by Meg Tilly
“Absolutely,” she said, placing her hand in his.
Twenty-three
GABE SAT DOWN on his sofa, drink in hand. It was good to be home, even if it was only for an evening. He swirled the crystal tumbler, the ice cubes tinkling. The color of the whiskey reminded him of the amber tones in Zelia’s hair, which the sun had called forth as they’d walked through the rental car lot. She’d glanced over, caught him looking at her, and smiled like warmed honey. Her lush lashes at half-mast partially obscured her eyes. What was she thinking that caused that siren’s smile?
He took a sip of his drink, savoring the heat as it trickled down his throat. He’d always been a staunch Scots whiskey drinker, but a couple of years ago, while on book tour in Japan, that had changed. After dinner, his host had served him Nikka Taketsuru’s seventeen-year-old pure malt. Gabe had taken one sip and was hooked.
Sort of like what happened with Zelia, he thought. Although, back at Berkeley it was only a look. No chance to taste. And now that he’d had the merest of tastes, he craved her like a high-octane drug.
He heard a door open and shut down the hall. Footsteps. Gabe found himself holding his breath, watching for her to appear.
Once they’d left the gallery, they had decided it would be best to put some distance between themselves and Feinstein & Co., so they’d hopped into the rental car, gotten on I-95 South, and headed for New York. The traffic was light, and an hour and ten minutes later they’d pulled up in front of his Tribeca apartment.
Washing up was a priority, as dumpster-diving had proved to be messy, smelly work.
“Thank goodness,” Zelia said as she stepped into his living room. “I feel so much better.” Her wet hair was slicked back from her face, accentuating her high cheekbones and making her eyes appear even larger. A riot of wet curls cascaded down, rendering the upper back of the white T-shirt she’d borrowed from him translucent as it clung to her skin.
He wanted to move her hair aside, peel the T-shirt off, scrape his teeth along the nape of her neck, taste her with his tongue. Her hair appeared darker, the blond and honey tones temporarily disappearing from the moisture captured in the strands.
“Are you sure the restaurant will let me in wearing these?” she asked, gesturing to his sweatpants. “They’re a little too tight in the ass, and the legs are too long.”
Too tight? Zelia’s curvy, rounded ass and womanly thighs poured into his sweatpants was one of the sexiest sights he had ever seen. He cleared his throat. “They’ll let you in,” he said, moving to the hall closet. “You’ll need a coat. A hat, too.” He removed one from the closet, helped her into it, then pulled a knit hat over her wet hair.
“I can’t wear this,” she said. “On Solace Island perhaps I could get away with it, but New York City is stuffed to the gills with gorgeous women.”
“You look adorable,” he said, slipping on his own coat.
“Men.” She shook her head. “Well . . .” There was laughter in her voice as she tucked her hand in the crook of his arm. “At least I no longer stink. Lead the way. I’m ravenous.”
Twenty-four
“IT’S TIME TO strap in, sir,” he heard the steward say. The flight was a last-minute decision. His secretary had been unable to make contact with his usual steward. Hence the idiotic instructions.
He glanced at his fingernails and sighed. It was so hard to keep them in pristine condition. An impossible task, really, with the life he led.
“Sir . . .”
He snapped his gaze up and watched with satisfaction as the color drained from the substitute steward’s face, his jaw working to formulate words. None came out.
He turned back to watch out the window as his Gulfstream jet began its descent. Could hear the steward scurry to the front of the plane, the click as the steward’s safety belt snapped into place. Pussy.
The glittering lights of Seattle shimmered and danced against the dark night sky, beckoning, and beguiling like a lustful belly dancer on the ground below.
The new plan, he thought with satisfaction, though hastily arranged, is a good one. So fascinating how an accidental interaction might very well be the thing to transform the mundane into something brilliant. He’d never combined the fluids of two people in one art piece before. One person. One painting. That was how he worked. However, the Alexus painting wouldn’t leave him alone. It was like a pit bull that had locked its jaws around his heart and wouldn’t let go. The painting was demanding, insisting on completion. Unfortunately, the little time-loss episode two nights prior had decimated an already meager supply of his most necessary ingredient.
He’d toyed with the idea of expediency. Hire some hooker, knock her out, withdraw a couple pints of blood, and then send her on her merry way none the wiser. But it didn’t feel right in his gut. Art was like that. It was a demanding mistress. Wouldn’t let him slather any old shit on the canvas. It needed to be connected in some way, a brother, a mother, a sister, a niece—and that’s when he’d thought of Alexus’s little gallery-owner friend.
He tapped his fingertips on the pale leather-clad armrest.
Tap . . . tap . . . tap . . .
“Zelia,” he murmured. “Zelia Thompson.” Her name shone before him as if it had been stenciled on the air. “It’s perfect really. They’re friends. Close friends, and the bitch did refuse to show my work.”
He heard the whir and then the clunk of the wheels descending from the belly of the plane as the ground rushed toward them.
He smiled. “It’s payback time,” he whispered as a shiver of anticipation coursed through him.
Twenty-five
“HOW DID YOU learn to do all that stuff?” Zelia asked.
“What stuff?” Gabe asked, but he had a feeling he knew what she was talking about. She’d been shimmering with excitement ever since they’d left Greenwich. He could feel the residual adrenaline rush buzzing like a million honeybees circling the air around her.
Hell, he was feeling it as well. Had managed to hold it together, do what needed to be done, but once they’d left the gallery the aftereffects had hit hard. It had caused him to feel light-headed, shaky; his knees suddenly had the consistency of Jell-O. He’d been grateful for the solid feel of the seat of the rental car under his butt. Forced himself to focus on steering and the traffic around them to help take his mind away from what they’d just done and how bloody stupid and risky it was. How scared shitless he had been. How he would do it again if she asked him to.
That was when he realized just how deeply invested he was in her and in a possible “them.”
“You know . . .” Zelia circled her fork in the air, a green bean stuck in its prongs. She glanced surreptitiously around, making sure the other diners and the waitstaff weren’t close enough to overhear, then leaned in. “Disengaging the burglar alarm,” she whispered, her eyes glowing. “Picking the lock, lifting fingerprints . . .” Her face was so expressive, literally radiating excitement and satisfaction at a job well done. He could almost see her walking through their visit to the gallery step by step and could tell the instant she arrived at being waist deep in the dumpster. Her nose had scrunched. “And the methodical way you had us sort through the garbage in that dumpster?” She grimaced and sat back in her chair, a shudder running through her. A cat doused with a bucket of water, shaking off the unpleasant evidence and memory.
Gabe didn’t blame her. That particular dumpster had been particularly foul smelling.
“It was disgusting,” she added. “But we did find the needle.”
“A needle, a bit of tubing, and a port. Not a syringe. Which is what would’ve been used to inject heroin,” he said. “We don’t know if it’s connected. If the needle is, it just brings up more questions, not answers.”
“Whatever.” She waved his comment off, too pumped up for his caution to dampen her parade. “Yes, we’ll wait for your brother to run his fancy
tests, but we both know it’s important. I got tingles when we found it. You did, too. I could see it on your face. We are so going to prove the truth about Alexus’s death.” She smiled brightly at him as if she thought he was spectacularly clever. “Totally made it worth rummaging around in that stinky dumpster.” She popped the green bean in her mouth and chewed contemplatively. “We were so damned smelly, one could almost chew the air around us. I have never been so happy to step into a shower. Didn’t want to get out—”
Gabe shifted discreetly in his seat. His writer’s imagination was not being his friend.
“Lathered up twice.” She shook her head. “Washed my hair three times. Three times, just to make sure I got rid of the stink.”
Oh Jesus. Now visions of her soaping up her luscious, curvaceous body were embedded in his mind. Zelia moving in slow motion, hot, steaming water pounding down, her lovely rounded arms over her head as she washed her hair. Her head tilted back, long throat exposed as if begging for a kiss, a love bite, right there. Her back arched. Her raised arms thrusting her glorious breasts upward.
It took all of Gabe’s willpower not to groan aloud.
“Are you all right?” Her voice broke through his daydream.
“Yeah. I’m fine,” he said, failing totally in his effort to sound nonchalant. What emitted had been a cracked growl.
“You sure? You had a rather intense look on your face.”
“I was thinking . . .” He paused. Great. Way to paint yourself into a corner. Don’t want to lie, but can’t tell her the truth. “That . . .” What had they been discussing? The dumpster. “That I was grateful for a shower, too.”
She laughed and finished the last swallow of her Syrah.
“More?” he asked, tipping the bottle toward her.
“Abso-fuckin-lootly.” She grinned, scooting her wineglass a couple of inches in his direction.
He topped off their glasses.
“So?” She propped her head on her clasped hands, elbows bent on the table as if settling in for a cozy bedtime story. “I’m waiting. It’s not every guy who has your mad skills at breaking and entering, fingerprint lifting, et cetera.”
His mind flashed to the sort of mad skills he’d like to show her. Naked. In bed. Partially clothed would work as well. Hell, we don’t even need a bed. I can demonstrate a few of those skills right here on this table.
Get your mind out of the gutter.
He cleared his throat. “Well, it helps that my little brother’s a cop. If there’s something he doesn’t know, he can generally put me in touch with someone who does.”
“And they’ll talk with you?”
He shrugged. “For the most part. When you write crime fiction, you get a wide spectrum of readers. Some of those readers happen to be in law enforcement, forensics, FBI. People like to see their jobs and what their lives are like portrayed accurately. I reach out to them, and sometimes they reach out to me. Not sure how to classify the relationships. Not really friends, not quite colleagues. Generally it starts with a chat over e-mail or the phone, and then we go out for drinks. It progresses from there . . .”
“Kind of like dating,” she said, beaming at him.
Nothing like dating, his internal horndog caveman wanted to growl. There is a big difference between hanging out with my brother and his law enforcement buddies and what I’d like to do with you.
“I guess,” he managed to say in a relatively civilized manner. “Soon I was learning how to handle various types of guns, how it felt to load them, hold them, shoot them, clean them. I got to ride along, visit crime scenes, the morgue.” He shrugged. She was gazing at him starry-eyed, but in truth, there were things he had seen that he wished he hadn’t. Heartbreaking images that would never leave him and shaped his view of the world in a detrimental way. Sometimes he wished he could go back to the innocent that he was before he started writing, diving into research. Believing that at the core of everyone was goodness. That wasn’t true. There was evil in the world and it came from the most unexpected places and in all sorts of guises. God only knew what kind of damage it was doing to his brother’s psyche being exposed to the monsters, day in and day out.
Zelia took another sip of her wine, looking at him from under her long eyelashes. She had a small beauty mark high on her right cheekbone that he wanted to kiss. “Gabriel Conaghan.” She shook a teasing finger at him. “I can see how you might have learned how to dust and lift prints riding shotgun with your brother and your FBI pals. However, I seriously doubt that the excellent men and women who make their livelihoods by upholding the law would teach you how to (a) disengage an alarm system and (b) pick a lock.” She smirked at him, then took another sip of her wine, tipping her head back, exposing her throat.
The woman was so damned erotic without even trying. God help the world if she ever decided to stand in her sensuous power. He exhaled slowly, trying to get a grip on himself. He was seriously hard beneath the table.
“Correct,” he said, amazed at how normal his voice sounded. “When I was a teenager I got a job working in a bike shop on the weekends. I had been saving my money to do something special for my godmother. She was turning fifty and had been a little blue about it. Never been married. No children.”
“Did she want children?” Zelia asked, sorrow for his godmother reflected in her eyes.
“For sure. She loved us kids and was like a second mother to us. She’d never met the right guy. I hadn’t thought about it, just took all that love, kindness, and attention she showered on us kids for granted. Then, one night, I’d come home late from a party. Snuck in the back door. I was being quiet because I’d had a few beers and knew my mom would give me hell for it.
“As I started to climb the stairs, I heard my mom and Nora talking in the kitchen. I was surprised she was still there, that they were both still awake. Nora was crying about turning fifty, saying life had passed her by, no husband, no children, nothing to show for her forty-nine years of life, and in a couple months she was going to be half a century old. She kept saying that phrase over and over, and I could hear my mom’s soft murmur as she tried to console her.
“I got a job the very next day, saved every penny. On her birthday I treated her to a fancy dinner and the musical Wicked on Broadway. She was so happy, loved the musical. I felt so damned proud. We had a wonderful time. Returned to her cottage and found a kicked-in door. The place ransacked. Nora was devastated. One of the things the thieves had stolen was a locket from her grandmother. It wasn’t worth a great deal of money, but it meant the world to her.” Still, after all these years, what had happened weighed heavily on him. “I felt responsible.”
Her hand covered his. He wanted to lean into the sensation, forget about the burglary, the feelings of guilt. “You didn’t steal her locket,” she said. “The break-in wasn’t your fault. If you hadn’t taken your godmother out that night, she might have been injured or worse.”
“My godmother said the same thing, but . . .” He shrugged. “Anyway, I became obsessed with home security. It’s amazing what one can pick up online. The more I researched, the more concerned I became. I figured if I could break into her home, burglars could as well. People always ask, ‘What did you purchase when your first novel hit it big?’ I pretend I forgot. Don’t want my godmother to be embarrassed. But the truth is I know exactly what I purchased. Solid wood outer doors for her cottage, dead bolts with deeper box strikes, reinforced doorjambs with galvanized steel, locks I couldn’t pick, and an alarm I couldn’t disengage. Still I worry, but she won’t move. She’s stubborn like my mom.”
“And you never know . . . perhaps the act of diving into a thief’s mindset to protect your godmother is what piqued your interest in the criminal world, was the catalyst for the successful career you enjoy today.”
“Huh,” Gabe said, feeling as if he had just been smacked across the head with a two-by-four. “I never thought
about it that way.”
Zelia smiled, but there seemed to be a trace of sadness lingering just under the skin. “Think of it as an unexpected gift your godmother graced you with.”
Twenty-six
STEPPING OUT OF the warm restaurant into the cold night air was like a slap to the face. The waiter locked the door behind them, was probably hoping like hell that the couple snuggling in the booth in the corner would take the hint and leave, too.
Zelia tucked her chin into the warmth of her borrowed overcoat and shoved her hands into the pockets. It felt so intimate wearing his coat, breathing in the faint clean scent of him embedded in the fabric. It was almost midnight. The road was relatively quiet, a few pedestrians, an occasional car zipping past, its headlight beams bouncing over the uneven road. Two blocks over there was the thrum of a steady stream of cars on Hudson Street, the occasional bleat of a horn.
Zelia walked alongside Gabe, unable to shake the heartbreaking image of his godmother crying in his mom’s kitchen.
“You’re quiet.” Gabe’s voice broke through the fog of her thoughts.
“Yeah. I’m thinking about your godmother wanting kids, never meeting the right guy.” She pressed her fist to her chest. “Hurts my heart.”
“I think she’s probably at peace with it now.”
Zelia shook her head. “No. I’d put money on it still causing her sorrow. I know it would me.”
Gabe’s steps slowed to a halt. “You want children?” he asked.
“Desperately,” she said, looking back over her shoulder to where he was standing. His face was in the shadows so she couldn’t see his expression, but she could just imagine the stunned, horrified look on his face. “A mood buster, huh?” She laughed, suddenly feeling rather carefree at having broken the unspoken cardinal rule of early dating. “I know. Not supposed to admit it, but it’s true. I’ve always wanted a big family, tons of children running in and out of the house, the mess, the noise, the sleepless nights and burping babies. I want it all. And yet . . .” The laughter had vanished as quickly as it had come and bone-deep sadness had taken up residence. “It’s clear . . .” She was having difficulty getting words out. “That a houseful of children is not going to happen for me.”
