Love Unlocked (22 page)

She’d lived in this house for mere weeks, and she’d been away from it for a little over two days, but she hadn’t recognized how much she’d come to consider it home until she walked in, breathed in the familiar scented air, saw the furniture she’d chosen herself, glimpsed the brand new deck out the kitchen’s French doors as she swept through, looking for the trespasser. Home. If she left, would she ever come back?

The floor appeared to be empty, then she heard footsteps coming down the stairs. She whipped around and put her gun-wielding hand behind her back in time to see John carrying something rectangular wrapped in the white eyelet coverlet from her bed.

Three rectangular objects wrapped in various pieces from her linen closet leaned against the wall behind the front door.

She’d thought that after yesterday’s betrayal she couldn’t have been surprised by anything this man did, but her heart broke again, perhaps all the way through this time.

A brief flash of anger surged and then faded away until all she felt was a kind of resignation. “Don’t forget the Rembrandt. It’s in the guest bathroom upstairs.”

John faced her, his face red from trucking up and down the stairs. “I already got it.”

“I don’t suppose you left the Wyeth? It’s one of my favorites.”

“Sorry, darling. I’m not going to get a tenth of what these are worth and if I don’t come through, I’m dead.”

“I know,” she said tiredly. “What happened to Deacon?”

“Dead, if he’s lucky. Kwan saw right through his little magnanimous gesture. Stupid git. I wasn’t there, but I know they found the Mondrian because I barely missed Kwan’s goons in the hotel. Deacon must have been persuaded to tell them where to find it.”

Eve was relieved that Deacon was unlikely to be a further threat, and that the painting being a fake had apparently escaped notice.

“Where are you going to sell them?” she asked, gesturing to the pile of treasures wrapped in blue polka dot sheets.

“I’m meeting a contact of Maurice’s in San Francisco tomorrow. I could probably get more in New York, but I don’t have the time.”

“What happened?” she asked. “Why now? What did you do? What happened to everything you made over the last ten years?”

“Evie, darling, you have one of the steadiest hands in the business, you know art, but you don’t have the soul of a criminal. That’s probably why you managed to get out. But I have extracurricular activities that I never told you about. Somehow, my ill-gotten gains never stretched as far as I needed them to. Then I borrowed some money, quite a bit, actually, from some very unpleasant people.”

“And you figured you could use me as your own personal ATM,” she said, her voice betraying the barest hint of emotion.

“I’m sorry, really, I am. If I make it though this, I swear I’ll make it up to you.”

“You know what, John? I owed you for getting me out of the sidelines and into the game. Let’s consider us even. Now, please leave my home. I meant what I said yesterday. It goes double today. I never want to see you again.”

He looked vaguely confused. “You aren’t going to try to stop me?”

Eve viewed the man she’d once considered a brother. “Do you want me to?”

“Evie, if I wasn’t so damned desperate, you know I wouldn’t do this to you.”

“Then don’t go back. You can go somewhere they won’t find you, you can start over, like I am.”

“Right,” he whined. “Look how well that’s working out for you.”

Maybe she was naïve, but she refused to think that this was John’s only option.

John seemed to consider her words, but drew up. “No. I’m sorry, but no. This is the only way. I’m going to retrieve my car from down the lane, finish loading these beauties in, and then I’ll be going.”

Regret seeped through her over the loss of her friend and her exquisite paintings. She was sad that these gems would disappear, go underground, in all likelihood become collateral for crimes like drug deals and money laundering. She could live with probably never seeing them again. It would be more of a crime if they were damaged or destroyed. She’d tried so hard to make amends for her sins, and it seemed that her past would never let that happen.

She nodded once, a lump in her throat. John wasted no more time on conversation. He grabbed one of the paintings in his other hand, but froze before swinging the front door all the way open.

“Who’s that? Did you call the police?”

A truck cruised by her house at a crawl. Her heart leapt into her throat, but it wasn’t Hudson’s vehicle. Then she saw the three A’s emblazoned on the side of the door. Will Cleary stopped the truck across the street, and she watched, her sense of dread growing, as he exited the cab and surveyed her house, a hand on his belt, hovering near the cell phone he kept clipped to his hip.

“Eve, I don’t like this.”

The note of desperation in John’s voice jump-started the adrenaline pumping in her veins. He lowered the paintings to the floor and pulled a small pistol out of a holster strapped to his ankle. Deacon must have armed him.

“John.” She struggled to keep her voice even and calm. “Don’t worry, he’s one of my contractors. I’ll get rid of him and you can leave.”

“He looks suspicious. Why does he look suspicious?” His hold on the gun tightened.

“He’s not suspicious. Let me go out there and talk to him.” She tried to tuck her gun into the waistband of her shorts and beneath her loose blouse unobtrusively so she could walk by John with it concealed.

“I don’t know,” he said, his voice getting tighter and tighter. Eve wondered if he was using drugs of some kind.

She’d tried calm, so she tried commanding. “John! Pull yourself together. I’ll make him leave. You stay here.”

He seemed to respond a bit better to her authoritative tone, but she’d lost her window of opportunity. Will tapped on the partially open front door, and John’s shred of control vanished.

“Eve? Are you all right?” Will said as John yanked the door open and dragged the man inside. Eve watched helplessly as John slammed the door shut and leveled his gun at Will.

“What the hell?” Will said, surprised and then wary.

She tamped down her anger at John for putting her in this position. What mattered was getting Will out of here unharmed.

She had two aces up her sleeve—her gun, and the fact that John didn’t know that Will was a security man. If he found that out, there was no telling what his paranoia might lead to.

“Will, it’s all right. This is a friend of mine. He’s a little nervous because he’s taking these paintings to the framer for me and they’re worth a lot of money. He’s taking his charge very seriously.”

Will looked far from convinced, and John frowned. She tried to keep her voice light. “Put away the gun, John, I’ll help you load up the Lotus. You can take it and I’ll take your car. Deal?”

She moved two steps toward the door, between John and Will, in the hopes that she could usher Will back outside and get him out of there without arousing his suspicions even more than they were already.

“Eve,” John said in a dangerously sharp tone. She’d heard only him snap like that once before, when he had been dealing with a fence who’d gone back on his word about something. He’d ordered her to leave in that same scary voice and they’d never worked with that fence again. If she hadn’t been so sheltered, she would have learned the truth about what John had done to him, understood what he was capable of. Will Cleary wouldn’t be in danger because of her.

She started to turn, slowly, but John stopped her with a hand on her hip. He grabbed her gun from behind her back. She let him. She had no other choice when his gun was trained on her at close range.

“What’s this?” he said, more softly, but the danger hadn’t passed.

Will was keeping blessedly silent though Eve could feel the tension radiating off of him. She thought of his children, of Caitlyn, Jordan, Gracie, and cursed her naiveté. In Chelsea, her friends would come because that’s what people did. Anonymous city living hadn’t trained her for the dangers of helpful, caring friends.

When would she stop putting the Clearys in danger? And John had both guns.

“John, don’t be silly, you can—”

“Shut up! I’m thinking.” His voice was staccato like gunfire.

Eve glanced at Will, hoping her expression was reassuring. He looked frozen in place.

“Give me your cell phones,” John ordered. She handed hers over slowly. John tucked her gun in his waistband and took her phone, powering it down, and then motioned with the gun to Will. “Now yours.”

Will was possibly in some kind of shock, because he didn’t immediately comply. Eve nudged him, and he mechanically unhooked the smartphone from his belt loop and handed it to John. When John snatched it away, Will flinched, and she sensed his fear.

The downstairs powder room was right behind John. He backed up, gun never wavering from its angle straight at her heart. He dropped the phones into the open toilet bowl. “Upstairs.”

Eve heard him turn the deadbolt in the front door as she slowly walked up the staircase. Will followed her and then John, with his gun, brought up the rear.

She didn’t know what he had in mind for them, but he was obviously not going to trust her to let him simply leave with the paintings. She wished there was a way to convince him that violence was completely unnecessary. She’d trade this entire house to get Will Cleary far away from this mess.

“To the guest bathroom,” John said when they reached the landing.

Eve led the way. He’d chosen the only room upstairs without a window. She fervently prayed he was selecting a location to keep them sequestered while he made his getaway, and not for an out-of-the-way place to contain their bodies.

“I’ll be back,” he said, pushing them inside. There was no lock on the door, but the heavy leather armchair on the other side of the door would make a fine barricade for the moment.

“What the hell is going on?” Will found his voice once John was gone.

“I’m so sorry, Will. I didn’t want anybody involved in this mess.”

“What mess, exactly?”

“The less you know, the better, honestly.”

“I presume he’s the reason you wanted the security system in the first place,” Will said wryly.

“Well, not him, precisely, but I had an inkling that what I had here would be tempting for someone one of these days.” She caught sight of the blank space of wall where her Rembrandt had formerly hung and sighed. “Unfortunately, John taught me everything I know about disabling security systems. So he probably broke through our first two layers of security.”

“What about the third?”

Snatches of Eve’s letter were replaying themselves on a loop in Hudson’s brain.

It’s better this way. I’ll call you when I figure some things out. I don’t want to hurt you.

Well, she’d failed on that last count. It hurt to know they could share so much joy, happiness, even tears, and she could get up from his bed and walk away. He would have felt sorry for Eve, unable to allow herself a moment of happiness without dragging all the guilt over her father and her various sins into it, if he hadn’t been so angry.

She might have been trying to pretend that she was leaving him temporarily, but what she was really doing was giving up. He knew about giving up. He’d given up who he was for two years because he thought he deserved it, he thought that denying himself his basic essence would make him feel better about his sister dying and him not being there for her. Well, now he knew that it didn’t. It changed nothing. It didn’t make anything better. He’d finally woken up and fully grasped that painting was his life’s purpose, and he was damn sure he wasn’t going to give up a second time. If he was certain about that, he was equally convinced that Eve was his other great passion.

If she had a problem with that, if she thought she could cut him out, then she was wrong.

He was going to stop her from taking off to who knew where, because he knew in his heart that if she left Chelsea today, she wouldn’t ever come back and he’d never see her again.

That would not happen.

So his anger receded into a kind of fierce determination as his truck climbed the hill. He was itching for a fight that would end in glorious make up sex and then he’d put a metaphorical ring on her finger if he had to, if it would keep her close to him. That was the only option.

He frowned as he drove up to Eve’s house. It seemed she had company. The Lotus and a fairly beat up black Mercedes sedan behind it took up the driveway spots. His brother’s truck was parked across the street. Curious. His adrenaline, which had been calming down slowly, kicked back up. There was something off here. He passed the house, drove to the trailhead cul de sac around the bend in the road, and killed his engine. He dialed his brother’s cell phone. It went straight to voicemail. That was enough to push him from concerned to worried.

He approached the house on foot through the copse of trees. He stopped stock-still in place when a figure came out of the house. He recognized John instantly, as well as the covered item he was placing in the Mercedes trunk as a painting. He also identified the bulge at John’s waist. A gun. There was no sign of Will or Eve. Ice water ran in his veins. What had that bastard done with them?

John returned to the house. Eve and Will were probably inside. Hudson could call the police, but it would take too long for anyone to get here and he didn’t have time to wait around for a county sheriff to show up.

The second John shut the door behind him, Hudson ran up to the front of the house, tested the door. Locked. Moving quickly, he ran to the Triple A truck, opened the cab with his spare key, and grabbed a few items from the toolbox on the floor of the passenger seat.

He palmed a crowbar and a lock pick set and raced to the front door. Eve and Will had done a first rate job of securing the house against the casual intruder. He had picked this lock once before, but that had been a flimsy hardware store lock. Now it had a sturdy deadbolt, but he had to believe he could do it. He couldn’t risk the noise of breaking a window.