Hot Property (12 page)

How horrible. How humiliating. No, not just humiliating,
devastating
. Her clients would drop away like rats deserting a sinking ship, and could she blame them? She wouldn’t want to leave her valuables or belongings with a suspected felon.

She took a deep breath and tried to put this fiasco into perspective. She’d known this would happen sooner or later. In fact, she was frankly surprised some reporter hadn’t found her name on the police blotter and run the story yesterday.

The adverse publicity could cripple her business, she thought grimly. Even after she cleared herself, she might never recover. Then again, she’d always heard that any publicity was good, anything that got your name in front of the public. Her newfound notoriety could be a double-edged sword. And if she managed to clear herself and find the real museum thief, public opinion toward her might turn favorable.

She could hope. She was nothing if not optimistic.

She scanned the article. Michael was quoted, of course. What he said about her was mostly benign—that she was a suspect, that the investigation was continuing, that nothing had been proven yet. Detective Smythe, the one investigating the home break-ins, was less circumspect.

The reporter did at least mention the mysterious Barnie Neff and cited the evidence that such a person existed, but they didn’t physically describe him or ask readers for help in identifying him.

Wendy turned her attention to her picture, a file photo taken several years ago when she’d helped organize a charity auction, an activity one of her wealthy
friends had lured her into. The likeness was less than flattering. She looked harsh, and she wasn’t smiling. Gee, if the paper had wanted a photo, she’d have gladly provided them with one of her glamorous publicity photos.

Enough of the pity party, she decided. First she would call Jillian and warn her to expect a barrage of cancellations. Then she would call the newspaper reporter and offer her side of the story. No, wait, Nathaniel had warned her not to talk to the media.

She flipped to the inside of the Met section, and her breath caught in her throat. Fabric-a-rama was having its semiannual clearance sale! And there was a location on Jefferson Street only about six blocks from Michael’s rental house.

She had to do something. She couldn’t just sit and twiddle her thumbs. There wasn’t even a television, not that she’d watch it if there was one. And Michael had said she could redecorate. Oh, not precisely. He’d said they could talk about it. But she was sure he would like what she did, and she would assume the risk.

She started making a list.

Michael was less than a third of the way through his list of errands, and it was almost one o’clock. He could see he wouldn’t be taking a lunch break.

What had possessed him to think this job was easy? The Poms—a pair of yippy Pomeranian dogs from hell—had scratched his leather upholstery on the way
to the groomers. He’d picked up a cake for a party from a bakery, then had upended it in the parking lot and was forced to pay for a replacement from his own pocket. He’d have to pick it up later that afternoon.

Taking some guy’s Lexus in for an oil change hadn’t sounded too hard, until he’d found a waiting line ten cars long. No way could he wait. He’d left the car there and jogged the mile and a half back to the guy’s office, where his own car was parked, explaining to the client that he would have to pick up the car later. The client hadn’t been too pleased.

He’d done the grocery shopping for a nice little old lady who’d provided him with a detailed list, but he was unfamiliar with her neighborhood store and it took him an hour to find everything. Then she complained that he’d gotten the wrong brand of bran flakes and laundry detergent. He soothed her by taking those items off her bill. He’d pay for them out of his own pocket.

He’d had to pick up two watches at two different jewelry stores and deliver them to their owners’ homes. He’d realized, as he was delivering the second one, that he’d gotten the watches mixed up. He had to backtrack.

Wendy enjoyed this? he thought. This was his idea of hell.

By two o’clock he’d made up some of the lost time by driving like a maniac. He was starving, so he stopped for a bagel.

That was when he read the newspaper.

Poor Wendy. He’d tried to downplay the story for
the reporter, as if it wasn’t any big deal, but he supposed his snow job hadn’t worked.

He pictured Wendy at home in his rental house, blissfully ignorant of the day’s news. He hoped she would take this opportunity to rest, sleep in, read a book. She would probably talk to Jillian eventually and find out about the article, but he hoped it was later rather than sooner.

He didn’t know when Wendy Thayer had gotten under his skin, but she was definitely there now. He wasn’t sure when he’d started to believe she was innocent, but the fact of the matter was, he couldn’t see her jaywalking, much less breaking into a museum or fencing stolen merchandise. She was too … too what? Nice? Sweet? Guileless? Innocent?

No, those words didn’t begin to describe Wendy. She was too … sexy. That was it. Too sexy to be a felon.

He shook his head, calling himself ten kinds of idiot. Was he was falling for the oldest trick in the book, letting a beautiful woman bamboozle him into thinking she was innocent just because she fluttered her eyelashes at him and seemed oh-so-overwhelmed by the mean old criminal justice system?

Maybe he was that stupid. But he hadn’t imagined that brown Caprice, or the speeding bullet that could have ended her life. That reminded him—he needed to call Joe.

On his way to a nearby department store to pick up concert tickets, he punched in the number on a spare cellular Jillian had given him.

“Joe Gaglione,” his partner intoned in a bored voice.

“Joe. You got any information on that brown Caprice?”

Joe chuckled. “It’s a more common car than you thought, Tagg. I have eight of them.”

“You’re kidding. But with the license number—”

“Partial license number. You only got the first three letters, you know.”

“Yeah, but you should still be able to narrow it down.”

Joe chuckled again. “Ordinarily. But you know how every couple of years the police department auctions off its outdated cruisers?”

“Yeah …”

“It so happens that in 1992 we auctioned off twelve of the suckers. All Caprices. Every one of ’em was painted a nice, neutral brown before the auction.”

Michael groaned. He knew what was coming next.

“They licensed them all at the same time, so the numbers—”

“—are in sequence,” Michael finished for him.

Joe continued his report, obviously enjoying his partner’s consternation. “Of those twelve that were auctioned, eight are still on the road in Dallas.”

“Do you have time to track any down?”

Joe sighed. “I got some hot cases, man. Anyway, what are you doing? I thought you were putting in some overtime today.”

That had been the plan, until he’d realized how badly Wendy needed a hand. “Something came up.
Fax the list to my house, okay? I’ll start making calls tonight.”

Wendy stepped back to admire her handiwork. Had she gone too far? She didn’t think so, but she chewed on her lip, hoping Michael would agree.

She’d found some gorgeous fabric remnants on sale for seventy-five cents a yard—unheard of, even at Fabric-a-rama’s semiannual sale. She could put together no-sew window treatments with rubber bands and safety pins in the blink of an eye. The plastic shades came down, replaced by white sheers. Okay, so each window had a different fabric. She’d coordinated as best she could, and the effect looked deliberately eclectic.

But she hadn’t stopped there. A cute little hardware store on Jefferson had some paint on sale. The walls in the living room were now a pale celery green.

Out of curiosity she’d pulled up a corner of the ghastly carpet to discover pristine hardwoods underneath. They didn’t even need sanding. The carpet was so old that a good yank was all it took to get rid of it. It was now heaped in the garage.

A couple of throw rugs from the Salvation Army Thrift Store—seven bucks each—kept the floors from looking too stark. Also from the thrift store, some Victorian-style prints of birds and flowers she’d found stuck in a bookcase. Framing them would have been more than she wanted to spend without Michael’s okay, so she’d thumbtacked them onto the bare walls.

The furniture needed reupholstering. Better still, it needed to be heaved onto the nearest trash heap. So she’d camouflaged the ugly brown color and boxy lines with some soft, pastel throws and pillows.

She’d finished the redecorating with herself. She’d sorely needed a change of clothes, so she’d bought a work shirt and a pair of jeans from a Western store.

She smiled delightedly. Michael would be shocked, but he couldn’t fail to be pleased with how little money she’d spent on his renovations.

Now that she was done with her frenetic activity, though, she couldn’t avoid her real problems any longer. She’d talked to Jillian, several times. A number of her clients, mostly newer ones who hadn’t known her long, called Born to Shop to announce that they wouldn’t be needing the company’s services any longer.

On the other hand, they’d had a little flurry of new customers. Of course, Jillian hadn’t mentioned the newspaper article to anyone who hadn’t brought it up first, but Wendy had to wonder if the new business was a result of the bad publicity. Some people were fascinated with notoriety of any kind and would do anything to get close to it.

A sound at the front door made her jump. Though she’d managed to forget it for a while, the reality hit her anew: Someone wanted to kill her.

“Who’s there?” she called out, already reaching for the cell phone, which she’d kept in her pocket all day.

“It’s me, Michael,” her visitor called through the door. “The damn key is sticking.”

Relief poured through her. She opened the dead bolt and flung the door open, feeling suddenly nervous over Michael’s return—like a new wife who’d done something to the house and hoped for her husband’s approval.

She pushed the silly thought aside and stood behind the door to allow Michael inside.

“Wendy? I—uh, oh, sorry, wrong house. No wonder the key didn’t work.” He backed across the threshold and onto the porch. She watched him through the narrow window to the side of the door, smiling as he checked the house number, then looked up and down the street. His handsome face was a mask of confusion.

He opened the door again. “Wendy?”

“Right here.”

He came inside and closed the door, trying to look everywhere at once. “Did I just enter the Twilight Zone?”

She laughed. “I was bored, so I did a little redecorating. Now, you might not agree with my taste—”

He turned on her like a ticked-off Doberman pinscher. “Wendy, what were you thinking?” He grabbed her by the shoulders, and she could tell he was trying to resist a mighty urge to shake her.

Her heart hammered inside her chest. “You don’t like it, you don’t have to pay for it,” she said in a small voice. “I’ll take it all down.”

“It’s not that I—how did you do all this in one day?” He wasn’t backing down at all.

“I just walked down to that strip shopping center—”

“I
knew
it! You left the house. You made yourself a perfect target. Wendy, Wendy, how could you be that careless with your life?” He crushed her against him, and all at once Wendy realized this had nothing to do with her taste in decor. Michael was angry because she’d put herself in danger.

“But no one knew where I was,” she defended herself, though she wasn’t sure he could understand her. Her face was mashed against his chest.

“Someone could have found out. I told you not to leave the house.”

“You didn’t,” she countered.

“Then I should have. I guess I assumed you had an ounce of common sense.”

She reared back, struggling against his embrace. “Now, you listen here—”

“No, you listen. I’m trying to keep you safe. I’ve put my career, my whole future, on the line by helping you, and you—”

“You put my career on the line when you arrested me! Now you’re just trying to cover your butt!” Even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true. Something had changed over the past two days. His actions toward her weren’t those of a man trying to salvage a career. He cared what happened to her. And he believed, at least on some level, that she was innocent, or that she might be.

Following her accusation, the anger seeped out of him. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

She shook her head, ashamed of herself, mortified that her eyes were filling with tears.

“God, Wendy, when I think what could have happened …”

They both fell silent and simply looked at each other. Wendy felt the moment was frozen in time. She wished it would go on forever, that silent communion. She thought she was looking into his soul, and it was naked and bruised and vulnerable.

Either he was going to kiss her, or he was going to come to his senses and push her away. Wendy decided she didn’t want the latter. Taking the choice away from him, she cradled his face between her hands and stood on tiptoe, touching her lips to his.

She was tentative at first, afraid he would reject her. Her breath caught in her throat at the feel of his firm, still mouth against hers. But it took only a moment for him to respond with blast-furnace heat. He took command of the kiss, angling his mouth against hers, his sudden desperation provoking her to match it.

Suddenly every one of her senses expanded to hypersensitivity. She could hear the traffic outside and the sound of Michael’s breathing, like that of a racehorse after crossing the finish line. His well-washed cotton shirt was smooth against her hands when she ran them along his arms; the rasp of his beard was rough on the tender skin of her face. She smelled the new paint mixed with the unique scent of Michael, which reminded her of something from her
past—high school proms and nerves. And the way he tasted—like pure sin.

The only sense that wasn’t awakened was sight, because she had her eyes tightly closed, savoring all the rest. Surely no kiss had ever transported her the way this one did.