The Collector

by Nora Roberts

  “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking hey, there’s the woman who wants what we have and doesn’t mind killing for it.”

  He gripped her arm, began to quick-walk her back the way they’d come. “Ease off, Ashton.”

  “Don’t even think about telling me to ease off. I leave you alone for one afternoon, and you go haring off after someone who tried to kill you? Or you think it’s her.”

  “It was her. And the more important thing is, what’s she doing here? How did she know we’re here, because it’s not a damn coincidence.”

  “No, the important thing is you taking an idiotic risk like this. What if she’d come after you again?”

  “She’d have to catch me first, and I’ve already proven I’m faster. And this time, I’d take her by surprise, not the other way around. And she didn’t see me. I wanted to see where she went, and I did. I have an address. You’d have done exactly the same thing.”

  “You can’t run off on your own. She’s already hurt you once. I have to be able to trust you, Lila.”

  Like he was speaking to a wayward child, Lila thought, and felt her hackles rise. “It’s not a matter of trust—don’t put it like that. I saw her, saw an opportunity. I took it. And I have an address—did you hear me? I know where she is right now.”

  “Did you see her face?”

  “Enough of it. I’m not stupid enough to confront her directly. I saw enough of her face. Add her height, her shape, the hair, the way she moves. She followed us. We should’ve been looking over our shoulder after all.”

  “Thank God!” Julie pushed from her perch at the Fountain of Neptune, rushed forward to throw her arms around Lila. Then she pulled back, gave Lila a shake. “Are you crazy?”

  “No, and I’m sorry I ditched you, but I needed to keep up with her.”

  “You’re not allowed to scare me like that. You’re not allowed, Lila.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m fine.” But she caught Luke’s eye. “You’re pissed at me, too,” she realized, and let out a breath. “Okay, three against one, I have to bow to the majority. I’m sorry. I hate knowing I upset my three favorite people. You’re mad and upset, but can’t we put that to the side for just a minute, and call the police? I know the current whereabouts of a wanted criminal—internationally wanted.”

  Saying nothing, Ash pulled out his phone. Lila started to speak, but he just paced away.

  “He was out of his mind,” Luke told her. “You didn’t answer your phone, we didn’t know where you were or if you were all right.”

  “I didn’t hear it. It was in my purse, and it’s noisy. I took it out to key in the address, and I answered as soon as I heard it ring. I’m sorry.”

  Ash stepped back. “Give me the address.”

  The minute she relayed it, he walked away again.

  “Does he stay this mad for long?” she asked Luke.

  “It depends.”

  “I gave the information to Detective Fine,” Ash said. “They’ll get through the channels quicker than a foreign tourist. We should go back to the hotel, make sure it’s secure.”

  Outnumbered again, Lila thought, and made no argument.

  Ash stopped at the desk before leading the way to the elevator.

  “No one’s come by or called looking for us—any of us. The hotel staff won’t forward any communications to the suite, or confirm we’re registered. If she’s here, and looking for us, it’ll make it harder for her to find us.”

  “She’s here. I’m not wrong.”

  He just ignored her. “I gave them her description. Hotel security will keep an eye out for her.”

  They walked out of the elevator, down to the suite.

  “I need to make some calls,” he announced, and went directly out onto the terrace.

  “Cold shoulders are brutal.”

  “Try to imagine how he’d feel if anything had happened to you,” Luke suggested. “The fact that it didn’t doesn’t change that ten minutes of fear that it could, or had.”

  But he relented, kissed the top of her head. “I think we could all use a drink.”

  Defeated, Lila sat while he opened a bottle of wine.

  “You don’t get to sulk.” Julie pointed at her, then dropped into a chair.

  “I’m not sulking. Yes, I am, and if everyone was mad at you, you’d sulk, too.”

  “I wouldn’t have run like a crazed rabbit after a known killer.”

  “I pursued, in a quick-thinking and careful manner. And I said I was sorry. Nobody’s saying good job on getting her location, Lila.”

  “Good job.” Luke brought her a glass of wine. “Don’t ever do it again.”

  “Don’t be mad,” she said to Julie. “I bought the shoes.”

  “There is that. I couldn’t keep up. If you’d given me a chance I’d have gone with you. Then there would’ve been two of us if anything happened.”

  “You didn’t believe I’d really seen her.”

  “Not at first, then I was terrified you had. But you did buy the shoes. Speaking of which,” she added, and rose when Ash came in, “I should put my trophies away. Luke, you need to come see what I bought.”

  Escape or discretion? Lila wondered. Probably a little of both, she decided as Luke carried Julie’s bags, going with her to their part of the suite.

  “I apologized to them again,” she began. “Do you need another, too?”

  “I talked to the airport where we keep the family planes.” His tone, cool and brisk, directly opposed the heat snapping in his eyes. “Someone using my father’s personal assistant’s name contacted them to confirm my flight information. It wasn’t my father’s assistant.”

  “So she tracked us.”

  “It’s a good bet.” He walked over, poured himself a glass of the wine. “I booked Lanzo and the hotel separately, on a recommendation my sister Valentina gave me more than a year ago. Harder for her to track all that, but if she digs around enough, she could.”

  “We should tell Lanzo.”

  “I already did.”

  “You can be angry about how I went about it, but isn’t it better knowing? Any of us could have wandered off to get a gelato and run into her. Now we know.”

  “You’re in this through me. There’s no getting around that. Oliver’s dead, through his own actions, but the fact is I didn’t pay attention. I brought Vinnie into it, and never anticipated. That’s not going to happen with you.”

  He turned back to her, that temper still snapping. “It’s not going to happen with you. You either give me your word you won’t go off on your own no matter who or what you think you see, or I’m putting you on the plane back to New York.”

  “You can’t put me anywhere. You can say get out, but that’s as far as it goes.”

  “Do you want to put that to the test?”

  She shoved out of the chair, walked around the room. “Why are you cornering me this way?”

  “Because you matter too much for me to do anything else. You know you do.”

  “You’d have done exactly what I did.”

  “Then this would be a different conversation. I need your word.”

  “Should I have just said, ‘Oh, gee, there’s Jai Maddok, international assassin, who’d like us all dead,’ then gone back to shopping with Julie?”

  “You should have said, ‘I think that’s Jai Maddok,’ taken out your phone, contacted me. Then if you’d followed her, I’d have already been on my way to you. You’d have been on the damn phone with me so I wouldn’t think she might have turned on you, sliced you open with the knife this time while I’m buying you a fucking necklace.”

  “Don’t swear at me, and you have a point. Okay, you have a point. I’m not used to checking in with anyone.”

  “Get used to it.”

  “I’m trying. You’ve got half a million siblings, this enormous family. You’re used to checking with, in and on. I’ve been on my own for years, through my own choice. I never thought about scarin
g you, any of you. I . . . you matter, too. I can’t stand thinking I spoiled things, with us—with everyone.”

  “I’m asking for your word. You can give it to me, or you can’t.”

  Outnumbered, Lila thought again, struggling against her own temper. When three people who cared about her saw things the same way, she had to admit her vision needed the adjusting.

  “I can give my word I’ll try to remember I have someone to check with, that it’s important to him I do. I can do that.”

  “Okay.”

  She let out a breath she’d been holding, shakier than she realized. She didn’t mind a fight, but she couldn’t fight when she clearly saw where she’d gone wrong.

  “I hate knowing I worried you so much, that I didn’t hear the stupid phone when you tried to reach me. If the situation had been reversed, I’d have been scared, too, angry, too. I reacted the way I’m used to reacting and . . . You bought me a necklace?”

  “It seemed like the thing to do at the time. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “You can’t stay mad at me. I’m too charming.”

  “I’m pretty mad.”

  She shook her head, went to him, wrapped around him. “I’m very charming. And really sorry.”

  “She kills people, Lila. For money.”

  And fun, Lila thought. “I can tell you I was careful, but you weren’t there and can’t be sure. She had a big, stylish purse, no shopping bags and no heels this time. She never looked back. She moved like a woman who had somewhere to be. She’s either staying in that building or she was meeting someone there. We could call in an anonymous tip to the local police.”

  “Fine and Waterstone are handling it.”

  “So we just wait?”

  “That’s right. And tomorrow we go see Bastone, as planned.” He glanced over her head at the shopping bags. “Are those all yours?”

  “It’s Julie’s fault. We should release her and Luke. I know she wanted to check out some of the artists.”

  “We’ll all go. From this point, we all stick together.”

  “Okay.” Adjust, she reminded herself. “We stick together.”

  They may need to look over their shoulders again, but Lila thought it did them all good to just go out, walk together, be together. They strolled along the bridge, with the river running below, so Julie could study and assess the paintings in progress, chat with artists.

  Lila leaned against Luke. “I never know exactly what she’s talking about when she gets into art mode,” Lila commented. “And now, Ash either.”

  “I can’t translate, but I like the painting they’re looking at.”

  Lila studied the dreamy image of a courtyard, flowers spilling from pots, climbing madly up a rough plaster wall. A little drama played out with a small child, bowing his head over a broken pot, and a woman standing just outside a doorway, hands on her hips.

  “She has a little smile on her face—just a hint of one,” Lila observed. “She loves him, her sad and sorry little boy. She’ll make him clean it up, then they’ll replant the flowers.”

  “I’d say you understand a lot more than I do. But I can see Julie likes it, enough to look at some of his other work.”

  “And we can’t neglect your work. We have to visit a few bakeries before we go back to New York. What a hardship that’ll be.”

  “I went to a couple this morning. I sampled a cornetto al cioccolato I think I can duplicate, and I got a line on a couple of secret bakeries.”

  “What’s secret about them?”

  “You have to hunt for them—off the beaten path. Industrial bakeries,” he explained. “They start making pastries in the middle of the night for the cafés. They’re not supposed to sell to individuals, but they do—on the side.”

  “A middle-of-the-night hunt for secret bakeries. I’m absolutely in. Julie said you’re going to open a second location. Tell me about that.”

  She hooked her arm through his, wandered down the line of artists, canvases until, flushed with success, Julie joined them.

  “I may have just changed a life. The boss gave me the go-ahead to sign him up—the kid-in-the-courtyard artist. It’s him—in the painting. Painted from memory, of his home, his mother and a little accident with a soccer ball one summer afternoon.”

  “That’s so sweet. I love it.”

  “His work has movement and tells a story. We’re taking three of them. The first thing he did—after kissing me—was call his wife.”

  “Also sweet.”

  “Fabulous foot jewels and a new artist.” With her easy laugh, Julie lifted her arms high. “My day is complete.”

  Luke grabbed her hand and gave her a spin that made her laugh again. “Nothing’s complete without gelato. You up for that?” he asked Ash.

  “Sure.”

  “If gelato’s on the agenda, I need more walking to earn it.” Julie glanced back, then at Ash. “You liked his work.”

  “You could smell the flowers, the heat, feel the mother’s amused exasperation and the boy’s resignation to whatever was coming. He paints with heart, not just technique.”

  “I felt the same. He doesn’t even have an agent. I hope he follows up on that.”

  “I gave him some names,” Ash said. “Once he comes down, I think he’ll make some contacts.”

  “Do you remember your first sale?” Lila wondered.

  “Everyone remembers their first.”

  “Which was?”

  “I called it Sisters. Three faeries concealed in the woods, all watching a horseman approach. I’d just finished it, working outside at the compound, when my father brought the woman he was seeing at the time over to meet me. She wanted it,” he said as they walked. “He said she could have it.”

  “Just like that.”

  “He didn’t get what I was doing, or trying to do, at that point. She did. She was an agent. I’ve always thought he brought her over so she’d tell me I should give it up. Instead, she gave me her card, offered to rep me and bought that piece outright. She’s still my agent.”

  “I love happy endings—and gelato. I’m buying,” Lila announced. “A tangible apology for before.”

  They walked to the park, wandered down the wide path of the Boboli Gardens. Ash steered her toward the pool where Andromeda rose and into the dusky green of plantings.

  “Sit down there, cross-legged.”

  She obliged, thinking he wanted a photo, then waved her hands when he pulled out his sketch pad.

  “A camera’s faster.”

  “I have something in mind. Five minutes. Turn your head, just your head, toward the water. Good.”

  She resigned herself as Julie and Luke wandered off.

  “He’s going to be a while,” Julie predicted.

  “I know how it works.” Luke swung her hand up, as he had when they’d been teenagers, and pressed his lips to her knuckles. “It’s beautiful here. Let’s sit down a minute, enjoy it.”

  “It’s a gorgeous day. It’s been a great day, even with the break for high drama. They look good together, don’t they? I don’t know Ash the way you do, but I’ve never seen him so focused on a woman the way he is with Lila. And I do know her. She’s crazy about him, and that’s a real first.”

  “Julie.”

  “Mmm.” She tipped her head onto his shoulder, smiling as she watched Ash sketch.

  “I love you.”

  “I know. I love you. It makes me so happy.”

  “I want to make you happy. Julie.” He shifted, turned, turned