights than she wanted to think about, she’d unearthed and inventoried every piece of the vast collection accumulated over seven generations of the Linden family.

  She passed the sixteenth-century European rapier collection she had just restored. The metal edges looked as deadly now as they had been three hundred years ago. It always amazed her how beautiful even an instrument of grizzly violence could be when laced with history.

  She glanced at each glass enclosure with satisfaction as she passed beneath gracefully arched doorways. If she were still at the Met, she’d never have had the opportunity to work with so many different kinds of artifacts. Everyone thought she was crazy to leave the security and prestige of such an excellent museum, but she had her reasons.

  And here’s one of them, she thought as she entered her favorite room, the sculpture chamber that housed the museum’s single most valuable artifact.

  Sitting center stage, the white marble of Nymph and Angel, by the French sculptor Emil Crozalles, gleamed under recessed lighting. Unabashedly naked and intimately tangled in spontaneous celebration, the couple had an unbridled joy that shone through their amorous embrace. Each piece the master sculptor created was playful and full of motion, but this one was special to her for a whole other reason.

  She glanced around to make sure she was alone. Then silence descended over her as she concentrated on the marble lines. Slowly, a vision appeared as if through rippled glass—hands chipping, rubbing, and caressing the marble with a lover’s touch. Then the face of the young sculptor, his hair white from dust, his expression feverish with excitement. The hazy scene filled her vision, blocking out the present as it stole into the past.