“Nope.” Grant glanced at the fire poker in his hand and back at me. “Since the day we met, I haven’t been able to get anything past her. And believe me—I’ve tried.”
Since it would have been impolite to glare at my hostess, I settled one on Grant instead.
“That’s rude,” I said. “Instead of constantly trying to provoke me, maybe you should just be nice for a change.”
Mrs. Emerson answered for him. “What would be the fun in that?”
* * *
“Okay, it’s the moment of truth. Do you want to sleep in my boyhood room or the guest room?”
Grant stood at the bottom of the stairs, blocking the hallway and making it impossible to move past him without brushing my entire body against his. Mrs. Emerson had already gone to bed, leaving us alone in this part of the house, which would make it a perfect moment for stolen kisses and body brushes of that sort.
So of course, neither one of us moved. I had the feeling even the slightest touch right now would send us both reeling. Me, because I couldn’t have more. Him, because he wouldn’t.
“Boyhood room,” I said.
“I should point out that the guest room has an adjoining bathroom.”
“Still boyhood room.”
“It also has a queen-sized bed and real goose-down pillows.”
“That’s gross. I only sleep on chemically manufactured fillers that have never touched a live animal’s skin.”
“But you eat animals all the time,” Grant said. He heaved a mock sigh. “Forget I asked. You’re planning on snooping through all my childhood treasures, aren’t you?”
“Without question,” I said and marched past him to what I assumed was his room, if the faded G.I. Joe stickers on the door were anything to go by.
I hadn’t been wrong about how much space he took up in that hallway. In order to get around him, I had to shrink myself down, force that hard body to move just enough to make room for me, and squeeze past his massive thighs and chest. It was a pretty good analogy for everything this man did to me, actually. He never budged. He never gave. He never strayed from his position.
God, he was annoying. It was a good thing I was just using him. The poor woman who ended up with this man would have a hell of a lot to put up with.
Those same massive thighs and chest pressed against me a little too hard as I popped out the other side, and I felt a momentary twinge of regret. It made a nice companion to the other twinges my body suffered in Grant’s constant looming presence. The poor woman who ended up with this man would also have a hell of a lot to enjoy. There were times when going head-to-head with a powerful and arrogant man had its perks.
Or so I assumed.
“I’m hoping there are old copies of Playboy between the mattresses and trophies of all your childhood triumphs on the walls,” I said with a glance over my shoulder. “Maybe even a framed jersey from your winning touchdown.”
He grinned. “Which winning touchdown? There were so many, I can hardly be expected to remember them all.”
Oh geez. He probably meant it, too. “You know, one of these days, someone is finally going to take some of the wind out of your enormous, billowing sails. All I can say is that I really hope I’m there when it happens.”
His hand caught mine and held it. “Believe me, Penelope—you already were.”
I stopped, and my heart stopped with me. This is it, I thought. This is the moment it all comes tumbling down. I’d never seen a man look so earnest, so intent, so real—and yet things between us were exactly the same as they’d been the day we first met.
He was still a federal agent, and I was still the jewel thief he was tracking. That truth would never change. And the longer I stood there staring at him, the pressure of his fingers like claws around my heart, the harder it was becoming to remember that.
With a bright, false smile that fooled no one, I turned to his room for a much-needed distraction. Fortunately, it provided all the wonder I needed to transform my brittle smile into a genuine one.
“You lie,” I said, my eyes wide. “This isn’t your room.”
He coughed. “You don’t like it?”
Like it? I loved it. It was a history museum crammed into three hundred square feet, from the glass-framed corkboard on the wall holding various pinned bugs to the cracked vase in one corner that looked as if it had been glued together by ancient Greeks. There were no girly magazines, no trophies, not even a dumbbell set gathering cobwebs in the corner. It was books and old maps as far as the eye could see. It was too good.
“Oh my God. This isn’t the nesting place of a virile youth with a football scholarship.” I whirled on him, not bothering to hide my glee. “This is where a kid with no friends lives. This is the childhood room of Indiana Jones.”
“Are you finished yet?”
Almost. “I can forgive you for a lot of things, but I’m not sure I’ll ever get over the fact that you didn’t tell me you were a nerd.”
He grabbed me around the waist and pulled our bodies flush, threatening me with his strength and proximity, with the massive biceps taut as they held me against him. “I was not a nerd,” he said.
He could flex all the muscles he wanted. I wasn’t giving up this easily. “What was your grade point average?” I asked.
“Irrelevant.”
“Were you, at any point, a member of a group that played chess and/or debated for fun?”
“I had a lot of interests.”
I squealed—half in delight, half because he’d moved one of his hands to pinch my chin. It was his favorite move when he wanted to show his dominance. Or, you know, kiss me. Those two things often intertwined.
“You can abuse me all you want, but it’s not going to change the fact that I know all your secrets now,” I said. I smiled up at him, practically daring him to drop his lips to mine. “You had the audacity to mock my sad and empty apartment for being juvenile, when all along, you were hiding a museum of nerd relics in your mom’s house.”
“They aren’t nerd relics. They’re an explanation—which I’m not sure you deserve anymore.”
He kissed me. It was fast and hard, as if he was afraid lingering too long would lead to something more, but it was effective all the same. For the moment, I forgot what we were talking about or why I needed an explanation, so caught up was I in the sensation of his delicious mouth moving over mine.
“That”—he pulled away and pointed at the vase in the corner—“was the first treasure I ever found. It was at an antique shop in town. The owner was tossing it out, because he’d dropped it on the sidewalk, and it cracked into a hundred pieces. He told me I could have them if I hauled them out on my own.”
“It’s…lovely?”
He ignored me. “And that”—this time, he pointed at a desk in the corner, which I’d overlooked in my earlier glee; it was rickety and unstable, chipped in ways that made it look about a thousand years old—“is an authentic seventeenth-century gueridon I found at an abandoned farmhouse about a mile up the hill.”
I didn’t tell him it would have been kinder to leave it there. “Um. Also lovely?” I said instead.
His eyes crinkled even as he sighed his exasperation. “And this”—he reached for a box on top of the fancy French table, opening it to reveal dozens of rocks and gems in various states of decrepitude. He pulled out a cameo brooch straight out of a Victorian movie—“I found under the floorboards at a school I helped renovate one summer in high school.”
“Oh, that one really is lovely.” I reached out to trace the woman’s profile, but he yanked the brooch back quickly—almost like a reflex—before I made contact. A ringing silence filled my ears as we both realized what he’d done.
“Here, you can hold it,” he said, but the mask had already slipped. For a few seconds, he’d unwittingly admitted the relationship between us—FBI agent an
d jewel thief, good guy and bad. A flush of color diffused his face, and he pressed the pin into my palm. “I found it in a box of old bills and jewelry, but I ended up giving those back to the woman they belonged to.”
I still had a hard time registering the shift, so he had to force my fingers closed around the brooch as he elaborated. “The box of stuff was stolen about eighty years ago. It was a kind of local mystery, a string of robberies in one of the affluent neighborhoods not as badly affected by the Depression. According to the police records I found, they arrested a traveling salesman in the area after they found most of the stuff in his suitcase. But they never found these.”
I swallowed heavily, unsure what to say. Something flippant about him holding on to women’s jewelry seemed pertinent, but I didn’t feel flippant. I felt angry, to be honest.
I might not have been the smartest woman he’d ever dated, but I could read subtext when it was being applied with a trowel. Criminals bad. Police good. Was he hoping I’d transform my way of life because he’d once found a box of buried treasure and returned it to its rightful owner? Did he think I took my position lightly, that I’d just woken up one morning and decided to embark on a life of crime for shits and giggles?
I made a motion to give the cameo back, but he wouldn’t take it. “I want you to have it,” he said.
As my response was to goggle furiously at him, he dove in to the rest of his story. “When I found this box, the town hailed me as a sort of local hero. I’d solved the closed case after eighty years, found the missing loot and all that, but I had a hard time accepting it. It didn’t make sense to me that this one box would turn up under the floorboards after all this time, so I dug around in the county records department. It turns out there were some carpenters doing repairs on the school that year. I think one of them must have been a copycat—someone who took advantage of the other thefts to try and line his own nest.”
“Maybe he needed it to feed his starving family.”
Grant had the nerve to smile at me. “I’m sure he had a heart of gold and planned to give it all to charity. Unfortunately, he never got around to performing his good deeds. He died first.”
“Oh? Did you find his ancient skeleton fingerprints all over the ill-begotten goods?”
“Not quite. But one of the carpenters died of natural causes a few weeks later. My guess is that he took the money and jewels, buried them, and then passed away before he had a chance to recover the box. Since he didn’t tell anyone, it stayed there for all those years.” His eyes had taken on an almost glazed, euphoric look as he spoke. “The woman’s granddaughter was delighted to get the jewelry back. A lot of it had been in her family for centuries. She gave me the cameo as a gesture of thanks.”
Once again, I wasn’t sure what to do with that information, other than swallow it bitterly. “Let me guess—that was your first solved case, and you won’t be able to rest until all of the world’s wrongs are righted again. Is that it?”
“Something like that.” His finger came up and stroked me on the cheek, his expression soft enough to lift some of my bitterness away. I suppose it wasn’t his fault I was more like the dead thief than the sweet old lady he stole from. “I like antiques. I like mysteries that have gone unsolved for decades. I like holding something in my hand and knowing it has an entire history I know nothing about.”
He grew quiet and pensive. So did I.
“I like even more that if I work hard enough, I can uncover that history. In all my years at the Bureau, one thing I’ve learned for sure is that nothing disappears without leaving a trace. Nothing and no one. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Oh, I understood all right. He wasn’t censuring criminal activity, and he wasn’t telling me my entire life was wrong. He was admitting that his goal was—and always would be—my father’s treasure.
I almost laughed out loud, giddy and desperate. My senses whirled. Good luck with that, my friend. If he thought I could give him even a little clue, he was headed for the disappointment of his life.
“So what are you going to do, Penelope Blue?” he asked, watching me.
I opened my mouth and closed it again. I had no idea. As far as I was concerned, he could spend the rest of his life in a never-ending search for a fortune that wasn’t there. Not even he could find something that didn’t exist. But if that was the only reason he kept me around…
He smiled and shook off the cloak of solemnity that had taken over, returning us to a place where I could at least feel the ground beneath my feet. “Do you still want to sleep in here tonight, among all my junk and boyhood dreams, or are you going to take the guest room after all?”
I could have kissed him for giving me such an easy out. He wasn’t asking me to make a decision about us. I just had to understand two things: he played to win, and he wanted my father’s treasure. Full stop.
“Oh, I’m staying right here.” I flopped onto his bed, laughing at his expression of dismay. “I refuse to believe there isn’t at least one picture of a naked woman hidden somewhere, and I’m going to find it if I have to search all night.”
21
THE PROPOSAL
(Fifteen and a Half Months Ago, Christmas Eve)
I knew what Grant was going to say as soon as he appeared in the kitchen.
“Oh no,” I blurted. I didn’t bother to hide my disappointment; my shoulders slumped, and a groan escaped my lips. I was pretending to help Myrna roll out cookie dough on the counters, my main contribution to eat the scraps that fell off the sides of her snowman-shaped cutters. “Are you kidding me right now?”
Myrna didn’t look up from her work. It was almost impossible to get that woman up from her chair, but once she was, it was one hundred percent focus and action. I bet she made a killer nurse. “What’s that, dear?”
“Grant has to leave,” I said and mustered up a smile for his benefit. “I’m guessing he just got the call. Sterling Simon needs him.”
He returned my smile with a slight upturn of the lips, guilt and gratitude in equal proportions. “I knew you were too smart for your own good.”
“Alas, we all have our crosses to bear,” I said.
Myrna brushed her stomach, leaving a trail of floury fingerprints across the frilled red apron that covered her robe. “I can’t say I’m surprised,” she said. “Criminals never seem to take federal holidays off to be with their families.”
I couldn’t help but meet Grant’s eyes at that, but if he passed judgment, he did a much better job of hiding it this time.
“I’ll just, ah, leave you two alone for a moment?” Myrna said. She didn’t wait for a response, but she reached up to place an affectionate kiss on Grant’s cheek before she bustled out of the kitchen. There was an equal chance she was going to collapse on the couch while the cookies magically baked themselves or head out to plow the entire street using only a shovel and pickax. She was capable of either one.
“It gets worse,” Grant apologized as soon as the door closed behind her. “I’m booked on the next flight out.”
“Does this mean you’re asking me for a ride to the airport?”
“Yes, unfortunately. It also means you’ll have to drive back on your own to return the rental. It’s terrible timing, I know. I’m sure this isn’t how you pictured spending your holidays.”
I paused a beat too long. He noticed.
“If it helps, Simon’s even more upset than I am,” Grant said. “He loves Christmas.”
“He does?” I had a hard time picturing uptight Simon spreading cheer and getting tipsy on eggnog. I assumed he went around handing out lumps of coal.
“He’s a regular jolly old soul.”
I could tell Grant wanted me to say something more, either fly out in anger or reassure him that spending eight hours in the car by myself on Christmas was my favorite thing to do, but I was never that kind of liar—the ordinary, wh
ite-lie kind.
“Well, I won’t pretend I’m not disappointed, but I understand. The job comes first.”
“The job doesn’t—” He grimaced and shook himself off. “No, you’re right. It does come first. In our line of work, it has to.”
I appreciated that he wasn’t the white-lie kind, either—and that he used the term our. It placed us on equal footing. We were just two people, dedicated to work, sacrificing human relationships for the sake of reaching our goals. No biggie.
Equals we might have been, but I was still hesitant to get out the next part. I rolled a piece of cookie dough between my fingers, worrying it into a ball before popping it in my mouth. Mrs. Emerson made fantastic cookies. “If it’s okay with you and your mom, I’ll stay here for the rest of the weekend rather than drive back right away.”
He didn’t respond, once again staring at me in that surprised, penetrating way of his, making me wonder if I was about to make the biggest mistake of my lifetime. Again.
“I don’t want to be a burden or anything,” I rushed on. I wasn’t a woman given to fits of self-consciousness, as my life story attested, but there was something about commandeering someone’s mother that put me at a disadvantage. “But since she canceled her whole vacation for our visit, it seems cruel for us both to abandon her. If she wants the company, I’m happy to stick around. I like her.”
There was no immediate end to my agony. I tried not to let it upset me—after all, overstepping boundaries was an everyday affair with me—but it was hard. Large, intently staring men are more difficult to shrug off than you think.
Then Grant’s face broke into a smile, lighting up the room and flooding my body with warmth. That wasn’t just relief I felt, let me tell you. There were feelings that would have frightened the little snowman cookies.
“You want to stay here with my mom?” he asked.
“Only if she wants me to,” I added hastily. “I know some people prefer their solitude to a strange houseguest.”
Stealing Mr. Right Page 21
