The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) (7 page)

“Have you finished?” he asked.

The torch wavered around the room, showing him the stash through her eyes by where the light lingered and where it passed quickly. Eight paintings, four from Caravaggio’s time, three in the Impressionist style and one Dutch Old Master that he shouldn’t have kept, reflected her beam, but femininity must confer extra senses because she homed on the portrait of Nora. All she could see was the back of the unframed five-foot-high canvas, but she reached her hand toward it.

“No!” It burst out of him, making her jump. He hadn’t meant to yell and struggled to modulate his voice. “Please don’t touch that one.”

The first version of Nora’s portrait had gone down in the sea, as if it demanded to join her son, but he’d repainted her. When nights were darkest during the 1940 Blitz, he’d talked to her. Returned for her through bomb-fires and a dozen other times when he should have been a hundred miles ahead of the bobbies, and had nearly lost her a few of those times. Then he’d stumbled into this tunnel.

“I’m sorry.” He kept his voice low and quiet. “That one’s fragile.”

She stepped back warily and looked at the treasures hanging around her. “Why are these here?” Her question was slow, as if muffled by the details of period clothing and velvet fabric.

“Vanity.” The worst kind, to have kept them together in one place. Even to a five-year-old the paintings unmistakably belonged in a museum. Millions of pounds’ worth of canvas and pigments on the walls, but Ivar wanted the images off-view, so Stig was unable to resell the paintings. To change the subject, he lifted the lid of a chest in the corner where he thought he’d stowed candles. The white tapers and safety matches were dry, so he set a handful of the candles in a mug on the seat of a chair. Their angled lengths stuck out like a bouquet, and their golden light made an informal candelabra.

“You’re an art thief too.” She flicked off the torch.

“Stating the obvious is such an American habit.” He had lockers of clothes here, twenty or more years out of date and once again fashionable. “Since before there was an England, my name has been synonymous with ‘thief.’” Pronouncements like that gave him the pleasure of speaking truth no one ever believed.

“That’s the first honest thing you’ve said.”

He lifted the latch on the leftmost locker. “I was honest about the search in the hospital, wasn’t I?”

“I wouldn’t call that honest.” She returned to studying the portrait of Ivar. “More like experienced.”

“Not to change the subject—” although that was exactly what he intended, “—but I’m going to strip off my filthy trousers.” He opened his door with a flourish undermined by the squeak of the hinges.

“Paintings, emergency supplies, clothes.” She tried to peer around his arm. “Is this your storage unit?”

“The world above the street may be transient, but beneath London endures.” His navy blue wool suit didn’t have a single moth hole, thanks to the coolness, and the pressed shirts smelled only vaguely like a cellar. “Did you know the Guildhall in the heart of the City has a Roman amphitheater in the basement?”

He reached for the zip at his throat. His shredded dress shirt was in the emergency room, so the steady sixty-three degrees underground was bracing as he pulled his arms out of the overall sleeves.

“What are you doing?”

He glanced at her. “Changing.”

“Oh.” She was looking below his neck, not at his face, and while she wasn’t edging closer, she also wasn’t backing away. No man with an ounce of self-awareness could have resisted inflating his chest and checking his posture under her gaze.

Her eyes widened as she took a matching breath, but her outer layer was too baggy for return admiration. He slipped out of his shoes and dawdled shoving the overalls past his hips. Her gaze followed his hands, lingering at his stomach. He knew when she looked at the trail of hair leading lower from his navel, because her eyes were almost as hot as he imagined her touch would be. The need to rush disappeared, replaced by a hunger to see what she would do next. He rested his hands on the waist of his dirty trousers, and his thumb slipped behind the button to rest against his skin. Yes, she saw that too, and her hand clenched. “Fair notice. I’m going to remove these next.”

She remained silent, but a slight head movement seemed to be a nod, so he proceeded. Slowly.

He popped the button and unzipped without taking his eyes off her. She still didn’t move, as frozen as a marble statue, the flickering candlelight making her appear almost as translucent around the edges as the best of Bernini’s nymphs.

Bending to strip off the trousers would break the spell that bound them. He waited for a moment, savoring the silent connection, but a man couldn’t stand there with his fly drooping open if the woman wasn’t going to leap into action. Showing one’s boxers became rather embarrassing after a few minutes.

He glanced down. A chap had to keep a few secrets.

“Oh! I’m sorry.” She turned abruptly to the farthest locker and struggled with the catch. “What’s in here? May I open it?” Her words were rushed, satisfying him that he’d rattled her.

“It’s either that or turn around to see what you see. Which is scarier?” All she’d see was him stepping into a pressed pair of trousers.

She snorted but didn’t take his dare.

He knew when she recognized the bottles stored on their sides on the crisscrossed lattice, because she gasped the way most women responded to sapphires.

“A 1947 Chateau Perlus? Is this real?” Her hands hovered in dust motes like a baker in a cloud of flour. She didn’t turn toward him when she spoke, as if afraid to look away from the wine but afraid to touch it at the same time.

“Would I serve a fake?” The smoothness of the high-quality cotton was heaven after the rough denim-blend overalls, and he savored the slide of it across his skin. It wasn’t a replacement for her hands, but it would have to be enough. For now.

The sound that came out of her lips wouldn’t have been out of place at a football match. “I suspect you’d serve fortified grape juice to the Queen of England and call it Gamay Beaujolais, so yes, you would.”

“Let me rephrase that for my cynical audience.” Doing nothing more than talking with a woman hadn’t felt this exhilarating in years. “Would I bother to store a fake here?”

“If it helped one of your plans, I bet you’d store it in your pants.” She still hadn’t touched the bottles or looked away.

“That worthy vintage is not part of this morning’s plans—” a pity, “—but we can bring a bottle of the ’47 Perlus with us.”

Her breath caught, before she continued in the higher-pitched register of hope. “With us?”

“We’re catching a train to France.” Only three ways off this rock: plane, ship or train. Airport security deployed too much face recognition software, and when she wasn’t dazed with tiredness, Christina might call his bluff and walk away in the midst of an airport. The Dover ferry was for men who trusted that metal floated; he knew better, so process of elimination left the train tunnel under the English Channel. “The Met is searching for us, ergo, we leave London.”

As if she hadn’t heard, she lifted the bottle with two hands, almost like an infant. “I’ve wanted to taste the ’47 my entire life.”

“That’s a lot of procrastination.” He removed his lock picks and passports from one pocket of his discarded trousers and his wallet from the other. His Walther PPK pistol and his watch were gone, but he could retrieve his cuff links from Christina.

“What really happened at Paddington?”

The question stopped him in the middle of settling the last items in his new pockets, and he refocused on her. When he’d met her at the party, her hair had been confined in a tight bun. During the night it had fallen down until its length swelled over her shoulders, making her appear loose and free, almost relaxed, present circumstances notwithstanding. She looked like a woman he could trust.

When she half turned, the coveted wine in her hands seemed less important to her than her question. “How did you manage the trick with the gun and the blood?”

“The truth?” He was unbearably tired of lying. Most of the time there didn’t seem to be a point, only a habit.

“Of course. Or I wouldn’t have asked.”

Seeing her surrounded by five hundred years of his paintings, on the run from his past and threatened by his present problems, instead of sleeping safely in her own bed in California, he realized he’d dragged her deeper into his business than any woman in decades. Maybe a century. “It wasn’t a trick. It was real blood, from a real bullet. I shot myself.”

The candlelight was bright enough to show her frown as she waited for the rest of his explanation.

He took a huge breath. This was the part where people usually failed him. “I’m immortal. So are Wend and Skafe. Nothing hurts us for long.”

Chapter Seven

“Immortal? And how did
that
happen?” They were back at square one, his lies and absurdities and insults about girls in cheap dresses rising up to overwhelm the fragile trust getting away from the kidnappers had created.

He seemed to let out a breath, and his shoulders relaxed. “We were part of Beowulf’s crew.
Vikings
is the English word. It seems that the monster Beowulf killed had some sort of—” he shook his head, “—contamination? A virus? Those of us who handled Grendel’s arm or head haven’t aged a day since. Our wounds always heal.”

He’d completed that whole story as if he thought she believed him. “Right. You and your friends are immortal Vikings. And you’re also Geoffrey Morrison, figment of my imagination, and you’re an undercover cop named Will and an art thief and I don’t know who or what else except a...”

She stopped before saying the word
liar
because he looked like a puppy, a pathetic, lonely puppy in one of those woodchip-lined cages at a big box pet store, with his overly long white sleeves dangling over his hands like outsized paws and his slumped shoulders. His little act made her feel guilty for not buying into his fantasy story, and that made her mad all over again.

“Whatever.” She put the wine back in its rack and yanked at the door of the next locker hard enough that when it popped she staggered two steps backward. Papers cascaded out. “Dammit.”

From the corner of her eye she saw him stare at his sleeves. He still hadn’t spoken, not a word of banter or defense. Damn, damn, damn.

She crouched to pick up the folders, not doing a very good job of it in her state. “I shouldn’t have busted on you. I’m sorry—” Then the illustrations registered on her consciousness. “Hair stimulation for discerning gentlemen? This is you?”

Two black-and-white drawings captured a businessman in a knotted tie and boutonniere, the before sketch showing him with a horseshoe-shaped smooth patch on his head, and the after showing hair exactly like the man five feet away.

“Male pattern baldness has always been a sure money-maker. Believe I leveraged those brochures into a country home, a three-time champion steeple-chaser and a Bentley.” He was back to being the suave fast-talker, which made her miss the man of shorter sentences from a few moments before.

“Is everything a scam?”

“One must relieve the boredom of eternity somehow, mustn’t one?” He lifted his hands. She knew enough about fine gentleman’s clothing from her work with rich wine collectors to recognize that his double-length French cuffs were in dire need of links. “Would you mind returning my cuff links?”

“Oh. Those.” They were in her purse, hanging cross-wise inside her janitor clothing. Minutes ago he’d taken off his clothes, and now she was doing the same. Her skin was already warm, and she couldn’t stop the awareness of each gesture, her right hand on the tiny metal tab, her left hand hovering empty in the air in front of her breasts, conscious that he was watching.

His gaze was heavy, nearly tactile, as it followed her hand to her chest. He didn’t look away, didn’t even blink, just stood there waiting and watching.

As if his attention made her brain disconnect from her fingers, the zipper caught on fabric and jammed. Each attempt to free the teeth rubbed her wrist across her chest. The friction of her inner arm even through her clothes combined with the weight of his stare to make her wobbly. She sucked in air, but it didn’t help the feeling of lightheadedness.

She should concentrate on her real problem, the zipper, not on Stig. All she had to do was return his cuff links and cover herself with this tent’s worth of fabric, because doing anything else at all, even thinking about possibilities naturally flowing from clothing removal, was crazy self-destructive bullshit.

Looking down, she saw that the hand not tugging uselessly on her zipper had curved in the air above her breasts, as if independently preparing to cup the weight and offer it to him. Whether the jam was due to her fingers or the metal no longer mattered, because her arms squeezed closer to the sides of her breasts and the pressure was exquisite.

“Keep trying.” His voice vibrated across her skin as distinct as a touch, raising the hair on her neck and sending sensations to the points of her nipples.

The three feet of space between them shrank, or their needs filled the void, because suddenly she didn’t feel separated from him. Evading his pull was about as likely as leaving those green foil-wrapped chocolate mints untouched next to a restaurant check. While her fingers fiddled with the little metal tab, her wrist fretted across the fabric over her nipple, pressing against it in tiny up-and-down motions, a stand-in for touching him, and for letting him touch her.

He knew what she was doing. What she was feeling. She could read his knowledge in the way the skin stretched taut on his cheekbones and his breath came louder through his parted lips.

Then the zipper jumped and moved freely until she had the coverall open, the air cooling her at the same time it revealed her. Whether the final result was better or worse for her equilibrium didn’t matter, because the spell had broken.

He looked away.

She was released. In a delirium she felt inside her clothes, found her purse chain and followed it to the oblong of her purse. The bag contained the familiar shapes of a lipstick tube, a prickly brush, her wallet and her friend’s passport, reeling her back to sanity finger by finger, until she found the corners of his cuff links. Her voice failed the first attempt to tell him she had them. The cuff links gleamed in the light, too shiny to be silver. Platinum, perhaps, and the black onyx chip on one side and diamond on the other were simultaneously formal and masculine.

“Here.” Their hands didn’t touch as she dropped the links into his outstretched palm.

Achieving her goal, desperate as it had seemed for a moment, released her, and a question tickled at the edges of her thoughts. “You knew your shirt would be ruined when you gave them to me?”

“I hoped we’d end up in an ambulance. I wanted to know these were safe.”

“They’re special to you?” The seesaw of tension and release was exhausting, or maybe that was however many hours she’d been awake with only the nap at Bodeby’s.

“They survived the sinking of the Titanic.” In the candlelight she saw his eyes shift toward the turned-around painting that he hadn’t wanted her to touch.

She stopped herself before doubting him out loud. Anyone could buy an antique.

“I have small item for you too.” He reached into the pocket of his discarded pants, and the sudden memory of watching him undress minutes ago made her borrowed clothes feel constricting and scratchy. This was crazy, but before she could shift her eyes to the paintings or other inanimate objects that she ought to stare at, his hand reemerged.

The ring in his open palm looked tiny and plain compared to the cuff links. Worn as the silver band was, the sight of the single pearl took her voice away.

“Where...How did you...” She wanted to grab it, but a superstitious part of her heart warned that the ring might disappear if she moved. She swallowed back tears. “My mother’s ring.” Nothing would ever be like getting her mother back, but for a moment the mistakes she’d made in the past twenty-four hours were erased. This one thing had been fixed.

“I crossed paths with a person wearing a dress I recognized.” He reached for her hand, and then he was sliding the silver band on her finger. His fingers were strong and surprisingly warm in the cool air. Or maybe hers had gone cold with shock. “Didn’t think you’d want the rag back, but I’d noticed you like to touch this ring.”

“Thank you.” She breathed the words. Unexpected gifts were rare in her life since Big Frank had died. Her twenty-ninth birthday had been celebrated with cupcakes at her store and a quick phone call from her baby brother at boot camp.

“Girl with Pearl Ring.” His eyes locked with hers, freezing her in place. Then he lifted a hand to cup her chin and the pad of his thumb crossed her lower lip, making the problems outside this room recede even further. She couldn’t remember why she should keep her distance. “You’re radiant.”

With his unfastened white cuffs flopped back, Stig’s wrists were illuminated by the candles as dramatically as the hand of the man reaching from the wall painting over his shoulder. His wrists were bare. “Your watch?”

“Probably at a pawn shop.” He shrugged, as if it hadn’t been worth thousands of dollars. “Better it than your ring.”

He’d traded his watch for her ring, an uneven exchange that made it hard to recall her annoyance about his lies and non-explanations, and easy to see him as an attractive man. Her hurt over his ridiculous claim to be immortal faded with the return of her mother’s ring.

Even as her shoulders leaned forward toward him, her exhaustion-fuzzed mind caught up with her simpler physical responses. That doubtful voice that was hard to silence, the one deep inside that hadn’t forgotten everything he’d said to her at Bodeby’s, piped up with the reminder that he was a man who churned with plans. A man who thought so many steps ahead that he’d given her the cuff links to preserve them. A man who did nothing without a goal, and his current one was suspicious. “I’m not sleeping with you.”

There. She’d said it, as much to herself as to him.

And he laughed. “I didn’t think you would.”

She pursed her lips, almost insulted. “Liar.”

“So you keep accusing me.” He crossed his hands dramatically over his heart, the intense focus of moments before submerged under the joking façade she was becoming used to. “My only plan right now is to cross London unseen.”

“Why do I suspect the abandoned tunnel figures in this?”

“Because you think like I do.” His smile broadened to look like a fairy tale wolf. “You’re one of the fraternity.”

Not a chance. She was honest and hardworking. Stig had probably never filed taxes, unlike her, who spent what felt like six months dotting her
i
’s and crossing her
t
’s for the federal and state governments.

“An old firefighter kit.” He handed her a tan canvas bag with two buckles over the front flap. “Stow that bottle of Perlus you’re so excited about and let’s hop to it.”

They really were taking the wine, but that wasn’t what made her heart pound as he snuffed the nurturing candle flames, shut the entrance to the hidden room and led her into the close-pressing tunnel. They were heading back to being mice evading a tribe of cats. As they crossed underneath the grate, she noticed the bars of light streaming from overhead were brighter now, indicating the advancing day. A hundred worries rushed her, and she stumbled, the impact of the fake wines and the police search pressing her once again.

Then she followed Stig out of the tunnel into a larger airspace, where a flash of light blinded her.

“What the—” She threw her arm over her eyes but retained the impression of a long platform.

“Lights activated by passive infrared motion sensors.” He was already lifting the hood of a miniature train engine that was about the size of the front of a tractor. Painted red and attached to a matching red open-sided wagon, it looked like something preschoolers rode to a pumpkin patch, minus the preschoolers. “Don’t worry. In the decade since the service closed, I’ve never encountered them being live-monitored.”

The space had the feeling of a movie set about a city hit by a plague or zombies. It had the familiar elements of a government office, from the Golden Rules of Safety sign posted on the white-paneled wall to the junky plastic rolling chair with a tilted seat, office debris around the world. Yet the thick dust contradicted the bright lights, turning the crushed coffee cup along the wall into a symbol of what had disappeared from the set. People. Small white stalactites marked the gaps between ceiling tiles, as if the world underneath the city was trying to reclaim its territory.

“Mind the gap, as they say painfully often in this town.” His fingers were black from fiddling under the hood. “The third rail’s off, shutting down the electric power for safety, but the last chaps cleverly parked a battery-powered engine at each end when they mothballed the system. We don’t have to walk.”

“I don’t think this train is going to France.” She wasn’t either, but that discussion could wait until they were out of the tunnel system.

The engine started with a muted version of a familiar sound, transporting her to the vineyards of her childhood riding beside Big Frank on a tractor pulling in boxes of grapes.

“I say, mademoiselle.” His accent was an exaggeratedly deep bass rumble to complement the engine. He turned to her with a completely proper expression, his chin dropped and jaw elongated to create a disapproving look as he touched a nonexistent cap. “All aboard.”

She laughed as she stepped into the miniature wagon. A compartment-dividing bar reached her waist, and there was nowhere to sit but the dirty floor. “Thank goodness I still have the coveralls.”

He settled next to her, several greasy fingers held up. “Since I don’t, could you lend me your sleeve?”

She shouldn’t let his English manners lull her into forgetting that he was a swindler, but the way he phrased simple requests was musical to a woman used to California’s casualness.

Their ride chugged away from the platform into the circular mouth of a tunnel. Returning to the absolute darkness was disorienting after the fluorescent lights, and she inched closer to Stig while also trying to find a comfortable position. “Where are we going?”

“Now that you ask —”

“You’ve got a plan,” she said at the same time as he said, “I have a plan.”

As they both laughed, her elbow bumped the low metal side of the car, and she pulled back sharply. “What—” Then her skull thunked into an equally hard object, which caused her to bite her tongue. “Oww.”

“Unn.” Next to her, Stig grunted and flicked on the flashlight, revealing that he had one hand pressed to his chin and lower cheek.

“I’m sorry,” she said through her own fingers.

“I’m glad that was an accident.” He removed his hand and turned his cheek toward her. “D’you want to kiss it better?”