Okay, so the sex was good. No, great. No, incredible. She waved her hand at her own inability to settle on a word then picked up her oversize cup again. So what? Sex was sex, no matter how incredible. She’d just happened to meet up with a guy who knew how to do it right, that’s all. Well, with a little instruction, anyway. Alex’s habit of trying to slow things down all the time frustrated her to no end. She liked it fast and rough. And, oh boy, had he proven the right man for the job.
But if sex was sex, what was she doing sitting there wondering what he was doing right now? And smiling at the knowledge that he was probably climbing the walls wondering where she was and when she’d be back?
She was a woman used to coming and going as she wished. No explanations. No set time for meeting up. Nobody to account to for her actions. Of course, since her mother had died, no one had really asked her to do any of that, either.
Strange…
A delivery truck pulled up outside the auction house. She sat back and opened the newspaper she’d brought along, pretending an interest in the sports section as she watched the driver get out and go inside. Minutes later he came back out again with a well-dressed older man, a guy she had already pegged as one of the partners of the auction house.
She’d learned from one of the part-time auction house stock workers that a few of the less expensive pieces had been delivered days ago and were sitting in the house’s basement vault. Amazing what a nice, crisp one hundred dollar bill could accomplish, especially when the information needed was essentially nonthreatening. After all, how could sharing information on what had already been delivered and placed under tight security endanger the pieces themselves?
But these pieces here…they were the real deal. If the hands-on presence of the auction house partner wasn’t a clear indication, then the Brinks-like security of the truck, and the uniformed men that climbed out of the back door, were.
Personally, she tended to stay away from anything with a lock on it. Technology today was ever evolving and hard to keep up with. Learn how to crack one safe, and the next day the mechanism changed and you were scrambling to learn how to bypass that one. Gone were the days when a couple of sticks of dynamite or plastique would do the job. Anyway, all that was too messy for her.
She watched the men carry pieces one by one from the truck into the auction house at the same time that she turned the page of the paper, then reached for an almond biscotti and dipped it into her latte.
She preferred crimes that required a little more finesse, a little role-playing, and, preferably, someone else to do the job for her without their knowing.
She crunched on the Italian breakfast biscuit then scanned the newspaper, zooming in on an ad for the auction house and its pricey stock up for bid next Tuesday morning.
She slid her cell phone from her purse and dialed Alex’s business number. She was immediately put through to his office by his secretary, who apparently would never forget her. She smiled.
“Cassavetes.”
Nicole’s smile widened. Her own personal Greek god. Her own Alexander the Greatest. “Hey,” she murmured.
He didn’t say anything right away.
She cleared her throat. “I didn’t get a chance to ask you last night—” namely because they’d been busy with other business “—did you go ahead and work up that faux policy you were talking about?”
“Funny you should ask. I’m holding a copy of it in my hands right now.”
“And it’s making the rounds?”
“Faster than a speeding bullet.”
She took a long sip of latte. “Good, that means you have time on your hands….”
On the other end of the phone, Alex paused and sat back in his chair, the springs squeaking. “Depends on what you mean by time.”
And it also depended on what she had in mind. If she was going to suggest they head back to his apartment for what would amount to his first “nooner,” he was all for it.
He glanced down at the front of his slacks then snapped immediately upright in his chair, nearly injuring himself in the process.
He didn’t know what it was, but all Nicole had to do was blink and he was hard. He grimaced, realizing she couldn’t exactly do that over the phone. But he could hear the smile in her voice. And that alone made him want her.
“I mean, can you get out of the office?”
Alex grinned. “Oh, yeah.” He craned his neck to glance out his open door at where his secretary pretended not to be listening to his end of the conversation. He swiveled his chair to face his window. “What did you have in mind?”
“Possibility number two.”
He squinted. Were those people in the office building across the street staring at him? Or was he getting paranoid in his old age? “I don’t get you.”
“The policy I chose that was taken out by the auction house? I’m sitting across the street from the house in question now. The prize pieces are being delivered as we speak.”
Alex’s ego deflated like a helium balloon.
“You won’t regret it. This restaurant serves great biscotti.”
He turned back toward his desk and tried not to let her hear his disappointment. “No thanks. I’ve got a meeting at one with my superior. Considering I was a no-show at the last two, I have to be there.”
Silence.
Alex rubbed the bridge of his nose, then turned to the page in the faux policy that mentioned the uncirculated Double Eagle ten-dollar coins.
“Nicole?”
“I’m still here.” It sounded like she was drinking something. “You really think he’s going to go for the coins, don’t you?”
“If you mean do I think you’re wasting your time at the auction house? Yes, I do.”
His loft was another matter entirely. Hell, he’d even be willing to risk his boss’s wrath if she so much as hinted at wanting to return there.
“Okay. It’s your funeral.”
Not exactly the imagery running through his mind just then. “Funeral?”
“Yeah. You know, for your job.” She crunched into something, then hummed as she chewed. Alex swallowed hard. “D.M. is not going for the metal, Alex. He’s going to hit the auction house. Probably four days from now, on the night before the auction.”
“How do you know that?”
“Gut instinct.”
And what a gut she had, too.
“Isn’t that the reason you kidnapped me in Baltimore? Because of my ability to sniff these things out?”
He blew a long breath through his lips. “I didn’t kidnap you. I apprehended you. And you are now officially my informer.”
“I’m nobody’s stoolie, Alex.”
Oh, how he knew that.
“I’ve got to go.”
There was a sudden urgency in her voice and Alex tensed. “What is it?”
“I think I just spotted somebody I recognize.” He heard rustling paper.
“Hey—” Alex said, afraid she’d already hung up.
“What?” she said quietly, moments later.
He grinned. “What time will I see you back at my place?”
She didn’t answer right away. Something he didn’t like at all.
“Goodbye, Alex.”
He opened his mouth to object, but quickly realized that she’d already hung up.
He dropped the receiver into its cradle then leaned back in his chair again. Had she really spotted someone? Or had it been an excuse? And why in the hell couldn’t she answer a simple question? It was normal for a guy to want to see the woman he’d just had incredible sex with, wasn’t it?
Unless it hadn’t been incredible for her.
He groaned.
“Can I get you something, Mr. Cassavetes?”
“Yes, a psychiatrist. I need my head examined.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing, Dorothy. I don’t need anything. Thanks for asking.”
At least he didn’t need anything from her. Not unless she could offer up some ad
vice on how to handle a woman who didn’t adhere to traditional rules, either in life or dating.
Were they dating?
He watched Dorothy leave the room.
“Close the door, please,” he called after her.
She stared at him, puzzled, then did what he asked.
Last night there had emerged a moment that felt…traditional somehow. Real. Two people connecting on both a physical and an emotional plane.
No one could have been more surprised than him when she’d offered up the information about her mother. Even she’d seemed stunned that she’d said the words, as if she hadn’t been aware she’d spoken them out loud. Hearing her experiences had made him feel awkward and sympathetic and fiercely protective of her. Which was the last thing he wanted.
Damn it, she was a thief. She stole things that he tried to recover. She followed a completely different code of ethics. She was completely without morals….
He felt himself go hot all over again.
Oh, how completely without morals she was….
He shook his head to clear it. This was insane. Crazy.
His gaze settled on his in-box and the cases waiting there to be investigated, then the pile on the other side of his desk on the policies issued over the past two months. He reached for that pile and started leafing through them, wondering if she was right about D.M.
His eye caught on something in one of the files. More specifically, a policy that was written up a week ago for a full and very expensive set of Tiffany jewelry. He closed the file and noted how far it was down from the top. Near the bottom. Had Nicole seen it and purposely placed it at the bottom of the stack to make it look like she hadn’t seen it? Or had she genuinely not gotten that far?
Why was he getting the feeling that he should be a little more careful with her?
Damn.
IT HAD BEEN A WHILE since Nicole had worn a maid’s uniform. Specifically over a year ago when she’d impersonated a maid at Christine Bowman’s rented house in St. Louis.
She braced herself as the taxi made a sharp right on Broadway, then adjusted her short black wig with the aid of her compact mirror. Oh, what a score that had been. She smiled, then wiped a bit of lipstick from the corner of her mouth. A tidy sum in uncut diamonds. And her plan had gone like clockwork, up to and including Christine Bowman’s arrest for the crime after Nicole had already lifted the diamonds.
She clapped her compact closed and slid it into her black leather backpack. The other day Alex had asked her if she was somehow violating the code of honor among thieves by targeting other thieves. She sat back and stared blindly through the window. A light summer rain had begun falling a little while after she’d left her post at the auction house and it made everything look blurry, dim. It had been a long time since she’d given a great deal of thought to what she did. A long time since she’d bothered to remember why and when she’d decided to target other thieves rather than make her own direct scores. And she wasn’t altogether sure she wanted to think about it now.
She tugged on the white collar of the black-and-white starched maid’s uniform. She’d been nineteen and become the unwitting victim of another thief. She’d just lifted her second set of Tiffany jewelry—a classic canary-yellow diamond set of necklace, bracelet and ring—when she’d gotten hit outside the house from where she’d taken it. Only there had been no flair in the second stealing. The thief, one of her father’s old cronies, had nearly killed her when she’d fought against him. She remembered the wild look on his face as he’d stared at her. The soulless shadows in his eyes as he held up a lead pipe and beat her to within an inch of her life.
She’d spent five days in the county hospital cramped in the same room with other uninsured unfortunates. Gunshot victims, victims of gang stabbings, people who attempted suicide, crack mothers. And while she’d always been street-smart, she’d never spent a great deal of time on that particular part of the street. And she’d realized as she’d gotten to know each and every one of her fellow patients that all of them were victims of another criminal. That just as there were cold-hearted crooks that sat behind CEO desks in large conglomerates taking from the less fortunate, so there were people in her profession that preyed on their own and were just as unlikely to be punished for their crimes.
So she’d set out to punish them.
She’d been young enough then to think of herself as The Equalizer. The Robin Hood of Manhattan, who stole from the undeserving thieves and gave back to those who had been hurt.
And in the case of D.M., increasingly those people were the families of those he killed.
She shuddered then rolled down her window, uncaring that rain got inside. She needed the air, needed to warm the air-conditioned air inside the cab.
“Hey, lady, you mind? You’re ruining my seats,” the cabby complained.
She asked him to turn down the air then rolled the window back up. That was okay. They were coming up to her drop-off point anyway. She reached into her backpack, pushed aside the small caliber gun she’d recovered from Alex’s loft, then pulled out her fake bonded card to flash at the head housekeeper she’d talked to on the phone earlier.
The cab pulled over to stop at the curb and she stuffed money into the Plexiglas drawer, staring at the upscale apartment building as she waited for her change.
The lady of the house was at a charity luncheon that would stretch well into the dinner hour. Her husband, undoubtedly, would be at work, just like all husbands that lived in this neighborhood. It was more than that they merely needed the money to cover the overhead, but men of this type tended to either be workaholics or had other interests that didn’t involve their wife or home.
That meant that only the housekeeping staff would be on hand—the head housekeeper who had answered the phone and perhaps one or two others.
She collected her change and left a large tip. “You didn’t see me,” she said.
The cabby grinned at her in the rearview mirror as he pocketed the money. “So long as you don’t kill anybody, we’re copasetic.”
She climbed out of the cab and waited until it rolled away.
The doorman stood looking at her warily from the double glass doors. She smiled at him then cleared her throat. When he smiled back, she knew she wouldn’t have any trouble blowing by him, and she didn’t. She had to fake a French accent, broken English and a twisted ankle along with a sob story about needing this job to cover her mother’s medical bills, but he was a breeze compared to other doormen. She’d encountered her share that wouldn’t let her in no matter what. If you weren’t on the visitor’s list, and the person in charge didn’t approve your being buzzed up, then you were out of luck, left scurrying for an alternative access to the premises. That’s usually where she called things off. When you started scaling fire escapes and busting windows, you were just begging to be caught and arrested.
The housekeeper, however, was another story.
Nicole stood in the third-floor hallway, calculating her odds of getting inside. She didn’t even try smiling at the matronly-looking Hispanic who looked like she wouldn’t let Guiliani himself in to use the bathroom. She merely handed over her fake bonded card, started mumbling about needing to get this job over with, and forced her way inside the apartment.
“Señora, señora,” the housekeeper called after her, following her down the main hall. “I must talk to the lady of the house before I let you in here.”
The key to success in any job was quickness. Nicole turned, held her hand palm out and began bobbing her head in exasperation the way she’d seen a Puerto Rican friend do. “Don’t ‘señora’ me. I’ve been stuck in traffic for the past hour, lady, and had to pay a fortune in cab fare to get here because ‘the lady of the house’ demanded someone be sent here pronto.” She turned and continued walking, hoping the design of the two-floor apartment was standard. “It was my friggin’ day off. And now I gotta pee something terrible.”
There. There was the guest bathroom. Right where it
usually was, tucked away neatly under the staircase.
The housekeeper was on her heels. Nicole turned and did the palm-out thing again. “Don’t even think about following me in there. I won’t be responsible for what I’ll do.”
The older woman looked shocked at the possibility that physical violence might be involved. She backed up then hurried in the other direction. Probably to get whomever else was in the house.
Nicole closed and locked the bathroom door, then glanced at her watch. Three minutes. Not bad. Not a record or anything, but nothing to cough at.
She put her bag down then flipped open the lid to the commode. There wasn’t much toilet paper on the roll so she found another one under the sink and began rolling it around her open hand. Judging the wad to be thick enough for the old plumbing systems of these apartments, she put the half-empty roll back under the sink then stuck her hand with the wad in it into the toilet. She hated this part, but hey, with any luck the bowl had been cleaned that morning. She stepped to the sink and washed up then waited.
She didn’t have to wait long. A few seconds later there came the expected banging at the door. “Señora, you muss pleeeaze come out now.”
I’d like nothing better.
Nicole made sure her wig was straight then reached over to flush the toilet. As designed the wad stopped it up and water began cascading over the top. She grabbed her pack then opened the door, feigning horror.
“Oh, no! Look what’s happened! What am I going to do?”
An elderly man stood with the housekeeper. Her husband? She suspected so.
Nicole stood back to allow them to enter the confined space then peered out into the hallway. No one else was in sight.
“The mop,” she said. “Where’s the friggin’ mop?”
The couple was trying to stop the flow.
“In zee kitchen pantry!” the housekeeper shouted. “It’s in zee pantry!”
Nicole rushed out into the hall…then closed them in. There was the simple matter of shoving the stopper under the door and she was free and clear. At least for the next five or so minutes.
She rushed up the stairs to the second floor, searching for the master bedroom where Nessbaum would have the jewels stashed. Guest room…guest room…master bedroom!
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