A Bid for Love (14 page)

Soft? Soft curls? It was the first time Jared had touched Cassi’s hair, and he could hardly believe that those tiny ringlets were soft and silky, not brittle as he’d expected.

“They’re getting impatient,” Cassi said.

Jared focused intently on the men. Now was certainly not the time to dwell on his romantic fantasy.
What can I do to save us?
he thought. Even with the training he’d gone through to be a guard for Laranda’s art treasures, he wasn’t prepared for this.

The two men scrutinized each of the many passersby, who were heading for the beach, and occasionally glanced at their watches, shaking their heads. Their black hair shone in the sun.

Jared knew he had to do something. Any minute now, the men might decide to come searching for them. Or turn and see them. And he hadn’t any doubts as to the hardware their jackets must conceal. Touching the reassuring weight of the Glock under his own arm, he debated what to do. Alone, Jared felt he could outrun them. But with Cassi, he wasn’t so sure.

“Let’s back away,” he whispered. “Slowly, so we won’t draw their attention.”

Yet even as Cassi obeyed, the men turned. In a single motion they leapt toward Jared and Cassi.

 “Run!” shouted Jared.

They sprinted down the street, drawing wide-eyed stares from the people they passed. Jared held onto Cassi’s hand, hoping to pull her along, but she shook off his grasp and wrapped both her hands around the box that held the Mother and Baby statue. She pulled ahead of him, the sun reflecting from her dark hair and bringing out the golden highlights.

Jared shook his head in amazement. The woman sure could run!

He followed Cassi’s lead and shifted the heavier weight of the Buddha to both hands. His tie flipped up at the movement, hitting him in the mouth and staying there as he gasped for air. Spitting out the cloth, he jerked his face to the side, pushing his sore body to run as fast as Cassi. The men behind, unencumbered with art treasures, were rapidly closing the gap.

On they ran to the Venice Beach Boardwalk, where they had to weave in and out of the hordes of people dressed in swimming suits, shorts, leather vests, and a variety of strange costumes. Pink, orange, and green hair dotted the crowd as often as black or blond. Jared had been on the boardwalk only twice before in his life, and the variety of individuals there amazed him. Along the strip of pavement that separated the shops from the sandy beach, jugglers, artists, disco-dancing in-line skaters, musicians, and even comics plied onlookers for cash with their outrageous—and sometimes very talented—spectacles.

As they passed several mimes and a juggler, Jared felt his lungs begin to burn. He was in good shape, but not accustomed to long runs. He lagged behind, and Cassi shot a worried glance behind her.

“In here!” she yelled, ducking into the opening of a nearby shop.

Jared followed. It was a clothing store, and already Cassi was grabbing several items off the racks. “Quick, get some clothes and change.” Not waiting to see if he understood, she plunged into a dressing room.

Once again Jared followed her lead, though he wondered at its prudence. At least it seemed that in their mad rush through the colorful crowd, they had pulled ahead of and perhaps temporarily lost their pursuers.

He changed quickly into the long shorts and T-shirt he’d grabbed. They were slightly large, but Jared didn’t have the time to be choosy. He wrapped his dress pants, shirt, and jacket around the Buddha’s case; his holster and gun lay just under the first layer where he could reach them at will. Cautiously, he peered from the dressing room out into the small store. Cassi was there, dressed in fluorescent pink shorts and a white T-shirt three times too big, her hair tucked up under a straw hat. To someone not knowing her, she looked completely different from the sophisticated woman of before.

She smiled when she saw him. “Do you think they’ll recognize us?”

“Not you.” He grabbed a straw hat for himself and went to the counter, where he quickly paid for the clothing. There was only one thing missing. “Do you have coolers?” he asked the clerk. “Big ones?” The man shook his head, watching Jared a little strangely.

Jared turned to Cassi and she shrugged, drawing her eyebrows together in puzzlement. “Why do you want a cooler?”

Before he could explain, the door to the shop opened. Both tensed, but it was only a couple of young boys, carrying of all things a large cooler between them. Jared eyed it for less than a second before saying, “How much for the cooler?”

“No way, man. Get your own,” said one of the boys, backing away.

“I mean it. What’ll it take? A hundred? Two hundred?”

The boys stared at him in amazement, their eyes glazing over as they tried to calculate Jared’s offer versus the price of the cooler and the few drinks inside.

“Two hundred,” the oldest boy said. Before the boy even finished speaking, Jared pulled the money out of his wallet. He was twenty dollars short, but Cassi handed him a bill. While the boys counted their loot, Jared peeked outside the door and unceremoniously dumped the ice and drinks onto the edge of the boardwalk. In less than two seconds he was back in the store, gently placing the Buddha’s case inside the cooler.

Cassi smiled as she put her box with the Mother and Baby on top of the Buddha and arranged their extra clothing to pad their expensive cargo. “Pretty good,” she told him.

Jared grinned, though he found it strange that her approval should mean so much to him. “Come on, let’s go.”

They left the shop with the cooler between them, moving quickly along the boardwalk, but not fast enough to set them apart from the crowd.

“Don’t look now,” Cassi said softly, “but I see them. They’re checking the stores farther down the walk. They must have passed by the store we went into and are doubling back now. They’ll catch up to us soon.”

“We can’t go back to the car,” Jared said.

“The beach then,” Cassi suggested. “Let’s sit down and pretend we belong. They’ll be looking for someone who’s moving.”

They angled out for the sand, but soon realized the two men had separated. While one checked the boardwalk and peered into the stores, the other scanned the beach. He approached them from behind, and Jared tensed. He could see the thug’s hand in his jacket pocket and the telltale bulge of his gun. The man had a hooked nose and was definitely one of the men who had attacked him at the hotel.

Jared lowered the cooler slowly and turned to Cassi. “Behind us,” he muttered, pulling his hat as far down as possible to hide his battered face.

“Kiss me,” she said.

Kiss her? Now? While the idea was something he’d been entertaining in his private fantasies since he’d seen her helpless in the hospital, this moment hardly seemed the time for romantic advances.

“Hurry, he’s coming,” Cassi hissed softly. Right. She wasn’t being romantic. She was trying to blend in. Could it work?

Jared pulled Cassi close. Her arms went around his neck, and despite the seriousness of their situation, he enjoyed her soft touch. Their lips met, tentatively at first and then more passionately, like a real couple. Jared’s heart hammered against his chest, and he wondered if Cassi could feel the pounding. He could always explain this as terror of the men who chased them, but in his heart he knew Cassi’s closeness was the real cause.

The kiss continued, and from the corner of his eye he spied their pursuer passing them. Would he look closely at them? Would he recognize Jared from the night before?

Jared would have held his breath, but since he was already doing so as he kissed Cassi—which, he reasoned, had to explain the sudden dizziness in his head—he couldn’t do anything but peek out from under his eyelashes.

To his relief, the man averted his gaze, just as Jared normally avoided looking at others who kissed in public.

Jared lifted his head. “He’s gone.” Relief washed over Cassi’s face. But now that the danger had passed, if only temporarily, Jared wanted to kiss Cassi again.

“What should we do now?” Cassi asked, her face flushed. Her hat was pushed back, and curly hair spilled out along her forehead.

Jared shrugged. He scanned the beach, tensing abruptly. “He’s coming back.” He grabbed Cassi again and lowered his lips to hers. After a long moment, he dared to peek beneath his lashes and saw that it wasn’t their pursuer after all, but someone dressed similarly.

He knew he should let Cassi go, that it wasn’t right to continue kissing her under false pretenses. Still, he kissed her once more before forcing himself away.

“He’s gone,” he said, his eyes searching her face for whatever it might reveal.

Biting her lip, Cassi dropped her gaze and stared at the sand. “Let’s go that way, nearer to the ocean,” she said, motioning in the direction opposite the one the thug had taken.

They walked along the beach in silence, carrying the cooler between them. The sand slid into Jared’s loafers, but he didn’t care. Cassi seemed to have the same problem with her sandals, and she stopped a moment to remove them. At long last, they emerged on an unfamiliar street, far away from where they had parked near Carl’s. From there they called a taxi and began the drive back to the hotel.

“You missed your flight,” Jared said, checking his phone.

Cassi shrugged and stared out the taxi window at the passing buildings. Her eyes were shuttered, and Jared wished he dared ask what she was thinking.

“I’ll get another flight,” she said. “Tonight or tomorrow. Do you think we should call the police?”

“Probably. I don’t know.” He thought a moment. “Look, come with me to put the Buddha in the hotel safe. I’ll hire that security company to transport it to New York, and then I’ll drive you to the airport. I want to make sure you get there okay. Or we could have dinner and go tomorrow. We still have to find some way to retrieve your luggage from my rental car.”

“We don’t need to have dinner,” Cassi said. “I can go tonight.”

Something about her words reminded him of how she’d reacted when Sam Boader had asked her out. Jared had thought then that she didn’t recognize the man’s intentions, but like Boader, he had only suggested dinner to have more time alone with her. Was it possible she misunderstood his intentions? Then again, she lived in San Diego, and he lived in New York, practically a continent away, so what were his intentions?

Before he could decide, the taxi drove up to the hotel. His attention was diverted immediately as he noticed several marked and unmarked police cars with flashing lights blocking parts of the drive. A growing crowd of bystanders lingered on the walkways and some even stood in the streets.

 He paid the driver with the bill Cassi had shoved into his hand as she jumped from the car. When he joined her, she was already questioning an elderly hotel employee who stood outside. “It’s like everything’s gone crazy,” the old man was saying, shaking his white head. “We had a break-in at the hotel safe, and it set off all the alarms, but we weren’t able to catch the thieves. Strange thing is that they got in, but they didn’t take nothin’ from the safe. Not a thing.” He leaned toward them conspiratorially. “The real shocker was when the Feds showed up in them fancy unmarked cars of theirs and blocked the drive.” His chin jutted out in the direction of the offending vehicles. “They didn’t known about the break-in. Just came to demand that we open the safe to show them something. But whatever they was lookin’ for, they didn’t find it. They went up to some guy’s room on the fourth floor and tore it apart, though. I heard someone say something about him being a Buddhist or something. I don’t envy that guy when they catch up to him. They looked real upset.”

They thanked the man for the information, and he gave them a nod before ambling away.

“Come on.” Cassi tugged softly on his arm. They walked down the street until they were well away from the confusion.

“We’ll go to another hotel,” Jared said, shifting the weight of the cooler they carried between them. “We can’t go back there. Maybe we should go to the police. But if this is as big as Carl seems to think, I’m not sure who to trust.”

Cassi stopped in the street and stared at Jared, horror filling her expression. “Linden,” she said. “I told him you bought the Buddha and that you’d be here for a couple days. I said you’d probably keep it in the safe. You don’t think he’s involved, do you? And why is the FBI interested?”

Tears glistened in her eyes, and Jared could see how much it hurt her to think that her good friend and mentor was involved. Jared hastened to reassure her. “I’m sure this has nothing to do with your boss. It could be anyone.” Jared thought for a minute. “Even that man who helped me last night was there when I called Laranda. He could have heard me tell her that the Buddha would be in the safe. For all we know, he’s working for someone.”

“You think so?” Cassi asked hopefully.

He didn’t, not really, but what he didn’t know about what was going on could fill an entire room. “It’s just as likely as anything else. Anyway, it seems to me that there are at least three parties after the Buddha: the men at the beach, the men who broke into the safe, and the Feds.”

Cassi started walking again. “But why? Because it’s counterfeit? There has to be something more.” She sounded scared. “Maybe we should just take it to the FBI at the hotel and be done with it.”

Jared thought it over and shook his head. “How do we know they’re really FBI? Or if they are, that they are actually there because of the Buddha? No. Tomorrow I’m going to the funeral, and afterwards I’m taking this statue to Laranda. Then she can do what she wants with it while I take a vacation. Maybe I’ll join Carl in Mexico.”

His comment brought a smile to Cassi’s lips, but when she spoke, her voice was serious. “What are you going to do with the Buddha during the funeral? They’ll be there, you know—all three groups who want the ugly thing. If you’re carrying a box, you’ll never get anywhere near without getting caught.”

“I’ll stash it somewhere,” Jared said. “It’s not as if it’s really worth four hundred thousand.”

“You’ll have to find some other way to fly home, too. They might be waiting for you at the airport.”