Twisted Taste

by Michelle Dayton

  But then the delivery girl waved up to the guys on the third floor and walked into the apartment, and he felt relieved and furious at the same time. He knew that wave and he knew that walk. He was attracted to the girl in the oversized baseball cap because it was Jess.

  “Adam, tell me,” she insisted. “How did you know I was here?”

  He relented. “I felt your eyes on me when I came home from work,” he said. “I knew someone was watching. I pretended to go to dinner but then I came back and saw you in the doorway.”

  He wanted to stroke her face and brush his knuckles against her obscenely full eyelashes until she smiled, but didn’t know if it was a good idea to touch her with the spark of temper still in place. It might easily transform into another kind of passion. “We need to work on your posture and mannerisms, Blondie. You might be wearing the clothes of an anonymous pizza girl, but your body language is still all Jess.”

  She huffed and tightened her lips—her customary response when she didn’t do something perfectly the first time. Patience, he thought fondly, was not her strong suit.

  Her brow furrowed. “Since I’m here now anyway, can you tell me about the job?”

  He sighed. “You know how I’m always telling you the setup is important? If you can, you establish yourself in the area before the target; it moves you lower on any potential list of suspects. Well, I knew that Stacey Jenkinson would be back at the rehab center one of these months, so I signed on as a contractor with the company that washes the windows at the facility. They know me as a guy who only works every other Wednesday.”

  He held up the diamond again. It caught the faint twilight from the dusty window and projected tiny prism rainbows on the wall. “She’s a beauty,” he said. “But I’ve taken a lot of red eye flights and washed a lot of windows for her in the past eight months.”

  She smiled a little. “I was just thinking earlier that being a jewel thief isn’t how they show it in the movies.”

  Yeah, he’d been trying to drill that into her head for the last month. Sure, there were disguises and lies and travel, but there was also endless waiting and researching and occasional manual labor. “Sure isn’t,” he said. “It’s just another kind of job.” A very lucrative job, though. After he cleared the 30% for his fence and subtracted his expenses, this endeavor would bring in just over half a million dollars. Not at all bad for an eight month part-time job.

  She looked at the floor and blew air out of her nostrils. “On a scale of one to ten, how mad at me are you?”

  “Eleven when I first walked in. Six now.”

  She cocked her head and raised an eyebrow. “Would that number go down if we went to get Indian food and ice cream together?”

  “We can’t, Jess.” He struggled to keep the exasperation out of his voice. “I’m still in the middle of a job here. There are video cameras everywhere. You know that better than anyone. If I become a suspect, which is a good possibility since I won’t be showing up for work in two weeks—and then you and I go on a little date tonight and we’re captured on some gas station surveillance tape—you’re implicated too. Sweetheart, you’ve always got to—”

  “Think about the long game,” she chanted. “I know. I’ve heard you. You’re right.” But her mouth turned down at the corners.

  Shit. His anger was fading at record speed. He hated to see her so discouraged. Hell, he’d love to take her on a real Nashville date. Or any date. That was one thing about their unusual relationship; they didn’t get to do too many usual things.

  “I’ll go,” she said. “I’ll fly back to Chicago tonight and meet you in San Francisco tomorrow as planned. One question first, though. You were going to dinner for less than an hour in a not-great neighborhood. Why did you carry the diamond on you instead of hiding it somewhere here? Why not beef up security on your apartment and leave the diamond in a safe or something? In these surroundings, isn’t it riskier to carry it around with you?”

  Christ, he dug this woman. She was angry, sad, annoyed—and still trying to learn. He finally gave into the urge to touch her. He raised his hand to her chin, traced the high angle of her cheekbone. “You never know when you might have to run,” he said. “What if it wasn’t you watching me tonight? What if it was a cop? Once I realized I was being watched, I could have taken off—with the diamond.”

  On its own, his hand trailed from her face, down her throat, and cupped the nape of her neck. “If you can do it easily, you carry the take.”

  “Carry the take,” she repeated, nodding adorably. “Got it.”

  His heart clenched in his chest, timed impeccably to the twist of lust felt everywhere else. Fuck, she killed him. Before he could think better of it, he knocked the silly hat off her head and yanked her to him for a long, hard kiss. After a tiny, surprised gasp, she opened her mouth and moved her lips furiously against his, a moan in the back of her throat. She smelled like tomato sauce and tasted like peppermint tea, and he would have taken her against the refrigerator with her legs around his waist in thirty seconds if a squad car hadn’t driven by with its siren screaming.

  She broke away, trembling and giggling. “I better go.”

  Adam thought about walking her out, but a glance down at his jeans told him he’d be better off waiting a few minutes before going out in even semi-public. He grabbed her hat off the floor and pressed it into her hands. “Return the pizza clothes, get back on a plane and destroy your current ID.”

  She sniffed up at him. “Shoot. I kinda liked this one.” Then she gave a philosophical shrug. “Oh well. So long, Mary Allen Wilkes.”

  He stifled a grin. Jess had decided to follow his lead when it came to aliases. Since his own name was Adam Patrick Henry, he liked to create IDs with the names of famous revolutionaries. The night he met Jess he was “Michael Collins.” An IT geek to the core, Jess had decided her aliases would be based on women in computing. From her enthusiastic lecturing, he happened to know that Mary Allen Wilkes, in 1965, was the first person to use a computer in a private home and the first developer of an operating system for the first minicomputer.

  “Yes,” he said firmly. “Fly as Mary home, then she’s gone for good. For God’s sake, follow the plan for tomorrow.”

  She gave him a mocking salute and then a sassy wink. “Yeah, yeah. Relax, gorgeous. I know what I’m doing.”

  He heard her footsteps bouncing down the stairs and sighed. His lovely new partner was a loose cannon.

  Chapter Two

  They made it all the way to the rental car before Jess burst out laughing. “Oh my God,” she sputtered. “You look like a Ken doll. A trust fund baby who doesn’t know that he aged into his thirties.”

  He grinned at her through five-hundred-dollar sunglasses and under a mop of carefully tousled blond hair. “You wound me, love,” he said in an impeccable Australian accent.

  “Don’t start that before we get there,” she said dryly. “I already almost can’t look at you.”

  “Sorry,” he said in his normal voice. “But I was using this cover on Todd before I even met you. I didn’t know I’d get involved with a woman who hated playboys from down under.”

  Jess faked a gag and shuddered. “Just don’t ever put on a disguise with a man-bun,” she warned. “I can only handle so much.” She pulled the seat belt across her body and grabbed a bottle of water from her bag. Instead of traveling in her disguise, she’d chosen to wear baggy sweats and a ball cap that completely covered her long dark hair and obscured most of her face. “How long a drive is it to Sonoma?”

  Adam put the car in drive and followed the signs leading to Highway 101. “If we get lucky with traffic, just over an hour.”

  “Perfect,” she said, stifling a yawn. He felt a pang of sympathy. Jess had tired eyes. She must have arrived back in Chicago late at night only to get on an early flight to San Francisco. She’d
probably had just enough time to get back to her apartment and grab her bags and equipment before heading back to the airport.

  At least she seemed to be in high spirits. She pulled out her laptop. “Plenty of time to go over everything again.”

  Jess started reviewing her notes, but immediately became distracted by the sights of San Francisco. Adam watched out of the corner of his eye as she oohed and aahed over the Painted Ladies and trolley cars. “I thought you’d been here before.”

  She flushed. “Just twice. Once for a college golf tournament, once for a work conference. I didn’t get a chance to do much sightseeing either time.”

  He smiled. Jess was always so sure of herself that he forgot she hadn’t been afforded the chance to travel widely. Growing up as one of four kids to a single dad, her childhood trips were limited to road trips to cabins in Wisconsin. As an adult, she’d been a workaholic, her schedule rarely allowing the time for vacation. “Maybe we should stick around a few days next week. You can get to know the city a little.”

  He took a left, navigating the streets with ease. The Golden Gate Bridge loomed in front of them and Jess squeaked in delight. As they drove over the bridge, she looked out her window and gaped at the water and Alcatraz Island. “Wow,” she breathed. Adam rolled down his window and inhaled the cool fresh air. Jess was right; it was absolutely beautiful. He’d been out there so many times he didn’t see it anymore. Which was a damn shame. Thank God he’d found Jess. He hadn’t even realized how jaded and faded he was becoming until she lit the spark in him, made him see the world again.

  Once they passed Sausalito, Jess reopened her laptop, her brow furrowed as she reviewed the pictures and specs on the world’s most secure safes. The computer bounced on her lap but it never disturbed her focus.

  Adam couldn’t even imagine reading off a computer screen in the car. He shook his head. “If I tried that, I’d throw up.”

  She raised an incredulous eyebrow. “You get car sick?”

  And how. “Any kind of motion sickness, really,” he admitted. “I have to take Dramamine before I get on boats, I don’t like to sit backwards on trains.”

  She grinned at him, biting her lip. “That’s really funny.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I think of you as a sort of Superman,” she admitted.

  He snorted. “Only if Superman is deathly afraid of turbulence.”

  They both laughed. He reached over and squeezed her hand. “Sometimes I forget we haven’t known each other that long.”

  Jess squeezed back and then brought his hand to her lips to press a soft kiss on his palm. “Me too. I feel so close to you that it’s a little weird how much we still don’t know about one other.”

  This long weekend would be a start to changing that. In Adam’s limited experience with partners, he knew that nothing broke down barriers faster than teaming up undercover.

  “You really seem to know your way around here,” she commented.

  “Lot of rich people in California. Lots of jewels.” He shrugged. “I’ve worked in this state quite a bit in the last several years.”

  She squeezed his hand. “Only work?” Her voice was too casual. “No trips with girlfriends?”

  He took his eyes off the road for a moment to glance over, but her face was turned to look out the window. Another thing they hadn’t done yet—talk about exes. Not that he’d even had any exes of note. “Nope,” he said. “No trips with girlfriends.”

  He debated asking her about trips with ex-boyfriends, but hell, he didn’t really want to know. He felt way too possessive about Jess as it was. He didn’t need to get all Neanderthal if she talked about a vacation with some dude she dated before he even met her.

  Luckily, Jess seemed willing to drop the topic too. Back on her laptop, she closed her file on safes and opened a photo of the Red Scarlet. “I have to admit, this necklace is amazing. I’m not much of a jewelry girl, but this one is wow.”

  “Agreed,” he said, briefly resting his eyes on the photo. The Red Scarlet was a one-of-a-kind stunner. It featured twenty-six Pigeon Blood Burmese rubies, varying from 1.27 to 5.38 carats. Each of the rubies was surrounded by a cluster of four marquise—and pear-shaped diamonds. The stones were set in platinum and white gold. Even more impressive than the sum of its parts, the Red Scarlet caught the eye because of its floral design. The jewel clusters looked like red and white flowers. When worn, it was supposed to look like a sparkling lei. Adam couldn’t be sure if it actually did. It had been privately owned for years and he’d never seen it on a woman’s neck.

  The Red Scarlet had a lot of admirers. Hundreds of knockoffs had been designed over the years, and it was on a lot of “Most Expensive” jewelry articles and websites. At first, the fame of the necklace was a huge turn-off for him. Because it was so well-known, it couldn’t be fenced on the normal market. In these kinds of cases, a buyer needed to be found before the theft or it wasn’t worth the risk. But a year ago, one of his regular fences let him know that he had a very interested buyer if the Red Scarlet ever became, ahem, available.

  So, Adam had gone into Step Three of his so-successful-it-should-be-patented thieving process: researching the target to get a sense of the person. In this case, that meant befriending Todd Fielding.

  The Fieldings had owned vineyards in Sonoma for decades and had been a name in the viniculture business almost as long—but Todd had raised himself to near-celebrity status in the last ten years, due to his flamboyant personality, love of the press and a decision to produce obscenely expensive Cabernets.

  One of his most outlandish stunts had been to announce his acquisition of the Red Scarlet after procuring it at auction four years ago. After dropping over five million dollars to possess it, the very single Todd announced to the press that someday the Scarlet would become the property of his wife.

  Adam didn’t know if Todd intended to throw himself in the path of every gold digger who read celebrity gossip, but over the next couple of years he’d never been photographed with the same woman twice.

  Adam had met Todd personally three times now, but had been a little frustrated in determining the nature of Todd’s true character. He had a huge personality—half Texas cowboy (not that he’d ever lived in Texas), half reality TV star. He loved to be the center of attention and he loved to talk. In Adam’s opinion (and the opinion of many of his more reserved Sonoma neighbors), Todd came across as a loudmouthed buffoon.

  But Adam couldn’t ignore the feeling in his gut that the persona might be just that. That the real Todd might actually be a decent guy who’d learned the unfortunate truth of the world: forceful, talkative idiots often got ahead more than any other sort of individual.

  Adam had forged his acquaintance with Todd by purchasing tickets to a few of his pricey wine dinners. Adam’s cover was as a silly-rich Australian trust fund baby who was toying with the idea of “getting into wine.” During the dinners, he talked constantly to his captive audience, often dropping uneducated, semi-shocking comments on all sorts of controversial topics. Religion, world politics, women’s reproductive rights—no topic was out-of-bounds for his boorish pontificating.

  To say it was off-putting was the understatement of the year.

  But Adam’s instincts told him that Todd was just putting on a show. In their one-on-one interactions, Todd was more measured. He still talked passionately, but about wine and art—two things he truly knew a lot about. From digging into his finances, Adam knew Todd also gave tremendously to charity. Maybe it was just for tax breaks or some other sort of bragging rights, but if not, there was no way Adam was going to steal from the largest donator to homeless shelters in all of Northern California.

  He couldn’t wait to get Jess’s read.

  It would also be interesting to meet the woman who’d convinced Todd to settle down. Apparently, he’d met the beautiful H
elen during his last trip to Tokyo. After a life-changing evening, he’d convinced her to abandon her plans and travel with him. Whipping through a whirlwind romance, he’d proposed just three months after they met.

  Right now, Adam and Jess were headed to their engagement party extravaganza. Taking advantage of the long Labor Day weekend, Todd and Helen had planned a party to end all parties. They had an event scheduled for each day and had invited hundreds of guests. Tonight, Thursday evening, was a Welcome Party Barbecue, although Adam sincerely doubted there would be any hot dogs or flip flops. Friday and Saturday afternoon, the guests would be treated to personal tours of the winery and vineyards. Saturday night was the official engagement shindig, a big fancy party. On Sunday was an overnight spa getaway for the ladies and golf for the gents. Jess had turned up her nose at this. She’d much prefer to play golf than get a facial.

  He wasn’t exactly sure how long they’d stay. Generally, the nature of his business was to get in and get out quickly in order to reduce any impressions on people. But he didn’t think they needed to rush through this reconnaissance stage. He’d already become a casual friend of Todd’s, and they weren’t stealing anything this weekend. Maybe they could actually treat it as a working vacation.

  He’d never done one of those before. He smiled at the thought of drinking wine and strolling through the vineyards with Jess. It would be perfectly in line with their current covers. Adam’s cover, Chase Kelly, Australian playboy, was known to Todd to be somewhat of a womanizer. Jess would be posing as a casual new girlfriend. So it would make perfect sense for them to sneak off on romantic interludes...

  Yes, he decided, with another sideways look at Jess. This could be good.

  Chapter Three

  “Holy wow.” Jess’s face remained impassive as she overlooked the scene of Todd and Helen’s opening “barbecue,” but on the inside her eyes were wide and her mouth was hanging open. Adam had warned her about Todd’s excessive tendencies, and he hadn’t been joking.