“You’re okay though? Truly?” I studied my sister’s face, and she met my eyes with the tiniest of smiles.
“Yeah, I’m good.”
“You’re good.”
The smile on her face bloomed into something pretty and real. “I’m good.”
She got off the bed and stripped off her tiny little camisole nightgown as she walked to the bathroom. My sister was the least self-conscious person I knew, and it was probably with good reason. Objectively speaking, she had a great body. Perfectly tanned all over in the way that only Saint Tropez or tanning beds can do, and curvy in a totally feminine way. “I’m going to shower. Make us some coffee, will you?”
“My hearts always turn out like penises though.”
She turned to stare at me for exactly one second before she finally rolled her eyes. “Don’t draw in the coffee foam, Sis. Coffee dicks are off-putting.”
I grinned. “Not to mention unsanitary.”
She laughed all the way to the bathroom. I could still hear laughter when the water went on.
“Four-two, Anna,” I murmured happily.
I studied my mother and her sister for a long moment. Alex had died just over a year ago, but Colette and I had never met her. My mother and her sister had had a huge falling out when they were in their early twenties, and Alex had left Boston right after their fight. She’d moved to Chicago, our mother had moved to Rockport, Massachusetts, and the twin girls born to Sophia a few years later had never known their mother’s older sister.
Aunt Alexandra had never had children of her own, and after she died it was a giant shock to all of us to learn that Colette and I were the main beneficiaries of her will.
That will was why we were in Chicago.
Alexandra Kiriakis had left her apartment to her firstborn niece, and Colette immediately moved into the badass brownstone in a part of the city neither of us could ever afford on our own. Colette had wanted me to live with her – the apartment had three bedrooms and it was huge – but Aunt Alex had left her art studio to her second-born niece, which was me. As a twin it was hard enough to find privacy, so I happily moved into the funky little downtown studio. It was much better for Colette and me that we didn’t live together, and having my own studio to go home to was one of the keys to our sisterly harmony.
About a month after I moved into the studio, I found the letter from Alex.
Dear Anna, it began. If you’re as much like me as I think you are, you’ll have found this letter pretty quickly. It had been taped behind a painting, and my only excuse was that I’d been so in awe of the painting that I hadn’t immediately looked behind it. Because really, who does? I need you to do me a favor if you can. If you can’t – or won’t – I understand, but I think you’re probably up to the challenge.
Challenge accepted. I’d never met a dare I didn’t take, or a bet I didn’t win, and somehow, my Aunt Alex had known that about me. Her letter went on to tell me about a painting that had been stolen from her, and how important it was that my mother get that painting back. It was a painting of Alex and Sophia that she called The Sisters. It was the last art piece they’d worked on together and it had been stolen years before. A man named Markham Gray had it and refused to return it, so the only thing Alex could think of was that it had to be stolen back from him.
I’ve tried to get it back from Markham for thirty years, and it’s just one more way that I’ve failed my sister. Please, if you can, take it from him and give it to Sophia. Perhaps then she’ll understand why I did what I did.
“I’m thinking about how to frame the sisters. How much canvas did you have to cut when you took it?” Colette asked as she walked out of the bathroom. She pulled the hair tie out of her hair and shook it down in a curtain of blonde curls around her shoulders.
“Not much. Probably half an inch all the way around.”
“I’ll have to make a custom frame before we give it to Mom,” she said as she slipped a dress over matching pink lace bra and panties.
I shook my head at her lingerie finery. “I’m lucky if I can even find a bra, much less one that matches my underwear.”
She shook her head at me with a sigh. “You’re so weird. Do you think we should go with gilded wood or plain?”
“It was in a heavy gilt frame in Gray’s panic room, and they looked like princesses locked in a tower. They should celebrate being let free with all the finery we can dress them in.”
Colette nodded absently as she studied the painting. Then she looked me in the eyes. “You did good, Sister.”
“Thanks. You too.”
I watched her choose a nail polish color to match her bra, which matched her panties, which would only be visible without the dress. I couldn’t imagine who would even notice that they matched. “I’m not good at being you, Sister. I kind of suck at it, actually,” I said.
“Well, considering that I can’t rock climb, ride a motorcycle, scuba dive, or jump out of planes, I figure we’re pretty even,” she said as she dropped the nail polish in the pocket of her dress, then tucked the heavy canvas of Alexandra and Sophia into a large portfolio and slipped it under her bed.
I thought of the boob-tastrophies in her pink dress and shuddered in horror. “Nah, you win. Ten-six, Colette.”
8
Darius
“When the winds of change blow, some people build walls, others build windmills.”
Chinese proverb
“Colette Collins is a twenty-six-year-old interior designer. How does she afford that address?” my colleague at Cipher Security, Shane, said through the sound system in my car.
“You should see it in person. People give left testicles and firstborn children just to get on the waiting list for a place like this.” I’d parked across the street from the graceful old brownstone and was sipping cold coffee as I debated my next move.
The computer keyboard clacked through the speaker. “The apartment is part of a family trust from the mother’s side,” she said.
“Those are the kind of trusts that usually require break-ins at attorney’s offices to dig into.” I winced at the prospect as I took another sip.
“She’s not a suspect though, right?”
The irrefutable evidence of Colette Collins’ innocence had been replaying in my mind since I saw the footage of her having sex with Sterling Gray.
Once I’d determined it was, in fact, Ms. Collins’ perfect naked ass that Gray had in his hands, I’d shifted my gaze to the timecode and kept it there until they’d dressed and left the room. At no time did he leave her alone, nor did she even excuse herself to use the bathroom. In fact, there was never a time during Ms. Collins’ visit to the mansion that she was out of sight of Gray or a camera. She came, she came, as it were, and then she went. Apparently in that order.
“She was with Gray the whole time she was in the house.” Was it the coffee that was so bitter, or my suddenly foul mood?
“Well, if you need any B&E, I know a guy,” Shane said. I could hear the grin in her voice, and then the sound of a kiss.
“Hey Gabriel,” I said, because no one else would be kissing Shane.
“Masoud. Everything okay?”
“Stolen painting from a system I designed. Just trying to tie up some loose ends.”
“Good luck,” he said.
“Let us know if we can help,” Shane added brightly.
I hung up, and “Bohemian Rhapsody” continued playing through the car speaker. My phone was playing all its music on random shuffle, and I just let it play. The only thing I couldn’t abide was Christmas music at any time other than between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve; otherwise, the randomness just felt like a soundtrack to my life.
If I was completely honest with myself, and I generally was, I had found the shimmery blonde intriguing – a strange and wonderful party bulb in a room of designer recessed lighting. She was lovely to look at, but so was every other blonde Gray had ever chosen. It was her utter disregard for convention – a recklessnes
s in her conversation that I could imagine spilled over into her everyday life – which had captivated me.
I had thought her unconventional, but sleeping with Gray had been a conventional choice.
So I’d put the spark of interest I felt into a box and tucked it into a dark corner of the mental closet in which I compartmentalized my life. Except that when I saw her round the corner from the alley that connected to the back of her building, that box tipped over and her strange light came spilling out.
I was out of my car and across the street to intercept her before I’d made up my mind to move.
I dimly registered her outfit – a white T-shirt under a motorcycle jacket, jeans with a rip at one knee that looked like it was from wear, not fashion, and low engineer boots. On another woman it might have been fashionably rebellious, but these looked like her everyday clothes. This was who she really was.
“Colette?” I said as I neared her. She was lost in thought and didn’t seem to hear me. “Miss Collins?” I tried again.
She looked up suddenly and stopped dead in her tracks. Her expression did something I’ve never seen a human face do – every emotion on the spectrum from fear to pleasure bloomed on her face at once, and the moment was somehow the longest single second I’d ever experienced.
“Hello,” she said a little breathlessly.
“Hello.” My answering smile was reflexive, and I could feel an odd giddiness bubble up at the delight on her face. But then her eyebrows wrinkled in a frown.
“Why are you here?”
“Why are you?” I said quickly.
“My—” She cocked her head sideways and studied me. “You’re here for me.”
“Why do you say that?” My parents were journalists, and our dinner table conversation had been an education in information gathering techniques.
“Because you know my last name, and you know this address.” She started walking again, and I realized she was heading toward the L train.
“I have questions about last night,” I said, as I fell into step beside her. “Can I give you a ride somewhere?”
She stopped and stared at me. “You have a horse?”
“What?” I stared back, a little incredulous. “No.”
“You don’t?” Her expression fell. “I love horses. Bicycles are harder with two people, and I don’t think you meant for me to ride you like a cowgirl.” She almost seemed to be talking to herself, and my sudden burst of shocked laughter seemed to snap her back to our conversation.
“My car is parked just there.” I pointed at the Land Cruiser across the street.
“Then you should have said drive. You don’t ride a car. You ride a horse, or a bicycle, or a bull. Well, I don’t ride bulls, they’re too big and mad, and rodeo clowns scare me almost as much as sewer clowns do.”
I didn’t even try to hide the grin on my face. My interrogation skills may have been excellent, but her answer-avoidance ones were off the charts. I surrendered. “Sewer clowns are definitely worse.”
She nodded, as though this required agreement. “What kind of questions do you want to ask? I mean,” she continued before I could answer, “are they specific questions that you’ve already thought of, or are they more general, like about the weather in Dawson City, or the price of gold, or what exactly are woodchucks? Are they marmots, or ground squirrels, or groundhogs? And why would they call a groundhog a groundhog when he’s no relation at all to a pig?”
“Are you done?” I finally asked.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Probably not. How much more distracting can I be?”
I pointedly avoided looking at her curves. “I won’t be distracted,” I lied, since I’d been nothing but distracted by her since I’d called her name.
She sighed, as though every conversational twist and turn had been a deliberate attempt to confuse me. “Of course not. Well, then, where are we going?” she asked, as though our meeting had a quality of unwelcome inevitability.
“I assume you’re on your way to work?” I said, as we crossed the street toward my truck.
She opened her mouth, then closed it, then finally spoke. “No one’s clamoring for me to find them today.”
Most people had their designers on speed dial, or at least the people I knew who had designers. Though to look at Colette Collins in her jeans and boots, with a messenger bag slung over her chest and some sort of harness on her shoulders, she didn’t appear to be about to visit design clients.
I opened the passenger door of my Land Cruiser, and she unslung her bag, and hauled herself in. “Nice truck,” she said, with an impressed nod at the exterior.
I was not susceptible to women in the way they often wished I were. Perhaps it was because the women I encountered in Chicago were so aware of how I spoke and how I looked that it felt as though I’d been assessed for my non-existent fortune in Middle Eastern oil reserves before a proper conversation was ever had.
Some might say I read too much into others’ reactions to me. Maybe. Maybe not. I had learned, however, to build three extra hours into every airplane travel day so the inevitable questions by TSA didn’t cause me to miss my flight, and I carried my passport with me as my daily identification in the event either my direct manner of speaking, my 1990s truck or my brown skin warranted a closer look.
Somehow, the fact that this woman was even less inclined to pretension and social graces than I, was far stranger than anyone I’d ever met, and admired the Land Cruiser rather than sneered at its obvious age made my mouth open of its own accord, and then words fell out that had no business being said.
“Do you want to see my boat?”
9
Anna
“Owning a boat is basically standing in a cold shower, tearing up hundreds and watching them go down the drain.”
Max Collins
“You have a boat?” I might have squeaked. Yes, it was entirely possible that I had squeaked like an excited little mouse about to get batted around by a sadistic cat.
“I do.” He looked pleased at my reaction, so I narrowed my eyes at him.
“Sail or power?”
He sighed. “I’m not significant enough to have a sailboat, sadly.”
“Define significant,” I snapped back to cover my giddiness at meeting a Disney prince with a boat.
He got in the driver’s seat and turned to me before he started the classic body Land Cruiser, about which I had serious car envy. “Motor boats require no particular skill to operate,” he said wryly.
“Owning any boat is like standing in a cold shower tearing up hundred-dollar bills, my dad always said. That’s pretty significant.”
He started the truck and pulled away from the curb to cover a smirk, but I still saw it. “So, you’ll join me?” His phone took a second to sync up to a bluetooth speaker and then something that sounded like a soundtrack came on. It was haunting and lovely, and I just barely resisted changing topics completely.
“Can we take the boat out?” I seriously tried not to bounce in my seat like a five-year-old who had to pee, but I’m pretty sure I failed.
He chuckled. “Yes, we can take it out.”
My self-preservation instinct had clearly taken a major backseat to the giant one I had for adventure. “Okay, good. Now first, what is this music, and second define significant.”
He drove smoothly with one hand on the top of the steering wheel. “This is my favorite song from the soundtrack of Aashiqui 2.” He stole a quick glance at me to see if I knew the movie, and I shook my head. “It’s a Bollywood romance with more than a passing resemblance to A Star is Born.”
“A Star is Born isn’t a romance,” I said firmly. “It ends badly.”
He nodded. “Fair enough. It’s a romantic musical, then.”
“Wait, you agree?” I stared at him.
He smiled slightly as he made the turn into the Diversey Harbor parking lot. “I generally find that picking fights about things for which I don’t have strong opinions makes little sense. I te
nd to save my bullets for things that matter.”
“Hmm. You’ve answered my first question, but added a third,” with the kind of grammar that makes your education sound expensive, I thought. The music had shifted to a punky cover of “Sweet Dreams” (Are Made of This), and I held up my fingers. “So number two is still define significant, and number three is, what matters?”
“Those are fairly existential questions, aren’t they?” Darius Masoud navigated his truck into a parking spot in the nearly empty lot and turned it off.
“Are Disney princes incapable of existential thought?” I was having way too much fun with this conversation to attempt to filter more than was absolutely necessary, preferring to save my own self-control bullets for things like not blowing my alibi.
He looked startled for exactly one second, then smirked. “I suppose it depends on the Disney prince. I mean, Aladdin and Beast might have a slightly better shot at existential thought than Prince Charming, for example, considering that he’s the man who thought finding a woman by her shoe size was a reasonable course of action.”
I laughed as I grabbed my stuff before exiting the truck. “You do realize that being able to discuss Disney princes with any degree of fluency is grounds for man-card removal.”
He shrugged. “An acceptable risk when my membership is already tenuous at best.”
“Because you’re not a man?” I asked with a grin.
“Define man,” he said with an answering smirk, as he unlocked a gate and held it open for me to precede him down the dock.
My heart did a little happy dance in my chest. It was a rare person who could play Disney prince with good grammar with me and not run away screaming. “You first. What makes a person significant, and what matters?”
We had arrived at a slip where a gorgeous 1950s wooden yacht – probably about thirty-five feet long, with a gleaming deck that looked freshly varnished – was moored. “Never mind,” I said as he hopped on the deck and held out his hand to help me onboard. “It may or may not matter, but I officially have significant boat envy.”
Code of Honor Page 5