An Angel in Stone

by Peggy Nicholson

  The SUV sideswiped a van—screeched and scraped along the car behind it, then crunched to a glass-tinkling halt. Its far door slammed open and the driver bolted west.

  Ripping his mask off, Clinton drew down on the runner, but Ten-ton dropped to his knees—which yanked on the tails of the tie the gunman had wrapped around his forearm. He staggered; the shot struck sparks off a brownstone, half a block away.

  “Son of a bitch, you want me to shoot you?” Clinton jammed the bore of his pistol in the player’s ear. “Get up!”

  “I’ve had enough, thanks,” the linebacker said in a soothing baritone. “So how ’bout we all just settle down and take a deep breath?”

  “How ’bout I blow your brains out? On your feet! NOW!”

  Peering around the front end of a Toyota, Cade lined up his sight. Okay, he could cap Clinton from here, but should he? If the creep squeezed his trigger as he died—Better to draw the heat instead, Cade decided. He shaved a bullet past Clinton’s cheek. “Drop your gun, bozo!”

  A hail of bullets slammed into the Toyota. Cade retreated to the curb, then crab-walked along the car. A shot punched through its back window, then the side glass above his head. The guy packed a fifteen-round automatic as well as a temper!

  “I’m doing this why?” Cade asked the stars above, then startled as a movement down the street drew his gaze. A horse, turning the far corner. Damned if Lady Godiva hadn’t ridden clear around the block! And here she came, riding hell-for-leather down the middle of the road. Distract him now!

  He popped up, bounced a shot off the pavement at Clinton’s feet, then dived for the next car under withering fire. He popped up again, squeezed the trigger, and—

  And—dammit all—Clinton had seen him try. So much for bluffing. Cade threw the gun at his head.

  Clinton dodged it, then straightened with an ugly grin. “All out, hero? Well, ain’t that a pity, ’cause I sure saved one for you!”

  Sirens whooped, blue lights flashed down at the Columbus Ave. end of the block. Finally, somebody had clued in the cops.

  Too late. Clinton tossed the ends of his hostage’s tie aside. He took loving aim on Cade, savoring the moment—then paused. His grin faded to frustration. “I really am gonna shoot you.”

  “Got that. You want me to cry about it?” Hold his gaze. Hold him while the hoofbeats hammered louder and louder, or was that Cade’s own heart?

  “Suit yourself. You can always cry aft—” Clinton spun. Froze before the oncoming apparition: flash of long bare legs and red silk, horse big as a truck and growing bigger by the second. His jaw dropped, his gun drooped from nerveless fingers.

  He’d let go of Trenton, so maybe she didn’t need her knife. Jamming it back in its sheath, Raine braced her weight in her right stirrup as she leaned down. Reached. Her target’s eyes grew wide…wider…his mouth a rounding O of horror. Just love a man with a tie! She grabbed it at the knot—“Ooof!”—and kept on riding.

  “Aaaaagh! Urrkkk!” He tripped—somehow found his feet as she yanked him up—to bound, stumbling and shrieking, alongside the thundering bay.

  Thirty feet down the block, she flung him to the pavement and galloped on.

  “Hey, cowgirl!”

  Once she’d reined her mount to a snorting, curvetting trot, she glanced behind.

  Cade sat midstreet on Clinton’s back. Making himself quite comfortable, it looked like. “Where d’you think you’re going?”

  Sticking around here answering police questions all night would be a total bore. They had plenty of witnesses without her. And Trenton had stumbled to his feet, looking shaken, but fine. She’d call him tomorrow, but as for now—“Got a hot date at midnight, remember?” she called, brushing her tangled hair back from a wicked smile.

  Intent on the downed shooter, a wave of cops stormed past her on either side. Raine walked her horse docilely to the corner and peered uptown. Here came a cab, miraculously with its light on. “Taxi!”

  When it pulled into the curb, she swung down and tied the bay to a lamppost. “I owe you a bushel of apples, sweetie.” She slid in behind the goggle-eyed cabbie. “Brooklyn Bridge, please.”

  Hot date? Oh, yeah, we’ve got a date. Ignoring the shouted questions as New York City’s finest bent over him, Cade stared after the taxi. And if you think make-up sex is fun, try almost-got-shot sex, was the thought dancing round his mind.

  Even if she was the enemy.

  Chapter 5

  “How did Cade know that I love the Brooklyn Bridge?” Raine wondered as she approached its first tower. Or was this simply another sign that their minds marched in step?

  Whenever Raine passed through New York, she walked the bridge. She hadn’t done so yet, this trip. And always before she’d come at dawn or sunset. Now she shivered with anticipation as its massive suspension cables curved upward to either side of the boardwalk. “Don’t look back,” she encouraged herself. “No-ot yet. You can do it.”

  Already she’d walked almost a quarter mile up the gradually rising ramp from street level. She was out over the East River itself—must be at least ten stories up in the air and still climbing. Beyond the bridge’s first tower, Brooklyn was a molten glow on the opposite shore, while Raine could feel Manhattan, looming at her back.

  On the roadway some twenty feet below the pedestrian walk, a car rushed past, fleeing the city. Tires growled on concrete, a radio wailed. A cool glissando of sax and trumpet drifted back on the salty air and Raine shuddered with pleasure. Rubbing the goose bumps on her bare arms, she took a deep breath—and turned. “Sha-zamm!”

  Palisades of light scraped a buttermilk sky—a jagged dazzle of gold and silver, blinking red and strobing white. Diamond rivers of headlights; streaming ruby taillights. While serene in its own beauty, a fat saffron moon smiled above this electric city of neon-crazed cliff dwellers.

  The shout of “Hey! Bike on your right!” brought Raine back to her senses. The rider whizzed past, helmeted head tucked to his handlebars, massive calves pumping. “Damn tourists!”

  “Sorry!” Raine laughed after him.

  On she strolled, swinging occasionally to drift backward like a child leaving the movie theater, shaking her head with incredulous delight. Born and raised in the wide-open West, she’d never make a city girl. Yet at times like this she could see why New Yorkers thought the sun revolved around their own special little island.

  Like the rough granite face of a cathedral, the bridge’s first tower reared into the dark. The boardwalk split and flowed to either side of the central stone column, then rejoined on its far side. Rounding it, Raine almost bumped into a desperately kissing couple.

  Her thighs tightened in reflex. Her nipples brushed against the silk of her dress. Aftermath of adrenaline, she admitted ruefully as she skirted the clinch—that and the knowledge that she should meet Kincade anytime now. “If he could get away from the police,” she muttered to herself. They might keep him half the night.

  But Raine didn’t believe it. He’d come. Something about the man told her that for better or worse he kept his promises. “A fossil of great rarity and interest,” she repeated, her blood surging with the thought. If he really had one to sell, she meant to acquire it!

  Ashaway All wasn’t a nonprofit museum that could throw its money around, but a business, with a business’s constant need to score. But would the attraction she’d felt for Cade survive a half–hour of hard-nosed negotiations? He didn’t look as though he’d be a pushover, when it came to bargaining. She was no cream puff herself, while cutting a deal. “Whatever.” If it came to a choice, rare fossils were in shorter supply than sexy men.

  Yet nobody waited on the boardwalk ahead. “Still time,” Raine comforted herself.

  Beyond the first tower, the view of the East River opened out to either side—a black velvet shawl crinkled with moonlight, spangled with gliding navigation lights. A tug trudged upstream against the monstrous outgoing tide. Nimble as a water bug, an airfoil ferry spun out from a pier be
low Wall Street. It rumbled off toward the outer harbor, trailing a widening wake of creamy foam.

  “Whoa—baby! Check it out!”

  Raine bobbled a stride, then walked grimly on. Up ahead on her right, three young men had balanced their way out one of the iron beams that stretched above the traffic lanes on the deck beneath. This idiot feat took them out to the actual edge of the bridge, where they could look straight down to the water, some hundred and fifty feet below—or jump, if they were so inclined.

  They looked more the type to push somebody else, than to jump. “Hey, bitch! Want some company?”

  “Sure she does! She dressed up just for me!”

  Without a word, Raine walked on, passing the point where their beam intersected the waist-high side rail of the footbridge.

  They weren’t the type to take a hint. Here they came, catcalling and clowning as they wobbled back along the girder with their arms outstretched.

  Not a bicycle cop in sight, nor anybody else. Raine sighed as she stopped to skim her gown up to midthigh. Definitely a side zipper next time.

  Behind her the chorus rose to gleeful hoots—then missed a couple of beats as she unsheathed her knife.

  The heavy silk slithered back to her ankles. Holding the dagger up by its point, Raine turned—and tipped her head inquiringly. You’re sure this is a good idea?

  “Sometimes a warning works,” Trey had told her more than once. “And sometimes it gives away your best advantage—the element of surprise.”

  Holding the stupefied gaze of the leading punk, Raine flipped the knife straight up in the air. Without seeming to watch its whirling rise, she caught it as it spun back to earth. Blade first.

  Her audience stood on the beam, uneasily silent.

  She tossed the knife again—caught it casually. Their size had misled her. They were younger than she’d thought, still in their teens, which if anything, made them more dangerous. Overdosed on testosterone, and probably they’d yet to learn how to shift into reverse. Still, the second one in line was actually shuffling his feet. The third had developed a sudden interest in the cars passing below. Raine gave their leader a confiding smile; it was best not to challenge. You’re prowlers of the night—but so am I. And it’s a big bridge. Who needs trouble?

  She turned and strolled on, her ears tuned for overtaking footsteps. All she heard was a buzz of earnest mutters.

  Then there, up ahead, sauntering to meet her from the Brooklyn shore, came Kincade! Raine laughed aloud. He must have driven over to the far side, where parking was better. She gave the knife a final jaunty flip, sheathed it, then met him at the halfway point.

  He scowled over her shoulder. “Did they bother you?”

  “No more than I could handle.”

  “Ah.” Amusement softened that look of glinting danger. “Then I guess I’ll let ’em live.”

  They turned as one to rest their forearms on the railing, and gaze southeast toward the outer harbor. Miles away, the twinkling spikes and curves of the Verrazano Bridge marked the start of the beckoning ocean.

  “Trenton was all right?” she asked as the sea breeze rippled her hair.

  “Seemed to be,” Cade agreed without turning. “They tried to whisk him off in an ambulance, but he wasn’t having any. By the time I ducked out, he was busy buying your police horse. Claimed he and a couple of teammates own a racing stable in Maryland, and any horse that saves his life, belongs in high clover, not breathing traffic fumes.”

  “And as for you?” Cade laughed under his breath. “Ten-ton said if it takes his last nickel, he’s naming your Carnotaurus ‘Rainy.’”

  “Oh, please!” Raine swung around with a comic groan.

  “And as for me…” Cade’s smile faded to intention.

  Her lips parted in surprise—she turned her head aside as his mouth descended.

  Another guy who couldn’t take a hint. He smelled of bay rum, tasted of champagne. Easy and slow, his kiss teased the quivering corner of her mouth, till she smiled in spite of herself. Warm lips brushed her cheekbone, then trailed deliciously away. “That’s…for saving my neck, there at the end.”

  “After I’d gotten you into the fix,” she reminded him, swearing inwardly at the way her voice had gone all fuzzy—all of her had gone hot and fuzzy. “He was my friend, not yours.”

  “Well, yeah,” Cade allowed with a glimmer of mischief. “But still—”

  She flattened a hand on his chest and locked her elbow, holding off a second demonstration of gratitude. “How about we get to business? What’s this fossil that you want to sell me?”

  “I want to—” Cade’s brows flew together. “Then you didn’t send me—” from an inner pocket of his suit, he fished a familiar white envelope “—this? You said you had a date at midnight. Once I read this, I assumed—”

  Raine shook her head. “I got an invitation, too, delivered at the party.” She’d dropped hers somewhere in all the excitement.

  “Then—” Cade snapped a glance left, then right. No one approached from either direction. “Hmm.”

  He really hadn’t sent it, Raine concluded, noting his wariness. “It’s clear why somebody would offer to sell me a fossil—they do it all the time. But why would someone think you’d be interested in buying bones?”

  “Ever heard of an outfit called SauroStar?” Suddenly Cade’s smile wasn’t all that friendly.

  Raine’s hand twitched toward her mouth, then she fisted it. Too late to wipe that kiss away. “You’re connected to SauroStar?” The company had materialized out of nowhere last year. If it even had a headquarters, so far Trey and Ash hadn’t been able to find it. SauroStar seemed to be simply a Web site backed by a very deep pocket. But it had been competing with Ashaway All in a way that was increasingly disturbing.

  Sure, there were half-a-dozen commercial fossil-collecting and supply houses like her family’s around the world. They vied fiercely for significant discoveries with each other—and also with the staffs of museums and academic teams fielded by the paleontology departments of numerous universities.

  But though feuds did arise from time to time, generally the competition was nothing personal. Advances in science made by a rival were to be applauded, as well as envied; they were comrades in the same exhilarating quest for knowledge. And considering that one commercial firm might dig up the back end of a Stegosaurus—while another found a front—well, in the long run, cooperation simply made sense.

  But SauroStar didn’t seem to be hunting bones, so much as hunting Ashaway bones. At least it was starting to feel that way, the family had agreed in a cross-country conference call only last month. This summer alone they’d lost three licenses to dig on private property out West, productive and profitable quarry sites that the firm had worked for two generations. And oddest of all, once SauroStar outbid them for these collecting rights, it hadn’t bothered to dig. Dog in the manger tactics, Ash had labeled that.

  Trey with his military background had offered a more ominous term. Scorched earth. Where one army burns or steals everything in its path, so the pursuing army can’t survive. “You’re with SauroStar?” she repeated. “We’ve been trying to talk to you guys!” Messages to the company had been met so far with stony silence. The only contact given on the Web site was—she winced as it hit her—“You’re OAKincade@tiac.net?”

  “Yes. And I’m not with SauroStar—I own it.”

  “Well, you’ve got a funny way of doing business, Kincade.”

  “Really?” His amber eyes mocked her. “Up till now, it’s been an amusing hobby. But now that I’ve got time to give it my full attention…”

  Raine bristled. Behind that sardonic smile, he was threatening her. Threatening Ashaway All. But why? And with what—financial ruin? Her family’s firm was the biggest, best-known fossil supply house in the world. He wouldn’t find it easy to knock them off the top of the hill. But, he looked cool, confident, dangerously capable. A man who accomplished his goals.

  “Excuse, please. You a
re Miss Ashaway? And Mr. Kincade?”

  They spun at the softly accented words—to find a slender young woman standing before them. Bundled in a tightly belted trench coat, she hugged a cardboard box to her stomach. A box that was either heavy or precious, judging from the way her gloved fingers gripped it.

  “I’m Kincade.” Offering his hand, Cade smiled warmly. “You have a fossil you’d like to sell me?”

  Hey, not so fast! “And I’m Raine Ashaway of Ashaway All. My company is always in the market for fine fossils.” Stepping up beside Cade, she gave him a subtle hip check, then added in Tagalog, “And what is your name?”

  The girl’s almond eyes narrowed for an instant, then widened as she tossed her head prettily. “That is not my language.”

  And you’re not saying what is, Raine noted. “Sorry. My mistake.” But she wasn’t far off. The girl came from somewhere south of the Philippines. Quite possibly, like Raine’s own sister Dana, she was of mixed race; the southeast Pacific was the crossroads of the world. Well, whatever had gone into this one’s genes, the results were certainly pleasing.

  And clearly she knew it, the way she batted her lashes at Cade when he asked her name. “You…may call me Lia.”

  Yeah, but who are you at home? There was something about her, a certain watchfulness, a certain smugness in the way the corners of her plump little mouth curled, that scratched at Raine’s nerves. Also, what was with those gloves, on a balmy September night? And if her tropic blood was really thin enough to need them, then why choose gloves that had been chopped off at the first knuckles? Pickpocket gloves. Is that what she’s come to do, pick our pockets?

  “Lia, what a pretty name. And how did you find us tonight?” Cade asked smoothly. He’d turned on the charm full blast, but was he as smitten as he appeared—or flattering for his own ends?

  “Oh, that was easy. I learn on the Internet that you both have interest in this sort of thing.” Lia’s fingers caressed the box. “Then I look up your names on LexisNexis to see where I find you.”