by Dee Brice
Dressed again in unrelieved black, looking dark and dangerous, Ian leaned against her doorjamb and raked her with a hot, predatory gaze. She had never seen him look so savage. So male. So sexy.
“Miss me?” he challenged with a boyishly charming grin that belied the primal heat blazing in his dark eyes.
“Why would I miss you? You’ve only been gone,” she glanced at her watch, “eight hours, twenty minutes and fifteen seconds. I guess I did miss you.”
“My plane was late,” piped an unfamiliar voice.
Convinced whoever belonged to that crisp British accent was about to arrest her, TC gulped and clasped her hands behind her back.
Adding to that conviction, Ian said, “Got ‘em?”
“Right here in the kit.”
An innocent-looking duffle bag preceded a young blond surfer-type into her bedroom.
“There is a God,” TC mumbled, almost convinced that this cherub could no more arrest her than she could fly.
Ian had stepped aside to admit his friend. Now, back at his station with the door shut behind him, he renewed his predatory scrutiny of her body. Though completely covered by a demure black linen sheath she’d donned for dinner with the Santanas, TC felt naked. And hot.
“Use the bed.”
“Uh, sure. I’m Nick Troy,” the cherub said, sticking out a large, well-manicured hand.
“TC,” she said, shook his hand, then quickly withdrew hers. She wasn’t about to let him hang on long enough to cuff her to the bedpost. She wasn’t that convinced his intentions were honorable.
“Tiffany,” Ian corrected in a bored voice, “thinks you’ve come to arrest her.”
With an unreadable glance in her direction, Nick carefully placed his bag on her bed. The zipper rasping open sounded like a buzz saw and grated on her already frayed nerves. She retreated to the French doors, only to find Ian looming.
Removing paraphernalia from his kit and placing it on the bed, Nick asked, “Has anyone been in here since the, uh, incident?”
“Only the maid that I know about.” Folding her arms over her chest, she meandered toward the hallway door. “Will you stop hovering?” she complained when Ian again appeared at her side.
Instead of answering, he scooped her into his arms and settled in a wingback chair with her in his lap.
Smothering a need to shriek in frustration, TC fought his grip on her wrists and, squirming, struggled unsuccessfully to get to her feet. Feeling a warm, hard pulsing against her bottom, she went utterly still.
“Guess you can feel how much I have missed you,” Ian whispered in her ear.
Casting an embarrassed glance at Nick, she murmured an objection. To no avail. Ian claimed her lips in a searing kiss that left her breathless and too weak to protest when he kissed her again.
“Pardon me.”
“What is it, Nick?”
“I’m finished.”
“Already?” Ian drawled, but she felt his body tense.
“No prints, just a slick little mechanism set to work the second time the shower was turned on.”
“The second time?” she echoed. “But I took two showers the day I arrived and one the next morning. What’s going on here?” she demanded of Ian.
“Well, the sludge could have slowed it down. Made it happen…” Nick cleared his throat, retrieved his bag from the bed and backed toward the door. “Later.”
“Oh, no you don’t, Nick Troy,” TC hollered. She sprang from Ian’s lap and put herself between the cherubic imp and his goal. “And don’t you dare laugh, Ian Soria, or I’ll punch your lights out.”
“Bloodthirsty little thing, is she not?” Ian said with a low chuckle.
“I wouldn’t call her little,” Nick replied, veering toward the balcony, looking as if he might jump off if she came any closer. He must believe she had murdered those men in Paris, that she would murder him if he let her close enough.
“Look, Nick,” she said, halting in the middle of the room and holding out her hands like a magician with nothing up her sleeves, “I’ll stop chasing you if you’ll tell me the truth. How could I take two, maybe as many as four showers and not trigger the mechanism?”
“Ian,” Nick pleaded.
“I did warn you about her tenacity.”
Nick’s silence had given her his answer. Someone had been in her room. Letting her hands fall to her sides, TC paced away.
“Holy shit,” Nick said with reverent awe as he watched TC walk away with boneless grace.
“Amen,” Ian agreed.
“If you two are through ogling me, maybe one of you can explain how, despite Santana’s vaunted security, somebody planted that bloody damn mechanism in my shower two days after I arrived?”
“Articulate, too.” Ian grinned at her.
“Damn you, Ian Soria, what the hell do you expect me to do? Cry? Have hysterics? Throw things?”
“I want you to do exactly what you are doing, only louder.”
“I beg your pardon.” She glared back.
“I want you to make a scene. Throw a tantrum. Pitch a fit.”
“Why?” If he didn’t tell her right now, she’d choke it out of him. Seeing Nick out of the corner of her eye, she’d need to scare him away before taking on his partner.
“Because I want you out of here and the only way to do that without arousing suspicion, is for us to have a fight. You pack and Nick will take you out.”
“And what are you going to do?”
“I shall stay for a few days, see if anybody tries to pump me for information you might have given me… That kind of thing.”
“Lord, you’re a miserable liar! You’re going to let this baby-faced agent arrest me.”
“Baby-faced?” Nick interjected.
Ian stood, retrieved her suitcases from the top of the armoire and tossed them on the bed. “Pack,” he said in so low a voice he might have whispered.
“You jerk!” TC shouted, flinging clothes into her cases. She muttered under her breath, shrieked and then muttered again. When she had finished, Ian pulled her into his arms, kissed her and then pushed her toward Nick.
“See you in Bogotá,” Ian said. Then he pinched her bottom.
“I’ll see you in hell first.” And she almost meant it.
Back and forth they went, alternately shouting and whispering all the way down the stairs. Thoroughly confused, Nick followed and was soon joined by the entire Santana family. En masse they went out the front door. Chattering like magpies, they circled Nick’s rented car while he stowed TC’s luggage in the boot. Finally, with TC seated beside him and still cursing Ian in the most colorful yet ladylike manner Nick had ever heard, he pulled away. His passenger fought her seat belt and turned to shake her fist at the assembled crowd.
Resettling, she grinned at him. “Well, wasn’t that special?” she said in a perfect impersonation of an American comedian whose name escaped him.
Startled by her smile and the incredible change in her mood, Nick smiled back. Gunning the engine, he maneuvered the car into a hairpin turn. Oncoming lights on high beam blinded him and he swerved to the right, taking them to the edge of a sheer drop before he finally brought the car to a stop.
“Where did you learn to drive?” TC demanded.
Taken aback by her belligerent tone, Nick took refuge in dignity. “In London, of course.”
“And how many times have you driven abroad, Mr. Troy?”
“Outside the Commonwealth? Just this once, Miss Cartierri. In Paris I use taxis or the subway. In New York City taxis are far safer than—”
“Limousines are the only safe mode of transportation in the world. You, on the other hand, are hazardous to my health.”
Unbuckling her seat belt, his passenger forced him out of the car. He fully expected to be set afoot, stranded, left to freeze in the cold mountain night. To his astonishment, he found himself ensconced in the passenger seat while his friend’s lady drove them through hill and dale. With the aplomb and expertise of a Gran
d Prix racer, she smoothly executed every twist and turn.
Near dawn they reached the road to the Colombian capital, but the lady continued toward Medellin.
“Miss Cartierri, Dam—Ian ordered us to meet him in Bogotá.”
“Hang what Ian ordered, Nick. We’ll hook up with him in due time. First we’re going to Medellin. I want to visit Suramericana de Seguros. See if Bijoux’s counterpart has heard anything about the Belt. Then we’ll go on to Muzo.”
“Muzo?” Nick repeated, feeling like a parrot.
“The Emerald Highway, Nick, begins at Muzo. That’s where we’ll begin the search for Isabella’s Belt.”
Chapter Ten
“Shit,” Agent George Fox muttered under his breath. What the fuck is Tiffany Cartierri doing in Medellin? He raised his newspaper and shrank into himself, cursing his lapse of caution. He should be sitting inside the cafe, not basking in the sun like some rank amateur. On the other hand, had he been inside he would have missed seeing Cherub, trailing along like a puppy on a lead behind Reynard’s prime suspect. How had Tiffany Cartierri managed to hook up with Nick Troy, Hunter’s number one researcher? And where the fuck was Hunter?
Somehow things had gotten out of hand. He and his silent partner had miscalculated badly. Their carefully laid plans were starting to unravel. Fox had not thought Tiffany Cartierri would leave London so precipitously. Suspecting Sir James Foster kept his daughter-in-law under a firm thumb, he had expected the girl would stay put, wring her hands and bemoan her certain fate at the hands of newly appointed Agent-in-Charge George Fox.
When she had disappeared from London, he had expected her to surface at one of Sir James’ country estates, one where his wife was not in residence, of course. One where Sir James could take full advantage of the lovely Tiffany’s distraught emotions. Recently widowed, all but accused of the theft of the millennium, the girl would succumb to the first person who offered her not only protection, but also emotional support. And that powerful, supportive, protective figure would not be Charles Cartierri, the father who barely acknowledged his daughter’s existence.
But none of that had happened. Instead, the girl had fled to a country whose political turmoil made extradition difficult if not impossible. A shrewd move on her part and on that of her puppet master, Sir James.
Yes! George Fox thought, scenting the kill. All he had to do was link the girl’s escape to Sir James and his own future was assured. The wealthy British lord could not afford the scandal of his daughter-in-law’s downfall—not if he were involved, by fact or by innuendo, in the girl’s crimes.
Realizing his thoughts had distracted him from his quarry, George returned his attention to Cherub and the lad’s lovely companion. Seeing them enter a long, sleek limousine, George hastily paid his bill and raced to his rented car.
He’d expected to find the bitch in Bogotá. He couldn’t risk losing sight of the woman now or he might lose her completely. Again.
Chapter Eleven
The woman had not one ounce of common sense, Damian thought as he watched Tiffany through high-powered binoculars. Dressed in white from her impractical sandals to her cloche hat, she refused the offered coveralls that would protect her clothing and slung one elegant leg then the other through a tire suspended on a chain. Grinning like a cat about to devour the proverbial canary, she waved at Nick Troy, then slowly disappeared below the earth’s surface. But before she vanished, Damian could have sworn she called out “Tally-ho.”
Well, he thought, impatiently observing Nick Troy pace all around the hole where Tiffany had dropped from sight, go on, Cherub. Get down there, you twit. You are supposed to guard her, you lily-livered ninnyhammer.
Dios mio, he sounded like his own nanny, he thought, wondering what madness had made him let Tiffany out of his control. Nor should he have entrusted her to Nick’s safekeeping. Instead of charming her like he had every female between the ages of one and one hundred, Nick obviously had fallen victim to Tiffany’s wiles.
Damn it, they were supposed to be in Bogotá, not gallivanting over rough and muddy roads in a bloody conspicuous limousine. What was she looking for anyway? Why had she not simply walked into the mine like a sane woman would? Why had that idiot Nick not gone down into Muzo with her? And what the devil was Reynard doing tailing them?
* * * * *
As the tire began its descent into darkness, TC turned on her flashlight and tried not to listen to the chain squeak. Her overactive imagination got busy, conjuring pictures of the rusty chain breaking or the worn tire falling apart.
What was she trying to prove, anyway? That she wasn’t afraid of the dark? She was afraid of the dark, she admitted, swinging the light over the rock walls of the mineshaft.
Fighting down her rising fear, she recited everything she’d learned about emeralds during three intensive years of studying to become a certified gemologist.
The name emerald came from the Greek Smaragdos or possibly the Persian for “green stone”. Only the finest of the beryls, the most precious being emeralds of the deepest green, were transparent. Inclusions, liquid or gas bubbles, healing cracks and foreign crystals, were not considered faults, but distinguished genuine emeralds from synthetic. Emeralds were brittle and sensitive to pressure and must be treated carefully when heated. The host rock was normally found near pegmatite veins, where the emeralds grew into small veins or on the walls of holes like the one she was descending.
At Muzo, miners loosened the black carbonaceous limestone with sticks and pecked out the stones by hand. Safer, somewhat, than at the hydraulic mines, where miners and risk-seekers were accosted by armed thugs and often shot if they refused to surrender their finds.
Muzo itself had borne the flawless cabochon emerald that was the centerpiece of Isabella’s Belt.
So, what did she expect to find when she reached the bottom of this endless vertical tunnel? That someone—Emilio Santana, perhaps—had dropped the Belt down this miserable excuse for a mineshaft? That the minute her feet touched ground, she would stumble across the Belt and re-emerge with it clenched in her fist like a trophy?
Of course not. She simply wanted to see an emerald mine, something she never had seen in all her travels during all the years she had worked almost exclusively with the lovely gems.
Far above her head the chain sang in the Stygian blackness, then fell silent. Closer to her, perhaps only inches away, she thought she heard individual links groan as her weight forced them open.
Not wanting to see how far she would fall, she let go of the flashlight. Above the roar of her own heartbeat, she did not hear the light careen down the walls of the shaft.
The chain jerked. TC bit her lips to hold back a scream, then screamed anyway.
“Stupid,” echoed back at her.
* * * * *
“Of all the stupid things you have done, this is the stupidest,” Damian said the minute Tiffany opened her eyes.
She winced. “Don’t shout.”
“I am not shouting,” he shouted.
“I hope you didn’t not shout like this at poor Nick,” she said, sitting up and reaching into the limousine bar to take out a club soda. “Where is Nick?”
“Finally attending to business.”
“I see.” She stared at Ian over the rim of her glass, then raised it in a silent toast. “Seeing to my extradition, is he?”
“No, you little fool, he is following someone. Someone who should not be here. Someone,” he added with calculated menace, “who would not hesitate to take you back to Paris and have you locked away for the rest of your life.”
Setting her drink aside, she eased onto his lap and wreathed her arms around his neck.
“What are you doing?”
“Thanking you for saving me, from the mine and from this nameless ‘someone’ who would arrest me.”
“Do not push your luck, Tiffany darling. I am not sure I have forgiven you yet.” Sliding his hand over her thighs, he rubbed his aching knee where she had kicked
him as he pulled her from the clutches of her precarious perch in the tire.
“Shall I kiss it and make it better?” She feathered kisses along his jaw and cheek, then sought his lips. Her fingers massaged his neck, then slid into his hair, bringing a sensuous tingling to his scalp.
Grabbing her wrists, he brought her hands to his chest and held her immobile. “What the devil are you up to now?”
Frowning, she twisted out of his grasp, then moved to the seat facing him. “I was trying to seduce you, you jerk. And don’t you dare laugh.”
“I would not dream of laughing at you, Tiffany darling.” He pulled her back onto his lap and kissed the pout from her lips. “As for seducing me, I think we can find more appropriate surroundings.”
“Nuts. I’ve never—”
“You have never what?”
“Never mind.”
“You have never made love in the backseat of an automobile. Was that what you were going to say?” His smile made her glare.
“Tell me about this nefarious ‘someone’ Nick is following. He isn’t dangerous, is he?”
“Not to Nick.” Forgetting about Nick, George Fox and his own aching knee, Damian kissed her until her moans told him she, too, had forgotten them. Too old for the kind of gymnastics backseat lovemaking required, he was more than willing to indulge in some old-fashioned necking.
“Why isn’t this person dangerous to Nick?”
Shifting Tiffany off the evidence of his arousal, Damian conceded he might be getting too old for backseat necking, too. “They know each other.”
“Ian, we have to find Nick right away. Do you know how many people are murdered by people they know?”
I know one who might be if she does not stop talking, he thought. “No, do you?” Banishing mayhem from his mind, he kissed her.
“No, but—”
“It is all right, Tiffany, luv. They work together.”
