by Julie Leto
“Newspaper editors sometimes have to go into undesirable neighborhoods. And, as the phrase goes, ‘My momma didn’t raise no fool.’ Don’t worry, I know how to use it.”
Reina rolled her eyes with adorable impatience. “Why don’t I doubt that? However, if I’m going to confront a potential prowler, even if it’s just to assault him with your cell phone, I’d rather do so dressed.”
She spun toward her bedroom, and Grey swallowed a chuckle then cautioned her in a whispered voice. “Fine, but don’t turn on any lights. I’d rather whoever it is think we’re not home.”
As he leaned forward on the desk, his eyes darting back and forth between the three small monitors, he wondered why he hadn’t asked Brandon to set them up with sound capabilities as well. Brandon had offered, but Grey had refused, claiming the advanced home security technology amounted to overkill. Still, right now, he’d like to know if he could hear any rustling beyond the sound of Reina dropping her sheet in the other room. The quiet slide of her closet door. The grate of hangers. The open and closing of a drawer. His gaze flashed toward the doorway to her bedroom, but she’d followed his instructions and hadn’t turned on the light.
What does a woman of style choose to wear to greet a potential burglar?
The more time that passed without anyone approaching the front or back doors, the more Grey guessed either the gate alarm had been a false alert or they did indeed have a prowler on their hands. Twice, he thought he spied movement just outside the range of the grainy black-and-white monitors. He considered going outside and doing a sweep of the grounds, but wouldn’t follow through until Reina joined him.
And she did rather quickly, dressed to the nines in a slim black cat suit covered with a long, sheer jacket and soft-heeled boots. She slipped behind him and watched the monitor from behind him.
“If all the female cops in New Orleans dressed like you, criminals would turn themselves in willingly,” he quipped.
She clucked her tongue at him. “My fatigues are at the tailor. This is the best I could do.”
Grey swallowed the thick lump of desire in his throat. “Your best is, as always, amazing.”
She slapped him on the shoulder and pointed toward the monitor again. “Anything?”
“Just a few suspicious shadows. But a visitor would have knocked by now, don’t you think?”
“You’d think,” she answered.
“The collection is safe?”
“Completely locked up. What do we do now?”
Grey pulled out the chair tucked beneath the desk, sat down on it, then pulled her onto his lap. “We wait. Another five minutes. Then, if we don’t see anyone, I’ll go downstairs and investigate.”
She twisted on his lap, undoubtedly attempting to find a comfortable position, but stirring his need for her instead. She smelled like sex, warm and musky, tinged with that subtle spice that anchored her favorite perfume.
The second time she moved, he groaned. “You need to stop that,” he warned.
“Sorry,” she said, but the humor in her tone told him she didn’t mean her apology in the least. “I need my own chair.”
“Torture though it is, my lap will have to do.” He shifted this time, so that his growing erection pressed against the curve of her buttocks.
“You are an insatiable man, aren’t you?”
“Just as insatiable as you are. Even if you do shy away from certain things,” he taunted.
She twisted around so quickly her hair whipped across his face. “I don’t shy away from anything.”
He needed to watch the monitors, but spared her a quick, doubtful glance first. “Really? Then why won’t you ask me for anything?”
“Why does it bother men so much when a woman doesn’t need them?”
He answered her question by yanking her fully against his hard sex. “Oh, you need me, chère.”
“I meant for anything other than sex. That is your complaint, isn’t it? An unfounded one, considering that I’m currently depending on you to help me keep the collection safe.”
“Something you asked for only out of sheer desperation and only because you thought I was my brother, with whom you admittedly share no sexual chemistry.”
“Zane is a good friend. I’m going to kill him next time I see him,” she muttered through clenched teeth, “but I can always depend on him.”
“And you’ve never met any other man you could depend on?”
She turned her eyes back to the monitors. “No.”
Grey narrowed his gaze, watching her expression, cast in the shadows of the bluish silver light from the small screens. There was so much she wasn’t telling him, so much she probably wasn’t even allowing herself to think.
Too bad for her that Grey didn’t let go of a mystery, or an interesting story, so easily.
“What about your father? Couldn’t you depend on him?”
He knew it was a loaded question. Though she apparently had a close relationship with her mother, she’d never once mentioned the man who’d given her the other half of her genes.
“I never knew him.”
“You never met?”
“I don’t even know his name.”
“You never asked your mother?”
Her laugh lacked any hint of amusement. “I asked, she refused to answer. I don’t even think Dahlia knows—mother hired her when she was already pregnant with me.”
“That doesn’t bother you? Not knowing your father?”
“Of course it bothers me.” When she turned this time, he instantly recognized signs of deep sadness. Her eyes seemed a little more glossy. Her jaw quivered, as if she clamped her mouth shut with a bit too much pressure. She inhaled deeply before finally speaking. “For many years—hell, even now—whenever I meet a debonair man around my mother’s age, I wonder if he could be the one. Doesn’t matter if he looks like me or not, since I look like my mother.”
“You have no clues? Nothing to go on?”
She shook her head. “When I was young, I used to snoop around in my mother’s things, hunting for something that could send me in the right direction. I even read her diary, which, quite frankly, made Viviana’s confessions seem like recipes for yellow cake. Whoever my father was, he had nothing to offer my mother, or she would have kept him around a little longer, if nothing else.”
Grey nodded, wondering if the conclusion his intellect told him to draw would be a fair one. “So you don’t commit to men because you fear they’ll abandon you, like your father?”
She laughed. “My, my, Dr. Masterson, such an astute diagnosis and I haven’t even inspected your therapy license.”
“Maybe I should start editing the advice column.”
“Maybe you should tune into something other than Oprah every so often.”
He chuckled, and so did she. Sharing the humor defused the tension in her body and she relaxed, leaning back a bit against his shoulder.
After a long silence, she said something he didn’t expect. “I’m not so complicated, Grey. My whole life, I’ve watched my mother bleed men dry. Of their money and of their love. Chances are, she did the same thing to my father. I love her deeply, but I don’t want to be like her.”
Grey pressed his lips together, his heart thrumming, his mind reeling, certain that confession had cost Reina more than the worth of the entire collection of gems and gold stored in the next room. This was what he’d wanted from her during their lovemaking—a glimpse into her heart.
Only he wouldn’t have guessed he’d find something so sad.
“I hate to point this out again,” he said, knowing he treaded dangerous waters, but equally certain she could handle the undertow, “but you’re a great deal like your mother in many ways. You look like her, you have the same innate sensuality…”
“Innate? Darling,” she said, sounding so much like Pilar Price, he shivered, “there is nothing innate about my sensuality.” She turned, kicked her legs over the arm of the chair and smoothed her hand over the stubble-r
ough skin on his cheek. “The Price women have honed their tempting powers from years of practice.”
Grey frowned. For the first time since he’d met her, he recognized the difference between the sexuality she turned on at will, like during her meeting with Claudio the evening before, and the charm she’d exhibited with him, even when she’d thought he was Zane. Particularly when she thought he was Zane. He sent a mental thank-you to his brother for never attempting a seduction of this amazing woman, for being her friend, for allowing a trust to exist that Grey, as her lover, now had the opportunity to take to a new level.
A higher level, one he himself had never climbed, despite years of searching for the right woman. Grey finally had the chance to fall in love—with a woman who could truly appreciate the emotion, since she’d certainly never allowed herself to experience it before.
Just like him.
“Powerful stuff, that Price sensuality,” he said.
A bored glaze descended over her eyes just before she turned lazily back toward the monitors. “Yes, I suppose it is.”
He opened his mouth to speak but was interrupted when she stood, her finger pressed against the center screen. “Grey, look!”
Grey shot up, sending the chair rolling back until it crashed silently against the bed. A figure, small in stature and dressed in dark colors from a ball cap to a dark jacket and jeans, walked furtively onto the back porch. After glancing both left and right, then leaning back to check the driveway one last time, the person stepped completely forward and pulled a key chain out of her pocket.
“Oh, my God,” Reina whispered, her voice hoarse with shock. “That’s Judi.”
REINA PRESSED HER HAND to her mouth and willed herself not to overreact. Just because her assistant and friend was stepping up to her back door dressed like a street thug and holding what she assumed was an unauthorized key to her house didn’t mean she was behind the robberies at the gallery.
But it didn’t look good, did it?
From the corner of her eye, she watched Grey disengage the alarm completely. Judi would be able to come right in with no piercing sounds to frighten her away.
They watched her pull the screen door open just enough for her to insert the key.
“Did you give her a key to the house?” he asked.
Reina shook her head. “No, Zane has the only spare.”
“She had access to your purse, though, right?”
This time, she nodded. Of course Judi had access to Reina’s purse! They were friends, associates. She’d introduced the young woman to her mother, an actress Judi claimed to have admired for years, having once seen her perform in New York, her hometown. Having no family in New Orleans, Judi had come to Pilar’s house for Thanksgiving, had exchanged gifts with Reina on Christmas Eve, then slept in the guest room—which she and Grey now shared with security equipment that would prove her betrayal.
“She knows about your workshop in the solarium?” he asked.
“She knows everything I know. But she didn’t know the combination to the second safe. I didn’t tell her, and I didn’t write it down anywhere she could see.”
Grey shook his head, his expression dire, as if that fact made little difference. “But she knew about the security cameras you added after the first robbery, didn’t she? She could have positioned the camera at the safe and recorded you using the code.”
Reina didn’t want to believe this. Judi was no criminal mastermind! She’d taken nearly a month to learn how to operate the new voice-mail system. “The security guard would have seen.”
“The same security guard who claimed to have been rendered unconscious during the second robbery?”
She stamped her foot but knew Grey’s theory held more likeliness than she wanted to admit. “They both passed lie detector tests.”
He frowned. “Lie detectors aren’t infallible. You said that yourself.”
They heard a scrape downstairs and a pinched scream, as if Judi had collided with some piece of furniture, probably the wicker chaise they’d moved to the other side of the solarium after Grey had dismantled Reina’s worktable and brought it upstairs.
Reina couldn’t deny that things didn’t look good for her assistant. She had more opportunity than anyone else to take the jewels from the safe in her office, and if she’d somehow enticed the security guard to help her, they could have taken the second stash. But why? What motive? Money? If that had been the reason, neither Reina nor the police had noticed any change in Judi’s spending habits. She still drove the same battered car, used the same secondhand Prada purse.
“I’d never figure Judi for such a cool liar,” she admitted. “And I’ve met some of the best in the Western hemisphere.”
Grey shrugged. “We don’t know what Judi’s up to yet. Maybe we should find out before we start accusing her of crimes.”
“We can start with breaking and entering. We can prove that much, can’t we?”
Incensed and betrayed, Reina pushed past him, stopping with a jerk when he grabbed her by the wrist. Her mind flashed to the last time he’d held her arm so tightly. When he’d been inside her, manipulating her body into an exquisite shape, joining with her for the most awesome lovemaking she’d ever known.
“What do you plan to do?” he asked.
Reina arched one eyebrow. Her stomach burned with the need to knock the two-faced twit on her ass, but Reina hadn’t been raised for actions so coarse. “I honestly don’t know. Let’s head downstairs and just play it by ear, shall we?”
12
REINA LEANED AGAINST the doorway for a moment, taking quiet, deep breaths, harnessing her anger into a manageable ball clutched in the pit of her stomach. A shadow in the darkness just outside the solarium, she watched Judi toss the pillows off the wicker couch in frustration. Grey pressed close behind her, the muscles in his chest and his soothing, spicy scent fortifying her resolve.
She flipped the light switch, bathing the room in a deceptively warm glow.
Judi spun and lost her footing, stumbling back onto the couch. “Reina!”
Reina smirked. Seasoned criminal? Not in this universe.
“Judi.”
Her assistant sputtered, then swallowed, scrambling to her feet with the grace of a pregnant elephant. “Zane! Oh, wow. I didn’t think you were home. I rang the doorbell…”
“That’s lie number one.” Grey whispered into Reina’s ear, apparently content to let her handle the situation. Judi could hardly be considered capable of inflicting any real harm, unless Reina acknowledged the true depth of her betrayal. In that case, Judi could indeed cause serious emotional damage. Judi had been her friend, not just an employee. Reina had taken her into her home, had her accepted into her family. Judi had attacked more than Reina’s valued business and reputation. She’d raided the very foundation of her trust.
Trust she’d only now begun to share with Grey. Trust that could have, perhaps even tonight, started her on a path toward love. Despite the strength his presence gave her, Reina stepped away from his rock-hard body.
“Funny, you’d think I would have heard it, since the bell is at the top of the stairs.”
Judi’s eyes darted back and forth between her and Grey. Reina doubted her assistant would turn to the man she knew as Zane to corroborate her story or provide any type of support. The two shared a mutual hate-hate relationship since the first time Judi came on to him and Zane turned her down flat.
“Maybe you were too busy.” Her sneer rang loud and clear.
Reina ignored it. “Why are you here, Judi?”
She dug frantically into the pocket of her oversize jacket, which Reina recognized as identical to the one her security guard wore on a rare cold New Orleans night, but with the insignia removed. “I was bringing this to you.” She shot forward, handed Reina a bill of sale, then slunk back to what she assumed was a safe distance.
She read the information on the yellow carbon copy. “Mrs. Davis bought Razi’s sculpture. It’s about time. She’s been
pawing the thing for over six months.”
Judi grabbed Reina’s easy tone as a sign that she was safe. Her relieved sigh could have been heard on the next block. “Yeah, I know. And the commission on that piece is huge, so I thought you’d want to know right away. Now maybe you don’t have to find an investor. You can afford new insurance.”
Reina narrowed her eyes. In all fairness, she had told her gallery employees and the artists about her canceled insurance, and the Davis commission was significant, nearly ten thousand dollars.
But none of that explained how or why Judi had entered her house without her invitation. “You could have called.”
“I did! No one answered.”
Reina zapped the next question quickly, pulling out the one truth she was one hundred percent certain about. “Where did you get the key to my house? I didn’t give it to you.”
Judi’s eyes darted to the door, to Zane, back to Reina, brimming with confusion. After a long, silent minute, they widened with realization. “What are accusing me of, Reina?”
Reina met her stare without blinking. “I’m accusing you of coming into my house with a key I didn’t give you.”
Judi straightened her shaking shoulders. “Your mother gave me the key. She was at the gallery when Mrs. Davis bought Razi’s sculpture. She thought you’d want to know, under the circumstances.”
Reina crossed her arms casually, hiding her clenched fists from view. Why couldn’t she accept Judi’s story as the truth? What was it about Judi’s pale expression and darting eyes that made her believe some part of the story was a lie?
Without a word, she turned and went into the kitchen, snagging a glass from the cupboard and filling it with water from the dispenser on the refrigerator. Grey stepped toward her, but she held up her hand to keep him from coming closer. She needed a minute to regroup, reharness her famous cool exterior, the facade she’d dropped around Judi on more than one occasion. She hoped he understood.
He winked at her, then turned back to Judi.
