Caught

by Kristin Hardy

  Reading the list of items taken was enough to make Julia’s eyes cross well before the end. A shame, but having met Zoey Zander at a few of her mother’s society dos, Julia would have laid even money that the “antique” items weren’t even authentic. The jewels, perhaps, but as for the rest of it, Zoey was more about flash than substance. Having it look right was more important than having it be right.

  Julia had never understood that. To her, it was the history of a thing that mattered, the story she felt when she touched it. Absently, she rubbed a finger over the bit of scrimshaw that sat by her telephone, a personal treasure that she knew she shouldn’t touch with bare hands but was helpless not to. She could imagine the whaler who’d spent long, windblown days working at the ivory, setting it aside at the cry of “Whale ho.” If she closed her eyes, she could smell the salt tang of the sea, feel the motion of the ship, imagine the distant blue horizon and the pale vault of the sky overhead.

  It had always been like that for her, since she’d been a child. She remembered going to the Metropolitan and staring at a pale blue glass cup in the antiquities wing, a glass that had been in the ground so long it had turned iridescent. It fascinated her so much she’d relentlessly pestered her mother, her nanny, her great-aunt Stella to take her to the Met over and over. An artifact from an ancient desert kingdom, she’d read on the identification card and imagined a little girl like herself who might have drunk from it. And at night, she’d dreamed that she was the little girl, a princess whispering in the desert dusk with her favorite friend, a young boy who dreamed of becoming a great warrior.

  She hadn’t had that dream for a long while.

  “Hey, gorgeous.”

  No matter how wrong for her he might be, something about Alex’s voice always sent a warm shiver through her, whatever she was thinking, whatever she was doing. Julia opened her eyes and gave her visitor a bland look. “Well, if it isn’t the infamous Alex Spencer.”

  He leaned against her doorway, looking like some GQ model in his expensive suit and hand-dyed silk tie. “Miss me?”

  She rolled her eyes. “How can I miss you when you won’t go away?”

  “I can’t go away. I have to stick around to keep you from falling asleep at your desk.” He clicked his tongue at her. “Maybe if you got to bed at a decent hour, you’d be more awake.”

  “Sometimes I get pestered by late-night callers,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t answer the door, then.”

  “I’ll remember that next time.” She folded her hands in front of her. “So what can I do for you, Mr. Spencer?”

  “A favor.” He stepped into the office and her lungs took a breath of their own accord. Honestly, there was nothing the man could do that wouldn’t look good. He had a gift for it, from his cropped dark hair spiked with just a bit of gel to his glossy Italian leather shoes. And she knew from personal experience that he looked just as effortlessly handsome in shorts and a polo shirt.

  Or in nothing at all.

  Maybe it was the thousand-watt smile, the square jaw, those green, green eyes. Eyes currently glimmering at her in humor, making her realize she’d been staring far too long. “Making notes for a portrait?” he asked.

  “Wondering if I maybe saw you on the post office wall,” she replied. “So what’s the favor?”

  “Someone I want you to see today. My sister’s got a friend who wants to bring in something for you to look at. She thinks it might be valuable—”

  “Alex, no,” Julia was groaning before he’d even finished. “No, no, no. You know how it works. They’ve gone to a flea market or on holiday to Morocco and they’ve got some piece of trash they’re convinced is the real thing.”

  “Maybe it is,” he suggested.

  “And maybe it’s a tourist tchotchke. Do you have any idea how often I’ve looked at those kinds of things?” she pleaded. “They’re never real. Trust me, antiquities don’t just fall in a person’s lap.” But he had that gleam in his eye that he always got when he proposed something outrageous, she saw sinkingly, that look that always seemed to get her to do what he wanted.

  “Look, it’s a favor for my sister. Why don’t you just give it a look and see what you think?”

  “I have a better idea,” Julia said silkily. “Why don’t you look at it?”

  “I’ve got to leave for lunch with a big donor—” he glanced at his sleek Bulova “—like, right now.”

  “And I’ve got meetings all afternoon.”

  “Then it’s good she’s coming this morning, isn’t it?”

  That stopped her for a moment. “Well, aren’t we sure of ourselves,” she said tartly.

  “Oh, come on, Julia, it’s five minutes. It’s for my sister. Family.”

  And if she didn’t watch it, she’d cave to him yet again, just as she had the night before. With everyone else she was intelligent, self-possessed, in control. It was only with Alex that she lost the ability to say anything but yes. “I don’t have time,” she lied. “I don’t know what made you think I’d agree.”

  Alex stepped inside and closed the heavy wooden door. “Maybe I could offer you something in return.” He ambled across the room looking amused, as though he could read her like the Sunday Post.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked uneasily, already feeling the treacherous flutter in her stomach.

  He didn’t answer, just leaned on the corner of her desk. “You know that your eyes always get a little darker when I come close?” he asked conversationally, reaching out to take her hand. “And they definitely get darker when I do this,” he added, touching the tip of his tongue to her palm.

  And lust just exploded through her. For an instant, all she wanted was to have him naked, against her, on top of her. In her. Outside in the hallway, voices passed by the door, chattering about the weekend.

  Inside, Julia froze, mesmerized by a touch, staring, boneless. And she’d just sat there and let him do it, she thought in annoyance. She wasn’t the type to just melt because some good-looking guy stroked his thumb over the back of her hand, stroked it and stared at her and made her think of what else those hands could do….

  “Stop it.” She rose hastily. “We’re at work, remember?” And if she didn’t get at least a few feet away from him, she wouldn’t care.

  “Forget it.” Alex stood and circled around the desk toward her, easy, relaxed, making her think of one of those clever, nimble border collies. Which, she supposed, made her the sheep. “Look, the door’s closed. And it’s not like I’m planting one on you, as much as I’d like to,” he added, approaching her. Julia took a few wary steps away. “Anyway, who’s going to care? It’s not like we work in the same department.”

  “Wait a minute. I care.” She held on to the sudden flare of anger like a shield. “I’m not going to be the latest watercooler topic.”

  He grinned. “Sweetheart, if people haven’t figured out there’s something between us by now, they’re blind.”

  Sweetheart. He had no right to use the word to snatch the breath from her lungs. “Well, they’re behind the times, because there’s nothing between us,” she snapped. “It’s over, all right? Done.”

  Alex blinked. “What are you talking about?”

  “Us. This…thing we’ve been having,” she said, throwing her hands in frustration. “I was out of my mind to start it, I’ve been out of my mind to keep it going and now I’m finished. Want me to be any clearer? I want you out of my life.”

  She’d never seen Alex in anything but easy good humor, so it took her a moment to realize he was angry. “Where’s this coming from? You don’t just come out of nowhere and cut it off.”

  “I’ll do whatever I want to.”

  “You said we were going to talk tonight.”

  “I’m done talking,” she flared.

  He rounded on her. “That’s right, you don’t talk, do you? No talk, just sex. Don’t get to know each other, don’t find out about each other’s lives, just get together to scratch a
n itch. Well you know what, Julia? That’s a crock of—”

  A knock on the door interrupted his furious words. For a breathless instant neither of them moved. Then Julia smoothed her trim claret suit and walked over to open the door. “Yes?”

  She saw a couple outside, the woman looking tense, the man clasping her hand protectively. “Are you Julia Covington?” the woman asked.

  Julia nodded.

  “I’m Marissa Suarez. This is my…boyfriend, Jamie Wilson. Alex Spencer said you’d be expecting us.”

  Alex stepped up behind Julia and the hairs on the back of her neck rose as though in a field of static electricity.

  “I’m Alex,” he said, stepping around her to put out his hand to shake. “Nice to meet you both. Unfortunately I’m late for a lunch appointment, so I’ll have to leave you in Julia’s hands.” Only Julia would have seen the spark in his eyes. “I’m sure she’ll be happy to talk with you. Julia’s always happy to talk with anyone.”

  JEAN LUC ALLARD walked into the museum, sneering inwardly at the guard who stood at the front door. So tall, so cocky in his uniform, with his gun. Pathetic. He could no more block a professional like Jean from his desires than could a child.

  It was always so. Those who were robbed were the weak. He was one of the strong. No one bullied him, not since he’d become a man. Not since he’d left his whoreson of a father crumpled and bleeding in that Marseilles alley, maybe dead, maybe alive. Jean neither knew nor cared, as his father had never cared all the times he’d treated him like so much filth beneath his feet. It was a debt paid, nothing more.

  Jean took what he wanted and prospered. After all, there was always a market for a man with certain…talents. His clients knew how to find him, and he knew how to get them what they wished.

  Like the White Star amulet.

  So beautiful, so alluring, a treasure that demanded to be touched. A seductive beauty that did not easily release the mind. When he’d sat across from his contact in the dark corner of that Parisian tavern, he’d been given only a description, a location, a name. Now that he had seen her, he knew what she could drive a man to do. He knew what a man might do to possess her.

  And he knew his client would pay more.

  All he needed to do was retrieve her from the foolish Suarez woman. Perhaps she had been lucky since he’d been forced to place the amulet in her bag to avoid detection, but it was of no matter. He had been punished for his foolishness, and now it was at an end. The White Star was his to take.

  He walked down the hallway with its echoing marble walls. Friday midday and all the little people had scuttled out of their cramped offices for lunch before their afternoon of meaningless rote work, like rats on the wheel. Pah. Fools, all of them, laboring their lives away for nothing, telling themselves they had control, deluding themselves they had security when he could move among them at will and take whatever he wanted.

  And what he wanted, he thought, listening to the voices inside the open office door, was his White Star.

  2

  Friday, 11:00 a.m.

  “PLEASE, SIT DOWN,” Julia said, waving Marissa and Jamie to seats before she crossed to her own chair.

  “Thank you for agreeing to see us,” Marissa said. “I’m sorry we interrupted you.”

  “It was nothing.” Julia welcomed the distraction. It let her heart level. It kept her from thinking about the look in Alex’s eyes. Instead, she studied the couple sitting across from her. For they were a couple—she would have known it before Marissa had said a thing. It wasn’t the clasped hands, but something that hummed between them, something that tied them as surely as a physical bond.

  She wouldn’t have put them together at a glance. Marissa looked too polished, too fiery for Jamie’s slightly rumpled, abstracted air. They seemed…glowing, somehow, though. Connected.

  Shrugging the thought aside, Julia folded her hands. “So,” she said briskly, “what have you got?”

  The two of them exchanged glances. Marissa moistened her lips. “I was just on vacation,” she began. “I wound up with something, and…”

  Ah, the dreaded vacation find, Julia thought in resignation, but then she realized there was a tension about Marissa, a strain in her liquid dark eyes that didn’t bespeak a flea-market tchotchke. “And?” she prompted.

  “Look,” Jamie broke in. “How about if we don’t tell you anything about it. Just…look at it. Tell us what you think. Tell us if you think it’s real.” He turned to Marissa. “Okay?”

  She nodded and opened up the leather bag she wore strapped across her chest. Reaching inside, she brought out an object wrapped in cloth and laid it carefully on the desktop before unwrapping it.

  And Julia felt the unholy punch of excitement in her gut. This wasn’t a vacation find brought in by some poor, deluded soul. This was the real thing. Where it had come from or how it had gotten there, she couldn’t say, but she could sense the power of its age as though it were radiating waves of antiquity.

  It wasn’t colored as so many of the pieces of that time were, and yet she was as certain as she was of her own name that it was ancient. Thin veins of gold chased around the carved ivory, an ivory so white despite the years that it seemed to radiate somehow. It was shaped like a star, with a hole through the center. Looking closer, she saw shallow etching, so faint and small as to be almost invisible, worn away, perhaps, by the years. Gods, designed to carry the bearer to the afterlife?

  Julia rummaged blindly in the desk drawer for the wooden box that held her loupe, unable to take her eyes off the piece. Who had carved it long ago, sitting in some dusty desert workshop, never guessing that his handiwork would leap across centuries, millennia? What had it meant? What power had he believed it held? Slipping the loupe in place, she looked closer.

  Only to be astounded by the detail. The figures stood facing one another, hands clasped. A man, a woman, staring into each other’s eyes. In each of their breasts a tiny dot of embedded carnelian flamed red, seeming almost to pulse before her eyes. And the hairs prickled on the back of her neck.

  Not gods. Lovers.

  A ribbon had been strung through a faceted hole that pierced the amulet just below the joined hands. “Have you been wearing this?” Julia asked, glancing up.

  Only to see Marissa’s cheeks tinting. “Only once,” she said, refusing to look at her boyfriend. “Before I realized it might be valuable. Is it?”

  “At a glance I’d say it’s possible, but I’d have to spend more time looking at it.” Caution was the way to go. As certain as Julia felt, she’d seen the best and brightest fooled by clever forgeries. The article in her magazine just that day had detailed more than a few instances where shady dealers had profited. Something else nibbled at the edge of her memory. “Could you leave it here with me for a day or two?” she asked impulsively.

  “But we—” Marissa objected.

  “Hold on,” Jamie said to her. “It might be the safest place for it. Keep anything unexpected from happening to it.” He stared at Marissa intently and some message passed between them. “How is your security here?” he asked, turning to Julia.

  She blinked. “The best. Why?”

  “Just want to be sure it’s protected,” he said affably.

  “We’ve got twenty-four-hour guards, electric eyes, motion detectors, the whole deal. The amulet will stay locked in my office safe unless I’m working with it. It looks familiar. I’ve got some source texts downstairs I want to consult.”

  “We think it might be the White Star amulet,” Marissa blurted.

  That was it. Stolen from Zoey Zander’s collection, Julia realized. But that heist had been carried out by professionals. She frowned. “Why haven’t you gone to the police?”

  Marissa flushed. “We wanted to be sure it was real,” she explained. “You have to admit, it seems pretty unlikely.”

  Certainly they looked like the unlikeliest of thieves. Then again, the best thieves did. “How did you come by it?”

  “The guy w
ho stole it might have dumped it in Marissa’s bag at the airport. We think we’ve seen him,” Jamie added.

  Which explained the questions about security. And the strain. Then again, the strain could have stemmed from taking a criminal risk.

  “What do you think?” Marissa asked.

  Julia looked down at the amulet, the lovers frozen hand in hand. The White Star. There were legends, she remembered vaguely, something fanciful about true love. “It’s possible,” she allowed. “But you have to understand, even if it is the Zander piece, it may not necessarily be the real White Star. It’s very difficult to authenticate antiquities, especially if the forgery itself is an antique.”

  “But it was being auctioned off,” Marissa protested.

  “Even the best experts aren’t infallible,” Julia said wryly. “We can all be taken in. Leave it with me for a few days. I’ll take some time to look it over, check to see if I can find anything definitive to authenticate it.” And if it were the real White Star, she could get the police involved.

  “Whatever you can do,” Jamie said and rose.

  Marissa stood and reached out a hand longingly toward the amulet but stopped short of touching it. “It’s so beautiful,” she murmured. “I don’t care if it’s real or not.”

  “If it is the White Star, it’s not ours,” Jamie said gently, putting an arm around her shoulders. “We only got to borrow it for a little while.”

  And to Julia’s everlasting shock, Marissa laughed and threw her arms around Jamie’s neck and gave him a kiss hot enough to vaporize metal. “And honey, we made the most of it.”

  FOOLISH WOMAN, to boast of security. As though motion detectors and pressure plates could keep him out. As though a mere office safe could block him from his prize. The White Star was his in all but actual fact. It was but a matter of time.

  He itched to hold her again. It was maddening to have her so close, yet out of his grasp.

  But he was a patient man.

  For now, hovering in the gallery near the entrance to the office wing held the most promise. He could linger, invisible to the imbecile guards, and watch. It was, after all, a museum, a place designed for lingering. He would bide his time, learn what he could. He could wait as long as he needed.