He’d been right, but not in the way he’d imagined.
And now, ten years after the death of his mentor, that made him a man who genuinely didn’t bother getting out of bed for less than a few million, except for the odd occasion when the temptation to stay between the sheets was worth its own weight in another kind of gold, the kind shaped like a desirable woman.
It’d been an annoyingly long time since he’d forgotten about work and spent the day in bed.
“Oi, she’s a bit of all right.”
It was a shame Brandon Bartley hadn’t decided on a lie in. It was a shame Brandon Bartley was a thing in Cleve’s life at all.
“Sweet Celestia is the largest vivid pink diamond in the world—she is more than a bit of all right.”
It was a shame Brandon Bartley was still breathing. The man has shown such promise as a thief, but turned out he was just a common garden-variety bagman, useful for collecting the rent as it were. Not at all what Cleve was looking for, because Cleve was looking for a partner to share the load, to go for even bigger paydays, in exactly the same way the professor chose him.
The problem was he was simply awful at picking the right accomplices. Brandon was his fourth not-rotten-enough-in-the-right-way apple.
“Hah, not the rock, mate.” Brandon tipped his chin at the screen. “The dolly bird.”
Cleve had been aware of the movement in the room on screen. The photographer’s assistants bustling about while the gum-chewing photographer herself barked orders, the furniture being moved in, the PR flak furiously typing on his cell, and the girl.
“‘Ard up like you bin, gov, fought you’d be all ova vat.”
Cleve took a deep breath, thought happy thoughts, like not dropping his aitches, and the deep tissue massage he’d have after he knew Sweet Celestia was his. Like hoping Brandon got another job offer.
Of course he was aware of the girl. He hadn’t had the delicious feel of a girl’s skin under his hands for months, and that girl was more than a dolly bird; she was genuinely beautiful, slender and steely strong like a ballerina, with clouds of almost-white hair and Elizabeth Taylor eyes.
But she also wasn’t much more than a walking manicure. Her job was to hold Sweet Celestia in her buffed and polished hands, adding warmth to cold perfection while the stone was captured in digital glory.
The girl, whose name was Melody Solo, wasn’t famous. She’d had all the usual physical attributes: height, slim form, barely enough curves to count, and a symmetrical face, as well as the relevant career milestones—beauty pageant, catalogue, catwalk, magazine fashion layout—to her name. But she’d been chosen for this job because she was no doubt cheap and available and looked a lot like the famous model she was replacing at the last moment.
It was Cleve’s job to know these things, just like he knew the photographer’s assistant with the ginger hair was having an affair with the PR flack, and the dresser, Katerina, was soon to launch her own label, and the guard with the cauliflower ears liked to bake, so yes, he’d noticed the girl, and she was indeed a bit of all right.
Given the chance, he’d stay in bed for her.
But she was eleven thousand miles away and within the next hour would be irrelevant.
She was also silly as a box full of kittens. She tittered, she fluttered her lashes, she had trouble walking in the jewel-encrusted shoes she wore. He might wrinkle a sheet for her because he was, after all, hard up, but he would most definitely kick her out of bed in the morning. He had no tolerance for silly—tried it, not to his taste. He’d apparently been ruined for silly for all time by the professor’s daughter.
On the screen, Annie swallowed her gum and the redhead positioned Melody on the chaise lounge as if she was a bendable Barbie.
The professor’s daughter was two years younger than him, sixteen going on juvenile delinquent when they met. Half her hair was dyed burnt orange and the other half of her head was shaved and later adorned with a tattoo of two crossed bones. It was a joke, skull and crossbones, and Cleve had loved her for that alone. She had a pierced tongue, a savage wit, a healthy disrespect for authority, and her favorite shoes were steel-capped boots. She’d been expelled from more schools than Cleve had bothered to bluff his way into, and she was the hottest, wildest, smartest woman he’d ever kissed.
The professor forbade him to talk to her. “It’s very simple. If you speak to her, I will turn you in. If you touch her, you die,” he’d said, with the same student-friendly tone he used to say, “Of course you can have an extension on that paper.”
A decade later Cleve had never quite recovered from his first love. Neither the high of risking his life to fall in love with her, nor the devastating low of losing her, raising the earth to find her, and coming up with nothing but empty whispers. She was a ghost, but the memory of her magnificence had stayed with him.
When a score went bad, you cleaned up, covered your tracks and moved on. He’d never quite been able to move on from Aria Harp and doubted he ever would.
“I’d do ‘er,” said Brandon, his awful tobacco breath wafting across Cleve’s face as he leaned in to the screen to take a closer look at what was happening inside Greville’s Auction House. “There’s our boy,” he added, as the camera rotated to capture a change out in the security detail.
Cauliflower ears was out and their boy Ajax, ex Hell’s Angels enforcer turned anti-security expert, was in. All according to schedule. Up next, Sweet Celestia would be removed from her glass vault, placed in the hands of Melody Solo, and Annie Leibaholm would do her thing. That would take an unfortunate amount of time, require a lot of faffing about with lenses and lights and poses, and then Celestia would be polished and returned to her vault where she’d sit until the auction in twenty-four hours’ time.
Except the real Celestia would be freed from her velvet-lined vault by Cleve’s crack team: Ajax, Gustav and Santino.
And no one would see it coming until the moment the buyer tried to verify the fake they replaced Celestia with, and then the only thing coming would be red faces and legal threats.
On the screen, Gus and Santino fussed about Melody, flicking hair, touching brushes to her cheeks, under cover of assessing the particulars of the display case Sweet Celestia was secured in. Melody had to be Hollywood-taped into that dress, it fitted so close it might as well have been painted on.
“Cor, think we’ll see some tits?” said Brandon.
It was the last thing Brandon said before Cleve banished him from the room. He felt oddly protective of Melody, and if she came out of that dress, he didn’t want Brandon to have the privilege of seeing her exposed. Yes, Melody in his bed would’ve been a fine, fine diversion. A humorous one, if she wore the shoes she could barely totter in.
Finally an auction house official wearing white gloves removed the stone from the case and, on Annie’s instructions, placed it in Melody’s outstretched hands. The silly girl made a goofy face and Cleve barked a laugh as everyone else in the room in Geneva bristled. He had no doubt her agent would hear about her unprofessional attitude, but he couldn’t help but be amused by her. Apart from the Sweet Celestia, she was the only genuine thing in the room.
The next half hour was taken up with a lot of stalking around and camera-pointing. A lot of minute adjustments to Melody’s fingers, wrists and the distance from her face the Sweet Celestia was held. Gus and Santino stood just out of shot, neither of them acknowledging their acquaintance with Ajax.
It was hunger not boredom that almost drove Cleve away from the screen. Afternoon in Geneva was breakfast time in Ubud and there was fresh fruit and strong coffee to consume. He was recording this, so he didn’t need to watch it live, but a good crime boss didn’t let a little time difference interfere with getting his control freak on. He’d learned that lesson at the professor’s feet, which meant he was watching, despite a grumbling stomach, when Anni
e instructed Melody to rise, when Melody stumbled in her spiked jeweled shoes, went to her haunches, tried to rise, lost her balance, tripped, grabbing for a light stand and sprawled in a tangled heap of legs and hot metal, a flash of naked breast and a photographer’s umbrella. When the Sweet Celestia spilled from her hands and bounced on the carpet.
And all hell broke loose.
Chapter Three
It happened like Aria rehearsed it. A second to wobble. A second to plummet to a crouch, hands down to break her fall. A second to release the fake Celestia from the jeweled arrangement at the front of her shoe, and another to snap the real Celestia in its place. Then the attempt to rise, stumble, trip, grab at the light stand and hit the floor in a tangled heap, releasing the fake stone from her hand.
It tumbled in a most satisfying way, eliciting gasps of horror.
The crouch was the artistry; the pratfall was the distraction she needed to ensure all eyes were on the fake Celestia and no one thought to examine her too closely.
It was the most exhilarating six seconds of her life.
But she hadn’t accounted for the way the room would erupt. Everyone moved at once, the assistants lunging for the fake diamond as Annie retreated with her camera, the PR guy almost treading on her hand as he tried to catch the synthetic Celestia on the bounce. Even the four stoic security guards showed they weren’t made from granite, one of them stepping forward, the biggest one face-palming to stifle his amusement.
She also hadn’t calculated on the shouting, for all the hands that would grab at her to haul her up, or for the fact that she simply couldn’t stop laughing, and not with Melody’s vacuous giggle, but with her own enthusiastic, full-throated guffaws.
It was most inappropriate.
The Giovanna Talessi dress was ripped from hip to hem, one of the light stand struts had carved a deep bleeding scratch across her shin. The Hollywood tape didn’t hold, so she’d had a wardrobe malfunction and flashed the room, and she’d have jewel-tone bruises on her elbows for sure.
But she’d done it. She had the Sweet Celestia, all sixty-one million of her, secured in a custom-made metal frame on the toe of her shoe. The same shoe she’d snapped the purposely weakened heel on while everyone was focused on the runaway artificial diamond. Now it was simply a matter of the manufactured stone passing an examination that would focus more on its integrity than authenticity, then being shouted at and sent home in disgrace with the shoes in her possession.
She’d had to eliminate any chance she was asked to surrender the shoes. That had been Pari’s job. To handcraft the most unusual stolen goods getaway vehicle ever, to promote the shoes to Contessa for the shoot, and to impress on the dresser that the shoes should only be returned in pristine condition or the model might as well have them, because it would be an insult to return them.
It was like the cotton balls—hard to believe anyone would swallow it.
“Darl, are you okay?” Gus was kind. Santino held on to her so she didn’t fall again. She managed to slam her teeth together to stop laughing.
While the fake Celestia was scooped off the floor by the gloved official and examined under a special light, polished, buffed and returned to its velvet cushion, Katerina brought a robe and peeled Aria out of the ruined dress. Neither Annie nor either of her assistants made eye contact with her, and the PR man was so angry he was incapable of speech. She had to tend to her own wound.
She was bustled back to the pop-up dressing room, and it was there that a cold-faced Greville’s head-honcho dismissed her. “You are a disgrace. You’re clearly on drugs. Your contract is void. You will not be paid for this job. Your agent will be informed of your unprofessional behavior. Please leave this instant.”
Katerina thrust the ripped and bloodstained dress at her. Aria still wore one of the shoes and held the broken one, the one worth sixty-one million dollars. “Take the dress and shoes, they’re ruined anyway. It’s the best you’ll do out of this job.”
She hung her head. She was still Melody Solo, imposter model, and had to act the part until she could be any number of her other aliases and go home much richer. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
“My advice is to find another line of work.”
“That’s lovely, thank you.” It came out strangled because she desperately wanted to laugh again.
Katerina stared at her and then said something crude-sounding in Slovakian and walked away.
Fifteen minutes later, in her street clothes but still wearing the jewel-toned makeup and lion’s mane of white-blond hair, Aria was on the street outside Greville’s, where a text message summoned a rental car. In twenty minutes she’d be at the airport, where she’d hit the first-class lounge and clean off the rest of Melody Solo. By nightfall, she’d be in London from where she’d make contact with Shoma Oshiro and negotiate the transaction.
Meanwhile she planned to eat everything on the plane, including anyone who attempted to talk to her. She’d never been so hungry.
She boarded a British Airways flight as Archie Peggio. It was Archie, wearing vintage jeans, a low ponytail, a leather bomber jacket and scuffed Doc Marten boots, who landed in Gatwick, caught a cab to the Charlotte Street Hotel, where she endured the raised eyebrows and snooty tone of the desk clerk for her down-market dress standards while she signed in, changing her name again and listing her occupation as web designer, and her purpose for staying as shopping. Only one of those things was a lie. She would definitely be shopping.
But that came after sleeping and a late snack, during which she called Pari using a burner cell phone.
“It’s me.” She took a bite of chicken, ham and leek pie. It was delicious, and so were the mashed potatoes.
“Hello, babe, did you have a good day?” Pari responded. There was the echo of being on speaker. Pari was in the shop, not the factory.
“Exceptionally good.”
“Ooh.” Aria could hear Pari clapping. It was a very Pari thing to do, that and design the most exquisite shoes in the world. If only the swanks, toffs, socialites and celebs who paid squillions for her creations knew Pari wasn’t the daughter of Indian royalty, but a Vegas hustler born in Detroit whose real name was Sue Ann Singh. “When do I get my cut, babe?” And nobody’s fool.
“When the transaction is complete.”
“Which is when?”
“A few days. It’s better if I let Shoma think I’ve got several buyers dangling.”
“It’s not better for me. I get a straight cut of whatever you take.”
“How could I forget.”
“And be careful with that yakuza bitch. You’re lucky I love you and there’s no vig.”
Aria was lucky she’d met Pari, someone who knew a great hustle when she saw it and how to keep her secrets close. Between the two of them they’d financed a life of crime from other crimes. Counting cards, rigging scams, duping tourists and fencing stolen property on an average day, running short cons on a good day—until Pari met Kristof, the love of her life, and went straight. More or less. And Aria decided to spread her wings with increasingly sophisticated long cons.
“Tell me I’m a genius with the shoe thing,” Pari said. “Did it go like we planned?”
“You’re a genius. It went exactly to plan.”
“That’s because I told that Slavic dresser she’d offend me if she returned the shoes with a single scratch on them.”
“Ah, Katerina.” Aria ate more pie. “She was nice to poor stupid Melody.”
“I’ll be sure to buy something off her when she launches her own line. I guess Melody’s career is in tatters.”
“Yeah, reputation ruined. She’ll never work as an upscale hand model again.” And yet Aria’s reputation, if she could claim it, would be wildly enhanced by her biggest ever score.
There were a good couple of minutes of cack
ling at that. Aria had to abandon her pie to breathless laughter.
“Now what are you going to do?” said Pari.
“Eat, sleep, shop. Mostly eat. All my regular clothes hang off me. If I get any skinnier my ribs will stick together.”
“And.”
“And start researching the Blue Hope.” A diamond bigger—and more famous—than the Sweet Celestia.
“It’s too big for a shoe,” said Pari. “We need another scam.”
“Hmm.” Aria yawned, took advantage of her open mouth and forked some mash. “What if Sikander-Jah made costume jewelry to match the shoes? You’d still have a legitimate reason to order high-quality synthetic diamonds.”
Dead silence. Even the rustling movements from whatever Pari was doing while they talked stopped.
“Pari.”
“Thinking.”
“And.”
“Shut it.”
“You like it.”
Pari clapped. “I fucking love it.”
They might have a delivery system for the theft of the Blue Hope, but they still didn’t have a scam to go with it, and a heist that big was a huge risk. It was going to take a lot of planning. They disconnected and Aria took another shower and flung herself into bed, where she stared at the ceiling for a while and then turned her pillow and stared at nothing some more.
There was a feeling inside her, and it wasn’t the rib ache of hunger or the dynamic explosion of laughter. It was quieter and heavier and uncomfortable. It might be anger, but what did she have to be angry about, especially tonight, on the occasion of her biggest professional achievement?
She’d had more than enough of angry. Had spent the last decade of her life angry: at her mother for quitting on her, at her father for doing the same, at Cleve fucking Jones for dirty double-crossing her, and at every person who’d taken one look at her and assumed they knew all about her. When she wore shoes she couldn’t walk in and giggled, she was stupid. When she wore denim and leather, she was low-class. When she shaved her head, she was dangerous. She was more than the sum of her appearances, but even her father, a master of disguise, hadn’t seen that.
Caught in the Act: A Jewel Heist Romance Anthology Page 2
