by Cassie Miles
“Too dangerous,” she replied. “If I made the sheikh angry, I’d lose my life. I never take such risks.”
“Never, eh? But I thought a cat or, should I say, a cat burglar?—had nine lives.”
A cat burglar? Though Henning spoke to Tasha, his gaze was riveted on David, watching him for a reaction And it took all of David’s self-control to maintain his attitude of impassivity. He didn’t flinch. His gaze was steady. Thanks to years of training, he betrayed nothing of the turmoil that ricocheted inside his head. Tasha was a cat burglar? That sure as hell explained her knowledge of fine jewelry and her passionate reaction to the Sheikh’s Rubies. And why hadn’t she mentioned this little, tiny, infinitesimal detail about her life? Why had she adamantly insisted that there was no reason for anyone to be after her?
She’d lied to him. Wrapped in a mantle of offended innocence, she’d cleverly disguised her true motivations.
Damn her lies! Beneath his perfectly tailored tuxedo, David began to sweat. He glanced down at her, waiting for her to deny the inspector’s oblique accusation.
Instead, she said, “David, I’d like to go back inside. There was one more person I wanted to chat with.”
“Certainly,” he said. When he took her hand and placed it on his arm to escort her back into Pola and Tweed, his grasp tightened like a handcuff on her slender wrist. She had some explaining to do, and he wouldn’t be satisfied until he had some answers. Honest answers.
“I’ll be seeing you again,” the inspector said. “For the next two weeks, I’ll be staying close to the rubies.”
“That sounds like a warning,” Tasha said.
Inspector Henning didn’t bother to put up a facade of politeness. He glared at her. “Quite right.”
As they stepped past him, heading back inside, she turned for a parting comment. “It wasn’t me in SoHo.”
“So you say.”
Inside Pola and Tweed, David automatically scanned the crowd. The presence of armed guards and the number of people crammed inside the silk-draped store made this into a fairly safe surrounding. The question was, should he be protecting Tasha from them or vice versa?
“Over there,” she said. “I want to talk with that woman who—”
“Not just yet.” His voice was low and hard. His anger simmered close to the surface.
Grasping her elbow, he propelled her to a relatively quiet corner of the room. “You have one chance to explain.”
“What do you mean?”
“The agency I work for, PEI, doesn’t extend bodyguard protection to criminals.”
Her dark eyes flashed. Her chin quivered. She tried to wrench her elbow away from him, but he held on tightly. If he hadn’t just heard a Scotland Yard inspector refer to her as a cat burglar, he might have fallen for her delicate, wide-eyed look of offended virtue.
“I’m not a cat burglar,” she whispered.
“Glad to hear it.” As if she would confess to him without a struggle! David’s patience wore thin. It was killing him to be subtle. He wanted to pry the truth from her delicate pink-tinted lips. “Tell me how you happened to be acquainted with Inspector Henning?”
“What an obnoxious creep! It’s going to be hell having him right next door for two weeks.”
“What happened in Miami?”
She winced. “It’s complicated, David. Do we have to go into it right now?”
“Yes.”
“All right. You asked for it.” She snagged two wineglasses from a passing waiter and held one out to David.
He refused. “I don’t drink on the job.”
“Just as well. I might need both of these.” She took a long swallow. “My mother came from Russia. When she emigrated to this country, in the late 1950s, it was the height of the Cold War. Though her family was aristocracy and she hated Communism more than anyone in the United States could possibly imagine, she was virtually unemployable. Nobody trusted a Russian woman. She had no job skills, spoke very little English and didn’t have a big bankroll to support her. What she did have was jewelry, a fortune in family jewels.”
“I see,” David said. Did he believe her? In this exotic setting, with draped silks and desert flowers, he thought of the legendary storyteller Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights who enchanted her enemies with fanciful tales. David refused to be so easily duped. “Continue.”
“I learned about gemstones at my mother’s knee. Literally.” She polished off one of the glasses of wine and set it down on a countertop. “When we were little, Mother used to insist that my sister and I sit by her side as she painstakingly cataloged her jewels, explaining the history of the piece, the carats, the workmanship. Some people have family albums. We had the family jewels.”
“Fascinating,” David said tersely.
“Insane might be a more accurate word.”
“All families have their idiosyncracies.”
“I’ll bet yours didn’t.” Her voice snapped like a whip. “I’ll bet you’re white bread through and through. I’d guess that you played football in high school, or maybe in prep school, dated a cheerleader and matriculated to Yale.”
“You’re wrong.” But he didn’t intend to be sidetracked by his own dysfunctional family history. “Let’s get back to the family jewels, shall we?”
“My mother, Martina, was married and divorced and then married again to my father. She had me and my sister. Then, she and my father divorced. I was six. It really hurt, but I can’t blame my father.” She frowned into her wine. “Here’s what you’ve got to understand, David. My mother is a tragic kind of person. She has that deep, Russian gloom—a darkness that’s heavy as the snows of Moscow in winter. After the two failed marriages, she was bitter toward men and vowed to never marry again.”
David was beginning to get a clearer picture of why Tasha was so adamantly independent. Her mother sounded like a classic man-hating witch.
“It was horrible when I started thinking about dating,” Tasha said. “Who was that monster in Greek mythology? The one who had snakes for hair and turned men into stone?”
“Medusa?”
“That was my mom. Any guy who came into my house got the Medusa glare right between the eyes.”
“So you weren’t dating the captain of the football team.”
“Not hardly.”
He knew that they had gone far afield in her explanation, and he suspected that her digression was purposeful, leading him away from the real story. “Tasha, what does this have to do with Miami?”
“It’s like this. Morty Lancer was fairly good about child support, but there was never enough money. Mother had to keep selling off her jewels, one at a time. Each time, It was an exercise in depression. You would have thought she was hacking off parts of her body, selling her lifeblood. Finally, my sister and I said we’d take care of the jewelry sales for her.”
“And you went to Miami,” David prompted.
“I’d located a buyer there for this incredible tiara, and it was worth the expense of the tnp for what this woman would pay. Unfortunately, at the same time, a pair of emerald earrings were stolen in a particularly daring cat burglary. Inspector Henning was called in to help the investigators. He got wind of the tiara, and—for some ridiculous reason—I became his number-one suspect.”
“A ridiculous reason,” David said coldly. Finally, she had led him to the meat of her story. But it seemed that Tasha was leaving out the most important facts. “In my experience, the police don’t often zero in on a suspect without some rational basis.”
“What?”
“This supposedly ‘ridiculous reason,’ what was it?”
“Oh, come on, David. You can’t possibly be on Henning’s side.”
“I want the truth.”
“If I was a cat burglar, would I be running a flower shop? I’d be filthy rich and living in Monte Carlo. And I meant it when I said I wasn’t in SoHo four years ago. You can check my passport.”
Which could be faked, he thought.
She stared up at him with her huge liquid brown eyes, the eyes that he thought from the first were secretive and mysterious. “David, you believe me, don’t you?”
God help him, he wanted to believe her. He might be making the biggest mistake of his career, but he hoped that Tasha was telling him the truth. “You haven’t told me the whole story.”
“You’re right.” Her voice was low, almost a whisper. “There’s more. But I don’t understand, David. Why do you need to know everything?”
“To save your life.”
Startled, she glanced up at him. Her eyes were haunted. In their liquid depths, he saw a shimmer of fear, like the flicker of moonlight across a midnight pond. When she looked at him like this, he wanted to hold her close, to be her haven in a world that had been cruel.
Then her lips quirked in a grin, banishing the naked vulnerability in her eyes. There was a spark, a flash of her teasing wit. “Maybe I’ll tell you, David. But only if I decide I can trust you.”
In a blink, she’d turned the tables. They weren’t talking about her dubious past, they were talking about him. Completely taken aback, David sputtered. “Me? You don’t know if you can trust me?”
“That’s right.”
“How can you say that?” He struggled to control himself. “I’m a bodyguard. I work for PEI, one of the most reputable agencies in the country.”
“All I know is that I wasn’t in danger until you arrived.”
She sipped at the second glass of wine, which David knew was her fourth drink of the night because he’d been counting. And he’d only seen her nibble at a couple of canapes. She did not, however, appear to be the least bit out of control. Apparently, little Tasha could hold her liquor. She was full of surprises. The greatest of which might be that she was a cat burglar.
She glanced back toward the party, which had begun to break up. “I want to talk to that woman with the daughter who’s getting married. Then we can leave.”
“Go ahead. I’ll wait here.”
David stood beside the elaborate floral display of anthurium provided by Bloom’s and glared as Tasha worked the crowd. Moving through the clusters of people, she was graceful. Men were captivated by her. Their appreciative glances followed her around the room. And the women seemed to warm to her, too. She made them smile. So easily, she disarmed everyone who came in contact with her.
He could see that Tasha would fit in anywhere. She’d be welcomed at a hoedown or a debutante ball. She was loaded with charm and sophistication—both were handy traits for a jewel thief. In order to pull off any caper, inside information was essential. Was that why she was in danger? She’d cleverly sidestepped his questions about the inspector’s “ridiculous reasons” for suspecting her. She hadn’t actually said that she wasn’t a cat burglar.
As he watched, she glanced over her shoulder and winked at him. A sudden heat flowed through his veins. Without thinking, he smiled back at her. She made him glad to be with her, proud to be her escort. And if she was a thief? How could he be exchanging warm grins with a criminal? That went against everything he believed in.
When she came back toward him, a touch of laughter lingered on her soft pink lips. With her short black hair, she looked like a gamine, more mischievous than mysterious.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s hit the road.”
Mindful of his duties as a bodyguard, he took her arm and escorted her onto the street. Even this slight physical contact, the nearness of her, aroused him, and David was annoyed at himself for allowing his emotions to go haywire. He shouldn’t be feeling this way about a client, especially not when the client might be a criminal.
They were parked nearby and the streets were well lit. It seemed safe enough to walk. He’d only gone a few paces, however, when he sensed a threat.
In the entrance to her shop, he noticed a thickening in the shadows. Someone was standing there, hiding.
David halted, stepped in front of Tasha.
A match flared in the doorway, illuminating the features of Inspector Henning. David smelled the rich smoke of a good cigar.
“Odd place for a smoke,” David said.
“Didn’t want to offend any of the party goers,” the Inspector said. “Nobody appreciates a fine Cuban cigar anymore.”
Tasha peeked out from behind David. “Perhaps it’s you that people find offensive.”
He chuckled. “Ah, Miss Lancer. You’re always a challenge.”
“Don’t play with me, Inspector Henning. You’ll never win.”
His laughter vanished in a puff of cigar smoke.
David whisked her to the car, held her door and hurried around to the driver’s side. Whoever was after Tasha had not made a move at the party. But were they still watching her apartment building?
On the short drive home, Tasha fumed, “Do you believe that Inspector Henning? What a snake! No, he’s too fat to be a snake. But a reptile, for sure. A lizard!”
“The thing with the tiara in Miami wasn’t the first time you met him, was it?”
“Oh, gosh, no. He’s been harassing me since I was just a kid. Seventeen. The first time was in London.”
“And I suppose that had something to do with jewels.”
“Of course, it did. That’s why he was so quick to jump to the wrong conclusions in Miami. What a jerk!”
But she didn’t want to dwell on the nasty Inspector Henning. Tonight had been a very successful evening for her, and she wouldn’t let old disasters ruin her rosy glow of success.
She glanced over toward David. His jaw clenched tight as if he were forcing himself not to speak. She, too, was silent. She’d left her story half-told. Had she said too much? Or too little?
Tasha cleared her throat. “When we get to my apartment, is there anything special I should do?”
“I’ll accompany you inside. Just do as I say.” He kept his attention on the road, but his eyebrows pulled down in a frown. “Returning tonight, after dark, would be a lot easier if I’d secured your apartment before we left.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have listened to you when you said I was in danger, but I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t. I still don’t know why anybody would be after me.”
“Come off it, Tasha. You’re a woman who has been suspected of burglary on an international scale. Hardly an innocent, law-abiding citizen.”
“Don’t be absurd! I can explain everything.”
“And you will,” he said. “As soon as we’re in your apartment.”
David drove slowly past the front entrance to her building. “Looks okay,” he said. “Get your keys out and ready. As soon as I stop the car, jump out and run to the door.”
“Should I take off my heels?”
“Yes. You need to move fast. I’ll be right behind you.”
He went around to the alley entrance. They were in luck and found a parking place next to the back door. David swerved neatly into the space. “Go!”
She darted from the car, raced up the four concrete stairs to the door and fitted her key in the lock. She could feel David right behind her. In less than a minute, they were inside her building, cocooned by soundproofed silence. The beige-carpeted hallway was deserted.
Hers was a relatively small building, four stories high. On Tasha’s floor, the second, there were only four apartments. Each was a two-bedroom.
With gun in hand, David preceded her up the stairs to the second floor where, once again, they met with quiet.
At the door to her apartment, he instructed, “You stay out here. Face the hallway. If you see any movement at all, yell. I’ll check out the inside.”
She unlocked the door, and he disappeared into her apartment. It seemed strange to be standing in her own hallway, watching for a threat. Everything looked exactly the same as usual. Well lit by precisely spaced ceiling fixtures. Textured white walls. Natural wood baseboards. Perfectly quiet. If it hadn’t been for that Russian man with the gun, she wouldn’t have thought it possible that she was in danger.
Despite what David and Henning thought, Tasha had no reason to be threatened.
David was back in the doorway, no longer carrying his gun. “It’s clear. Come on in. Quickly.”
Inside, she fastened the dead bolt, dragged herself over to the couch and collapsed onto it. She exhaled a deep sigh of relief. At last, she was home. Safe.
David also seemed to relax by several degrees. No longer on the alert as a bodyguard, he tugged at his bow tie, untied the knot and allowed the ends to hang loose on his snowy white shirt. When he unfastened the top button on his shirt and rubbed at his throat, she noticed an enticing glimpse of chest hair, and Tasha smiled to herself. She was seeing him with—no pun intended—his guard down.
David shrugged out of his tuxedo jacket. “Mind if I hang this in the front closet?”
“Not at all.”
He put away his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. His forearms were strong. The crisp hair, like the hair at his throat, was darker than the thick, chestnut brown hair on his head. His black shoulder holster was clearly visible above the cummerbund, and she couldn’t help staring at it. Tasha wasn’t afraid of guns. In fact, she kept a .32 revolver locked in her bottom desk drawer in the office, thinking that it might be some kind of deterrent against robbery. Still, it seemed odd to have an armed man in her living room, casually relaxing as he pulled over a chair from the dining room table and sat opposite her. “Apparently, these people who are threatening you don’t want to kill you.”
“No? Running me down with a car and sticking a gun in my face seem like pretty fatal gestures.”
“If the gunman wanted you dead, he wouldn’t have talked to you. There was plenty of time to pull the trigger.”
“That’s true,” she agreed. “He told me to-come with him, and he’d explain everything.”
“What was he talking about?”
“I don’t know.” She saw the disbelief in his gaze. “Listen, David, I know it seems weird that I don’t know what these people are after. But it’s even more strange from my perspective. I really don’t have a clue.”
