Deep Desire: The Deep Series, Book 1 (7 page)

“Why? Did they give you a hard time? Or—”

“It just took time I didn’t want to spend. I’ve got a ticket to San Francisco tonight to speak with my friend Edward, who brokers manuscripts and art from legitimate sources. I think he’s got contacts that are not so aboveboard. His partner is an insurance investigator. They might be able to point me in the right direction. I must find the manuscript before—” He broke off. “Anyway, Edward’s my best hope.”

“What if someone simply wanted it badly enough to steal it but has no plans to sell it?”

Donte immediately came to mind. “I can think of one person who wanted it and
could
steal it, but I don’t believe he did. I need other ideas.”

“Why?”

“The people who collect these kinds of manuscripts aren’t exactly James Bond, Deana.”

“You are.” She grinned.

“No, I’m not.” Adin shook his head. “But I can and have kept myself out of trouble so far. The people who took this manuscript were professional thieves. They took out the security cameras on this floor and opened the safe. They probably aren’t the kind of people who sit in clean rooms translating sixteenth-century Italian love letters.”

“But you can’t rule it out.”

“Well, no. It’s always possible that Ned Harwiche the Third, who I am told I outbid for the manuscript by a very narrow margin, has grown a set and gotten his
Mission Impossible
on to steal it from me. Somehow I doubt it.”

“Ned Harwiche. Isn’t he the one who favors a less-masculine Truman Capote?”

“Yes. He’s been honest in all our dealings before. But he has the money to send a large ninja army should he wish to. He’s on my list. The thing is…I really want
Notturno
back.”

“Oh, honey.” Deana continued making small circles on his back with her nails. Adin let himself be soothed by the motions. “How can I help?”

“I’m packing,” he said, “and then I’ll need a ride to the airport. I’ve checked out of the hotel. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. When it’s over, can we have a long visit? Maybe a good weekend together somewhere?”

Adin smiled at her as she removed the tags and folded the clothes he’d purchased that afternoon. “Sure, that sounds really nice.”

“You’ll be careful,” she said without looking up.

“I promise.” He meant it. She was his only family, and for her, he’d be careful. “I promise you I’ll take every precaution. I left some things with the dry cleaners here. Maybe you could pick them up?”

“Sure.” She smiled and continued folding and packing until everything was in his suitcase, ready to go. “My car’s down in the parking garage.”

He hefted his case and took a last look around. “Good to go then.”

“Where will you be staying in San Francisco?” she asked.

“The Kabuki.”

She frowned. “Do I know that one?”

“It used to be the Miyako, near the Japan Center. Next to the plaza with the tower?”

“Oh…yeah.” The elevator arrived, and they entered it. “Nice place.”

“I have my phone, or e-mail me if you need me, okay? I have my laptop.”

“I thought you said your case was stolen on the airplane from Frankfurt.”

Mention of that plane trip made a ruddy flush stain his cheeks. “It’s weird, you know? I didn’t put my laptop or the manuscript in my briefcase. I put them in the suitcase and checked them through. I guess I had a feeling…”

“You’re fey, oddball,” she said, getting off the elevator with him and heading across the parking garage. She pressed her remote and her car chirped cheerfully.

“That’s Mr. Oddball to you.” He followed her to her car. After a few steps he stopped, then turned, as he’d done in Frankfurt, an entire three hundred sixty degrees.

“What is it?” asked Deana, her hand poised on the handle of the car.

“Sometimes I get the strangest feeling I’m being watched.”

“Look, maybe you shouldn’t go,” Deana said, looking at him over the roof of her BMW.

“I’m sure I’m just paranoid. I was robbed twice, after all. It’ll take me a while to settle down.”

“I hope that’s all it is.”

“What else could it be? They’ve got what they wanted,” he pointed out. He opened the trunk and put in his case and garment bag.

Deana finally opened the driver’s-side door and got in. “I guess so. The Kabuki, right?”

“Right. It’ll be fine, Deana Beana,” he said, getting in on the passenger side. “You’ll see.”

As she pulled out onto Flower Street, Adin had to force himself not to swivel his head in order to look around. His blood was whispering to him, a low hum he’d almost begun to regard as foreplay. It threw his body into a chaos of longing. He had no doubt Donte was in that garage, watching him from the shadows. He felt it. His blood told him Donte was near. He wondered if the feeling would dissipate with time and distance.

Adin’s heart constricted at the thought.

He would probably never see Donte again, unless he got
Notturno
back. Even that would be no good, because they’d be on opposing sides, each struggling to take it and hold it for their own. The faint thrill of connection was disappearing, and it saddened him. For a while at least, he had known, in as deep a place as the molecular structure of his body, a connection to a person not in his immediate family.

For the briefest of moments he hadn’t felt alone.

Chapter Six

Adin emerged from the plane, part of a crowd of tired people being funneled into the long hallway leading to the terminal. It was around ten forty in the evening, and he followed the tide down to the baggage claim area where the hotel driver was scheduled to pick him up.

As he descended the escalator, he looked for his driver. He nodded and smiled when the man holding a sign that read
Tredeger
scurried over to introduce himself. Adin wasn’t a tall man, but the driver, who identified himself as Boaz, came only to his chin. He chatted amiably and seemed to have energy to burn. When Adin’s suitcase and garment bag came down the chute and he pointed them out, Boaz shot between a number of larger, more determined people to retrieve them.

Once in the limousine—a luxury that made Adin thoroughly ashamed—he tried to relax. He’d thought they were sending a car or a shuttle, but here he was riding too comfortably in the back of a white stretch limo, sinking into baby-soft leather seats, and he
loved
it. It wasn’t a long drive, but Adin took advantage, finding a classical radio station and allowing the pimped-out neon stripes on the walls and ceiling to soothe his nerves as they changed from one color to another.

“Boaz,” he called out, turning the radio down for a minute. “Do you think you could stop so I can buy a bottle of Bushmills?”

“Certainly, Dr. Tredeger. I’m completely at your service.”

Adin restored the radio’s volume and rested his head against the seat cushions. He was thinking how used to the experience he could get when Boaz slowed down to park in front of a liquor store. Just as Adin went to open the door, it was opened for him.

“I’ll be back in a minute.” Adin left the Boaz with the car. He entered and started up the aisle, looking at all the different types of wines and liquor they offered. They had snacks as well, and Adin automatically picked up some chips, some trail mix and chocolate truffles—things he liked to have on hand in the middle of the night when he just wanted a handful of something. He found his whiskey, Bushmills 16, in a locked case, so he flagged down an employee to get it for him. He was bending himself back through the limo door that Boaz held open for him in no time.

“That was quick,” said Boaz as Adin seated himself.

“It helps if you know exactly what you want.” Something tingled on the periphery of Adin’s awareness, and he looked past Boaz to see a tall man in a long, dark overcoat. Adin’s heart rocketed around his rib cage. Was it Donte? No. He resembled Donte, though. He was looking curiously at Adin, staring in a frank way that Adin was unused to and uncomfortable with. Boaz closed the door, and in minutes, they were on their way.

Adin didn’t think about Donte again until he was alone in his room at the Kabuki, a lovely, comfortable hotel with down pillows and comforters, terry-lined silk robes and shoji screens on the windows. He was in the garden wing, on the fifth level, a private floor he’d needed his key to access, there being no fifth-floor number on the elevator panel. Safe as houses.

He hung up his suits and placed his Pullman on the luggage rack before pouring a drink and settling into the soft bed. After taking out his reading glasses and the yellow legal pad on which he’d written his translation of Donte’s journal entries, he reread them slowly. Adin felt a faint hiss of awareness as he closed his eyes, but thought it was primarily arousal, because reading the words Donte wrote made the man come alive in his imagination. He took out his laptop, grateful he’d gotten the photographs of the manuscript before it was stolen. Even though they were a poor substitute for holding the centuries-old journal in his hands, it didn’t take long before he was lost in his translations.

My best loved, I write this in the spring, after the snows have melted, while the sun warms the earth. I know very well that if I could move through time and space to be by your side at this minute, and I lifted your hand to my lips for a kiss, I would find it redolent of basil and maybe fennel. You may not deny this! I know you’ve been in the garden. I can see you there, and if I have a quiet moment with no distractions, I can imagine the scent of your skin, warm from the sun and sweetly green from rubbing your hands on the plants.

My son thrives, and I have no idea how. He is his own worst enemy. He chases the animals and has no fear of the stairs or the water in the fountain. There are four girls employed just to see that he doesn’t get into mischief. Renata quickens again, and the house trembles with her moods. For myself, I am man enough to want more sons, the only reason I ever go near her at all. And you, beloved, are married and might have a child on the way for all I know.

It breaks my heart to have no message from you. Is it possible that you don’t know that I wait for word as though it were water and I were dying of thirst? I shall never believe, my love, though my heart fails me, that you have no wish to write to me. I would die deluded before I would die faithless. So now I wait and hope and dream and love, with such a love that were it a tangible thing, you would feel it rush to Liguria and crash over you like wind and water speeding from where I sit. Dear heaven, Auselmo, what are we to do? I ache for you.

Auselmo, sweet lover, how handily you made me a fool and surprised me on my own doorstep. I was beginning to feel almost tragic when I saw your standard bearers! Renata is in an uproar, as always, ordering the servants about and making everyone miserable. Naturally this delights her. Your sweet wife said not more than two words the entire noonday meal, and I feared she would faint dead away when Renata suggested they spend time together.

As I write this you sleep beside me, still damp and sated from our endeavors. I am breathless with joy and cannot sleep, so I will draw you as you lie beside me, and I will record your blotchy, well-marked skin for all eternity. What we shared felt sacred, my love, superhuman almost, divine. That I asked you to fill me with your body and your seed distressed you, I could see, but when you loved me passion glistened in your eyes, and I know you felt it too.

We are something new. Something powerful and eternal. There is nothing and no one who has been as we are, and none shall ever know what we know. I am yours, as completely as if you bought me for a slave, and you, my love, are my prize, won by what magic I do not claim to understand. I cherish you completely, amore, with the certain knowledge before all the gods that ever were, that I would gamble all except for you, and they may reward me for it or not.

As long as you are by my side, I care not what befalls me. Mad words for a man who must rise before the dawn and slink like a penitent, beardless boy back to his room in case his bitch of a wife sends servants to find him. I asked you again last night, should we have run while we were boys and had no one to disappoint but ourselves?

Wise Auselmo, you never answer, save to use your body to make mine burn. Will I ever be worthy of you, I wonder?

Raking an impatient hand through his hair, Adin put his laptop aside and rolled over, pulling the soft pillows to his chest. He’d fallen fast asleep with the light still on.

In the muffled quiet of the night, Adin dreamed of his sister and their family as they’d been while he was growing up. They’d lived everywhere, from Alaska to Saudi Arabia to Kuwait to Indonesia. Anywhere with a possibility of oil. His geologist father’s small consulting company had grown, and with it, their fortune, and when his father finally retired at an early age in San Francisco to teach, he’d sold the business, cashing in at exactly the right time.

Adin remembered his father as a literate and charming man as well as a thoughtful, scholarly professional. They’d had a wonderful family life in the years before he and Adin’s mother passed away in a tragic boating accident. There was a slightly awkward period of time after Adin came out. His mother had been the last to adjust to…what? Disappointment. Not in him, or his choices, but maybe
for
him. For what they’d perceived his choice meant. They’d seen him rootless in his middle age, without a home, without a family, and he’d tried to reassure them that those things would be there for him regardless of his choices. That he’d make a home and create a family if he chose.

They’d come to a loving acceptance, but then tragedy struck. Adin had been in studying abroad for a year in England when his parents died, and Deana was a junior at USC. In those terrible weeks during the search for the boat and the missing Tredegers, Adin returned to San Francisco and discovered that he could no longer sleep in the city he called home, and he hadn’t slept a single solid, dreamless night there since.

This night, for the first time, Adin thought he might actually
feel
rootless, so it didn’t surprise him at all that his own family returned to him in dreams.

Adin dreamed his father was sitting in his tiny office with his hands up in a halfhearted defensive gesture as a group of girls pressed a plastic-wrapped plate of brownies on him. As if Adin were only a disembodied presence in the room, he could wander and look at the pictures on his father’s desk, the books lining his bookshelves, and the view from his window. He spent, in dreamtime, what seemed like a pleasurable afternoon there.

Lying quietly, he tried to figure out exactly what he was feeling. His blood was silent.
Donte?
Nothing. He closed his eyes and dreamed again, this time of elevator cars that felt like clear glass ornaments and eyes the color of the rich, brown leather club chairs that once dotted the large library of his parents’ Victorian home.

He awoke sometime later feeling vaguely lost. He resolved to call Boaz first thing after breakfast, hoping the small man wouldn’t be too busy to drive him for the rest of his stay. While being driven in a limo was pretentious, he liked the idea of renting a car and driving himself through San Francisco’s overcrowded streets even less. The memory of Boaz’s smiling face reassured him in an odd way, and he looked forward to the company of the diminutive man, which made going back to sleep a little easier.

Adin finally woke up at about the time the hotel put out their continental breakfast. He slipped into his spa robe and padded out to get a plate of fruit and rolls and some coffee. He smiled genially at the other guests doing the same. Once back in his hotel room, he phoned Boaz, who said he would be happy to drive him wherever he needed to go while he was in town. They made arrangements to meet in front of the hotel at ten a.m., and Adin hung up the phone feeling better than he had since he’d landed.

“Where to, Dr. Tredeger?” Boaz inquired as he handed Adin into the back of the car.

“I’m meeting friends for breakfast at the Buena Vista.”

“Very good, sir,” said Boaz. Adin gave him a look that said,
Don’t push it
. Boaz grinned and closed the door, leaving Adin alone in the back with his thoughts. He touched the button for the classical radio station again and prepared himself. Edward and Tuan were old friends, comfortable allies to have at a time when he felt so unhappy. Edward was an art dealer from a long line of men and women who either produced art or traded it. But Tuan…

Tuan was an enigma. Adin didn’t know much about him, only that he and Edward met in Paris. Tuan worked as an investigator for an insurance firm, and Adin privately suspected—although it had never been said—that Tuan was part of another kind of world altogether: perhaps military, certainly secret, and that his appearance in Paris had come at a time of political crisis, with meeting Edward as a bonus.

Boaz pulled the limousine up to the front door and Adin got out, straightening his leather jacket and smiling his thanks. Boaz practically bowed. “You may phone me, and I’ll be here to get you in a matter of minutes, Dr. Tredeger.”

“Thank you.” Adin left him standing on the sidewalk.

Once inside the crowded diner, Adin caught sight of Tuan first, in his dark suit and tie, reading the paper. Then he saw Edward, who existed in a completely different world. By contrast to Tuan’s conservative attire, expensive watch, and the round little glasses he wore that made him look like a well-built Asian banker, Edward’s look screamed fetish from his head to his toes. He wore Doc Martens under jeans that slouched precariously on his luscious ass. Over that he wore a tight Sex Pistols T-shirt, and a number of belts, chains, bracelets and visible piercings, which Adin knew to be the tip of the iceberg. His skin bore the ink of a dozen artists. The surprise was an ever-ready, sweet smile, which was just short of angelic.

Just then Edward was gazing at Tuan with the look of a besotted teenage girl, and Tuan gave him an indulgent smile back. Despite their differences, these two were the happiest couple Adin knew. Tuan hadn’t noticed him yet and held the newspaper up at an angle so he could kiss the delighted Edward behind it.

Adin cleared his throat, and the paper came down to reveal two red faces. “Guilty as charged, Adin,” said Tuan with a grin.

“You go. Wish I had one of those.” Adin sat down. Tuan immediately signaled the waitress for coffee.

“One of what?” asked Edward.

“Someone who looks at me the way you look at Tuan.” Adin fiddled with his napkin. He didn’t know why he said that. It certainly hadn’t even been in the top one hundred things he wanted until recently. “Been a while since I’ve seen you.”

Edward leaned over and kissed him on both cheeks. “Missed you. Tell me about your manuscript, and we’ll brainstorm. You don’t think Ned Harwiche? He was certainly pissed when you outbid him.”

“Harwiche wouldn’t hire thieves; he couldn’t. His reputation is everything to him. If he had it, sooner or later someone would talk, and then the provenance of every piece in his collection would be looked at under a microscope.”

“You’re right; he couldn’t help bragging. He’d be locked up within a week if he stole that from you. Besides, if he had
Notturno
, he’d have called me by now to gloat.”

Tuan put his paper down. “I’ve heard something, although it may be simple talk.”