Code of Honor

by Smartypants Romance

  “Just seeing how it could be done,” I said as casually as a person could with a thousand-mile-an-hour heartbeat and the instinct to flee.

  One of his eyebrows went up as he studied me, and then he shocked me when he sat down and stretched out on his back on the tiles. “Show me,” he said in a tone that was more command than request. I turned my face to see stern lines around his mouth, and I tried not to remember how soft his lips were.

  Then I looked back at the building rising around us and raised a finger to trace Honor’s path up. “From the staircase rail, up to the lower ledge, across to the Juliet balcony, up the column to the railing, then across to that column, up again, use the decorative stonework as hand and footholds, and then finally in at the fourth floor.”

  He nodded. “It would take skill.”

  “It could be done,” I said, suppressing the itch to try it.

  “Is that why you’re here?” His tone was cold, and I didn’t like the sharp edges in it. They hurt.

  “I’m not a thief.”

  He looked sharply at me. “Aren’t you?”

  I sat up to escape the barbs in his gaze and wrapped my arms around my legs to defend against the chill that sent a tremor through me.

  There was ice in his voice. “The lights to blind the cameras was a clever touch, I admit, but I’m not certain I admire your use of your identical twin as an alibi quite so much.”

  I got to my feet and turned to help him up, but he ignored my outstretched hand, so I hopped the rope and stepped back into the corridor.

  He followed me and spoke in a low tone that could have seemed intimate to someone who didn’t understand the context. “I saw you naked. I know you have tan lines. There are no tan lines on the woman who was, shall I say, with Sterling Gray while his father’s painting was being stolen.”

  I flinched at more than just the words. Tan lines. I thought about my sister’s perfectly even tan. I wouldn’t be able to hide my tan lines if they arrested me tomorrow. My God, I could be sharing a cell with Junior tonight if Darius had already called the cops. At least maybe then I could find out what he knew about the Gardner heist.

  I stopped suddenly and turned to face Darius. “What are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing here?” he countered.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” I said.

  “That’s why I’m here,” he answered in the same tone of voice.

  I stared at him. “You followed me?”

  His expression was totally neutral. “It wasn’t hard.”

  “How,” I demanded.

  He almost rolled his eyes, the jerk. “Shane recognized you the minute she saw you, or rather, she recognized your sister and realized – like I already had – that you’re twins.”

  “Identical in every way except all the ways we’re not,” I muttered to myself.

  I strolled down the corridor, mostly to get away from his angry intensity, but also because I was curious. Why had Darius Masoud followed me? Was he here to take me in for the Gray mansion break-in? He didn’t have any real evidence unless he had the painting, and technically, there was no proof that I’d even been at Gray’s mansion. Colette Collins had been the name on the invitation, the man at the door had greeted Colette Collins, and Colette Collins had slept with Sterling Gray that night.

  The only thing the Disney prince had was a mental snapshot of my tan lines and some speculation.

  “Why are you here, Ms. Collins?”

  I froze for a moment, then stuck my right hand out to shake his. “My name is Anna. I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself properly.”

  “You lied,” he said, and there was an edge to his voice.

  “Not to you,” I countered, with some in mine too.

  “Then tell me why you’re here, in this museum, at this moment.” He ground the words out between clenched teeth, and I was surprised at how much I wanted the fight.

  And that made me smile sweetly – the kind of expression that generally guaranteed a lost temper in the opposition. It had worked like a charm on my sister growing up and generally made bail jumpers do crazy things like throw punches, which put them off balance and made for an easy over-the-shoulder flip. So, I pulled out the sweet smile and total honesty. “I just brought a bail jumper into the Boston P.D. He tried to trade his freedom for information about the Gardner heist. I did a little pocket research and then came straight over from police headquarters to see if I could figure out what he could possibly have known. Mysteries are kind of my thing.”

  His head exploded in a most delightful, Disney prince-ish way. First his eyes opened wide, then they narrowed as he tried to gauge my level of truthfulness, and then they crinkled at the corners as he … laughed?

  “Shane said you were a bounty hunter, and it fits you so much better than interior designer did.”

  I crossed my arms in front of me and glared at him. The laughter annoyed me, and I wasn’t sure why, because I was used to guys not taking me seriously, especially about my job.

  I tried to pick through all possible retorts to that statement and none of them really said what I was feeling. Probably because I had no idea what I was feeling – annoyed and defensive for sure, but also a little fluttery that I’d made him laugh and that he thought about me at all.

  So, instead of speaking, I stalked off down the corridor again, and turned into the first room I saw.

  The walls of the room were covered in watery blue fabric, and paintings hung in odd groupings and at strange heights all around the space. The paintings seemed to be as jumbled in their themes as their arrangements were, until I began to look more closely.

  I stopped in front of one wall. Darius came up behind me and stood at my shoulder, so I talked to him instead of talking to myself like I usually did. “An Egyptian bust, a goat, and some people on the beach,” I said, indicating the three paintings hung one beneath the other, “by different artists. Why? What are they looking at?”

  The subjects of all three paintings were looking to my right, out of frame – it was the only thing they all had in common. So then I looked right as well, and a small portrait of a young boy caught my eye. I walked over to it and studied the image.

  “Why this boy?” I asked. “What was special about him?”

  An attractive young woman with corkscrew curls and shiny eyes came over to stand next to us. “He’s called The Little Groom. Isabella Stewart Gardner bought him from a doorman in Italy. I think he reminded her of her son who died of pneumonia when he was two.”

  I looked back at the right-facing paintings, then at the boy. “Yes! They’re definitely looking at him, and they want us to look too.” I met the young woman’s eyes. “There are stories here, aren’t there?”

  The woman, whose badge said her name was Crystal, grinned happily. “They’re everywhere. A group of landscapes with a single portrait of a person looking at them tells the visitor they should stop and pay attention – there’s something interesting to see here. The statue of the elf, missing his legs, has a perfect view of the outside so he can imagine himself dancing there. And almost none of the columns in the loggias actually match each other, but somehow they look like gorgeously dressed guests standing around a ballroom waiting for the music to begin.”

  The grin on my face must have been huge, because Crystal began walking me around the room talking about this painting and that fragment of fabric, this book and that drawing, until we arrived at a console table, above which hung a small empty frame with a large empty wall above it. Darius, who had been following us without saying a word, came up beside me.

  “What went here?” I asked Crystal.

  “The Manet painting that was stolen in 1990 – Chez Tortoni. The museum has left the empty frames in place so you can see how large, or in this case, small they were,” she said, in a voice that sounded like the tinkling of a chandelier.

  “No, not that. The space above it. Something else should be there,” I said, looking for any signs of discoloration
on the fabric.

  “That’s where the other Manet usually hangs,” Crystal said. “Madame Auguste Manet is on the fourth floor for a private party tonight.”

  I swallowed hard and Darius looked at me oddly, maybe because I suddenly looked like I wanted to throw up.

  “Can we see her?” he asked.

  Crystal looked startled. “Madame Manet? Ah, no, I’m sorry, not unless you have an invitation. The fourth floor is off limits to museum visitors. There’s a print of her in the gift shop if you’d like.”

  Darius hadn’t taken his eyes off me until he finally nodded and answered Crystal. “Yes, thanks. We’ll stop in there. What’s on the fourth floor?”

  “It was the apartment where Isabella Gardner lived, and now it’s where the museum director and her staff have their offices. But I don’t get to go up there very often – the interns from MassArt don’t get staff privileges.”

  “Massachusetts College of Art and Design?” I asked, happy for the change of subject.

  She perked up. “Yeah, a lot of us do internships here. It’s pretty great to have this place right around the corner from school.”

  “My mom and aunt went to MassArt. What’s your major?” I was afraid that my desperation to keep the subject away from Madame Auguste was painted around me like an aura.

  “I’m studying dance,” she said with a smile. “And before you ask, yes, there’s totally a connection between the old master paintings and dance.”

  “Right? I mean some of the old potato farmers are a bit heavy-footed when they step out of their frames, and the wooden clogs of the Dutch ladies get loud on wood floors, but the little girls holding puppies always leap out of their portraits like they have wings on their feet, and I’ve seen whole ballets performed to Romany music by some of the Degas dancers.” I had grown up with my mother’s art books, and the paintings in them were like kindling to a girl with my imagination.

  “Exactly!” she said excitedly. “No one else here has ever heard the clogs upstairs, but that’s all I ever hear in the Dutch Room.” Suddenly her walkie-talkie squawked, and a voice murmured from her hip. “Sorry, I have to answer this.”

  She moved away toward the door and left us alone.

  Darius continued to study me, and in the reflected light of the blue silk walls, his skin looked shimmery. “What is it about the missing Manet that makes you so nervous?”

  He didn’t look at the empty wall behind him, but I knew it’s what he meant. I shrugged. “I’m not nervous,” I said, totally nervous – practically shaking with it.

  His eyes narrowed. “What aren’t you telling me? Perhaps doing a little recon for your own heist?”

  I stared at him. “You think I’d steal from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum?”

  Darius raised one eyebrow and wore an expression that said, Maybe.

  I threw my hands up in the air and huffed out an exasperated breath. “Oh, come on!” I said a little too loudly. Two ladies who lunch glared at me, and Crystal looked up from her walkie-talkie conversation in surprise. I grabbed Darius’s hand and pulled him out of the Blue Room, not stopping until we were back outside in the deserted courtyard.

  Then I stopped and turned to face him, hands on my hips and a scowl on my face. “You called me a thief, and yet you have no proof that I stole anything. My sister happened to be with Sterling Gray when his painting was stolen, a fact you’ve apparently verified from her lack of tan lines. So she has an alibi, and – interestingly, so does he.” I let righteous indignation fill my voice with snark before I continued. “And other than that, the only thing you have on me is that I may not actually be quite as indiscriminate in my sexual encounters as you must have thought I was.”

  His jaw clenched as he considered me for a long moment. “I met you at Gray’s party.”

  “Did you?”

  “You said your name was Colette.”

  I blinked slowly. “I don’t introduce myself with my sister’s name.”

  “You lied to me.” His voice was angry and sharp, and I realized this was a big sticking point for him. “Outside your … her apartment. I called you Colette.”

  “I didn’t correct you when you called me by my sister’s name. Do you know how often that happens to me? Do you realize how petulant and fussy it sounds to my own ears every time I correct someone who mistakes me for her? I’ve learned to roll with it in self-defense.”

  He looked baffled by my b.s. for exactly one second and then he shook his head. “Enough, Anna. I may not be able to prove that you and your sister stole Gray’s painting, but you and I met that night at the party. That was you in the hot pink dress, looking like something that rose from a field of wildflowers, smelling of spring, and speaking inanities that lit up the room with pure, ridiculous joy. That was you, not your sister, and it was you I encountered outside her apartment building. It was you who went out on the boat with me, and it was very definitely you I made love with on the lake.”

  I felt like all the air had been sucked out of the courtyard – as though a glass pane in the roof had opened, broken the pressure seal, and all the oxygen had rushed out in a whoosh, taking the breath from my lungs with it.

  Darius spun around and strode several feet away from where I stood on surprisingly unsteady legs. He sat on a bench, his elbows on his knees, as he studied the mosaic tile pattern of the floor. I watched him from a safe distance for a long moment, then finally found enough air to exhale before making my way to the bench. I sat beside him and looked at his hands where they cupped the sides of his head. They were strong hands with old scars and the callouses of a person who handled ropes. I knew the touch of those hands on my skin, and I reached out to trace the line of his index finger. He flinched, but I didn’t pull away until I’d traced all the veins in the back of his hand.

  He finally sat back and met my eyes. “What’s the deal with the Manet?”

  I flinched and tried to stop the words I knew were coming. With a filter, I could have lied to him or even just stayed silent. But if I’d ever had one, it was broken, and being with him had scattered the pieces. “I … found one.”

  20

  Anna

  “The only bad taco is the one you didn’t get to eat.”

  Anna Collins

  He stared at me. “You found one? What does that even mean? You found a print of Madam Auguste Manet?”

  “Not a print,” I whispered. “It didn’t come from here, though.” I’d almost said that I didn’t steal it, but he was close enough that I could smell his shampoo, and his scent filled my memory with truth serum. Not being able to lie to him was a serious problem.

  “A copy of a Manet. You found a copy.”

  I stood up and away from him in hopes of finding little bits of my broken filter and using them to cover the naked parts of me. “People copy the old masters all the time. My mom’s an artist, and she spent her whole youth training in the old master art techniques.” It was a diversionary tactic that could never work with someone like Darius Masoud. I knew it, he knew it, and yet he let the diversion hang in the air as a docent emerged into the loggia to tell some other guests that the museum would be closing in ten minutes.

  He stood and met my eyes. “And you’re here to look into the Gardner heist?” It almost sounded like he was trying to convince himself of something.

  That question was easier, and I didn’t even have to evade any part of it when I answered. “Honestly – I did ten minutes of online research after Junior tried to use it to get me to let him go, and I couldn’t not come here to see for myself.”

  I cast a longing glance down the corridor as we made our way toward the exit along with the other stragglers. “I’ll be back tomorrow to poke around the Dutch Room and the Short Gallery, in case you’re still following me then.”

  Hope and fear had a fierce little battle in my chest as the words left me, and the expression on his face turned thoughtful.

  He followed me to the coat check, and it wasn’t until the
guy behind the counter came back with my things that I remembered I’d checked both my messenger bag and the portfolio.

  Darius eyed the portfolio but said nothing about it as he held the door for me and we stepped out into the cool night air. The Fens beckoned to the north, and I had the momentary impulse to disappear among the trees, but then he finally spoke.

  “Do you paint?”

  The question startled me until I saw his eyes stray to the portfolio slung on my messenger bag. I still couldn’t lie to him, and I was too tired to try to evade the question. “I never learned how. I was too busy climbing and running and jumping and generally acting like a wild thing. I like colors though, and patterns. I like putting colors together in ways that tell me a story.”

  He cast another look at the portfolio, and we walked in silence for a minute.

  “Is Colette actually an interior designer?” he finally asked.

  “Yeah, she does a lot of apartments for people who want to look fancy and rich,” I said.

  His mouth quirked in the smallest smirk, and it felt like a reprieve to see his expression shift away from its usual thoughtfulness. “Not the actual fancy and rich people, just the ones who want to look that way?”

  I grinned. “Exactly.” We began walking down the street, away from The Fens, and it felt a little like making a choice. Darius’s stride was casual and matched mine easily.

  “How does one choose bounty hunting as a career?” I could hear the vaguely European accent of his youth in the carefully worded question.

  “One generally doesn’t choose to become a bail fugitive recovery expert, one falls into it, or almost falls.” I looked at the scars on my hands for a moment before pointing one out to Darius. “I got this from a rock face in California when a piece of the boulder I was hanging from broke off and I had to grab at a scrubby manzanita brush to keep from splatting. There was a guy on the ground with another climbing group, and he said he needed someone with my skills for a job he had coming up in San Francisco. I’d graduated from college and was just doing odd jobs to finance my travel habit, so I said yes. Turned out he was a bail bondsman, and the bounty who’d skipped on him had holed up in a brick warehouse he’d fortified like a prison. He wanted me to climb the outside of the building and then open the front door from the inside. It was an easy way to make a couple of hundred bucks, and now it’s an easy way to travel and see the country.”