ItTakesaThief

by Dee Brice

  “Esmé enjoyed her privacy and respected mine. Even when I was young, we had separate rooms.”

  “I see. Thank you, Señorita Cartierri.” The dapper colonel stood and then bowed over her hand.

  “That’s all?” Charles Cartierri growled, clenching his fingers into fists.

  Expecting him to lunge at her, TC surged to her feet.

  “Well?” she heard her own voice say, followed by Esmé’s suggestion that she shower. Mesmerized by the hatred in Charles Cartierri’s eyes, she could only stare at him while the tape played on, revealing all their sordid secrets in camera-ready sound bites.

  “Incest was never an issue.”

  TC felt the blood drain from her face, watched it drain from James Foster’s.

  “Turn it off,” Ian said, rushing across the room to catch Sir James before he collapsed.

  “No, let it finish,” TC countered, her gaze again locked with Charles’.

  “Damn you, Esmé. Damn you to hell.”

  “Is that why you killed her?” Charles demanded in a tear-choked voice. “Is that when you picked her up and threw her over the parapet?” He advanced with his hands outstretched.

  TC could almost feel his fingers closing around her throat. She swallowed hard, but held her ground. She was finished with letting him bully her, finished with letting him ruin her life. He always had to blame someone—most often her. She understood his compulsion, but she no longer had to prove anything to him.

  “Señorita Cartierri did not throw your wife over anything. On the other hand, Señor Cartierri, you could have.” Colonel Mendez’s voice was low, almost genial, but his hand rested on his gun’s hilt.

  Charles halted in mid-stride, then spun on his heel. “Any further communication can be made through my attorney, Diego Sanchez.”

  “Do not leave Colombia, señor.”

  With a fulminating glare over his shoulder, Charles Cartierri exited the suite, slamming the door behind him.

  “Gee, I wish I’d slammed the door like that,” TC said, then laughed, a shaky sound that ended with a hiccup when she saw Ian’s eyes. “Don’t you dare pity me.”

  Ian’s gaze shifted to Nick. “Call the doctor, then take Tiffany down for breakfast. I will join you shortly.”

  “What’s wrong? What’s the matter with Sir James?”

  “Tiffany, for once in your life do as you are told.”

  She growled, a wild, uncontrolled sound. “All my life I have done what I’ve been told to do. For once I’m going to do what I want.”

  “Which is?”

  “Take care of my f-father.”

  * * * * *

  An hour later Damian stood with his arm around Tiffany’s shoulders while they watched Sir James sleep.

  “Do you think he knew?” Tiffany asked in an uncharacteristically small voice.

  “Knew what, love?” Taking her hand, he led her from the room, but left the door ajar so they could hear if Sir James called out.

  “That I’m his daughter. Did he know all my life that he’s my father or did he learn about it later, when I married William?

  “Ian?” she said when he said nothing.

  Sighing, he pulled her into his arms and cradled her head against his shoulder. What he had to tell her was easier if he did not have to look into her eyes. He had questions, too, but they would have to wait.

  “It is possible he did not know until he heard the tape.” When she tried to pull back and look at him, he pressed her closer. “It is possible he is not your father at all.”

  “But why would Esmé lie?”

  “To hurt Charles.” He sat and tugged Tiffany down on the couch beside him. “You heard what she said, Tiffany. She hated him.”

  “But if she lied to me, that means she hated me, too.”

  “I do not doubt her love for you, Tiffany darling. But sometimes love and hate get all mixed up until you cannot tell the difference. By then you do not care who you hurt.”

  Tiffany turned in his arms, leaned back against his chest and laid her head on his shoulder. “Do you think Charles killed her?”

  “I do not know. Yet. Unfortunately, I do not believe he did. Esmé had skin under her fingernails. Whoever killed her has some pretty deep gouges, probably on his face, possibly on his hands.”

  He felt her exhale and smiled into her fragrant hair. “No, Sir James did not kill her. Aside from the lack of scarring, he has an alibi. Even in a jet, he could not have flown here, killed Esmé and then flown back to Bogotá in time for a highly public dinner last night. Dios, you are tense.” Shifting her slightly, he began to massage her neck and shoulders until she purred under his fingertips.

  “Yum. I’ll give you a millennium to stop that.”

  “Tell me about William,” he whispered in her ear. “No, do not tense up, just let your thoughts flow. Do you remember the first time you met?”

  “I don’t want to do this, Ian.”

  “Okay.” He moved her away, then took his hands off her shoulders.

  “This is blackmail,” she said, looking over her shoulder, a simmering gleam in her emerald eyes.

  “Yep.”

  “I suppose I owe you. I mean, if you weren’t so intent on proving I stole Isabella’s Belt, the real one, you wouldn’t have followed me to Cartagena. Which you still haven’t explained. How did you know I was here? Hmmm,” she sighed when he kneaded her spine, his thumbs tracing small circles along the indentation. “And if you hadn’t followed me, you wouldn’t have seen me when…when you did. I’d probably be in prison.”

  “Probably.”

  She turned her head far enough to glare at him from one very green eye. Grinning, he kissed her cheek.

  “I don’t want to talk about William. You heard the tape. Isn’t that enough?”

  “No, it is not enough. It does not explain why you married him. It is important, Tiffany.”

  Damian wanted to shake her. Instead, he quieted his hands on her slender back and absorbed her conflict through his palms. He could feel her trembling, could imagine her face flushing with embarrassment that he knew the secret of her marriage.

  “Esmé was right. I did adore him, but not in the way everyone thought. I loved him because he was everything I wanted to be—charming, witty, intelligent. When we were together, it was as if he held up a mirror of himself so that I could see everything he was in my own reflection. Pure selfishness on my part.

  “There was some trouble. I don’t know all the details, but there were threats to expose William as a… Demands for money. Sir James—James was fighting for his position at Bijoux and a scandal would have ruined him.”

  She expelled a sigh heavy with remorse. “I don’t suppose our marriage fooled anyone, especially not when William’s latest lover appeared on Capri a week after our wedding. But the British are masters at maintaining appearances. To them, ours was an eccentric marriage, but a marriage nonetheless.” She gave a short laugh then went on. “By then William was being careful and monogamous, but it was too late. Jerry, William’s lover, stayed with us until he could no longer bear the sight of that once magnificent body wasting away to nothing.”

  “But you stayed.”

  “What was there to go back to? Had I returned to the States, Charles would have bullied me into going back to work for him and railed at me for the failure of my marriage. England was William’s home not mine, so I stayed with him on Capri until he was too ill to travel.”

  He heard her swallow her tears, but resisted the urge to take her in his arms, to love away her pain.

  “When William died, Sir James came to me with a proposition. Since my marriage to William, there had been a noticeable drop in the number of hotel jewel thefts.” A wry tone had invaded her voice and Damian felt like cheering. Anything was better than the lifeless monotone of her earlier recitation. “Still, according to James, there was enough fraudulent thievery going on to keep someone with my ‘unique skills’ busy and on the right side of the law.”

&n
bsp; A soft, bitter laugh preceded, “I was something of a pariah in England. After all, AIDS is highly contagious and one might contract it simply by shaking hands, mightn’t one?” she said with obvious sarcasm at the continuing myths surrounding the disease. “So we agreed that I would return to the States. As far away from Charles as possible, but in a city where my pedigree gave me access to society.”

  “San Francisco.”

  “You’ve done your homework.” She wiggled her shoulders. Obliging her unspoken request, Damian resumed rubbing her back. “I went to work for a jeweler, where I could pick up little morsels of gossip. Any hints of prospective malfeasance. As a designer rather than a shop girl, I was privy to all sorts of secrets and, as Charles Cartierri’s daughter, I was invited to every important social event from Sausalito to Burlingame.”

  “Now, tell me about Charles. When did you—er—pull your first… Could you help me out here?”

  “Heist? Caper? Robbery?” she suggested, her voice cracking, but he could not tell whether from laughter or from tears. After a long moment, during which he rubbed the new knots of tension from her back, she pressed her face into her knees and muttered, “Six. Before then Charles thought I was too young to be trusted, too young and too stupid to follow his instructions.”

  “Dios,” he whispered, wishing Charles Cartierri was there now so that Damian could wring his miserable neck. “How…how long did you work for him?”

  “Ten years.”

  “What happened to make you quit?”

  TC heard Charles’ voice in her head and flashed back to the night William had discovered her with her hands in his mother’s jewelry case.

  “What happened?” Charles asked, eyeing the two men flanking her.

  “She got caught in the act,” William Foster said, slinging a protective arm around her shoulders.

  “In the act of what?”

  “The game’s over, Charles,” Sir James Foster said in a voice that chilled TC to her soul. Quiet and calm, it hinted at barely leashed violence.

  “If the girl has broken the law, take her to the police.”

  “TC says you—” William began.

  “The girl has a history of petty theft,” Charles interrupted, “and emotional instability. Just like her mother,” he added with a look at Sir James that TC didn’t understand. But she could feel the hatred flowing between the two men.

  “William, help Tiffany pack a few things, then take her and wait in the car.”

  “If you leave, girl, you’re no better than your mother.”

  “Leave Marlene out of this!” Sir James snapped, motioning William to take TC out.

  At the door, TC hesitated. Turning back, hoping for some sign of love, or at least forgiveness, she met Charles Cartierri’s implacable glare.

  “Why do you hate me?”

  “Just like your mother, you got caught.”

  “Dios,” Damian said again when she had finished her toneless recital. Then, deciding she was vulnerable enough to tell him the rest, he prodded. “How did you manage to pull those heists without getting caught? Without leaving so much as a trace of forced entry?”

  Still hiding her face, she laughed, a bitter sound. “It was easy. Don’t you see, Ian? I didn’t have to force my way in. I was a guest in the victims’ homes or hotel suites. An invited guest.”

  “What brought you to St. Anton?” he asked, now feeling he knew too much. At least he finally understood what it was in the reports that had troubled Michael and him all those years ago. No forced entry.

  “Skiing, of course.”

  “Tiffany,” he warned. They had come too far for her to retreat behind that flippant gaiety she used to mask her real emotions.

  “I needed a vacation.”

  “And an innocent-seeming excuse for being in Europe at the same time as Isabella’s Belt.”

  “Gosh, you’re smart.”

  “Do not act like a smartass. It does not require a rocket scientist to figure out that much. And now I know why you chose a total stranger to give your virginity to. You were a virgin, weren’t you, Tiffany darling?”

  He turned her in his arms. She ducked her head, but not before he had seen her scarlet face. He gently shook her. “Weren’t you?”

  “Technically, yes… Oh Lord, was I that inept?”

  He tried to stop it, but laughter burst from him in waves.

  Insulted, TC fought for freedom, but found herself sprawled across his rock-hard chest, her legs captured between his muscled thighs, her pelvis pressed against the warmth of his erection. Ensorcelled by his jet-black eyes, she forgot her anger, forgot everything but how it felt to join with him and experience the power surging through their bodies.

  “Does this feel like ineptitude?” he said in a voice so low she had to bow her head to hear him. He nipped her earlobe, then traced the shell with his tongue.

  “Dangling for compliments, Ian?”

  Muscles rippling, he rolled until he held her captive between the couch back and his body. “I thought that is what you were doing. Inept, my ass. You were—are—my dream of what a lover should be. You gave me laughter. You gave me passion. You gave me the precious gift of yourself.”

  “If you say I got nothing in return I’ll… Well, I’ll think of something dreadful.” She resorted to humor to hide how deeply his words touched her.

  “I am sure you will.” His smile fading, he asked, “Is there something else I can give you?”

  She snuggled closer, then nodded. “Yes. I…I would like to know your real name.”

  “My name is Ian Soria.”

  She pulled away, dread in her soul. I should let this go. Let his lies go unchallenged. But those were the patterns of her childhood. She owed herself a clean slate—one without lies. Especially between her and the man she loved.

  “One thing that has always bothered me—beside the lack of forced entry,” he said as if discussing the weather.

  Fear flooded her. That lifelong terror of being abandoned, of being unloved and unlovable invaded her. She knew she should bury it once and forever, but she couldn’t find the courage. Instead, she nodded, giving him permission to continue.

  “Why steal only emeralds,” he asked, his fathomless dark eyes empty of all emotion.

  “I told you.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “Charles specializes in emeralds. Why steal anything else and have the victims go to any reputable jeweler to replace the stolen pieces?”

  “Ah,” he said, as if the last tumbler on an intricate lock had fallen into place and the contents of the safe were now his for the taking. “Did you ever want to get caught?”

  “Once.” She sighed. “I left an earring. I don’t know what I thought would come of it, but… I hoped they’d do DNA tests or something. Do you know what happened to it?”

  “Why would I?”

  “You can’t stop lying, can you? Ian Soria isn’t your real name. Fox calls you Hunter. Esmé said your real name is Damian Hunter. Why would she say that? How could she know unless she’d met you or heard of you somehow, somewhere? Who are you?” she whispered, her fear of him like a fist in her throat threatening to choke her from the inside.

  He sighed, then said, “Damian Hunter y Soria. You understand the Spanish convention of using the mother’s maiden name to distinguish between various families of the same last name?”

  Nodding, she said, “Mark Hunter is your father. Your mother and sisters were kind to me to help you catch a thief.”

  “No! They—we all care about you, Tiffany.”

  “Damian Hunter y Soria,” she repeated. “Of Scotland Yard? Of the Paris Police? No, of course not—jurisdictional problems in this country for either one of those agencies, eh?” She snapped her fingers and smiled, a rictus kind of smile she supposed.

  “Tiffany, do not do this.”

  “Damian Hunter of Interpol. Right?” Her hoarse voice revealed every nuance of her pain at his betrayal. “Then you knew who I was all along
. You knew I was…Emerald.” She had suspected, of course, that he was an agent of the law but, like a fool, she’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this. This betrayal of everything they had shared.

  “Of International Investigations,” he corrected as he stood. “And I suspected. Not that it matters, but I am sorry for deceiving you.” On silent footsteps he left her, closing the door behind him.

  * * * * *

  Nick Troy watched Damian pace the length of their new hotel suite—Sir James and Tiffany now residing in their old rooms. Damian had a tumbler of scotch in his hand. Not that he had drunk any of it. To Nick, the glass, the scotch itself, seemed more like an anchor than anything else.

  “Should I make reservations?” Nick asked when Damian paused at the balcony doors.

  “Reservations?”

  “Airline reservations. Shouldn’t we wrap this up and go home?”

  “We have not finished, Nick. We still have to find the murderer—the Paris murderer.”

  “Okay. I’ll book us to Paris.” He headed for the telephone on a nearby desk.

  Turning, Damian glared. “We are not done here, Nick.”

  “Colonel Mendez and the local police will handle the investigation into Mrs. Cartierri’s death.”

  “Murder,” Damian corrected, his voice as dead as Nick had heard it since Michael was slain.

  “Which means we have no reason to stay. Unless… Do you think Ms. Cartierri killed her stepmother?”

  “No, but… My guts tell me the murders in Paris and Mrs. Cartierri’s death are connected. Somehow.”

  “Or are you simply making excuses to stay? To see Tiffany through this difficult time?” Returning to his chair, he watched Damian resume his pacing.

  “Ms. Cartierri has Sir James to support her now. She wants nothing more to do with me. I…I told her who I am. What I am. She believes I used her—in ways far worse than Charles Cartierri ever did.”

  “Did you?” Damian’s silence spoke volumes. “Yulie Cardoza’s dead, Damian, but you still think every woman is just like her. Don’t you?”

  “I think I am more like my dead brother when he was alive. I too have fallen in love—under lust’s spell. I should resign from the case, but I cannot. There are too many questions left unanswered.” He met Nick’s intense gaze. “You, however, should go home. No sense in us both facing dismissal.”