Nights with a Thief

by Marilyn Pappano

  It was Ali who brought up the subject. “Harry No-Hair says Candalaria hasn’t found any takers yet. Rumor says he even offered to buy one guy’s boat, but the guy turned him down.”

  “Does Harry really have no hair?” Lisette asked absently, though her brain was returning to reality too quickly.

  “Actually, his hair is longer and curlier than yours,” Jack replied. He’d had the option of taking the seat beside her this morning, but he chose to sit across from her again. The better to see him, a fairy tale-ish voice in her head had pointed out. “It’s pure white, and it’s been that way all his life.”

  Simon curtly said, “He’ll branch out soon. If he doesn’t find help in Santo Domingo, he’ll go farther, someplace where the saints’ names don’t carry any weight.”

  Padma turned an innocent, open-eyed gaze on him. “Such a place exists? I had no idea.”

  His expression didn’t change one bit, but Lisette was pretty sure she saw some tinge of humor hiding there. Were Padma and the Dark Lord flirting? Seriously? They’d known each other mere hours, and Padma had grown up with the same Toussaints-are-evil mantra that Lisette had.

  “The farther you get from our headquarters, the less influence we have,” Simon replied. “Maybe Ali should take some staff and persuade Candalaria it’s a bad time for a visit.”

  Persuasion seemed to be their favorite way of dealing with troublemakers, but Lisette still didn’t know exactly what that meant. Going toe to toe, flexing muscles, flashing weapons? Taking up position for a chat, Ali and Candalaria unarmed while their soldiers formed a circle around them? Keeping distance between them and exchanging threats by cell?

  Killing Candalaria and anyone else who gets in their way?

  Simon Senior’s men had done just that to her father, and they’d left her mom to the same fate. But Jack and Simon weren’t pirates. Even though she didn’t feel nearly as at ease with Simon as with Jack, she was sure he wouldn’t resort to murder to take care of a pesky problem. Relatively. Mostly.

  Okay, she wanted to be sure.

  “It can’t hurt to talk to him,” Ali agreed, his fingers flying over the screen of his cell. “We’ll leave at nine. And, no, you can’t go.”

  His last words were directed at Jack, whose mouth was open to speak. The muscles in his jaw tightened. “You know, he’s here because of me. He’s probably more likely to talk to me.”

  “Or shoot you on sight. He’s not the first person who’s felt that way,” Toinette reminded him with an elbow to the ribs.

  “You stay here,” Simon agreed with Ali. “You can show our guests the family treasures.”

  The words had hardly registered in Lisette’s mind when Toinette laughed. “Ha! Lisette thought she saw the treasures last night.”

  A flush warmed Lisette’s face even as she realized that family treasures translated to art. She knew Simon wasn’t comfortable with having a thief other than Jack on his island, and she wouldn’t have blamed him at all if he’d refused access to her. She had no clue whether the invitation would include Le Mystère, but even so every muscle and nerve in her body was dancing at the possibility.

  Padma apparently felt the same way. She rose from her chair, her features set in full surprise, and said, “Really? We can see your collections? Now? Come on, sweetie, Charming, why are you wasting time still sitting?” Catching the hint of a frown marring Simon’s face at her enthusiasm, she frowned back, managing fierceness to match any they’d seen from him. “You don’t have to worry. I’m not the light-fingered one. The actual stealing is Lisette’s job, and she’s too busy being girly with Jack.”

  “He gets that look when Jack goes into the galleries, too,” Ali pointed out. “It’s hard for a collector to feel safe with a known thief on the premises, no matter that they were crib brothers.”

  “You meant to say ‘renowned thief,’ didn’t you?” Jack stood and circled the table to pull Lisette from her chair. “Besides, he knows I wouldn’t take anything from the family collections.”

  “Because he knows I’d take him past the divide again, and this time he wouldn’t come back,” Simon replied drily.

  Everyone else rose, too, Ali heading for the helicopter on the side lawn where his officers had gathered. All of them were heavily armed. Toinette picked up her coffee and strolled north toward her office, and Simon followed, giving a lingering look over his shoulder at Jack, Padma and Lisette.

  She was flattered that he thought highly enough of her talents to worry. And saddened that he was right to worry.

  “Do you want to start with impressed and work your way up to flabbergasted or get your socks knocked off right at the start?” Jack asked.

  “The former, of course. It’s always better to start with the least and finish with the best.” Lisette loosely clasped her hands; she didn’t want him to think that not having stolen anything since last week had given her the jitters.

  “Hear that, Jack?” Padma said. “She expects you to keep getting better.”

  “I think I’m up to the challenge,” he teased.

  Behind his back, Lisette widened her eyes and fluttered one hand over her chest, making Padma swallow a giggle.

  He led them past the kitchen and into the main corridor. Lisette hadn’t seen much of the house so far. The floor tiles were deep rusty red, covered here and there with antique rugs, and the furniture visible in the rooms they passed was old and solid. The paintings and sculptures were lovely, created by talented artists but not breathtaking. That would change once they reached the entryway to the right of the front door.

  It was a simple doorway, double wide, a pattern of leaves carved around the edges. It looked like the other doors opening off the hallway into mundane living spaces, except those appeared to never close and these stayed that way. And the keypad. These doors had an electronic lock.

  Simon had already deactivated the alarms, so all Jack had to do was open the doors. Her breath caught in her chest when she got her first glimpse. Lights came on automatically, motion-activated, and climate-controlled air welcomed them. Padma squeezed Lisette’s elbow, their looks both giddy when they stepped inside.

  Lisette had been in museums where the smallest gallery was ten times the size of this room and held one-hundredth—one-thousandth—the value in art. She didn’t know where to look first: at the Rothko directly in front of the door or the Turner competing for attention from the wall on the left. There was the sculpture by Modigliani in the center, the Chihuly blown-glass installation on the right and...

  “Wow,” Padma said, and Lisette echoed it. “You have, oh my God, your very own Caravaggio. And Kandinsky. And Church.”

  “I would have made straight As in art appreciation if I’d ever gone to school,” Jack said smugly.

  Padma stopped in front of a textile—eighteenth century, a palampore, made of chintz and hand-painted in vivid shades of red—and turned to him. “You didn’t go to school? Ever?”

  “I’m not barefoot and ignorant—” he glanced at his flip-flops and grinned “—but no. We traveled a lot, so I always had tutors.”

  Which meant the best education money could buy and little chance to slack off. How much more would Lisette have loved the traveling, the museums, the cultural opportunities, the one-on-one attention of a tutor over the daily drudge of public school?

  While Padma studied the textile from every angle, Lisette wandered to the nearest object, a vase, hard-paste Oriental porcelain, overglazed in pastels. “Qing dynasty?” she asked, her voice soft as if sound waves might damage the piece, her fingers hovering inches above it.

  “Yes. My great-great-grandfather lived in China a while.” Jack paused. “You can touch it. You can both touch what you want.”

  Her gaze jerked to his. She’d seen so many priceless works of art in her life, but the only ones she’d ever touched were the
ones she or Marley had stolen, and that had always been with gloves. Paints and canvas, clay and porcelain, threads and wood and precious metals lost strength over time. It was only common sense that treasures needed protection.

  “Really?”

  Jack moved closer behind her, taking her trembling hand in his, and laid her fingertips against the vase. He took a firm grip on the vase so she could slide her fingers from birds to flowers to background, the sheer importance of it penetrating from her fingers into her senses. Dear heavens, she was touching a centuries-old vase worth at least twenty million dollars. Goose bumps spread through her, her muscles contracting as if they could somehow imprint the feel on her memory, and her lungs seemed to have frozen midbreath.

  “Incredible,” Lisette said.

  Jack’s head was bent close to hers, his mouth brushing her skin, when he spoke. “This is one of the benefits of a private collection. One easy door to walk through. No pesky laser grids, vibration sensors, motion sensors or hard-eyed security guards who value their job more than your life. No cameras everywhere capturing unflattering angles of you.”

  From the corner of her eye, she saw him lean back, take a look at her backside and grin. “Not that I’ve yet found an unflattering angle on you.”

  Carefully, she removed her hand from the vase and swore her skin continued to tingle for a moment. Giving the sensation time to fade, she looked around the room. Except for the cameras, all the other security measures had been deactivated for their visit, and she was hesitant to pay too much attention to the cameras. She didn’t want him to think she was wondering how to defeat their system.

  But he knew anyway and laughed. “Every time I walk into a highly fortified place, I immediately start figuring how I would bypass the security—even at my mom and dad’s houses. It’s an occupational hazard.”

  “Does Simon know that?” she asked as he moved to the next display, drawing her with him.

  “I set up the security here. Tried to get past it a few times but failed. Ah.” Switching to a pirate-y voice, he said, “Here there be jewels.”

  Three necklaces graced a primitive-looking table. The first was rubies, multiple strands with a gorgeous monster of a stone. The second contained sapphires of varying sizes woven on thin gold wire to create an impressive collar.

  The last was of yellow diamonds: thin chains of gold connecting perfectly matched stones, the smallest at the top, each succeeding pair larger, ending in a teardrop of about five carats. The necklace was perfectly balanced, and when Jack fastened it around her neck, it damn near sizzled against her skin.

  In the nearby mirror, she envisioned the necklace with the proper dress: black, shoulderless, low-cut, fitted over her breasts but flowing like a silk column to the floor. Nothing to distract from the beauty of the gems themselves.

  “It almost makes me regret that I’m a jeans and T-shirt girl. It’s a good thing, too, given that I’m likely unemployed at the moment.”

  “You’re out of a job, but you’ve still got your career. With a little change in attitude, you could be living on the next island to the west—it’s for sale—and we could be neighbors. Maybe even partners.”

  Partners. The idea sent shivers down her spine at the same time her stomach turned a little queasy. Still having Jack in her life a few months or years down the road sounded wonderful. Stealing for no reason but to build up her own wealth? It would never happen.

  Unfastening the necklace, she returned it to the table. Something else that was never going to happen? Him wanting anything to do with her once he’d found out the truth.

  That certainty turned the shivers and the queasiness to something she’d never felt before: pain right in the center of her being. A rare sort of sorrow, as if things were rushing headlong down the wrong path and nothing she did could ever put them right again.

  It was the feeling, she was fairly sure, of her heart breaking.

  Chapter 11

  They spent several hours in the first-floor gallery where they’d started and the basement wing directly beneath. Jack had seen all the pieces dozens of times before, but experiencing them with Lisette and Padma was different. Their enthusiasm was so genuine, their appreciation so damn near dazzling, that it made him look at familiar old friends in a new light.

  Just as they’d suggested, he saved the best for last. When they returned to the elevator, he pressed the button for the second floor and waited. Tension filled the small car—curiosity about what could possibly outshine the items in the first two galleries; anticipation; even...he wasn’t sure what. Something that always niggled inside him the moments before the doors opened to reveal the most extraordinary treasure on the island.

  The elevator stopped, the doors slid open soundlessly, and he stepped off. Padma took Lisette’s arm and pushed her ahead.

  The third gallery wasn’t really a gallery at all, just a single room, no bigger than his bedroom. The walls were tan, and the floor was planks of wood, salvaged from an ancient saint’s ship and laid in their original condition. Cameras mounted in the ceiling covered every inch of the room, where the sole display stood in the center, resting on a weathered column of oak.

  Padma’s reaction outshone Lisette’s: a shriek that ended in a gasp and uncharacteristic speechlessness. Lisette’s response was much quieter—he heard her breath catch—but fueled with an intensity that radiated off her.

  “Le Mystère,” she whispered before taking a halting step forward, stopping abruptly as a shudder rocketed through her.

  Probably fewer than a hundred people had seen the statue in his lifetime, and most had shown the same sort of awe and disbelief. A lot of people in the art world insisted the statue didn’t exist. It had never been photographed, exhibited or shown to any but the people closest to the Toussaints and Sinclairs, so over the centuries it had become more legend than fact.

  It struck him that Lisette—and Padma by extension—was the only person he’d ever shown it to. That said so much more than he wanted to acknowledge at the moment.

  Lisette finally moved, circling the column, slowly easing closer with each rotation. “We saw Martin Luther King in Sapphire when it was on display at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, and it was incredible, a bust carved from a single stone, but this...” Her voice clogged with emotion. “It’s so...delicate. So perfect.”

  Le Mystère was. Unlike the more common carvings in diamonds—busts, faces—this carving was a full figure: a slender young woman, her hair pulled back and woven with flowers. Her arms and feet were bare, as was one strong thigh, and her gown floated over her torso, appearing gauzy and airy. She stood on rocks at the edge of a stream, with flowering trees in the clearing behind.

  At four inches tall, she was damned impressive.

  “It’s hard to believe,” Lisette said. “The size of the stone necessary. The willingness of the owner to commission such an attempt, and of the sculptor to risk such a stone. The talent. The precision. The vision. And all done without computers or high-tech drills or micro tools.”

  “Why don’t you share it?” Padma asked. “Send it on a tour of the top five art museums in the world. Let a few magazines do a feature on it. Something like this should be shared.”

  “If more people knew it existed, more people would want the bragging rights for it. It’s pretty much one of a kind, priceless, and there are people out there who want to add exactly that kind of piece to their private collections. It would become a target. It would make our families targets.”

  “True,” Padma conceded. “And I can say from my limited experience that being a target isn’t fun.”

  “Sixty percent of the Toussaint and Sinclair collections is traveling at any given time. This is the only piece we own that’s never left the island and probably never will.”

  Lisette stopped directly in front of the column before glanc
ing at him. “May I...?”

  Jack joined her on one side, Padma on the other. “Just don’t drop it,” he teased. “I really don’t want to die in the jungle with the ghosts.”

  She picked up the statue, cradling it in her hands, turning it side to side, front to back, her gaze soft and wary and filled with awe. She wrapped her fingers around its middle, as if amazed that something so rare that it truly was priceless fitted almost perfectly into her palm. Eyes fluttering shut, she rubbed her fingertip across the soft folds of the gown, touched the tiny, perfect feet, then the hair coiled atop the woman’s head.

  With a shaky breath, she set it on its base again, strode to the elevator and took up position in the back corner. He and Padma watched her, then their glances met. Clearly she wanted to go to Lisette, but just as clearly something held her. “Can I...? Just a touch?”

  He nodded, and she held it the same way, fingers around the middle, without lifting it from the stand. Just as quickly, she let go and hustled to the elevator, too.

  Interesting responses, Jack thought as he texted Simon to rearm the systems in two minutes. He was pretty sure there would be no lingering on the first floor.

  They left the gallery and the house in a curious line: Lisette followed by Padma followed by Jack. They were angling toward the beach, as good a place as any to go when you were unsettled. Sitting in the sand might not solve a person’s problems, but at least it made life more bearable for the moment.

  Jack wondered what had caused Lisette’s mood. Le Mystère? Was she wondering if it was touched by innocent blood like so much of the saints’ lives? Did she think the family was cheating the rest of the world by hiding it away?

  Or maybe it had nothing to do with the statue at all. Maybe it was remembering all the chaos in her life back home, or seeing the over-the-top exhibit, or trying on a necklace with a single stone that could support her and Padma and a half dozen more for the rest of their lives. Maybe it had fully hit her how unfair life was—losing her father, her mother, her job—while he had everything, for no reason other than he’d been born into the right family.