Billionaires Prefer Blondes (20 page)

She tried to turn around, but he kept her facing away from him, her bottom wriggling against his cock making him ache. Putting one hand down between her legs, shifting her folds apart with his fingers, he bent her forward with the weight of his body and slowly pushed inside her.

Samantha grabbed on to the safety rail and held on as he pumped into her, hard and fast. The wet slap of their skin intoxicated him, and he moaned, shifting one hand back up to her breasts again.

This, she had to understand—that they were made for one another, that he owned her in a way that neither of them would probably ever acknowledge. In the same way that she owned him.

“God,” she rasped, and her muscles tightened convulsively around him.

“I love when you come for me,” he whispered, increasing his own rhythm until with a grunt he climaxed.

He held her there for a long moment, breathing hard and letting the soap and sweat and water intermingle on their bodies. Finally he pulled away from her.

“I just wanted to remind you that you have more to think
about than just a robbery,” he said, opening the shower door and stepping out to grab a towel.

“Rick?”

He faced her.

A washcloth hit him full in the face, warm and sopping wet. As he pulled it away, angry, Samantha was still gazing at him. “I didn’t forget about that,” she said in a much milder voice than he’d expected. “Now come back in here and wash my back.”

This was what he never wanted to give up. Richard dropped the towel and stepped back into the shower.

Monday, 7:40 a.m.

“I
don’t need to go into the office,” Rick said, as he adjusted his black and gray tie.

Sitting at the small table beneath the windows of the master bedroom, Samantha flipped another page of the Metropolitan Museum of Art guide she’d picked up when she’d visited with Stoney. “Yes, you do,” she said, gazing at the photo of the Stradivarius violin she was supposed to steal tomorrow. “I’m not writing you a note for missing your negotiations today, bucko.”

“That’s why I’m employing Stillwell, so when something unexpected comes up, I’ll be available.”

She looked at him. “You hired him so you could be free to keep track of me. You’re not my damned mother. Or my parole officer.”

Rick frowned. “Fine.” Moving to the bedroom door, he quietly closed it. “I think he might have heard us.”

“This morning? We haven’t said anything too weird.”

“Not this morning. Last night.”

“Last…Oh. Shit.” She paused. “Not the shower sex, right? The talking in the kitchen.”

“Precisely.”

“Shit. So fire him.”

“He hasn’t done anything wrong. In fact, yesterday he may have saved me about half a million annually in property taxes.” Rick gazed over her shoulder at the photo. “And isn’t it a bit hypocritical of you to assume that he’ll be trouble?”

She shot him a grin. “You weren’t wrong about me being trouble.”

“Just keep an eye on him until we know.”

“I have to say that I don’t like the idea of having a potential spy in our own house.”

He drew a breath. “Neither do I. But I’ll handle him.” He sat beside her. “And I hired him because my life has changed over the past few months, and I’m adapting. And yes, you’re the reason my life has changed.” Rick picked up her glass of Diet Coke and took a swallow. “It’s just not the same as coffee.”

“And amen to that. Go to work. I’m going to run through the schedule and make sure I have everything I need.”

He tilted her chair back to give her an upside-down kiss. “I’ll call you as soon as I get a moment.” Setting the chair back on all fours, he picked up his suit jacket and headed for the bedroom door.

As Samantha watched him exit the room, it abruptly occurred to her. The solution. A way to stop Veittsreig, and a way to keep Martin from reneging on his deal with Interpol, and a way to move any suspicion away from Rick. Her heart stopped, and then slammed into hyperdrive.

“Hey, Brit,” she called, rising and making her way to the head of the stairs.

On the landing, Rick stopped and looked up at her. “What is it?”

“I love you.”

His jaw worked for a moment. “I love you, too, Yank.” He hesitated, as though contemplating climbing the stairs again.

“Call me,” she said, giving him a smile. “We’ll do lunch. And don’t forget to take Stillwell with you.”

With one of his your-ladyship bows, he grinned back at her and continued down the stairs. Samantha waited where she was until she heard the two men’s voices, and then the click and lock as the front door closed. Then she bolted back into the bedroom and grabbed her cell phone off the charging cradle.

She’d memorized the number the one and only time she’d seen it, and she punched the buttons before she could change her mind.

“Gorstein,” the voice at the other end came.

“Gorstein, it’s Jellicoe. I’d like to have a chat with you.”

For a heartbeat she didn’t hear anything. She’d surprised him, then. Good. “Come down to the station.”

“Nope. Meet me at the Art Café on Broadway for breakfast. Eight-thirty.” That should give her time to lose whoever might be tailing her this morning.

“I already ate.”

“Like I care. Are you going to be there, or not?”

“Yeah. I’ll be there.”

“If I see any uniforms or any handcuffs, Gorstein, I’m going to assume you won’t play nice.”

“You are one paranoid lady, Ms. J.”

“And don’t you forget it.”

It probably didn’t matter if the cops tailed her today, but it was the principle of the thing. Besides, she couldn’t risk having Wulf or Bono or one of the other members of Veittsreig’s crew tracking her to a meeting with a cop. Especially one they’d seen visiting her house before.

Grabbing her phone, purse, and the museum guidebook, she left the house and hailed a cab. For a second she considered leaving Rick a note, just in case, but if this went wrong, no couple of words on a piece of paper would be able to explain it.

Four taxis later, she stepped onto the sidewalk in front of the Art Café. She liked the place—good, inexpensive food, unpretentious, and best of all, Veittsreig and his guys probably had no idea it even existed.

“Ms. J.”

She turned around as Detective Gorstein approached from the corner. He was on time, anyway. So he was the guy she was going to bare her soul to. Yep, that was her brilliant plan: Tell Gorstein everything, and hope that he would be happier at being able to nab some big-time art thieves and get in good with Interpol and the FBI than he would be to get one more crack at her and Martin. As for the Hodges job, well, she hadn’t decided about that one yet. Confessing to a crime no one suspected her of—that was just wrong.

At least, unlike Frank Castillo in Palm Beach, Gorstein didn’t exude copness, which made talking to him in public a little less problematic. She still didn’t like him, but anybody who knew her old rep and not him would think she was meeting with a fence or an antiques dealer or something.

Her thumping heart did a flip and then crashed into her gut. Gorstein
didn’t
look like a cop, yet Nicholas had identified him as such the night he’d come to collect the diamonds. And Nicholas hadn’t been in town long, so how had he known
what Gorstein was? Well, she could think of one reason. Gorstein was dirty. And that meant she was about to shoot herself in the head.

“Are we going in?” he asked, holding open the door.

Christ
. She needed to know for sure. Subconsciously, she’d trusted the way she’d felt about him enough to make the call. If her gut was right, the plan could still work. If she was wrong, Nicholas knew exactly where she was, and was waiting to see if she was willing to sell him out to the police or not.

She went into the café. “Since I’d like to keep this low-key,” she said, signaling that they needed a table for two, “do you have a first name? Besides Detective, I mean.”

“Yeah. It’s Sam.”

Samantha blinked. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Nope.”

“Well, I’m not calling you that.”

“I didn’t think so.”

Trying to buy some time while she ran all of their past conversations through her head, she ordered the pancakes with bananas and walnuts, plus a Diet Coke. He asked for a bran muffin and coffee. Cop food, not that that meant anything at this point.

“I thought you’d eaten,” she noted, glancing around the room for any familiar faces. Nothing.

“I had some gum and a Tic Tac.”

“You’re trying to quit smoking, aren’t you? That explains why you’re so cranky.”

“I don’t smoke,” he grunted. “I’m always cranky.”

Other than the ubiquitous toothpick, which he wasn’t chewing on this morning, he wasn’t bad-looking, either. That fact made her feel disloyal, but it gave her another reason for wanting to see him besides spilling her guts—if it turned out that she needed another reason.

Once the waiter brought them their plates, Samantha leaned her elbows onto their small booth table. “Any leads on the stolen art?”

As she leaned forward, he sat back. “If I’m here so you can yank me around, then forget it. I have a lot of work to do.”

It sounded like genuine frustration. To her that signified honesty, which was good—unless he was just a better actor than she was. Man, she was an idiot to go into this without backup. She only hoped she had the chance to learn and benefit from the lesson.

She offered him a slow smile. “I’m not yanking you around. But in my position I have to be cautious, you know.” Okay, that was good.

“And what position is that?”

“You said you went after my dad once. Did you ever see him? I mean, how did you know it was Martin Jellicoe you were after?” Especially since it hadn’t been. But if he was crooked, he’d probably seen him after—and very recently.

“No, I never saw him. Not then. That son of a—Sorry, I know he’s your dad, but he was one, you know.”

“I know. He never told me much about what he did for a living, but I know.” No, she wasn’t going to completely bare her soul. She wasn’t an idiot.

“Yeah, right. Okay, I kind of liked the way you got right in my face, and your obsession with Diet Coke is kind of…endearing, I guess. But if you laugh, I’m gonna find a way to bust you. I swear to God I am. And I know you wrecked an undercover car yesterday, by the way.”

“Not if you can’t prove it. And I won’t laugh. I promise.” With the way her nerves were rattling around, she’d be lucky if she didn’t start screaming and run away.

“I didn’t have a clue who pulled that job. Not until eight months later, when the Miami PD caught him elbow-deep in
a pile of Spanish doubloons at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida. The MO matched my job, and they gave me a call. I flew down to Miami to question him, and he wouldn’t say a damned word. He just smiled at me. It was this ‘proveit’ look, like he knew I couldn’t. And I never could. Slick, slick, slick.” He set down his coffee so hard that it sloshed onto the saucer. “They gave him how many years in prison?”

“One hundred and eighteen,” she supplied quietly.

“One hundred and eighteen years in prison, and I couldn’t prove the Warhol. I’d give my left nut, excuse my language, to have been the one to bring him down.”

Samantha watched his expression, listened to his voice, to the words he used and to the obvious frustration and anger there. Even though Martin wasn’t the one who’d stolen the Warhol, she couldn’t believe that the man sitting opposite her would ever under any circumstances agree to work with her father, much less help him get away with an even bigger robbery.

And Martin had seen Gorstein before. He would have recognized him the night she was arrested, on the television news, and the night the detective had called on her for help. It made sense. And more importantly, it felt like it made sense.

“That Warhol was eight years ago,” she said, inwardly steeling herself, ready to run if he went after her. She couldn’t trust the honest cops any more than she could the crooked ones, although for completely different reasons. But this cop, she was about to bet, was an honest one.
And
one she could trust. “The statute of limitations has run out.”

“It still bugs me. And the bastard’s dead, so I can’t get a deathbed confession out of him. I hate loose ends.”

“Well, in the interest of what I hope is about to be a kind of a partnership, the Warhol went to a private collection in Amsterdam. It’s still there, as far as I know.”

Brown eyes narrowed. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“I took it.”

He started to his feet. Samantha held out a hand, her other going to the butter knife on the table. “Statute, honey. You can’t arrest me for it.”

“Are you here to gloat, then? To say that I wasted all that time going after the wrong Jellicoe and there’s nothing I can do about it now?”

She grabbed his wrist and yanked him back into the booth. “Will you keep your damn voice down, Gorstein?” she hissed. “No, I’m not here to gloat. You brought me a soda, and you’ve been up front with me. Maybe I can pay you back a little for the Warhol.”

“Fuck. And how are you going to do that?”

“Okay. I’m not going to play the on-the-record or off-the-record snitch. I’m going to tell you some things because basically I have two choices in front of me, and one gets me dead, while the other one loses me…some things I don’t want to lose. You’re my third choice.”

“You
did
take the Hogarth and the Picasso, didn’t you? I knew it, you—”

“I did not.” She lowered her voice further. “I only have one ground rule, and that’s that you listen until I’m finished.”

Gorstein edged upright again. “And then I can arrest you.”

The tips of her fingers went cold, and she flexed them. “That would be choice number four, but I’ll leave it up to you.”

“I’m getting a little weary of having this same conversation over and over again,” Richard said, standing at the head of the conference table to emphasize his point. “If the city
council would rather have a derelict thirty-five-story building in the middle of Manhattan and if they prefer to forgo my offer to supply twenty million dollars toward low-income housing, then just mention traffic congestion one more time and we’re finished.”

John Stillwell cleared his throat as Rick walked to the window. “I believe that Mr. Addison’s point is that the amount of increased traffic would be negligible when compared with the prestige of having a five-star hotel in the middle of your downtown area. Employment will increase, as will your tax revenues. Mr. Addison has been very patient, but at some point this becomes a losing proposition, and we will move on.”

“But we have to consider—”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Richard strode to the conference room door. “My people, out.” As his employees filed past him into the reception area and the seated council representatives looked at one another, stunned, he exited the room as well, stopping in the doorway. “Consider all you want for the next fifteen minutes.” He closed the door on them.

“Rick?” Stillwell said, approaching him with some paperwork.

“No. We are not doing anything else on this project until I get an answer from the city. Go get a cup of coffee or something. I don’t want them even to
see
any of us for fifteen minutes. And John?”

“Yes, sir?”

“That was a nice bit of bad cop/good cop. Well done.”

Stillwell smiled briefly, glanced toward the glass walls, and stifled the expression again. “Thank you.”

His team scattered. Wishing he could lock the bloody conference room doors, Richard retreated to his office. Halfway there his cell phone rang in the tri-tones he’d assigned as
Samantha’s ring. He took the phone from his belt and opened it. “Hello, my dear.”