Danger and Desire: Ten Full-Length Steamy Romantic Suspense Novels

by Pamela Clare

  “I’m guessing not elderly,” Dax said.

  “Thirty to fifty.” That was the dominant demographic for jewel thieves. “And it can’t be in any database.”

  “Would you like the location of the Lindbergh baby, too, Mr. Hawkins?”

  “This gets me the boat, Dax.”

  Cole knew that Dax was as concerned about the boat as anybody. Dax had even activated a sleeper operative in Hawaii on it. There was some thinking the boat had picked up crewmembers on the big island. They discussed trackers. Borgola had said the diamonds were in bags; Dax said he’d arrange for tech to put together fiber trackers—stiff enough to be forced into the hem of a small bag.

  Cole ended the call and went back in. He climbed down the rope to join the guys. The elevator shaft was clean. The thieves had their bases covered. He wouldn’t have expected anything less—not from professionals capable of cracking a Fenton Furst.

  The doors at the very bottom had been jimmied open. He stepped out. Tunnels stretched every which way.

  Cole stood there where they’d stood. The trio had an inside informant and a lot of strong planning. They’d brought smoke bombs, for crissake. Unusual and a bit theatrical, but effective.

  He called the elevator car and used his key to send it a few feet back up, then he untied the rope from the bottom of it. Yellow. Coated. Not very distinctive. Probably from a big chain store.

  He stood in the tunnel, listening to the echo of Hensen’s voice, feeling a strange kinship with the thieves. He and the thieves were both up to something very dangerous—screwing Borgola. And things were about to turn south for the thief who’d cracked the safe. He wouldn’t want to be dragged back the mansion but Cole wouldn’t give him a choice. He’d let him live if he could. Getting to the hidden safe and finding the boat were his priorities.

  Cole needed to work fast. A lot of the jewel gangs traveled. Many of them were Europeans. He sent Smits to go and run down the source of the rope. He and Hensen followed the route the thieves had taken, walking the tunnel, which stretched a good 300 meters south, almost to the gate.

  This tunnel had been made for escape—he’d been in it before, though he pretended he hadn’t. He looked around, inspecting it thoroughly. They climbed out the hatch and followed the trail beyond, all the way to the wall. Cole was stalling at this point, trying to kill the three hours he’d given Dax to get him the replacement blood so he could hand it over to Borgola’s guy DNA to test. The Association would test the real blood.

  A little before five in the morning he found himself again in Borgola’s office. He showed Borgola the wallpaper spatter. That wasn’t even the best sample, he assured him.

  Borgola went to his massive desk and extracted a card from a wooden box. “Bring the sample to this fellow. He’s a P.I. who owes me a favor, and he knows guys who can run it. Keep me in the loop on every step.”

  Cole nodded and left. Mapes was going to be pissed. Some things couldn’t be helped.

  *

  Cole arrived at the drop-off, a Starbucks in a strip mall east of Yorkwood. The Association had found Starbucks to be a convenient place for quick meets and pick-ups, points that worked even when one was being followed. If you couldn’t do a handoff in person, you could leave things in gaps they’d created behind the baseboards in the men’s bathrooms. The fact that they opened at 5:30 a.m. was also convenient.

  He bought a coffee and went to the condiment station where he loaded in the cream. “Nice day for a coffee,” he said to the striking blond man in a rumpled tweed coat and glasses who wandered up next to him. This was the standard Association greeting, though sometimes it was a nice night for a beer, or a nice afternoon for a walk, or whatever suited the occasion.

  “Clears the mind,” Macmillan said, the standard Association reply.

  This was their all-clear signal. Deviation from the Association exchange signaled trouble.

  “I thought you were in Morocco,” Cole said.

  Macmillan sighed. “Scuttled.” Macmillan was a linguist and one of the Association’s most brilliant and dangerous operatives, a man who could pose as anything. Macmillan’s hair was longish and swept back; he looked every inch the academic.

  Cole smiled. “Back to Professor Maxwell, I presume.”

  Macmillan gave him a dark look. Professor Maxwell was one of Macmillan’s covers. “And I went through a great deal of trouble to get you a little prize from the med school lab,” Macmillan said in his clipped Euro accent. “Two prizes, to be precise.”

  The hands. “Are they on ice?”

  “Of course, old man.”

  “Don’t call me that,” Cole said. It reminded him of Borgola. Anyway, he and Macmillan were both in their thirties—hardly old.

  “Small cooler in the back of that black Navigator. Right back door’s unlocked. And I’m to courier your sample.”

  Cole nodded.

  “Did you saw them off yourself?”

  “No, I had one of my fawning grad students do it,” he said caustically. “Cut these off at the wrists, love. Bone saw if you please. Daddy needs extra hands.”

  Cole tried not to smile.

  “Thaw at room temperature overnight for best results, my friend.”

  Cole and Macmillan had come up together and Cole enjoyed seeing him, even for these short bits. It could get lonely being undercover. “Do my hands have a name?”

  “Dieter Weiss. Swiss national. Dax is putting together the records and he’ll shove them down a few levels in the federal database. It’ll take a bit to populate. What’s the plan?”

  Cole related the specifics—returning the diamonds as a Trojan horse. Following them to the secret safe. Forcing the safecracker to break in.

  “Your safecracker’s not going to go back easy,” Macmillan said.

  “No,” Cole said. “But I feel confident he will. I’ve been studying my copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

  Macmillan smiled. “How rocky have things gotten?”

  Cole knew what he meant. How much trouble are you in? How precarious has your cover become? “Beyond rocky.”

  “Beyond the rocky and into the Maelstrom,” Macmillan said. “What does Dax say?”

  Cole gave him an icy stare. Don’t tell, that was the message.

  “It’s not all on you,” Macmillan said. “Hawaii’s on it, too.”

  “I’m the only Associate with any chance of getting that boat in time and you know it,” Cole said.

  Macmillan said nothing. He knew it was true. He knew about hiding trouble from the Association, too.

  “Inside that mansion you’re in do-not-extract territory. But Cole, call me all the same—”

  “I won’t,” Cole said.

  “The offer stands. Even if you just need them distracted.”

  “It’s my risk.”

  Macmillan raised an eyebrow. “And the risk of a certain safecracker. It’s a bad day for clever safecrackers. By the way, you owe me a white oxford. Good luck and all that.” He shoved a copy of The Nation under his arm and settled into a window table.

  Cole fitted the cover over his cup and headed for the door.

  The sun was just coming up, and the parking lot was relatively vacant. The Navigator was in the center of a loose group of cars. He opened the right back door, pulled out the ice chest, and set the baggie containing the blood-spattered wallpaper under the driver’s seat. Then he got back in his Borgola-issued SUV.

  He started up the engine and peeked into the cooler. Two hands. Cut clean. A forensics lab would be able to tell Borgola that the hands had been chopped off long after death, but Cole had to take the chance he wouldn’t reach out to get an opinion on that. It was one thing to send blood off for testing; it was another to ask for information on severed hands.

  Cole replaced the lid. A padded envelope was taped to the side of the chest. He pulled it off and opened it, extracting a small tube full of blood. Perfect. He pulled the blank wallpaper and rug cuttings out of his case and tipp
ed a blood drop onto each and blew on them to dry them. He’d drop them with Borgola’s man in a bit.

  After that, he’d wait for results of the real blood sample. He could have a name in as soon as two hours—everything was a rush. Then the full firepower of the Association would be turned on helping him find the thieves.

  Chapter Five

  Angel pulled out three fabric swatches and slid them across the table for her client, Lisa, to inspect, pushing them up next to the cabinet door facsimile—water glass framed in dark walnut. She set the piece of translucent green tile next to that. The tile showed what would be on the backsplash.

  Lisa was a good client—she trusted Angel to guide her and narrow down her choices, and she tended to like the type of warm, eclectic, pattern-rich interiors Angel had become known for around Santa Monica.

  Angel pointed to a flower on her favorite of the choices. “This one is slightly vintagey, and the yellow picks up the abstract art we’ve got going in the great room. This other is subtler. This blue pattern will show lavishly alongside the greens, but still look clean.” She talked about the different samples, the effect that they’d have as curtains, which she liked to think of as jewelry for windows.

  “It’s amazing how you can see this,” Lisa said. “You can look at a place and imagine possibilities and then make them come true.”

  Angel smiled a fake smile, because deep down, she felt like an imposter. She was still just a thief trying to go straight. A poor girl longing for beauty and never finding it.

  Parker Gables was where she’d first met Macy and White Jenny—they’d all lived down the hall from each other in the apartment complex. The three girls became instant friends, mostly because other kids didn’t want anything to do with them. Macy was smelly and her crazy-scary mom would speak in tongues half the time, White Jenny was fat and one of the few white girls in the whole place, and Angel was fat, too, and also shy.

  As pre-teens, she and Macy and White Jenny would spend hours on the apartment complex roof, spinning tales of themselves driving red convertibles and wearing pretty dresses, or dining at restaurants where they could order anything on the menu without looking at the prices. Or learning they were lost royalty, finding treasure, flying their own jets. They would make books about their future lives from pictures they cut out from magazines. Here’s my car, here’s my house. Elegant men would fall at their feet. There would be many romantic dramas.

  They got lots of praise from teachers for their imaginations, and their families were happy they seemed to be doing constructive, smart-girl things instead of playing video games or smoking behind the rec center.

  Angel couldn’t remember when the imaginary stories slowly became plans, but she was pretty sure it was about the time they turned fourteen. The three of them were over their ugly duckling phases, so boys and drinking got blended with their life plans, and the three of them fell into stealing cars. They ran away, got arrested repeatedly, and wound up in juvenile detention. That was where the jewel thief dreams began.

  Lisa smoothed a hand over the pattern with grasses.

  “Nice and fresh with this palette,” Angel said. “It’s a beautiful choice with the rich wood of the floors. And look at these colors you surround yourself with—” Angel swept a hand across the woman’s counter, which was lined with jars of pasta and legumes of every kind, and bowls of red onions and garlic bulbs. “These things are beautiful. And the way you put them together. The dishes you create, this is beauty you create in your life, and it needs to be part of our design.”

  Lisa’s eyes brightened. “You’re right, I love cooking, but I never thought of it as visual. As art.”

  “Well, it is. Your ingredients are like sculptures that live and evolve in your kitchen. It’s a manifestation of your inner beauty. And the herb garden in the living room? And the dishes display? This is from your own beauty and your love of your family, and your Italian mother, too.”

  Angel watched Lisa run her hand over the green. This was a good moment, when a client recognized that she contained beauty that was reflected in her own environment. Something intrinsic, something of hers. Lisa ran a finger over the pattern. People wanted beauty in their lives. They would shop for it and buy it, but what they really wanted was for it to come from within.

  A good designer helped clients find that. Angel was good at it because she could never find it in herself. It’s why she preferred the shadows.

  Beauty is only skin deep; ugly cuts clear to the bone.

  She shook her dad’s words out of her head. He loved her, and he never meant for the ugly part to apply to her, but she felt so guilty for her choices and for all the people that she’d hurt. Her folks worked long hours to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, their chanclas, and she’d thrown it in their faces. Thank goodness for her brother, Hector, a star lawyer. One kid for them to be proud of, one kid not ugly clear to the bone.

  Lisa rearranged the items to look at them in a new way. They discussed how the mood of the lighting would affect the choices, and Angel pulled up some images on her notebook.

  She nodded and smiled while Lisa looked them over and commented, but really she was thinking about the man from the night before. The insistent force with which he pulled her up to him lived in her body even now, along with the feel of his lips against hers. He’d treated her as if he knew her already, as if he had her already. Arrogant, presumptuous, reckless, no good.

  And it had excited the hell out of her.

  She didn’t want that kind of guy anymore, she told herself, and she didn’t want the trouble and drama he would surely bring. Macy had once accused Angel of running headlong into the chaos of self-destructive men because it took the spotlight off of her—made her forget her guilty conscience the way you forget about a headache when you break your leg.

  Maybe. All Angel knew was that it felt good. This guy, he felt good.

  Even the ragged sound of his inhale as he broke away from their kiss had a sexy, masculine desperation. In thirty seconds he’d taken over her body, turned her on, and stripped her of her gun.

  Lisa went back to the swatches and chose the green, as Angel knew she would. It was time to go to the lighting showroom. Angel picked up her white purse, which popped against her fire-engine red suit. She’d put on her most elegant outfit that morning, as if that would erase what she’d been the night before. It had felt so natural to melt into the shadows, cracking a safe in the dark. Really, decorating homes was a kind of shadow business, too—setting the stage for somebody else’s life. Angel liked to be behind the stage.

  In movie theaters and classrooms, she always sat in the back. She liked to be the observer; never the observed.

  They left in her red BMW convertible and headed up the surface streets to a lighting outlet. She’d bought the car with design money—she’d gotten rid of all the diamonds and accounts.

  Too little, too late.

  She’d promised her parents and brother that she’d gone straight, but still remembered the look they gave when she drove into Parker Gables last Thanksgiving in a nice car. They assumed she was back to the life again.

  They’d forgiven her with their heads, but not with their hearts.

  Who could blame them?

  Angel thought about the diamonds, the way they’d shone when Macy spilled them out into her palm, and how she had burned to hold them, too, to feel their cool weight. To put them against her cheek.

  If Angel could trace their jewel thievery career to one formative event, it was them finding the InStyle magazine that showed the woman wearing the Contessa Herron sapphires.

  And not just any woman—this was a photo spread about European royalty. She and Macy and White Jenny would take turns checking it out of the juvie hall library. They’d stare at it endlessly, the image of those blue jewels on a lady’s creamy pale neck. You couldn’t see her face, just the bodice of her blue gown, the blurred chandeliers, and people dancing in the background. The lady in the photo held a gloved ha
nd to her neck, showing off the sapphire necklace, bracelet, and ring all in one shot. Everything in the photo was dreamy, really, except the jewels; they were like knives of brilliance cutting through the world.

  Angel remembered staring at it, dreaming of those jewels, though it wasn’t just the jewels, it was the whole thing, that scene of light and elegance and beauty. If she let herself, she could still connect to the fierceness of the longing she felt when she looked at the photo. She could still remember crying angry tears into her pillow. The dream of having such beauty for her own wasn’t a dream of hope; it was a dream of rage.

  She and Lisa arrived at the lighting showroom. Angel suggested modern, simple pendant lighting above the island.

  Lisa liked that idea. “I would love to see your place,” she said. “I bet it’s amazing.”

  “It’s actually very practical,” Angel confessed. “And I’m always changing it and trying new stuff out for clients.”

  “I wouldn’t be able see your inner beauty there?”

  “I’m afraid you’d have to settle for fresh baked cookies,” Angel joked.

  “Mmm,” Lisa said.

  Mmm? Did Lisa actually want to hang out as friends, or was this just a client thing? Angel had been so tight with Macy and White Jenny for so long, she barely knew how to make girlfriends. In the past five years since she’d gone straight she’d felt awfully lonely. She’d tried to socialize with Macy and White Jenny at first, but it was awkward and difficult, especially after Angel took her name off the joint bank accounts they were holding for old age. Her friends became like distant satellites, orbiting around, but rarely seen. Until last night.

  She checked her phone while Lisa checked the lighting. No messages. Macy was supposed to call when they made the trade to free Aggie.

  *

  Five hours later, Angel stepped out of the elevator on the fourth floor of her building, all loaded up with groceries. She’d hit the supermarket after she’d dropped Lisa off. She deserved to indulge for once, and tonight she was making an elaborate caramelized onion and brie cheese pizza. Lisa had given her the recipe.