And the only man who had, used it against her.
So yes, she was angry. Angry that she’d triumphed, that she’d proven herself a more than adequate heir to her father’s crooked empire when it no longer mattered and no one would care. Angry that other than Pari, who had Kristof to hold her tight at night, Aria had no one to share this moment with.
When she was eighteen, she’d imagined pulling off heists like this with a partner who’d share the risk and celebrate the genius, who’d never let her fear or regret or get drunk alone. Who’d feed her pie and run her a bubble bath and tell her how much he loved her. Instead that man was a rival, and she’d taken something he would’ve wanted and she felt satisfaction at that.
But right now, in the dark, with rain pattering against the window of yet another city she couldn’t call home, she’d have traded that professional pride, that up-yours delight, for a single hug in Cleve Jones’ strong, sure arms.
She was twenty-eight years old. She’d just pulled off one of the largest diamond heists in history, and tomorrow she’d spend up on clothes and shoes she didn’t need because she had no idea what else would fill the hollow space inside her.
She used the Egyptian cotton sheet to mop her eyes, and it was a long time before she slept.
Chapter Four
Cleve stared at the replay on his screen, his laughter loud enough to frighten his household staff into thinking he’d gone mad. He still couldn’t believe what he’d seen. But he didn’t have the breath to tell his housekeeper, cook, gardener and Brandon that he was watching comedy gold. They clustered around him voicing concern until he waved them off.
That poor dizzy girl with the lovely face, gorgeous legs and delicious little tits was hauled upright and dragged, bleeding, out of the room with one shoe still on so she lurched about like a drunk in the grip of Gus and Santino. The expression on Ajax’s face was enough to make Cleve choke up all over again, and that was nothing on the reactions of the photographer’s crew or the Greville’s staff.
Where Cleve saw the ridiculous, they saw horror, and in the best tradition of the theater they enacted their tragic revenge, tossing beautiful, hapless Melody out into the street with only her torn and broken costume for company.
His first instinct was to track her down and anonymously send her something precious and valuable as a reward for the best laugh he’d had in years.
“Tickled your fancy, eh, gov?” Brandon said, after he’d made himself useful and assured the staff their boss didn’t need saving.
“Everyone in that room should’ve been laughing. It’s a fucking diamond, can’t hurt it by dropping it. And they should’ve taken more care with that girl. She could’ve been badly hurt.” He knew she wasn’t, because Gus had added a note to his last encrypted message, but that wasn’t the point.
The point was, the last time he’d laughed like this it had been with Aria. The night of a rooftop raid that’d not quite gone according to plan. The professor had tasked him with snatching a priceless Babylonian statue of the demon Palazuzum, a ferocious figure with a scorpion’s body, feathered wings and legs, talons and two snake-like faces. Palazuzum was the king of evil winds and the bearer of sickness.
And that turned out to be prophetic.
It was a one-man job and Cleve was supposed to go alone, but Aria had cornered him on his way out and insisted on accompanying him. Her insistence came in the flavor of a promise to let him kiss her. And since that was his supreme objective in life, after staying alive and staying out of custody, he gave in and let her tag along.
The plan was to snatch the statue from the bedroom of an antiquities dealer, going in through the double doors of a Juliet balcony off the bedroom. Like all of the professor’s raids, it was simple and clean. Move swiftly, stay silent, be unexpected. In, out and away. The problem was the discovery that Palazuzum was indeed the king of evil winds.
It was an inconvenience that the antiquities dealer was in his bed rather than in another city where he was supposed to be. But the real problem was the man’s farts and the eye-watering stench that dated them.
He and Aria were three stories up, standing on the balcony in full view of the sleeping dealer should he wake. Cleve had eased open one of the double doors and could see Palazuzum, as expected, standing on the dresser under a glass dome, much like the demon was a cheese. The dome would be alarmed with a pressure sensor. Cleve would have to skirt the bed, disable the alarm, pocket the figurine and exit the way he’d come without waking the dealer.
It was no big deal. He’d done similar things before, more complicated things.
It should have taken no longer than two minutes.
The first fart came when he was just inside the room. It was symphonic. He hit the floor, crouching by a padded club chair because a fart like that could wake a dead man. He held his breath, watched the bed, readied himself to dive for the window. The dealer snoozed on. It was a miracle. Outside on the balcony, Aria had slammed her hand over her mouth to stop from laughing. He shot her a warning glare and readied himself to move, but then the smell came.
It was biblical in its intensity, rising up from the curled shape on the bed, through layers of bedclothes, the smell of eons of rotten fruit and crumbling cities, acrid cat-pissed swamp water and steaming fresh manure, baking in the sun. Cleve gagged, biting off the sound but involuntarily shrinking further against the chair because that was the kind of smell you should’ve been able to see. It had such presence it should waft like a dark cloud, or the smoke of an ancient curse. It was the kind of smell that could knock a large man over. He didn’t dare look at Aria, but he heard her muffled cough.
He gave it a second or two and rose to a low crouch. He only made it to the foot of the bed before the second fart sounded, a series of wet, sloppy toots. He hit the floor again as the dealer rolled over to his back and the soft snores that had signaled he was still asleep halted. The smell was a few degrees less vile this time, but it was still enough to asphyxiate a dog.
Cleve waited on his hands and knees. He’d been inside the bedroom far too long already. Palazuzum was still well out of reach and the likelihood of the dealer’s own eruptions waking him was ripe. He should abort. Everything the professor had taught him said the stakes were now too high, the chance of being caught too certain. No amount of sweet-talking was going to work in his favor if he was discovered wearing cat burglar black in the dealer’s bedroom, and the professor abhorred violence—it was for amateurs and thugs.
But the girl of his dreams was waiting on the balcony and she’d not only voluntarily risked the wrath of her father by speaking to Cleve for the first time outside of “pass the salt” and “get out of my way,” she’d scrambled across rooftops with him, and now she waited to see what he’d do. He couldn’t let her down.
When the dealer’s snuffling became even snores again, he crawled forward. The third fart, a fart to end all previously recorded farts in living memory, came as Cleve put his hand to the base of the statue’s alarmed stand. This fart was a clarion trumpet blast. It was reveille calling the ancient dead to wake and roam the earth bringing pestilence and inspiring TV production runners. He froze, and since he was positioned not far from the end of the bed, roughly between the open legs of the dealer, the smell was a direct hit. Rotting flesh and carbonated bile—his eyes went to water and he rammed his arm over his mouth to muffle his cough while he went facedown on the floor, his short life flashing before his eyes.
The death of the grandmother who’d raised him, the months of shoplifting and drifting, working odd jobs and sleeping in his car before he decided the only way out of his misery was by pretending to be someone bigger, better than he was, using the only asset he had: his gift of gab. That led to three months of living in a Walmart overnight, and a permanent job talking pensioners out of their weekly allowance for a local gang who cut him in on the proceeds of th
eir scam. He’d played the perfect down-on-his-luck orphaned earnest student raising money door-to-door for his education, because he was the perfect orphaned earnest student, but he was also smarter than the thugs who started the scam and had enough morality to despise how good he was at tricking people who didn’t deserve to be fleeced out of their grocery money.
He’d fled the scene of that crime with a bag of money, enough to stake him in a regular poker game with a bunch of persistently drunk college jocks he systematically conned out of clothing, watches, laptops and passwords. What he didn’t pawn, he used to remake himself in their image.
He’d already spent a few months going to school at Harvard before the professor had cottoned on to the fact he wasn’t a Kennedy’s shoelace, let alone scholastically or financially able to attend the school, but since any deal was preferable to being locked up, he became the professor’s apprentice in thievery.
And now he was going to jail without ever having put his hand to the naked scalp of Aria’s head, never having held her serpent beringed fingers or kissed her black lips. And that was the worst thing that had ever happened to him.
Except the fart king was snoring again, long-drawn, airy in-breaths followed by choppy, snorting out-breaths, a silent pause and then the rhythm started up again. Cleve came up on his hands and knees and peered over the bunched bedclothes at the sleeping man. There was no visible miasma of the farts from gut hell, just the slightly open-mouthed dealer lost to REM sleep.
It could almost make a criminal believe in God.
Cleve moved quickly. He slid a tool between the base and dome of Palazuzum’s home and disabled the alarm. Then he lifted the dome, palmed the statute and replaced it with a Darth Vader figurine that’d come in a Happy Meal. He secured Palazuzum in his zipper pocket and rearmed the alarm, then moved cautiously back across the room to the window.
The dealer let another musical fart rip just as Cleve was stepping on to the balcony, and he almost stumbled, but Aria caught his arm and pulled him upright, managing to close the door softly behind him.
Jammed together on the narrow Juliet balcony there was a fraction of a moment where he thought she’d kiss him, but she was up the drainpipe and on the roof before he could mourn it. They made it across the roof, into the parkland behind the house and almost to the stolen getaway car before she started laughing. A silent shake, then a stuttering sound, he shoved her in the car just in time for her to let go.
He’d never heard Aria laugh. He’d heard her shout. He’d heard her stomp and rage against her father. He’d heard her sulk. He’d heard her go about silently living in the part of the house the Harps shared where he was forbidden to go, and the part where they crossed over—the kitchen. She could open the refrigerator door with the sound of fury, she could unstack the dishwasher with the sound of despair, and start the microwave with the sound of confusion.
Once when entering the house, he thought he’d heard her crying. It’d made him want to break the rules that kept him safe, find her and comfort her. The sound she made in the car, raucous and wild was the clearest indication he’d ever had that there was true joy in the world.
Her laughter was like sex. It put a shiver up the back of his neck and made his own laughter curl in his belly with the urgency of starvation. He could barely get the car started he was laughing so hard and when she forced out the words, “I can still smell it,” he almost drove up the curb. Three streets away from the crime, but still too close to be safe, Cleve pulled over and they laughed till tears rolled down their faces and they fell over each other. And then they kissed for the first time, because she’d promised, because he couldn’t live any longer without it.
After that night, they’d snuck away to talk, to hold hands and laugh and kiss till their lips were swollen and their tongues were tired, until the week the professor was away at a conference and they broke every rule all over both parts of the house and each other’s bodies.
All of that was more than a decade ago and it was made fresh and vivid like a pink diamond by a model who couldn’t walk in her heels.
He looked at Brandon and pointed at the screen. “That was fucking funny.”
Decision made. He would find Melody Solo and he’d make sure she knew someone appreciated her work.
The joy of Melody stayed with him all day, while he ate, worked out in his home gym, swam and watched the computer as Gus, Santino and Ajax took possession of the Sweet Celestia. It was with him the next day when he called his patron about the good news and it was still just under the surface of his skin when Ajax arrived at the villa with the diamond.
But the opposite of joy is pure burn-the-world rage.
They’d snatched a fake. A better fake than the one they’d left behind, but still a fucking fake.
“How is that possible?” he thundered. Dangerous enough in his wrath that Santino flinched, and Ajax, who outweighed him by fifty pounds and six inches, took a step back.
“It’s impossible. Since the stone arrived at Greville’s, we’ve had eyes on it,” said Gus. “Electronic and human.”
“It has to have been switched out before it got the auction house,” said Santino.
“No,” said Cleve. “We had eyes there too.” A separate team, unknown to these men. Men who he suddenly didn’t trust. “Somewhere between the Sweet Celestia arriving at Greville’s and being placed in my hand, the stone was switched.”
“Not by us,” said Ajax. “Boss, why would we do that?”
Cleve stalked to the wide terrace and looked out over the lush green rice paddies. Why would they? No one got a payday for snatching a fake stone. “It has to be someone on the photo shoot crew. Someone we haven’t vetted. A last-minute addition.”
“There’s no one, boss,” said Ajax.
Except the girl. She was a replacement, but they’d had time to do a detailed background search on her. She’d checked out. But she was an awkward model, a disaster, clearly uncomfortable with the tight dress and the sky-high shoes.
Heavily jeweled shoes.
Which she’d left Greville’s with.
“It’s the fucking girl.” She wasn’t comic relief—she was a thieving virtuoso. Who the fuck was she? Because she wasn’t Melody Solo, model.
“We checked her out, boss. Plus, she didn’t have much going on up top,” Gus said, tapping the side of his head.
“Find her,” he said, and went to his office, sat at his desk and opened the file from the photo shoot.
He watched the girl enter the room, suffer her arms and legs being manipulated into position on the lounge. He watched her take the stone in her hands with none of the awkwardness of everything else she did. She handled the Sweet Celestia like a pro. He hadn’t noticed that before, like he hadn’t noticed that the main jewel in the arrangement on the toes of her shoes was the exact size and color of Celestia.
He was an idiot. It was bait and fucking switch, the oldest con in the books. He moved the recording to the moment of her fall, and sat forward. That’s when she’d done it. Her knees folded, one hand went to the ground, the one holding Celestia went to her shoe, and in a rapid sleight of hand as she went sprawling, she swapped the stones over, dropping the fake to make sure everyone focused on the stone and not on her.
He sat back, shocked, impressed. It was genius. She’d simply walked out of Greville’s with the diamond in her carry bag.
He framed a close-up of her face and filled his screen with it. She might not be a real blonde. She was so thin, she was all sharp cheekbones, nose and chin. Melody Solo, was that her real name? Her eyes were a violet blue color, but they were clearly contacts now that he studied them.
She’d laughed like Aria. But Aria had disappeared, dropped out. He’d tried for years to find her. She was probably married and fat with a dozen kids in the suburbs, embarrassed about her background, inventing a new life
for herself far from trouble.
She’d laughed like Aria, but she couldn’t be Aria. The last time he’d seen Aria she’d had her septum pierced and an angel stud in her cheekbone. She’d had a plug in one ear and two snakebites on her bottom lip. Was this woman’s skin beneath the makeup flawless, or would he find the tiny indentations left from abandoned piercings?
“We’ve found her, boss. She boarded a British Airways flight to London under the name Archie Peggio and checked in to a hotel off Oxford Street, but using the name Beat Cornet. She’s still there.”
Melody Solo, Archie Peggio, Beat Cornet. The one thing Donald Harp had allowed his daughter to learn about his side business was identity forgery. That’s why he hadn’t been able to find Aria. She didn’t want to be found.
“Santino, did she have any scars—top lip, ear, cheekbone?”
“Yes, boss.” He touched his cheekbone. “Tiny. She’s had a piercing, but long ago.”
“She’s not a real blonde?”
Gus made a face and shrugged. “I’m not a real hairdresser.”
“Any other AKAs? Any of them made up from musical terms?”
“Think she might also use the name Belle Canto and Allegro Bass,” said Ajax. “What are you thinking, boss?”
That he needed to be in London. That Melody Solo, Archie Peggio, Beat Cornet, Belle Canto and Allegro Bass had stolen something more precious than the Sweet Celestia from him.
That when he’d long stopped looking, hoping, Aria Viola Harp had found him.
Chapter Five
What was it about a career making score that turned a girl to mush? Weeping alone in bed, thinking she’d trade that success for one kiss from the bastard Shadow’s lips. Insanity. In the cold light of what was supposed to be a London summer day but was wet and cold, Aria felt ashamed of herself for thinking like that for even one second.
Caught in the Act: A Jewel Heist Romance Anthology Page 3
