“Avy’s busy on another job. They sent me instead. Since the results are the same”—she pulled a familiar mahogany box out of the huge handbag—“we didn’t clarify that I’d be the point person instead.” Gwen set the box on his desk and took a step backward.
“C’mon, Gwen. You knew damn well that I was the CEO.”
“No.” She met his gaze without flinching, and there it was: the triple blink that meant she was annoyed. “I knew that the CEO of Jaworski Labs was our client. That’s all. So at the risk of being rude—”
He laughed. “The Gwen Davies I remember never took any risks. She found herself a man at the first sign of trouble.”
“—at the risk of being rude,” she repeated, “don’t flatter yourself.”
“She was never rude, either. She wasn’t brought up that way.”
Gwen’s soft, full mouth flattened into a thin line. “Things change, Mr. Lawson.”
Mr. Lawson? He nodded. “And they also stay the same.”
She inclined her head. With a small smile, she stepped forward again and flipped open the hinged mahogany box. “I believe this is what you were looking for?”
The gold mask stared up at Quinn, its eyes as empty as Gwen was trying to make hers.
He nodded. “You work for ARTemis.” He said it dubiously, almost mocking the concept. Gwen was some kind of art world Jane Bond? With her total lack of a sense of direction and nonexistent street smarts?
“Yes.” Her gaze might be steady, but he could read the defiance there, no problem.
“Honey, you used to get lost in a mall.”
She nodded. “And you used to be a grease monkey,” she said, eyeing his Rolex, his Hermès tie, his three-hundred-dollar shoes. “I guess you’ve come a long way, baby. Any further questions?”
Nicely done. Even he had to admit she’d scored with that one. “Where did you find the mask?” Quinn asked, suspending his disbelief for the moment.
“In a warehouse on the Miami River.”
Jesus H. Christ. He pressed his fingertips together, hard, under cover of his desk. “Please tell me you didn’t go there alone.”
“Mr. Lawson, how I do my job is none of your concern. ARTemis doesn’t make a policy of sharing details.”
He supposed he deserved that.
“And the thieves?”
“The thieves aren’t my concern, either. We’re recovery agents, not police officers.”
“But you must have some knowledge of these crooks, or you wouldn’t have found the warehouse. . . .”
“I can’t help you. I’m sorry.”
“Isn’t that a little immoral, Gwen?”
There was that small smile again. A little bit sad this time. “Amoral, Mr. Lawson. And again, it’s part of the job.”
He wanted to shout at her not to call him friggin’ “Mr. Lawson” in that cool, snotty way. But he wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. “Part of the job you like?”
She shrugged. “Do you like every aspect of yours?”
Score again. “The Gwen Davies that I knew had very clear ideas of right and wrong. She was neither immoral nor amoral.”
As the words spilled from his mouth he had a quick, unwelcome flashback to a narrow, dark alley in Rio and the living color of an intoxicating Carnevale.
Oceans of alcohol, raucous laughter, and intemperate music that stole taboos and hurled them to the four winds. Wild, fantasy-spurred costumes. Gwen’s silver mask glinting in some form of celestial communication, flashing signals of pleasure and madness to the moon . . . her lovely mouth open to drink everything in . . . him utterly lost to reason between her bare thighs . . . the stone wall scraping his knuckles as his palms supported her naked bottom.
He’d made her come against that wall without even knowing her name.
Amoral? Immoral? Right? Wrong? Did it matter? They’d simply been two kids woven into the sexual tapestry of an exotic, foreign celebration. Drunk on freedom, anonymity, and desire.
He shoved the memories aside, but not soon enough. God damn it, he was hard. So hard it hurt. How fucking ironic that she, of all people, had returned this other mask.
Gwen stepped forward again and leaned over the desk that now trapped him instead of lending him executive power. She was close enough that he could smell her perfume, which was an edgy, citrusy blend, not the sweet floral he remembered. It, like her hair, was different. And she wore smoky, mysterious eye makeup with a lot of mascara, so that her eyes appeared huge.
He liked the fresh-scrubbed nineteen-year-old version of her better, the one who’d had a tiny zit near her nose the last time he’d seen her . . . even though this thirty-four-year-old polished woman was undeniably gorgeous.
“The Gwen Davies that you knew, Mr. Lawson?” she said softly. “She no longer exists.”
And as Quinn absorbed that statement and argued with it mentally, she turned on her heel and walked out of his life just as suddenly as she’d walked back into it.
chapter 4
Gwen held her head high and aimed a smile at the young man who occupied the desk outside Quinn’s big executive office. “Thank you,” she said.
“Have a nice day,” he told her.
A nice day? She almost laughed, except she was shaking under the bravado, and if she let the hysteria escape, she’d probably sound like a helium-inflated squirrel on a bender.
Of all the gin joints . . . No, wait, that would have been his line. What was hers? Play with me again, Sam?
She’d never thought she’d see Quinn Lawson again, after the night she’d packed her bag while he studied late at the Stanford library for the GRE. She still remembered the Yellow Cab that took her away.
Dents testified that the vehicle had been in more than one accident, and the interior smelled of pot and salami. The stuffing poked out of a jagged hole in the vinyl bench seat, and it had seemed a metaphor for her emotions. She’d stared at the crumbly foam all the way to the airport.
The driver, a grizzled man in a soiled Oakland A’s baseball cap, asked casually if she was going on vacation.
Not exactly . . .
Even now she still remembered the words she’d written to Quinn before she folded her good-bye note and left it on the kitchen counter of their rented apartment.
Dear Quinn,
You’ve done the best you could in a bad situation and I love you for it. But given all that’s happened, it’s time that we end this now. I’m leaving because I know that you never will; that your sweet stubborn streak and your endearing sense of what’s right will hold you on a course that’s wrong—for both of us.
I wish you nothing but happiness as you build a better life, Quinn: the life you deserve. I’ll always think of you fondly.
Yours,
Gwen
Cold? Cowardly to leave a note instead of saying good-bye in person? Perhaps. But she’d ruined enough of his life already, and for his sake as well as her own, she needed to make a clean break.
If she’d tried to leave in person, he’d have taken her in his arms, locked her against him, made it impossible for her to go. She had never been able to fight his sexual magnetism.
They’d have ended up in bed. Or up against a wall, which was how they’d gotten into trouble in the first place.
Quinn Lawson, CEO, Jaworski Labs. How ironic that he’d ended up running a pharmaceuticals company, given the chemistry between them.
She put her hands to her flaming face as the recurring dream came back to haunt her. Dear God, she’d had it again this morning before she awoke. . . . Had she conjured Quinn somehow? Pulled him psychically back into her life? Or had he done it to her?
She’d always thought it odd that he hadn’t come after her to have a final confrontation. The fact that he hadn’t didn’t fit his personality. He could be relentless in pursuit of what he wanted—and he’d have wanted closure. The chance to rail at her, the chance to control the final act of their story. Quinn would’ve wanted to scrawl The End himself before closing t
he book.
Some might call him a control freak, but she knew that it stemmed only from his utter lack of power as a kid. As an adult, he had to manage things—and judging by his current position, he’d done well at managing them.
Quinn Lawson, CEO. Fine-art collector, judging by the mask. Big-game hunter, judging by the horrible dead-animal trophy. Player of golf, judging by the picture of him with Tiger Woods behind his desk—a game he’d once insulted as one enjoyed by men in pastel sweaters, with little balls.
Who was this guy? Not the man she remembered.
There’d been no fishing rods in sight, no muscle cars, no sign of the ropers and beat-up jeans he used to wear. Just a big, dark-blond guy in a suit, studded with status symbols, in the blandest, beigest office she’d ever seen, with a snarling bear’s head proclaiming his virility to anyone who entered.
She didn’t like this Quinn. He’d once had a personality and a soul. Now he’d sold both, it seemed, to the corporate devil.
Her hands shook as she unlocked the door of the Prius. Her stomach turned over with the engine, and the alternator seemed to fuel her frayed nerves as well as the car. She wanted to get home and pull a bottle of crisp white wine out of the refrigerator . . . and stop thinking about Quinn Lawson.
Cookie Monster. Her idiotic name for him came back to torment her. How dumb could an eighteen-year-old girl get?
She’d erased all of it, damn it! Rubbed out that chapter of her life. It wasn’t supposed to come alive now in full Technicolor and Dolby stereo, presented as a major motion picture.
Gwen closed her eyes but still saw his inflexible cleft chin, his wide mouth and jaw, the slightly Roman nose, the intelligence in the long-lashed eyes that were the exact color of tawny port.
C’mere, Daddy’s Girl . . .
Back then, he hadn’t meant it as an insult. Back then he’d just been teasing her about her overprotected life and her trust income, her parents who adored their only child to the point of suffocation.
She’d gone to Brazil to study Latin American art and to taste a little freedom. She’d had exactly a month of it before she let Quinn step between her thighs that night. She’d woken up with him and he’d never left.
A horn blew into her consciousness, and Gwen realized that she’d run a stop sign without even registering her actions.
Pull yourself together before you kill someone!
She heard a clicking noise and couldn’t figure out where it was coming from until she looked at her own hands. They still shook, and the ring on her right hand rattled against the hard, molded steering wheel.
She wanted to call Avy . . . but Avy, who knew everything else about Gwen’s life, didn’t know about Quinn. And Avy was off on some secretive mission of her own. Gwen had a feeling that it involved her new fiancé, “former” thief Sir Liam James, but she couldn’t confirm it, and if Avy had wanted her to know, she’d have told her. Avy had been odd and moody lately, and not eager for Gwen to meet Liam. Why? It confirmed all of Gwen’s suspicions about him.
She called Avy as she pulled into her driveway, just to hear her voice and break the news on her recovery, but Ave didn’t answer.
Gwen lived in one of the last little 1930s houses still standing in her neighborhood. The developers had bought most of them and torn them down to build condominiums instead, and who could blame them for wanting to get ten purchase prices instead of one from the same lot?
But she had steadfastly refused to sell her little two-bedroom house, even for the exorbitant sums they’d eventually offered her. She didn’t need the money, and she didn’t want to live in a condo or a high-rise, even if it was becoming the Miami way of life. She didn’t need a spa, a gym, a restaurant, or a retail space below her, and if she wanted a view of the ocean, she went to the beach.
Gwen didn’t bother garaging the Prius. She pulled a stack of envelopes and catalogs out of the mailbox chosen by the previous owner, which was also yellow and had pink flamingos and blue dolphins glued to it. Then she climbed the four concrete steps to the tiny porch, picked up a half-full pitcher, and stopped to water the hanging ferns and the peace lily before she unlocked the front door.
She threw the mail on a chair and went immediately to the 1950s fridge she’d salvaged and paid an electrician hundreds of dollars to rewire and update. She had a retro stove, too, and no microwave or dishwasher.
She pulled a bottle of cold chardonnay from the refrigerator, closed the door, and stared at the appliance in sudden unpleasant recognition. Why had she never noticed—or admitted—that it looked exactly like the one from the apartment in Brazil? When she’d gone retro with the kitchen she hadn’t examined her reasons closely.
Gwen fumbled in a drawer for the corkscrew and proceeded to break off the cork in the bottle. She threw away the top half and reinserted the screw. The cork finally came free.
She took a glass and the bottle into the bathtub. Insisting to herself that she was celebrating her first recovery, she drank most of it before falling into a fitful, uneasy sleep . . . and woke the next day after having the dream yet again.
Quinn was being briefed on some clinical trials of Alaban when Chris knocked on his office door.
“Yes?” he called.
Chris was tall, gangly, and well dressed. Unfortunately his short, black ponytail made him look a little like Olive Oyl. He came in, said a quick “excuse me” to the two junior executives who sat in front of Quinn’s desk, and said into his ear, “Jaworski sent a car for you.”
“What? I’m in the middle of a meeting.”
Chris said, “He wants you at the Breakers for an emergency board meeting in ninety minutes.”
Quinn’s eyebrows shot up. “Excuse me for a moment,” he said to the junior executives. He went outside with Chris and closed the door. “Jaworski can kiss my ass. I’d have to get into the car this second to make that.”
“Just relaying the message, sir. Don’t shoot.” Chris tried to grin but his expression betrayed his worry. Emergency board meetings were not at all normal.
Quinn nodded. “Call him back and tell him I’ll get in the company hearse when I’ve wrapped up this meeting, and not before.” He paused. “Sorry you’re stuck in the middle of this pissing match.”
Grimly Quinn went back into his office. The junior executives went on with their report, clearly enthusiastic about Alaban’s continuing excellent trial results. He listened to them with half an ear. An emergency board meeting called on two hours’ notice was ominous, to say the least. Trouble loomed on the horizon, and his total ignorance of it didn’t bode well for him.
Jaworski should be in a decent mood—he had his damned Venetian mask back, and the quarterly earnings reports looked good. What was going on?
A full two hours later, the company limo pulled up to the spectacular Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach and Quinn got out, running a million scenarios through his mind.
Jaworski could be entertaining a buyout offer. A member of the board might have had a health crisis. Someone might have resigned . . . or a major PR issue had developed. Had a class action lawsuit been filed?
Quinn walked in knowing that Jaworski wouldn’t be pleased that he was a half hour “late,” but he was damned if he’d be the man’s puppet. Even in an emergency it was normal to give directors a day or two to juggle their schedules.
The Breakers sat on 140 acres of prime beachfront property. Built by Standard Oil magnate Henry Flagler, the luxury hotel had been founded in 1896 as the Palm Beach Inn. Over the years it was expanded and then redesigned from the ground up by the Beaux Arts—trained architects Schulze and Weaver.
Inspiration for the Breakers came from various palaces and gardens of the Italian Renaissance. Quinn thought wryly that Gwen would have felt much more at home here than he did. She’d have been able to talk intelligently about the architecture and decor. Him? Mainly what he noticed was that the corridors of the main lobby were wide enough to drive a Hummer through, and the chandeliers looked like they’d
be a hell of a lot of fun to swing from. Other than that he enjoyed the miles of pristine ocean view.
Jaworski had brought Quinn here a couple of times—to embarrass him on the golf course. Ed was a scratch golfer and liked to rub it in.
Quinn strolled into the massive Italianate building, then found the meeting room with no problem and knocked on the door before pushing it open.
He was greeted by a funereal mass of pin-striped suits. The directors sat around a long table like a gaggle of unusually polite vultures staking out a carcass. Jaworski glared at him through a pair of steel-rimmed reading glasses. Then he looked at his watch. “Nice of you to show.”
“The meeting was called on very short notice. I couldn’t get away immediately,” Quinn said, pulling out the last available chair. He helped himself to some coffee.
“Mr. Lawson, the board has assembled here today in light of some disturbing developments having to do with the Borgia mask.”
Quinn took a sip of coffee. “Is there a problem? The mask has been recovered.”
“No, Mr. Lawson, it has not.”
Quinn knit his brows.
“The item returned to you by ARTemis is not, in fact, the Borgia mask. It’s a cleverly made copy.”
The table, vultures and all, seemed to spin as Quinn absorbed this information and processed it in disbelief. He set down the coffee cup.
“It was you who hired ARTemis to recover the mask, Mr. Lawson. Is that correct?”
“Yes—on the recommendation of Angeline Le Fevre, our company art consultant.”
“And it was you who authorized a five-hundred-thousand-dollar commission check to be cut and made payable to ARTemis, Inc.”
The faces of the vultures melded together as Quinn absorbed the implications of this statement. “Are you questioning my integrity?” he demanded.
“You authorized the check without testing the authenticity of the mask.”
“I’m not an art expert. It didn’t cross my mind that . . .” But Quinn couldn’t deny it. This was worse than anything he’d imagined.
Take Me Two Times Page 4