Flirting With Danger

by Suzanne Enoch

  With a quick grin, she shook her head. As if he would. “No. But I’m wondering if someone had that in mind. The real one isn’t here, but that might explain why the fake is.”

  “So framing you was just convenient? ‘Oops, I forgot to make the switch?’ That puts the reason for the bomb back into question again.”

  “Yep. And how about this?” she countered, shuffling the photos again. “Why make a good-quality fake if you’re just going to blow it up?”

  “You don’t,” he said slowly. “My estate gets recompensed the same amount whether the thing is stolen or lost or destroyed.”

  Rick stood. She thought he meant to pace, as she did when she was trying to decipher a particularly complicated knot, but instead he went to the phone and dialed. She made herself sit still, trusting him not to do something that would endanger them—or her freedom.

  “Kate? Hi, it’s Rick. Is Tom in?”

  Sam rolled her eyes. Even if she didn’t half suspect him, she had to admit that she liked antagonizing Donner. Besides being fun, it might piss him off enough to get him to make a mistake.

  “Tom. Who the devil does my payroll? No, not mine personally. The payroll for the estate. I need to know who’s been here over the past…three weeks, say.”

  Sitting forward, Samantha slid the photos back into their file. “You might also check outside services who have the same person here on a regular basis.”

  “Right. Tom, no, you don’t need to bring it by in person. Just fax it to me. But I need it today, so you’ll have to go into the office. And I also want a list of outside services personnel who are regularly assigned here.” He paused again, listening, his stance going from alert to aggressive. “None of your bloody business.”

  “He’s talking about me, right?”

  “Hush.” He turned his back on her, striding to the veranda door with phone in hand. “All right, all right, yes—something new’s come up. Be here at ten tomorrow morning with a trial attorney—Macon, maybe—somebody who takes client-attorney privilege seriously.”

  As he punched the phone off, he walked back to the couch. “Don’t argue,” he said, before she could open her mouth. “I believe in being prepared for any contingency. If Castillo or somebody gets hold of this”—and he gestured at the tablet—“you are going to be in serious trouble. Fake or not, I don’t want you caught with it.”

  “That was probably the thinking of whoever dumped it on me. Do you want me to hide it somewhere?”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Rick, with all due respect, you’re a smart guy, but you don’t have some of my talents. I know how to hide things. I’m in this shit deeper than you are, and I’d just as soon you not end up in jail because I asked you for help.”

  “Bit late for that, my dear,” he said, brushing hair back over her shoulder. “As we say in Britain, in for a penny, in for a pound.”

  God, just the touch of his hand on her hair made her all shivery. On impulse she leaned over and kissed him. Rick wrapped an arm around her shoulder, pulling her in closer and deepening the embrace of their mouths. As before when he began touching her like that, her mind shut down. It was so tempting, just to sink into him, to let everything go away. Everything but pleasure and heat and Richard Addison. It would work for a while, until someone decided to drop the gun that had killed Etienne into her purse or something.

  She pulled back, but he pursued her, sliding her down onto her back with her head resting against the duffel bag. A warm hand slid up under her shirt, cupping her breast.

  “Rick, stop,” she protested, in a choked-off moan of pleasure.

  “I want you,” he murmured, ducking his face into her neck.

  “Good God.” Shuddering, she shoved at him. “We fucked all night. Stop distracting me,” she muttered, pulling back through his arms.

  “I think that’s a compliment.”

  “I want to see the videos for last night and this morning, Rick.”

  “Later.”

  “Whoever this is, he’s been a step ahead of us all the way,” she said, putting a hand over his sensuous mouth when he would have argued with her. “I want to at least pull even. Ahead would be nice, too, don’t you think?”

  With a curse, he blew out his breath and sat up again. “All right. We’ll look at the video.” He looked over at the tablet. “And where do you recommend we put this? Under the bed?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  After she wrapped it back in its protective cloth, she dumped out her knapsack, folded a shirt around the bundle, and slid it in. “There. That’ll do until we get it out of your room and somewhere safer.”

  Rick, though, was toeing through her knapsack refuse. He bent and picked up a broken computer board. “And this is?”

  “Part of my home computer. I heard the police coming, and I didn’t want them accessing the system.”

  He gazed at her, his expression part lustful and part worried. “We are seriously going to consider another line of work for you when this is over with,” he murmured.

  At the moment, it almost sounded like a good idea.

  Fifteen

  Sunday, 11:54 a.m.

  Ronald Clark had been moved to the day shift after the break-in, and he was seated in his chair before the bank of video monitors and computers when Richard led Samantha into the security room.

  “Mister Addison,” the guard said, standing. The Adam’s apple bobbed above his tie, and his thinning blond hair was slicked back in a distinctly unflattering style. A cop wannabe, she decided immediately, who probably couldn’t figure out why he kept failing the psych profile part of the entrance exam.

  “Clark. Miss Jellicoe and I would like to review the tapes for the garage, starting at about nine last night and up through ten this morning.”

  “And for the front drive at the same time,” Samantha added.

  Clark sat again. “Um, okay. I’ll put ’em up on those screens over there. It’ll take me a minute.”

  “What time did you start your shift this morning, Clark?” Samantha pursued, brushing a hand against Richard’s arm as she passed him.

  She intoxicated him just by being in the room. And she’d accused him of being too distracting. Since she’d dropped into his office to ask for his help, she’d become his obsession. To date he’d canceled three meetings, four conference calls, and a flight to Miami. The cost of his neglect could potentially come to millions, but a few one way or the other didn’t matter all that much. It seemed more important that when Samantha was around his heart raced, his pulse heated, and life became more…alive. The glimpses of the clever, funny woman beneath the cool, professional facade fascinated him.

  “I came in at six,” Clark answered, looking from his employer to Samantha. “Louie Mourson had the night shift. Why?”

  “No reason,” Richard answered, following Samantha to the monitors in the corner.

  The look she aimed at him said otherwise, but he wasn’t about to accuse people who worked for him without a damned good reason. She gripped his shoulder, going up on her toes to reach his ear. “He was here both times,” she whispered. “Don’t be so quick to dismiss coincidence.”

  “I dismissed it where you’re concerned,” he returned in the same soft voice.

  Samantha grimaced. “Yeah, well, you were here both times, too.”

  The monitor flickered to life. They were looking at a video of the garage taken from the southeast corner, giving the camera a view of both the wide front doors and the smaller door leading to the house. Unlike the outdoor cameras this one was fixed, rather than rotating back and forth.

  Samantha nodded her approval. “That’s good placement,” she said, “except you don’t have a redundant camera. If someone figures out how to get past this one, they’re in.”

  “Not everybody is an expert at electronics and burglary,” he muttered, keeping his voice low so Clark couldn’t overhear.

  “Anybody who could get this far into the estate without
being detected would be an expert,” she shot back at him huffily.

  “Could you get in and out of there without anyone knowing?”

  “Oh, they’d know I’d been there, but not until after I stole that hot blue Bentley Continental GT and left again.”

  So she liked the Bentley. Next time they went somewhere together, he’d let her drive. Of course she apparently didn’t have a driver’s license, but that seemed the least of their worries. “Can we speed up the tape from here?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “Yep. Just use the keyboard there under the desk. It’s all set, Mr. Addison.”

  From the meter in the corner of the screen, it was three minutes after nine o’clock, and the Mercedes hadn’t yet been returned to the garage. Samantha pulled out the keyboard and tapped a key, and the tape glided into high speed. After about forty-five minutes, the car zoomed into view, taking its place among the others.

  Samantha backed the tape up again to watch the entry at regular speed. Ben Hinnock drove the SLK into its spot, got out, wiped a smudge off the windshield, and left through the wide doors, which closed behind him. At eleven the preprogrammed lights dimmed, leaving the garage in heavy shadows.

  “That’s stupid,” she muttered, keying the tape into high speed again. “Like the cars need dark so they can sleep or something.”

  “How can you see anything with the tape going that fast?”

  “Just watch the trunk. That’s all we need to see, unless you want to sit here for thirteen hours.”

  “Okay. But what do you suggest we do if we find something, Samantha?”

  “If we find something, then we show it to Castillo, say we looked in my bag because of it, and ‘wow, look what we found.’”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “You’re frightening.”

  She kept her eyes on the screen, but her lips twitched in a fleeting smile. “You scare the hell out of me, too.”

  Richard leaned his hip against the table, settling in for a long, nonblinking surveillance. “We should have had breakfast first. Or at least coffee.”

  “Soda. Coffee’s for amateurs.”

  “Did I mention that you’re very stra—”

  “Whoa.” Moving fast, Samantha froze the tape. “Did you see that?”

  Richard stiffened. “What? Nothing moved.”

  “No, not that. The time.” She backed the tape up, then sent it forward again at normal speed. At seven-fifteen the tape bumped and jumped to seven-nineteen. Nothing else in the picture changed. “Four minutes.”

  “That’s what happened with the secure room’s video the night of the robbery.” He looked at her. “How easy is that to do?”

  Samantha shrugged. “If you know the system, it’s fairly simple. If you’re sure it’s not our friend Clark,” she whispered, gesturing, “then it was done somewhere between here and there, and done so that it didn’t set off any alarms.”

  “Wouldn’t Clark see that the screen was blank?”

  “The camera picture might have looked normal, and it just wasn’t recording. Or the image might just freeze, or something.” She swiveled in her chair. “Clark, what time do you take your morning break?”

  The guard ran a hand across his balding pate. “I’ve been going up to the kitchen for coffee at about seven-fifteen, but just for five minutes or so. Then I usually don’t take another break until nine-thirty.”

  “You’re pretty consistent, then?”

  “Well, yeah. Hans said he’d shoot me if I tried to make my own coffee in there, and he doesn’t have the first pot ready until after seven, most mornings.”

  “Hans is very protective about the reputation of his coffee,” Richard supplied with a slight smile. “He won an award for it, once.”

  “Too bad I don’t drink it, then.”

  She pushed the tape into fast-forward again, but nothing moved until after ten o’clock, when the two of them strolled into the garage, hand in hand and wearing their dressing robes. Richard watched as they flirted in fast motion, noting with a deep rush of satisfaction the way she gazed at him when he wasn’t looking. Castillo came into the picture as they were both bent over the boot, and thankfully nothing of the tablet showed in the video.

  Sam stopped the playback. “Just in case, we should look at the front drive video, too,” she said. “Maybe whoever it was walked by on their way in or out.”

  “Except that you don’t think whoever it was has been going in and out,” he reminded her. “They’ve been here all along.”

  “It’s looking more and more like somebody who knows the household routine and has a good working knowledge of the security system.”

  “The part I still don’t get is the bomb,” Richard said, taking her hand as she rose. Perhaps it was sappy, but he felt the need to touch her every few minutes, to make certain she was still there, and to show whoever might be watching, himself included, that she belonged to him—whether she realized it yet or not.

  “May I please have some breakfast? Or it’s brunch now, I guess,” she asked in an exaggerated pleading voice as they returned to the hallway. “I’ll think better when I’m not starving.”

  “On my veranda,” he agreed.

  “On my veranda,” she countered. “I can see the front drive from there.”

  He couldn’t blame her for being paranoid. If she hadn’t been good at what she did, she’d be dead. “I’ll put in an order with Hans and check my office to see if Donner’s sent me that fax yet.”

  She nodded and would have headed up the stairs, except that he took her wrist and turned her back to face him. “What?” she asked.

  “I can’t seem to get enough of you,” he muttered, and touched his mouth to hers again.

  “You’re not so bad yourself, for a rich-guy Brit,” she replied a little breathlessly. “Mind if I stop off in your room for my stuff?”

  Her stuff—which would include the fake tablet. “Samantha. You—”

  “I don’t want that thing found in your private rooms, regardless,” she said in a tone that surprised him with its seriousness. “I won’t do anything with it until you get there.”

  Richard knew better than to fight a battle he couldn’t possibly win. “All right. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

  She smiled a little at him. “I’m not going anywhere. Partners, remember?”

  He remembered. He just hoped she did.

  Rick had missed the main difficulty in all this mess, Samantha mused as she strolled toward his private rooms. Him. She made her lifestyle an excuse for not dating much, though she had to admit that most men she ran across seemed rather…dull. When their most exciting activity was Pilates, they really couldn’t compete with her evenings. Rick Addison could compete, and in spades. And he intoxicated her. She’d known him for less than a week, and already she felt like an addict. How would she make herself leave at the end of this?

  “Miss Jellicoe.”

  With a start, Samantha turned around. The prissy Italian acquisitions manager, his curling black hair styled to perfection, strode up to her. “Partino?”

  “Si. I just wanted to welcome you to the company.”

  She frowned. “Beg pardon?”

  “I saw the newspaper this morning. Rick has hired you for art security.”

  “Oh, that. Yes, just until we get this mess figured out.”

  “I made some calls. You work for the Norton. You are an expert in art and antiquities.”

  He almost made it sound like an accusation, so she smiled. Charm time. “I’m not trying to take your job or anything. I’m here for security, and that’s it. And just temporarily.”

  Partino smiled brightly back at her, though she couldn’t help noticing that the expression didn’t touch his dark eyes. “Of course. That’s just as well, anyway.”

  “And why is that?”

  His smile deepened. “You are not the first employee to try sleeping with the boss, Miss Jellicoe. None of them still work here.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “I th
ink that’s more my business than yours.”

  He nodded. “Yes. You understand, we must all look out for our best interests.”

  “Oh, I understand that.”

  “Good day, then.” With a bow, he turned on his heel.

  She shrugged off the slightly slimy feeling the odd little man left behind. He probably wasn’t feeling quite his best, anyway. An acquisitions manager who allowed art objects to get stolen couldn’t feel very secure about his own continued employment.

  At the same time, as far as she knew it was the first time anything had gone missing from the property—a pretty good track record, considering the quality of the stuff Rick collected. And Partino had worked for Rick for a good ten years. What happened to the little Italian wasn’t any of her business, though if she’d been the one to take the tablet, she supposed it would be her fault if he were fired. Too weird.

  Her room and Rick’s were in opposite wings of the house, and she was out of breath by the time she’d hauled her knapsack, duffel, and kit down what felt like a mile of hallways and galleries. Yeesh. She was going to have to hit the gym—though if she and Rick continued exercising as they had last night, that would probably take care of her daily workout.

  She smiled as she shouldered open her suite door and dragged the duffel inside. If they continued as they had last night, she’d be dead in a week. What a way to go, though.

  The knapsack would have to stay packed until Rick came in, since she remained determined not to touch the tablet outside of his presence. She had more clean underwear and clothes in the duffel, though, and nice as the things were that Rick provided, she felt more…independent in her own clothes.

  Hefting the heavy duffel again, she dragged it to the bedroom. In the entryway something pressed against her thigh, and she instinctively backed away an inch.

  It was too late. With a faint pop the safety pin at the end of a wire pulled out of the grenade taped to the inside bedroom wall. Gasping, she slammed her hand around, just catching the lever against the grenade as it started to spring away.