Billionaires Prefer Blondes (9 page)

“He was at Sotheby’s casing the place,” she pushed, verifying reality for herself as much as for him. “Really interested in a newly discovered Hogarth that Rick ended up buying. I slipped him a note to meet me, and while I was out last night for the rendezvous somebody broke in and swiped the damned thing.”

“But—”

“I know, Stoney! It’s absolutely friggin’ nuts. But he’s here. And I think he played me to get that painting.” Samantha cupped the phone. “You’re the only one who can help me with this. I can’t go to anybody else, and you know it.”

More silence. “Does Rick know about any of this?”

“No. All he knows is that I went out last night, his alarm went off, and then the cops busted me—
me
—for the robbery. I spent a fucking hour in handcuffs. And I am not—” Her voice broke, and she took a moment to regain her balance. She was not going to fall apart over this. Not, not, not. “I am not going to let that happen again. And I’m not going to screw my life or Rick’s life up any more until I know what’s going on.”

“I’ll be on the next flight,” he said.

“I really don’t want Rick to know anything about this. Not yet.”

“Okay. I’ll phone Delroy. He’ll set me up with a place to stay. I’ll call you when I get in.”

“Thanks, Stoney. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Hey, honey, that’s what family’s for. Busting ghosts and shit.”

She wiped a grateful tear from her face, surprised to see it there. “What are you going to tell Aubrey?”

“Twinkle toes? I’ll just tell him I’m taking a long weekend, and that he can catch me on my phone.”

Samantha smiled into the receiver. “Rick says Aubrey’s not gay, you know.”

“The billionaire’s just jealous ’cause Aubrey hasn’t hit on him. I’m running home to pack, and then I’m on my way. Hang in there.”

“Okay. Thanks again.”

Thanks didn’t seem adequate, considering that Walter Barstone was the only person in the world she could count on to both be able to verify that the man she’d seen was actually Martin Jellicoe, and to not call the cops on him. And whoever
had
taken the Hogarth, whether it was Martin or not, she needed to take steps to get it back.

As soon as she hung up the phone she began feeling like a dirty rotten traitor. Rick was in the other room reading over a press release stating their innocence in all of this. And there she was, sitting around with a pretty good idea about who’d pulled the job, and bringing in secret help to investigate behind Rick’s back.

She told herself that once she knew something for sure she would let him in on it, but that wasn’t necessarily true. If her father came into the picture, she didn’t know how she could possibly tell Rick without risking losing him.
Whether he trusted her or not, putting Martin back into the equation changed everything. She might have retired, but it was looking like Martin hadn’t. And rich as he was, Rick Addison couldn’t afford to have a thief in the family.

The phone in her hand rang. Startled, she nearly hurled it across the room before she got enough control over her nerves to hit the talk button. “Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” a crisp male voice returned in a British accent. “John Stillwell calling for Richard, Lord Rawley.”

“Hold on.” Carrying the phone, she went next door to the office and rapped.

“Come in.”

She pushed open the door and bowed. “Lord Rawley, a John Stillwell is on the phone for you, Your Royal Immenseness.”

Rick grimaced at her. “Damned Brits,” he grumbled, taking the phone as she tossed it to him. “I must have left the house number for him by mistake. Apologies.”

If Rick was giving out his private number for the house instead of the office one, he
was
frazzled. And that was her fault. “No problem,” she said aloud, swallowing her annoyance at him, at least for the moment. “He sounds very well pressed.”

She left again, closing the door behind her. With finally a minute alone in the hallway, she walked to the rear window. Rick probably found it suspicious that the burglar had gone in the same way she had earlier in the day, but any cat worth his or her salt would have evaluated the location and made the same decision.

Thank God she’d at least had enough sense left to wear gloves when she’d broken in. If not, she would probably still be in that interrogation room with Detective Gorstein.

Samantha scooted the low hall table out of the way and crouched in front of the window, being careful not to wrinkle her dress. The fresh silicone she and Wilder had used to repair the casing she’d broken was in still-damp blobs on the floor. Fresh scratch marks marred the sill where the alarm wires had been rerouted.

Hm. Whatever implement the cat had used was longer than the nail file she’d carried—from the shape of the scratches it was probably one of those old rolled copper measuring tapes. Those things were great. The actual tool, however, wasn’t as significant as the fact that the cat had bypassed the alarm on the way in. Therefore, the alarm had been triggered on the way out. Which left her with the question of whether it had been on purpose or not.

If, as she suspected, her father was the cat, then there was no way in hell that he would set off an alarm that simple and straightforward by accident. And if he’d done it intentionally, she had a whole new set of problems.

“Be careful about fingerprints,” Rick said from behind her, as he crossed into the bedroom to replace the phone. “The police have already dusted for them, or whatever the devil they call it, but they might be back.”

“I’m not touching anything,” she said, not moving from her squatting position. “I’m just looking.”

“See anything interesting?”

“Lots. Whoever it was came in exactly the same way I did. Exactly.”

“But you didn’t set off the alarm.”

“Not on the way in.”

He stopped in the middle of the hallway. “Then it tripped on the way out. On purpose?”

Samantha stood, dusting off her hands more to stall than
because she’d touched anything. “He, she, they, came in, bypassed the alarm, walked down the hall and down the stairs, found the right painting—since I assume they would want the new Hogarth—went back upstairs and out. I’d bet that the alarm wasn’t an accident.”

“Which means I probably missed whoever it was by a minute, at most.”

A cold sweat started beneath her hair. Martin and Rick—what would they make of one another if they ever met? Not much, she suspected. She hoped it would never happen. “I’m making some calls to get this place rewired,” she said, moving past him.

Rick put a hand on her shoulder. “Why wouldn’t they take both paintings?”

She shrugged. “I would have. I mean, jeez, it’s all wrapped up already. Maybe they only had a buyer lined up for one of them and didn’t want to store the other. Or didn’t have a
place
to store it.”

“I would think for a cut of five million dollars you could rent a storage locker somewhere.”

Samantha looked sideways at him. “I thought you were turning me straight, not that I was making you into a cat burglar.”

With a brief smile he tightened his grip on her shoulder and drew her around to face him. “As you’ve said, our worlds at times aren’t all that different.”

They held where they were for a long moment, standing a foot apart, his hand the only connection between them. Any other day in the past five months, Rick would have kissed her. Today, though, he let her go as Ripton emerged from the office.

“Ready?” the attorney asked.

With a deep breath she took Rick’s hand, and they headed downstairs to the front door. And she would stand there while Phil read a statement she knew to be a lie, because she did know something about the robbery, and they weren’t doing everything they could to cooperate with the police.

In the old days, that would have been a good thing. She knew her dad’s rules, the ones that Martin had drummed into her head all through her childhood. Protect yourself, only give up information when someone else had already figured it out, look after yourself first. Here, with Rick, she’d begun to think that not only could she set aside some of the rules, but that a number of them were just stupid and selfish and didn’t have a place outside the shadows. The shadows seemed to be closing in around her again, but at the moment she could deal with that. And the reason she could was holding her hand despite the fact that she wasn’t being honest with him, either.

Not only did Rick already know enough about her to put her away for a very long time, but if she was forced to flee into the night, thanks to him she wasn’t certain she would be able to go back to her old way of life. He’d made her see what she liked about herself. Before Rick, she’d only been able to be the real, actual Samantha Elizabeth Jellicoe on the most fleeting and rarest of occasions. She still thought like a cat burglar; she knew that. But not all the time, now. Her life felt…expanded. She spent less time looking over her shoulder, and more looking in front of her. That was still new enough that it felt precious and fragile.

Had Martin’s plan been to force her back into his life? Considering that she’d thought him dead until last night, his methods didn’t seem very fair. Martin had always been
a Machiavellian kind of guy, though. His profits always justified his methods.

Samantha drew a deep breath. At the moment, however this turned out, she didn’t see that it would be anything other than bad. Bad for her freedom, bad for her health, and bad for her heart.

Wednesday, 9:18 p.m.

“T
hat sucked,” Samantha said, scooping a chopstick’s worth of Chinese noodles into her mouth and pointing at the television. “They didn’t even show the part where Ripton said we want the painting back.”

Beside her on the couch, Rick filched another piece of her mushroom chicken. Any other time she would have questioned why he’d bothered to order broccoli beef if he was only going to eat her dinner, but at the moment it was kind of nice that he—they—felt easy enough to share.

“They’re a celebrity newsmagazine,” he commented, gesturing with one of his own chopsticks. “They don’t care who did it, as long as we keep talking about it.”

“But we didn’t talk about it.”

“We did show up, however. That’s the only requirement, sometimes.”

“Then why did we show up?”

“Because the newsmagazine is secondary. We’re trying to impress the police.”

“This is a new low.”

“An unavoidable one.”

She glanced at the grandfather clock in the corner. After nine o’clock. Stoney should already be in New York and staked out on Delroy’s couch by now. Sneaking out for the second night in a row didn’t seem the smartest thing to do, but she needed a face-to-face with him.

“I’m surprised Walter hasn’t called you,” Rick said abruptly, making her wonder if he could read minds. “This had to air in Palm Beach.”

“He watches
Jeopardy!
and
Wheel
.”

“You haven’t called him, then?”

“I did. While you were in with Ripton. He thinks I’m an idiot and should run off to Paris.”

“Oh, really?” Rick sat forward and scooped another mound of chow mein onto his plate. “And your reply was…?”

“Springtime in Paris is no fun alone.” She grinned briefly. “Is all this going to hurt your hotel deal?”

He shrugged. “Someone stole from me. That affects how I’m perceived. It gives the impression that I can be taken advantage of. At the moment I would imagine that Matsuo Hoshido is probably having a good laugh, adding a million or two to his price, and putting in a few more conditions that will not be favorable to me.”

Samantha blew out her breath. “I know some people here in the city,” she said slowly. “I could ask around.” Sitting there wouldn’t get her anything but insane, and she needed an excuse to get out of the house. And it wouldn’t even be a lie.

“Right. That’s a fine idea. You go and let yourself be seen with known art thieves or fences.”

“Who says I would let myself be seen, smart ass?” She set her plate on the coffee table. “The way I see it, you need the painting back. I need the painting back. How it gets back is secondary.”

“I don’t know how many ways I can say it, Samantha, but Gorstein wasn’t impressed by you or charmed by you. That—”

“I don’t know about that.”

“That makes him dangerous,” Rick continued, as though she hadn’t interrupted. “He will not look the other way like Frank Castillo does. And I’d rather risk a trial based on nothing but speculation and rumor than on photos or recordings of you chatting with felons.”

Even the word
trial
made her break out in a cold sweat. For a long moment she gazed at Rick’s profile as he ate, half his attention apparently on
Law & Order
. He knew how to push her buttons, and she had no doubt that he was trying to scare her into staying put.

“Frank does not look the other way. He gets that I have my own way of doing things.”

“He gets that you helped him solve two murders,” Rick countered.

“I could charm Gorstein if I wanted to. Under the circumstances, I didn’t see the point.”

“Mm-hm.”

“What does that mean?”

Rick looked at her as he slurped in a chow mein noodle. “What does what mean?”

“‘Mm-hm.’ I charmed you, buddy. I can charm anybody.”

So there
. Samantha stacked the empty rice box into the chicken. Wilder would clean up the mess, but she still felt uncomfortable about having people sweeping up after her.
Housekeepers and butlers were well and good, but she disliked leaving a trail of evidence about her comings and goings for someone else to wipe away.

When she’d straightened up as much as she could considering that Rick was still eating, she stood. “I’m going to bed. And tomorrow, when you have your hotel meeting at the office, I’m going shopping again. Your social schedule’s been wearing my wardrobe pretty thin.” Because she couldn’t seem to let an argument go without knowing exactly where he stood, she stopped in the doorway. “If we’re still going to be socially active. Together, I mean.”

Rick’s plate clattered to the table. With that athlete quickness of his, he stood and crossed the room to stand in front of her. Before she could take a breath to respond to whatever he was about to say, he grabbed her arms and jerked her up against him. His mouth closed over hers, hot and insistent and tasting faintly of cream cheese wontons.

He overwhelmed her senses; he always did, no matter how jaded she was and how much she knew about need and greed and what steps people took to protect their own interests. Apparently—no, obviously—he considered her one of his interests.

She moaned, tangling her fingers into his black, wavy hair as he planted his palms on her ass and pulled her hard against his hips. God, how could she give this up?

“We’re not finished,” he murmured in between kisses. “And whatever I might think is best, I know you want to get some answers. Just promise me that you’ll be low-key about it, and that you won’t do anything to give Gorstein’s suspicions teeth.”

With luck, Gorstein wouldn’t have a clue what she was up to. “I promise, Rick.”

He ran his hands up under her T-shirt. “Then let’s take this upstairs, shall we?”

“Heck, yeah.”

She hoped that eventually he would understand why she couldn’t just sit back and do nothing. It felt as though her old life was rising up to drown her, and she couldn’t just let it go—not for either of their sakes. Rick trusted her, but he didn’t trust her old life. And at the moment, neither did she.

When she woke up the next morning, it was nearly nine o’clock. Jeez. A little time in the slam clearly exhausted her. Rick was nowhere to be seen, but he nearly always got up before she did. It made sense; his business tended to start early, while her old life rarely began until well after nightfall.

With a stretch she got up and went into the bathroom. He’d left a sticky note on the mirror, and she smiled as she read it. “Out buying hotel. Call me for lunch? Love you, Rick.”

Yep, that was her guy, and she did love him back. So much it scared her sometimes. Not for anybody else would she risk her freedom and her future the way she did just by spending each day with him. Other times, though, she wanted to knock him in the head and tell him to stop trying to be her conscience. She wasn’t the only one who’d played with the law in this house, after all—even if her games had been of the easier-to-spot and simpler-to-prosecute kind.

Okay, she might do lunch with him, especially if it would help keep his level of suspicion down. The first phone call of the day, though, was for somebody else.

Once she’d dressed and thrown on some high-end shopping-appropriate makeup, she grabbed her cell phone and dialed Stoney’s mobile number. Thank goodness she’d been able to talk him into getting a cell phone; since no one had arrested
her after Rick got her one, he’d probably decided it was pretty safe.

“
Hola
,” his voice came.

“
Hola
, big guy.
Cómo estás?
”

“I think I have Chee·tos wedged in my butt after spending the night on Delroy’s damn couch,” he retorted. “I’m moving to a hotel.”

“Don’t make it the Manhattan,” she returned. That would be great. Stoney staying at the hotel Rick was trying to buy.

“Deal. When are we meeting?”

She glanced at the nearest clock. “How about half an hour at the Amsterdam Avenue entrance of Trump Tower?”

“Gotcha. Am I a tourist, or a businessman?”

She thought about it for a second. “I’m dressed to shop Madison Avenue, so you be a tourist. And we’re using the old signals.”

“Martin knows the signals,” he said after a moment, his voice more serious.

“But the cops don’t. Since they weren’t too happy about letting me go, they might try to keep an eye on me. The head detective once tried to bust Martin. I don’t want this getting any more tangled than it already is.”

He snorted. “Yeah, because your usual amount of trouble is enough.”

She blew him a raspberry.

“Hey, I didn’t even point out that before you went straight, you never used to have this kind of trouble.”

“Except for that last job. You know, the one where the security guard got blown up and I had to save the homeowner’s life.”

“Speaking of whom, how is Addison these days?”

“He still doesn’t know anything. And I’m going to keep it
that way for as long as I can. It’ll be a big deal to him, Stoney, if Martin’s alive.”

“
If
. And it wouldn’t be your fault.”

“It’s not about fault. It’s about having me around with Martin on the loose. If.”

“I mean it, Sam—crime is simpler.”

“Yes, but I like these sleeping arrangements better.”

“Uh-huh. See you at ten, then, honey.”

All of her things—keys, mirror, small roll of duct tape, paperclips, lipstick, cash, the credit cards she’d been slowly accumulating—were in the black purse she’d used last night. She pulled another purse out of the closet, looking at each of the items before she transferred them, and dumped the black purse into the trash. Maybe she was paranoid, but after last night she didn’t want it anywhere around her, just in case somebody could use it to track her.

She’d never thought that living the straight life would be more expensive than staying on the fringes, but then she hadn’t counted on living with a guy who bought hotels for fun. The black bag had been a $440 Louis Vuitton, which she’d bought for a charity luncheon in Palm Beach two months ago. “Crap,” she muttered.

As soon as the cab Wilder had called for her rolled away from the curb, Samantha pulled the mirror from her new purse and began fiddling with her hair. Or pretending to. A couple of seconds after they turned the corner, a brown Ford Taurus made the same turn. Probably a coincidence, but she kept an eye on it, anyway.

By the time they reached 59th Street, the Taurus was still one car behind the cab.
Shit
. She leaned forward, rapping on the plastic dividing the driver from the passenger compartment. “Make a left up the next one-way street you can, and
drop me off halfway down,” she instructed. “Don’t pull over. Just stop.”

“
Qué
?” he said, looking half around.

She repeated the request in Spanish, and the driver nodded.

“Okay,
señorita
.”

“
Bueno
.” Pulling twenty bucks from a pocket, she fed it through the divider.

He did as she asked, and two minutes later she jumped out of the cab and headed back up the street against traffic. Tempting as it was to wave, she ignored the Taurus as it drove past her and then accelerated. They would be calling for backup, so as soon as they turned the corner she stopped and hailed another cab heading in the same direction as the cop car.

“Trump Tower,” she said to the driver in the turban.

“Trump Tower. No problem.”

Let the cops try to tail a cab in New York once they’d lost sight of it.
Ha
. But her hunch had been right; Gorstein was having her followed. That wasn’t going to make things any easier.

Before she’d moved to Palm Beach, Florida, three years earlier and limited her thefts to the occasional interesting grab, she’d pulled maybe a dozen high-class thefts in New York alone, not counting the grabs at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. She wasn’t sure she would call them happy memories, but they’d definitely been exhilarating ones.

And she’d given it up for Rick—well, not just for him, but also for herself, for a future where she wouldn’t have to spend every moment looking over her shoulder, waiting to be caught—though with the way crimes kept happening around her, nothing much seemed to have changed. Nothing, that was, except for the fact that she didn’t get to profit from the lawbreaking, any longer.

Stoney had a map, a camera, and a pair of sunglasses, topped by a Detroit Tigers baseball cap which covered his bald, black head. “Excuse me,” he said, edging up to her as she drew even with him, “I’m looking for Trump Tower. Can you give me a hand?”

“No, I need both of mine,” she returned, looping her arm around his and heading him toward the curb.

“Hey, I thought we were using the codes,” he grumbled, lowering his sunglasses to glare at her over the rims.

“And you did. I happen to know that I was being followed, and that I lost them. Let’s get going.”

“Going where?” Stoney replied, holding out his map hand to hail another cab.

“Where would you start if you were trying to track down Martin?” she countered, slipping onto the worn black cab seat and sliding over so he could join her.

“He always found me. Assuming that you didn’t eat some bad seafood or something and that he really is alive, I don’t think he’d be inclined to answer any of the code ads we could place in the newspaper.”

“I’m hoping I did eat something funny, but that wouldn’t explain who took the Hogarth. And I agree; under the circumstances, I doubt he would be happy to be found. We used to spend a lot of time in New York, though, before we split company. He took me to some of his hangouts, but not all of them.”

Stoney sighed. “He would have taken you to all of them, if I’d let him. A ten-year-old girl at Hannigan’s, hustling tips.”

“Hannigan’s Bar,” Samantha told the driver. “On the waterfront.”

The disgust in Stoney’s voice surprised her a little. She knew that she’d probably spent more time living with Stoney
than with Martin, but it had never really occurred to her that the arrangement had been anything but for convenience’ sake. “I used to make pretty good money toting drinks at Hannigan’s.”