Thieves In The Night (13 page)

“Elise, I don’t think the Sandhursts are interested in charity fund-raisers.” Her voice sounded pretty good, increasing her confidence.

“My dear, everyone with money is interested in charity. It helps ease the guilt of having so much wealth among the starving masses.” Elise flashed a sparkling smile in the direction of the Sandhursts and lifted her hand. “I’m sure they’d be delighted. I insist that you ask them. They are your clients, after all.”

“Were, Elise. They were my clients. I wouldn’t take their listing or business again for all the gold in China.” A stubborn quality crept into her voice, eliciting a peevish glance from her aunt.

“Don’t be naïve, Chantal. Business is business and, well, charity is charity. The ball was your idea. One of your better ones, I might add.” The Lodestar Charity Ball had put Lodestar Realty on the Aspen social map the year before. Elise hadn’t bought the idea of sponsoring the orphanage in Denver, so Chantal had kept her involvement private, except for the Palmers. Her aunt sometimes wondered, out loud, where all of Chantal’s money went. An elegant, casual glamour, Elise constantly reminded her, added to the Aspen mystique. And when people bought in Aspen, mystique was a lot of what they bought.

Mystique, Chantal thought. Her clients didn’t know the half of it. No one in Aspen did, except Elise, and they both kept the family secret as if their lives depended on it. Certainly their livelihood did. Whatever Elise was thinking about what had happened that afternoon couldn’t be as bad as the truth, and Chantal had yet to come up with an explanation. At least not one that wouldn’t send Elise into a banshee wail of recriminations.

“Here’s your chance, dear,” Elise said sotto voce through a welcoming smile. “Angela is coming over.”

And so she was, gliding from table to table in a bleached blond flutter of almost-kisses and -hugs. Dark-eyed and slender, except on top, she worked the room for every ounce of attention, leaving a trail of curious glances in her wake.

“Hello, Mrs. Sandhurst,” Elise said. “I hope you’re enjoying your new home.”

“Haven’t you heard?” An absurdly tiny, breathless voice came out of the statuesque woman. “We had a real shoot-out at the ranch last night. Absolutely everybody was there. It was just like the old West.”

“Shoot-out?” Elise questioned.

Shoot-out? Chantal cried inwardly with dismay.

“Oh, yes! We were having a humongous party, when all of a sudden the alarm went off. The boys went a little crazy defending the homestead. Of course”—a thought seemed to cross her mind, looking oddly out of place—“it was a false alarm. Jimmy says there’s a widgety glitch in the system.”

Chantal doubted if Jimmy Sandhurst had ever used the term
widgety glitch
in his life. And only Angela would refer to five acres as a ranch, and a group of live-in thugs as boys.

“Chantal?” Elise turned to her. “Didn’t you have the security system professionally checked before the”—a thought definitely crossed her aunt’s face, looking precisely in place— “closing?” she finished lamely. The agenda for lunch tightened up.

“Yes,” Chantal answered simply. Monosyllabic was her best bet at this point.

Angela fluttered a hand at them. “Oh, don’t you girls worry. Jimmy said he’d take care of the problem all by himself. ’Bye, now,” she chirped, and bustled off to the next unsuspecting table.

Chantal could just bet Jimmy was taking care of the problem. Her plan had been perfect, her motives pure. How had so much gone wrong?

The answer was three little letters—Jaz. Mexico looked better and better. He could have Cozumel and the Caribbean, and she’d take Acapulco and the Pacific. That should be enough distance to keep him safe. If his luck held out.

Tense minutes of silence followed Angela’s departure, leaving Roger with two women racing food around their plates.

“Is there something going on here I should know about?” he asked hesitantly.

“No!” Elise and Chantal both said, then snapped their heads around to stare at each other.

“I’m going to the powder room.” Elise grabbed her purse. “Come with me.”

“I don’t—”

“Your nose is shiny.” She made it sound like the crime of the century.

On feet of lead Chantal followed her aunt across the carpeted dining room, the marble foyer, and into the quarry-tiled bathroom. Her mind was blessedly blank, but not for long.

The door closed behind them and Elise whirled around, her face drawn tight, and paling under her carefully acquired tan. Her voice hit an earsplitting screech. “Ten years! And a client! What is it? In the blood?” She ripped open her purse and started a frantic search for her compact. Tissues and keys were jumbled up on the counter. “No, of course it’s not in the blood. Look at me. I’m a normal, hardworking—”

“Elise.” Chantal tried to interject a calming note.

“—run-of-the-mill real-estate broker. Who had a perfectly brilliant career.” The compact came whipping out, and their eyes met in the gilt-framed bathroom mirror, Elise’s filled with raging accusation, Chantal’s holding all the weariness of the past twenty-four hours, all the guilt of the last ten years.

An overwhelming sadness tugged at the corners of her mouth and pressed the breath out of her lungs. “I had to do it, Elise,” she said softly, knowing the explanation was pitifully thin. “I never meant to hurt you.”

She lifted her shoulders once in supplication, an action completely ignored by the piercing dark eyes in the mirror. Then she turned and walked out—out of the bathroom, out of the Hotel Orleans, leaving the coyote coat draped over a chair in front of a man she’d never love.

Seven

Chantal hurt all over, inside and out, and added to the pain by cursing herself for being a fool and failure with each jerky step. Sprays of snow kicked up in front of her boots, some making their way under her dress to melt and tingle on her knees, but she was past feeling the cold. Her arms were wrapped around her waist and her chin was buried in the cowl neck of her dress for comfort, not heat conservation.

Losing her job and listings was one thing; losing her reputation and her ability to make a living was another. She’d gone into the night before with her eyes wide open, fully realizing the risks, and she’d come out the big loser.

Fool.
The word echoed between her ears in ever-increasing volume. No wonder her father had never asked her back. No wonder Paul had never written her. That Elise was going to throw her away like everyone else was a foregone conclusion.

Worthless fool.
She knew she was being hard on herself, but anything was better than succumbing to the other goodies lurking in her emotional grab bag—sadness, loneliness, and pure heartbreak.

Out there, somewhere, Jaz was cruising. It wouldn’t take him long to find easier game than she. A man with as much sexual charm and energy as he’d been lavishing on her didn’t need to take no for an answer.

He was right: They hadn’t even started this relationship, and if she had half a brain left after the previous night, she wouldn’t let one start. She’d tried love once without sharing her secrets and had tangled herself in a web of lies. Her attempts to fabricate a respectable history for herself and her family had twisted and turned on her until even a man who’d loved her had walked away in frustration. Her wounds had healed, almost too quickly, making her wonder if she’d been in love or just lonely. Jaz Peterson wouldn’t be so easy to forget. He’d shred her heart into a thousand pieces and she’d spend a lifetime trying to put them back together.

She found her Land Rover two blocks away and spent a few cathartic minutes kicking ice off the underside of the chassis. No coat, no job, no Jaz. Now all she needed to do was go home and figure out what she did have left, and she’d better start with a balance sheet.

* * *

Feeling only the slightest pang of guilt, Jaz juggled the containers of Chinese food in his arms, stuck a couple of the wire handles in his mouth, and picked the lock on Chantal’s cabin door. With a little skilled maneuvering the dead bolt gave way, and he shoved the door open with his good shoulder. All right so far, he thought. Fireworks wouldn’t hit the fan until she got home, but he was more than willing to take his chances. Some things in life were worth their inherent risk, and the night before, on a roof, he’d found one right under his nose. He didn’t understand it, but he knew it as surely as he was standing in her cabin with a lockpick in his hand and Chinese food dangling from his teeth.

He set the cartons on the kitchen counter and made another trip outside for his duffel bag and a bottle of tequila. He’d stay out of her bed until he was invited, but he wouldn’t stay out of her life—not until he knew Sandhurst had been neutralized, not until he believed her when she said, “Go away.” She’d need a pretty slick line to convince him, and she’d have to deliver it with her eyes closed. There wasn’t any room in her baby blues for lies, especially when he kissed her.

He filed that vital piece of information away and set about making a fire, finding a radio station through the bands of static, and figuring out how to work the microwave. He got action the first time and was feeling inordinately pleased with himself until the oven beeped and kept going. Not sure what was going on, he punched the stop button and checked the chow mein. Cold. His mother’s worked a lot better. In a minute it could incinerate anything, turning a cup of coffee into a volcano and a muffin into granite, even his mother’s muffins. Second time out nothing happened. After three more tries without being able to repeat his initial success, he rummaged through the kitchen drawers looking for instructions.

What he found was a lot more interesting: a burglar’s arsenal. In the right hands there was enough junk in the drawer to break into Fort Knox, and he just happened to know a pair of hands that could do it. The lady was good, and her daddy had been even better.

The plans for a pilot-activated weapons system he’d retrieved from Sandhurst the night before had been a powerful bargaining tool, and he’d used it to the maximum and beyond, undoubtedly setting himself up on the wrong end of General Moore’s favors list again. A small price to pay for the information he’d gotten.

A general’s arms reached longer than the law’s when it came to getting across continents and oceans and into files. Jaz knew the Cochards’ history and their present situation, knew they’d only been caught once, knew her brother had gone to jail. He also knew Paul Cochard had worked with an accomplice that night. It didn’t take much deductive reasoning to figure out why the beautiful French girl had ended up in America the day after her brother was arrested. She’d been sixteen.

Damn, Jaz thought. What some people did for a living was bad enough. What they dragged their children into was unforgivable. Elise was as clean as a newborn lamb, and from what he’d seen that afternoon, she wielded a heavy emotional stick when it came to her tainted niece. No matter. He’d take care of Elise in the morning. Tonight he wanted to take care of his lady, wanted to make things okay for her after the previous night’s fiasco.

Given her set of circumstances and the skill to pull it off, he would have gone after Sandhurst too. The man played by those kind of rules. Life never turned out as neat and tidy as you expected. Sometimes you had to use your edges to get through.

The microwave manual lay underneath the junk, and he pulled it out and flipped through the pages, finally finding what he needed. The thing worked great once you got it out of defrost.

While the chow mein and sweet and sour pork heated up, he sliced the lime he’d bummed off the bartender at the Orleans, cutting it into eight chunks, and putting four of them in the refrigerator. He wasn’t planning on getting drunk or getting her drunk. A little tequila would just soften some of those edges they’d both been straining.

Five minutes later he was stretched out in front of the couch with the paper cartons lined up on the hearth and the tequila bottle in easy reach. All he needed was a lady, a very special lady, and since she wasn’t sleeping with old Roger she should be home anytime. He loosened his tie, picked up the chopsticks and the chow mein, and settled in to wait.

* * *

Nobody she knew drove a rented Jeep, and the one in her driveway was a rental, beat up but reliable—like Jaz. It could only be. He had a lot of nerve showing up on her doorstep uninvited and breaking into her house, and she was just the lady to tell him. Those self-defeating moments of melting in his arms were over.

She stomped up to her front door, letting each reverberating step harden her resolve, giving him fair warning of the hurricane about to cloud his horizon. Bursting through the door in a whirl of snow and wind, she caught him half rising to his feet.

“
Friends
”—her strident voice froze him in mid-crouch—“do not break into other f
riends’
homes!” She slammed the door behind her, adding the perfect exclamation point. Mentally she gave herself a pat on the back for an appropriately dramatic entrance. Then he went and ruined it all with a cheerfully amused smile.

“Does this mean you’re not glad to see me?” he asked teasingly, both brows lifting above his sparkling clear eyes.

“Don’t evade the issue,” she warned, tossing her purse on the table near the window and jamming her fists on her hips.

He’d expected fireworks, Jaz though, not short-fused dynamite. Determination stiffened her warring stance and fractured the crystalline depths of her eyes into a hundred individual glints of steel. The elfin princess had turned into a Valkyrie of old. He was in trouble and thinking fast, but not fast enough.

“This partnership is formally dissolved, Jaz. Permanently dissolved. You know the way out.” Leveling him with one more resolute glance, she turned on her heel and strode into the bathroom. That door also slammed.

A slow sigh whistled through his lips as he resettled himself on the rug. Once again she’d told him to go away, and once again he didn’t believe her. The possibility of being wrong never crossed his mind. He bit off some egg roll and chewed reflectively, mulling over various and sundry opening lines for her return, searching for the right words, the right delivery. Something between a plea and an ultimatum would be nice. She might have been mad, but she wasn’t a hard woman, and he figured he had a safe amount of leeway on either end of the spectrum.