“Please let me show you records of the trust.”
She grumbled with her mouth full, but he got her disdain for that idea loud and clear.
“Why would I lie about that?” he said.
She laughed, choked and made a grab for her soda.
He was a grown ass man, but her refusal to cut him some slack on this fucking well hurt. It’d hurt when she’d run, because they might’ve had a life together free of fear, full of choices. Without her, he could’ve stripped the bank accounts, sold the great big, sad, dusty mansion of a house and fenced the antiquities to the highest bidder. He wouldn’t have had to risk his freedom grafting for a living because it was the only thing he knew how to do.
“I never lied to you.”
“Why would I ever believe that? You wanted in my pants.”
He toyed with his meal, appetite shot. “I got in your pants. Doesn’t mean I stole your inheritance.”
“Why else would my father leave it all to you if you hadn’t manipulated him into it?”
There was no quick and tasty answer to that. The professor was a hard man, and the more Aria had tried to get him to pay attention to her, the more he’d turned from her.
“You frightened him.”
She scoffed. “The only thing that frightened him was the idea he might get caught and do time.”
“You were anarchy on a sugar high. He didn’t understand you and he didn’t want the responsibility of being your parent.”
“Oh, but he was quite happy to be yours.”
Almost. The professor had been an authority figure, but more like a commanding officer than a father. “He knew about us.”
She stiffened. “He’d have killed you.”
He’d certainly threatened to have Cleve disappeared, and the threats were strong enough to keep him from trying anything other than longing looks at Aria for two whole years. But that was the strange thing. Why would a man who didn’t care about his daughter’s welfare outside of housing and feeding her give a damn about who she slept with? He already thought she was a tramp, and Aria had never disabused him of that idea.
“I’ve had plenty of time to think about this. It’s the only conclusion I’ve got. He knew we were sleeping together. He changed his will when he acquired that new shipment of Middle Eastern antiquities. It was the week you got the tattoo.” He touched his head where her crossbones would be, under her hair. “He must’ve thought I was the responsible one and would take care of you if anything happened.”
She looked away. “He didn’t think I could take care of myself.”
“He didn’t expect to die. He was furious with you. It had to be an impulse and he wasn’t an impulsive man. The lawyer tried to talk him out of it. I’m sure if he’d lived he’d have changed it back once he’d cooled down.”
“You’re defending him.”
“Jesus, no. He’s indefensible, but taking the blame for what happened on yourself isn’t the way to go either.”
She drained her soda. She was trying hard to show she no longer cared, but it bled through her careful nonchalance in the way she squeezed the can until it buckled. He’d do anything to take the bitterness of this from her. He didn’t know why the professor hated his daughter, but he’d seen it often enough for it to feel like it was the normal state of play between father and daughter. Hate was a more destructive force than greed. Greed made you covetous, made you a thief and a liar and a conman. Greed and a sense of entitlement made you take things that didn’t belong to you because you could. Hate made you destroy things you had the chance to love.
Cleve was a greedy man. He’d made a life from greed, but he didn’t hate, didn’t have the incentive or the gene for it, and seeing Aria was making him remember how he’d scorned the idea of being like the professor, still in the game in his fifties, when he had no need to make more money, accumulate more things, hate his own family.
But that’s what he’d become, a man looking for a protégé like he’d once been, without his own family.
“He tried to have me committed once.”
Her voice was so flat with the effort to sound neutral it drove him out of his chair. He stood and pulled her up and then into his lap, and she came without protest. She trusted him for comfort at least.
“He said I was using drugs and had anger issues. I was depressed and was a danger to myself and others. I was fourteen and I was miserable and I missed my mother so much. I’d been in his study when I wasn’t supposed to be and discovered his alternative life. I guess he thought I might turn on him and it was better to discredit me so I had no chance of being believed. Then he taught me about forgery so I couldn’t turn him in because I was guilty too.”
He settled Aria against his arm, took her hand in his. “I never knew my parents, but I got the better end of a bad deal. My grandma was a saint and an excellent card sharp.”
“I don’t know why he hated me, except I looked like my mother and he loved her and she’d up and died on him. I did everything I could not to look like her so he’d love me for myself.”
Fucking hell, that explained some things. “None of that is on you.”
“Some of it is. I didn’t try to understand him.”
“You were a kid. That’s not your job.”
“I knew the bones tattoo would infuriate him. If he hadn’t choked on a sandwich in the dining hall, I’d have been a murder suspect. It was well known we didn’t get along and I virtually danced on his grave.”
She’d shaved her head completely, worn revealing clothing and goth makeup to the funeral. She’d refused to speak to anyone, not even him, and then before he could break through to her, she’d run.
“No one was surprised he disinherited me but me,” she said.
“Well, you showed him. He’d be astonished at what you did.” She shook her head. “The master thief’s daughter pulling off the heist of the century? Of course he would.”
She made a sound of surprise. “I never thought about it.”
“Oh, come on, you must’ve. It was the greatest fuck you ever.”
“I only thought about you.”
That stuffed his next words back in his throat. He turned her face so he could see her eyes. “You thought about me?” His heart did a gymnastics feat worthy of a cat burglar, flipping over and climbing up his ribcage while he waited for her to answer.
“I wanted to celebrate with you.” She lowered her eyes. “How unhinged is that?”
Not unhinged, but an open window, and through it a new view of life. “I think we should take that celebration you were talking about to bed.”
She stopped him standing, taking his face in her hands. “Are we safe here?”
“Perfectly, if you let me make the deal.”
“It’s not your deal to make. I’m not giving you Celestia.”
“Goddamn, Aria, then no, we’re not safe for more than a few more hours. They will find you as easily as I did.”
She stood and took his hand, drew him up and to the bed. “Then let’s make them count.”
He could count the ways this was like a sting gone bad, being handcuffed to a chair, beaten and left for dead. He could count her ribs, see her dedication in the sharp lines of her collarbones, and her discipline in the jut of her hips. She’d turned her body into an instrument of illusion and her rebellion into a tool of deceit, and the admiration he had for her threatened to wreck his determination to keep her safe.
The only way he could make anything count was to tumble her on the bed, mouth at her mouth, hands on her clothing, pulling it away, shrugging off his robe. He met her lips in a flurry of sadness and wonder and lust. If he’d understood then what he did now, he’d have run with her, taken her at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. Even if that’d meant boosting cars and petty crime, they’d have been togethe
r and he’d have saved her from the horrors of trying to win the love of a loveless man.
He had to save her now.
Become another loveless man.
The only way to make anything count for Aria, to keep her safe, was to do the one thing he’d never done—break faith with her. Lie to her, steal from her.
Destroy any chance he had of keeping her in his life.
For the second time.
But this time it would be a deliberate choice and she’d never forgive him.
She lay on the bed with her arms raised to him, with her eyes gone soft and her mouth wet and pink. He’d known he’d loved her before they’d ever touched. Spent two years convincing himself it was just the risk of her he craved, the wild idea of her; then the months they’d had together he was so twisted up in her he was a danger to himself. He’d lose track of a safe crack sequence, stumble in a bluff, drop a tool and make a noise when he should be silent because he’d been caught out thinking of her.
He was caught out now. Hands shaking as he smoothed them up her thighs, gut tight, tense and oversensitive, intelligence reversing all the way back to an elementary action reaction state. When she gasped, he did the thing that made her make that sound again. When she arched, he pressed forward; when she bucked, he held her steady. When she chanted his name, he captured that sound so he could replay it when she was gone.
Two shuddering orgasms he coached out of her before his body gave in and the greedy man took over.
He gripped her chin. “You should’ve trusted me.”
She opened heavy-lidded eyes and curled her fingers over his forearms. He hadn’t meant to sound angry, but there it was, blistering his skin, ten years’ worth of regret scraping out of his throat.
“Eighty-seven thousand six hundred hours.”
He shook his head and sat back on his heels.
“Eighty-seven thousand six hundred hours is ten years. I’ve missed you every day. I told myself I hated you, but it’s me I’m angry with. I never should’ve run from you, I should’ve let you find me, because we could’ve been something.”
Oh fuck. He went for her mouth. She’d said almost everything he’d ever wanted to hear from her, and it was too late.
When she was made of nothing but noodle limbs and the spice of their coming together, he flipped her over and hauled her hips up, taking her from behind with a thrill of hot fury, one hand to her scorpion belly and the other wrapped around her hair, too craven to meet her eyes, desperate to give her what he’d be unable to at twenty, desperate to take what he’d never have again.
His own staved-off orgasm hit him like eighty-seven thousand six hundred pounds of pleasure and relief so profound he was stunned silent, motionless, only dimly aware he was crushing her, rolling them and then fighting to stay awake as she slipped toward sleep.
Limp and warm and snuggled to his chest, she was seconds from gone when she said, “Don’t even think about going near that coat.”
He murmured something deliberately unintelligible and she responded with, “I trust you,” a crooked smile on her face.
It was the most devastating thing she’d ever said to him.
When her breathing went slow and deep, he pulled out of her arms. He took his cell to the bathroom and made a call. He dressed, used a steak knife to open the lining of her coat, and he stole the Sweet Celestia right from under her, easy as he wrecked their chance to ever be anything together again.
Chapter Nine
Nothing was too much trouble for the hotel: extra towels, a pillow menu, give your wayward pretend husband a room key, collect a left-behind coat worth sixty-one million dollars and some chump change, provide hair-clippers.
The sink was full of Aria’s hair, and strands of it were all over the floor. Housekeeping was lucky it wasn’t blood, viscera and body parts. She’d wanted to dismember Cleve when she’d woken alone. Taking her stupidity out on her own head was her version of trashing the room in a fit of rage.
She’d gone to sleep knowing she’d have to negotiate a partnership with him to get the sale done because what he’d said about her vulnerability rang true. She was a minor player breaking into the big leagues and as much as it irked, she hadn’t paid her dues and since she operated as a lone wolf, she didn’t have protection.
She’d trusted him.
She’d given him her body and opened her heart to him. She’d fallen asleep tangled in him and expected to doze and wake in his arms, to leave the hotel with him, to run with him, and if it worked out, to keep running with him, because he was right about that too—what they could be together.
Nothing.
They could be a black yawing pit of flaming nothing.
She called Pari while she packed. Got factory noise in the background before Pari answered.
“Hi, can you talk?” she said.
The grinding sound faded. “Can now. How’s my investment?”
“About that.”
“Yakuza bitch giving you trouble? You expected that. You’ll find a way to sweat her.”
Aria scrubbed her hand over the top of her head, feeling the soft stubble. “I may have overestimated my ability to do that. It’s over.”
“It isn’t over till the fat lady sings.” Pari broke into Adele’s “Hello.”
“Adele is not fat.”
Pari snorted. “She’s no size zero.”
“Fuck size zero. She’s beautiful. You wish she’d wear your shoes.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Fuck size zero. I’d kill to have her wear my shoes. What’s the deal?”
“There’s no deal and there never will be one.”
Pari made an agitated buzzing noise as she absorbed the fact Aria wasn’t joking around. “You going to color that in, yeah, because I’ve got an unpaid invoice from the synthetic diamond makers that makes ‘fuck size zero’ sound like a lullaby, taste like, I dunno, roast swan or something freaking exotic and horrifically expensive. We could probably buy one of those islands that might sink for the cost of the fake.”
Aria sat on the end of the bed and kicked her packed carry-on. It bulged from all the shopping. She had serious expenses to pay and nothing to pay them with, and not four hours ago she’d almost told the man responsible for that problem she loved him.
“Cleve Jones happened.”
He’d dropped from the sky like some dark wizard and entranced her. Older, sexier, more masterful than he’d been the first time he’d short-circuited her brain. Then she’d been on a mission to fuck with her father and he was the perfect candidate to aid in that. At first glance she’d decided she could use him and have fun doing it, only to discover he’d rather remain alive than play into her scheming. It’d taken two years to thaw his resolve, two years of what she recognized now as extreme foreplay. No wonder she’d never gotten over him.
No wonder he’d gotten one over her.
“Your Cleve Jones? The Cleve Jones your dad trained? The dude who goes by the Shadow? That Cleve Jones who you hate with the passion of a million gunshot wounds?”
She sighed as Pari laid it on as thick as possible. They’d known going into this who their most likely competitors would be, and Cleve was king of the list.
“Yep, that bastard.” It was surprising how close on a continuum love and hate were. From kiss to kill and round and round again until it all dissolved into a clutter of worthless emotion. That’s what she was now, an aching chaos of blame and guilt and fear.
“Are you okay, babe?” She would be. Eventually. She had no choice. “What did he do?”
“It’s what I did.” She rubbed her face. Tiny bits of hair were caught in her lashes and clung to her cheeks. “I fucked him and then he fucked me back by taking Celestia. It’s my fault. I knew better than to trust a thief.”
Pari shrieked with ou
trage. “He beat you? He tied you up? Babe.”
“No, no. He didn’t hurt me.” Not that you could tell from the outside. From inside it felt like she’d had a major organ extracted and been left to bleed out. “He waited till I fell asleep and he stole Celestia.” She’d been exhausted, incapable of staying awake and he had to have planned it that way, used sex to flatten her defenses, just as she’d planned to do to him. “He knows how to move like a fucking wraith. I didn’t hear a thing. I’m so angry I trusted him.”
“That mangy, scavenging fuck bag.”
“I’ll find a way to pay your cut and the supplier, I promise.” Somehow, because it wasn’t like Cleve was going to send her a money order in the mail. He’d had expenses too, a whole crew to pay, and all his talk about a partnership was part of his ruse. Being had like that stung so badly, worse than it otherwise might because she’d fallen for him all over again.
“Vegas?”
“I have another idea.” It was probably a dead end, but what if...
“Don’t do anything too stupid.”
“I think I’ve already got that covered.”
“I’ll see what I can come up with at my end. There must be some too skinny rich bitch I haven’t sold a couple of hundred thou in shoes to yet. Stay in touch.”
Aria’d need another cell to do that. She trashed this one—and the yakuza-designated cell, as well most of her stash of fake passports—and jumped a cab to the airport, where she boarded an Aer Lingus flight to Boston, travelling as Echo Serenata and using a fake credit card to fund the ticket. Eight hours later, she stood in front of the two-level, six-bedroom, seven-bathroom Cambridge Square colonial manse that had once been her home, and wondered if it truly still was.
It looked the same, white paint, neat front garden. She’d already learned that by Googling the Irving Street address. There’d been no sales listed, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been shifted privately and some other family wasn’t living here. Still, she half expected her father to stomp out on the porch and shout at her for cluttering up the path and lowering the zip code value. Cleve had to be lying. But she had to know.
Caught in the Act: A Jewel Heist Romance Anthology Page 7
