by Nora Roberts
“No apologies necessary.” Max felt the familiar tingling in his fingertips as he approached the front door. Taking out his packet of picks, he went to work.
“Why fool with that? Have Mouse break it in. The alarm’s down.”
“Lacks finesse,” Max muttered, his eyes half closed, his mind inside the tumblers. “There . . . only a moment more.”
He was as good as his word. Minutes later they stood inside a dazzling three-story black-and-white marble foyer, facing a reproduction of Venus and an indoor goldfish pond.
“Jeez,” was all Mouse could think of to say.
“Indeed. It nearly makes one want to pause and reflect.” Max glanced toward an enormous coatrack made of steer horns. “Nearly.”
They separated, LeClerc going up the wide curving stairs toward the bedroom safe and milady’s jewels, Mouse and Max covering the first floor.
They worked smoothly, cutting paintings from what Max considered overly ornate frames and rolling them inside the velvet box. Sculptures of bronze and marble and stone were wrapped in the thick soundproofing.
“A Rodin.” Max paused a moment to teach. “A truly remarkable piece. See the movement, Mouse? The fluidity, the emotion of the artist for his subject.”
Mouse saw a funny-looking glob of stone. “Ah, sure, Max. It’s neat.”
Max could only sigh as he tucked the Rodin reverently between folds of the heavy cloth. “No, not that one,” he said when he noted the bronze work Mouse was holding.
“It’s real heavy,” Mouse told him. “Solid. Must be worth a lot.”
“Undoubtedly, or it wouldn’t be in this collection. But it lacks style, Mouse, and beauty. It’s much more important to steal the beautiful than the valuable. Otherwise, we’d be robbing banks, wouldn’t we?”
“I guess.” He moved to the next room and came back hefting a Remington piece of a cowboy astride a bucking horse. “How about this one, Max?”
Max eyed it. A good piece and probably as heavy as a truck. Though it wasn’t to his personal taste, he could see Mouse was drawn to it. “Excellent choice. Best take it out to the limo as it is. We’re nearly done here.”
“We’re well done,” LeClerc stated, striding downstairs and tapping his bulging pouch. “I don’t know what Madame and Monsieur took to Europe, but they left behind plenty of baubles for us.” It had been difficult to ignore the negotiable bonds and cold cash he’d found in the twin safes, but Max was superstitious about stealing money. LeClerc never sneezed on anyone’s superstitions. “Look at this one.”
He pulled out a blinding array of diamonds and rubies worked into a three-tiered necklace. With a grunt Max took it and held it up to the light. “How can one take such beautiful stones and make something so hideous from them? The lady should thank us for never having to wear this again.”
“Must be worth fifty thousand, at least.”
“Hmmm.” Possibly, Max thought and wished for his loupe. He would choose a few of the choicer stones and have a more suitable necklace made for Lily. A check of his watch, and a nod. “I believe our shopping spree is over. Shall we load up? I believe we can be back home in time for brunch.”
PART TWO
A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains,
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost . . .
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
8
When Luke was sixteen, Mouse taught him to drive. They did a lot of bumping and grinding on the back roads, and once, when Luke attempted to shift, steer and brake at the same time, nearly ended up in a swamp. But Mouse had an endless store of patience.
Getting his driver’s license was a momentous occasion for Luke, that giant step toward reaching the manhood he was beginning to crave. But even that paled against another momentous occasion. His date with Annabelle Walker that included the fantasy roller coaster of Star Wars, two giant tubes of popcorn and an evening ending in sex in the backseat of the secondhand Nova he’d bought with his savings.
Neither Annabelle nor the Nova were strangers to the backseat boogie. But it was Luke’s first time, and for him, the dark road, the music of the cicadas in counterpoint to all the gasps and grunts, the miraculous feel of Annabelle’s braless breasts in his hands were as romantic and majestic as the Taj Mahal.
Annabelle might have been considered easy, but she only crawled into the backseat with a boy if he was cute, if he treated her well and if he was a good kisser.
Luke qualified on all counts.
When she let him under her T-shirt to sample those generous, milk-white globes, he thought he’d found heaven. But when she tugged down the zipper on his Levi’s and took hold, he understood the gates of paradise were swinging open.
“Christ, Annabelle.” He fumbled with her jeans while she jackhammered him toward delirium. He’d hoped she’d let him touch, but he’d had no idea a handful of dates and an evening watching worlds being saved would convince her to let him do the big IT.
Still he wasn’t one to miss an opportunity once it was presented. Max had taught him that much.
“Let me . . .” Let him what he wasn’t precisely sure, but he got his hand inside her lacy red panties.
Wet, hot, slippery. His blood swam wildly downstream from his head to his crotch, throbbing there in a jungle drumbeat that set the rhythm for his seeking fingers. Annabelle’s pleasure sounded in a low hum that became quick greedy moans, desperate pants, delightful little whimpers. Her generous hips arched and fell, slapping against the tattered seat of the Nova. The windows Luke had rolled up against the chill of oncoming winter fogged up, turning the car into a steamy sauna that smelled of sex.
He could feel, actually feel her muscles contract around him as she pitched higher and happily came in his hand.
His breath hitched in and out as he struggled toward something that had been only a dark dream punctuated by locker-room talk.
With his face pillowed between her breasts, one hand busily working her, he tugged his hips free of the Levi’s. The sensation of being inside of a woman this way was nearly enough to shatter his control. Yet a part of him, some small corner of his brain, remained cool, oddly detached, even amused.
Here was Luke Callahan, bare-assed in his ’72 Nova, with the Bee Gees warbling on the radio—Christ, did it have to be the Bee Gees?—and Annabelle spreading her legs in her best cheerleader style beneath him.
His cock felt like a rocket, huge and hot, vibrating on the launching pad of his arousal. He could only hope lift-off didn’t occur prematurely.
It wasn’t skill which had him giving her more than the other boys she’d dated. It was pure inexperience mixed with healthy curiosity and a love of beautiful things. Feeling all that hot moisture, feeling a female form tremble and buck beneath his was one of the most beautiful things Luke had ever experienced.
“Oh, baby.” A veteran of close-quarters sex, Annabelle wriggled and shifted and locked her legs around his hips. “I can’t wait. I just can’t.”
Neither could he. Blind instinct had him driving himself into her. Control that was as much instinct as the tutelage of four years had him holding back that need for instant release. He worked them both into a delirious sweat before letting go. The last thing he heard was her calling out his name. She all but sang it.
Courtesy of Annabelle, he would return to school Monday with a reputation a growing boy could be proud of.
The house was dark but for a light left burning in the kitchen when he arrived home, smelling of sex and sweat and Annabelle’s Charlie cologne.
He was grateful no one was up to greet him. Even more was he grateful that he’d been given every other weekend off from the club to, as Max put it, develop a well-rounded social life.
He sure as hell was feeling well rounded tonight.
He opened the fridge and drained a pint of orange juice straight from the bottle. He was grinning still, and humming the Eagles’ “Witchy Woman” under his breath when
he turned and spotted Roxanne in the doorway.
“That’s disgusting.” She inclined her head toward the bottle he held.
She’d sprung up over the years, as he had. But while Luke skimmed under six foot yet, and was no more than average height for his age, Roxanne was the tallest girl in her class—taller, in fact, than most of the boys. Most of it was leg, as showed now in the short nightshirt she wore. Since her hair was neatly brushed, something Luke knew she did every night before bed, he assumed she’d yet to go to sleep.
“Stuff it.” He smiled and set the bottle on the counter.
“Maybe someone else wanted some.” Though she wasn’t in the least thirsty, she marched to the refrigerator and searched. As she chose a Dr Pepper, she wrinkled her nose at Luke. “You smell.” Sniffing the air she caught, among other things, the fading hint of Annabelle’s cologne. “You went out with her again.”
Roxanne hated Annabelle Walker on principle. The principle being that she was petite and blond and pretty, and that Luke spent time with her.
“What’s it to you?”
“She bleaches her hair and wears her clothes too tight.”
“She wears sexy clothes,” Luke corrected, feeling an expert on the subject. “You’re just jealous because she’s got tits and you don’t.”
“I’ll get them.” On the cusp of thirteen, Roxanne was mortified by the snail’s pace of her feminine development. Almost all the girls in her class had at least the buds of breasts, and she was still as flat as LeClerc’s breadboard. “When I do, they’ll be better than hers.”
“Right.” The idea of Roxanne with breasts amused him. Initially. When he began to think about it, it became uncomfortably warm. “Beat it.”
“I’m getting a drink.” She poured Dr Pepper into a glass to prove it. “I don’t have a bedtime on Saturday nights.”
“Then I’m going.” How was a guy supposed to float around on a cloud of lust with that little whiner around? he wondered as he strode out and up the stairs. Not wanting to miss a moment of the indulgent dream he had planned, Luke stripped and plopped naked onto the bed.
He’d gotten used to the scent and feel of clean sheets, though he’d yet to take them for granted. It was a rare thing for him to go to bed hungry, and for long periods of time he’d forgotten what real fear was.
In the past four years, he’d traveled over most of the eastern United States, had performed in fallow fields, in dingy clubs and on polished stages. The previous summer after Max—with some regret—had sold the carnival, they’d traveled to Europe, where Max had added to his reputation as a master magician.
He could speak French, haltingly, and had learned to make the cards dance. As far as he could see, he had it all. Life was perfect, Luke thought as he drifted to sleep.
So he was stunned when he woke in a cold sweat an hour later with a whimper in his throat.
He’d been back, all the way back to that cramped two-room apartment. Al’s belt had whipped like a razor across his skin, and there’d been nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
Sitting up, Luke gulped in huge breaths of the heavy, autumn air and waited for the shaking to pass. It hadn’t happened in months, he told himself as he rested his head on his knees. Months and months without his subconscious zapping him back there. He’d thought he’d beaten it. Each time weeks or months passed without one of those hideous dreams he was sure it was behind him.
Then it would pop back, like a cackling gremlin out of a closet, to taunt and torture.
He wasn’t a kid anymore, Luke reminded himself and stumbled from the bed. He wasn’t supposed to have nightmares and wake up shaking and wanting Lily or Max to come and make it all go away again.
So he’d walk it off. Luke pulled on pants and told himself he’d walk over to Bourbon and back and shake off the sticky dregs of the nightmare.
When he reached the bottom of the steps he heard the high-pitched scream and the muffled mutter of voices. Glancing into the den, he spotted Roxanne seated cross-legged on the floor, a bowl of popcorn on her lap.
“What’re you doing?”
She jolted, but didn’t take her eyes off the screen. “I’m watching ‘Terror Theater.’ Castle of the Walking Dead. This count guy’s embalming people. It’s neat.”
“Gross.” But he was caught, at least enough to sit on the end of the couch and dip a hand into Roxanne’s popcorn. He was still feeling shaky, but before Christopher Lee got what was coming to him, he had fallen asleep.
Roxanne waited until she was sure he had, then, leaning her cheek against the cushion on the couch, reached up to stroke his hair.
“They’re growing up on us, Lily.”
“I know, honey.” She sighed as she settled into the brightly painted horizontal box. They were rehearsing alone in the club, a new bit Max called the Divided Woman.
“Roxy’s going to be a teenager.” Max clamped the locks into place while doing a stylish turn around the box for the benefit of the potential audience. “How much longer are the boys going to stay away?”
Lily smiled and wriggled the feet and hands that stuck out of the holes in the box. “Not much longer. Don’t worry, Max, she’s too smart to settle for anything less than exactly what she wants.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“She’s her father’s daughter.” Lily made the appropriate whimpers and moans while Max demonstrated the keenness of the blade of a jewel-encrusted scimitar.
“By that you mean she’s stubborn, ambitious and one-track-minded.”
Lily was silent as Max went through the routine of cutting the box apart and then joining the halves together. Then she asked, “You’re not sad the kids’re growing up, are you, sweetie?”
“Maybe a little. It reminds me I’m getting older. Luke driving a car and chasing girls.”
“He doesn’t have to chase them.” Lily’s brow creased in annoyance. “They throw themselves at him. Anyway,” she sighed, “they’re good kids, Max. A terrific pair.”
Half of that terrific pair was two blocks away, running a brisk game of Three Card Monte. A flood of conventioneers had poured into town. Roxanne simply didn’t have the willpower to resist.
She was neatly dressed in pink jeans and matching jacket, a flowered shirt and snow-white sneakers. Her hair was pulled back in a bouncy ponytail, and her face was scrubbed clean of everything but freckles.
She looked like a sweet, wholesome, all-American girl. Which was precisely her intention. Roxanne knew the value of illusion and imagery.
She’d already taken in over two hundred, though she made certain to hit no one mark too hard. She wasn’t doing it for the money—though she was every bit as fond of what money could buy as her father. She was doing it because it was fun.
Once again she slapped three cards on the little folding table. She took the five-dollar bet from her current mark—a portly man in an aloha shirt—flipped the cards facedown and began to manipulate them. And the rest of the crowd.
“Keep your eye on the black queen. Don’t blink. Don’t sneeze. Keep watching her. Keep watching.” Her small, long-fingered hands moved like lightning. And, of course, the queen was already palmed.
She took in another fifty, paid out twenty of it to maintain good community relations. Somewhere close by a street-corner musician blew a lonely trumpet. Roxanne decided it was time to close down and move on.
“That’s all for today. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Enjoy your stay in New Orleans.” She started to scoop up the cards when a hand clamped over her wrist.
“One more game. I didn’t get to try my luck.”
It was a boy of eighteen or nineteen. Under his faded jeans and Grateful Dead T-shirt was a wiry build—all lean muscle. His shaggy hair was a golden blond, a scruffy halo around a narrow face of sharp angles. His eyes, a deep, dark brown, were locked on Roxanne’s.
He reminded her of Luke—not in looks but in that inner wildness and potential for mean. His voice didn’t sound like New Orleans. It
didn’t sound like anywhere at all.
“You’re too late,” she told him.
His hand remained firmly locked around her wrist. When he smiled, showing perfect, even white teeth, her nerves jangled. “One game,” he said. “I’ve been watching you.”
It was nearly impossible for Roxanne to resist a direct challenge. Instinct told her to, but pride was stronger.
“I’ve got time for one. The bet’s five dollars.”
With a nod, he pulled a folded bill from his back pocket and laid it on the table.
Roxanne laid the cards down, two red queens with the black in the center. “Watch the black lady,” she began as she flipped the cards over. In a split-second decision she opted not to palm it, but to face the challenger even up. She shifted the cards in an ever-increasing rhythm, and kept her eye on the boy.
He wasn’t new to the game. She’d been in it herself too long not to recognize a pro. Roxanne bet her ego against the five-dollar bill.
Though she hadn’t looked at the cards since she’d begun, she knew exactly where the black queen hid. “Where is she?”
He didn’t hesitate, but tapped a finger against the left-hand card. Before she could turn it up herself, he snagged her wrist again. “I’ll do it.” He flipped up the queen of hearts.
“Looks like my hand’s quicker than your eye.”
Still holding her hand aloft, he turned up the other cards. He blinked once when he saw the black queen was exactly where she’d begun. In the center.
“Looks like,” he murmured. His eyes narrowed as he watched her slip his five and the cards into a bag she’d put under the table.
“Better luck next time.” She folded the table, hitched it under her arm and started toward the Magic Door.
He didn’t give up that easily. “Hey, kid. What’s your name?”
She slanted him a look as he fell into step beside her. “Roxanne. Why?”
“Just like to know. I’m Sam. Sam Wyatt. You’re good. Real good.”
“I know.”