Flirting With Danger (15 page)

“Danger, Will Robinson, danger, danger,” she muttered, putting the folder down beside the tablet and digging deeper into her duffel for clean clothes.

This situation was becoming extremely dangerous, and not just because people were dying and cops were walking around the estate at will. Her first thought this morning when she’d seen Rick’s face and followed his gaze down to the tablet in his hand hadn’t been for her safety. It had been that he wouldn’t believe she hadn’t done it. She was
supposed
to worry about herself before anyone or anything else. That was rule number one. Take care of yourself.

Ignoring rule number one for the second time that morning, she went to Rick’s bathroom to take a shower instead of resuming her study of the tablet. She needed to think things through, and the shower was great for that. At the same time, neither did she want to touch the tablet again without Rick in the room. She evidently needed his protection even more now, but above that, she wanted him to trust her, which was absurd under the circumstances—hell, she would have been ready to arrest herself a half hour ago.

When she emerged from the bathroom she had a vague list of suspects, but she needed Rick to confirm who had access to the estate, and who had been there both the night of the robbery and either last night or this morning. And she wanted to look at today’s paper, just to confirm what Castillo had said, that her face had appeared on the page along with her name.
Good God
. As if she didn’t have enough to worry about.

So she wouldn’t be tempted by the tablet, she went out to Rick’s private veranda and sat in the shade of an umbrella to let her hair dry. She could go back to the room he’d loaned her, but then whoever’d been able to dump the tablet in her duffel would have no trouble at all getting into Rick’s suite and taking it back.

“Why are you smiling?”

She nearly jumped out of her skin as Rick stepped onto the veranda from the pool deck stairs. “Jesus Christ!” she gasped, putting a hand over her heart.

“Sorry,” he said, brief amusement touching his eyes. “I thought you had nerves of steel.”

“That’s Superman or something.”

“Ah. And you’re Catwoman.”

“Cool. Where’s the cop, Batman?”

“I just walked Castillo out to his car.”

“What did he want?”

“Showed me some photos of DeVore, wanted to know if I recognized him. He wanted to ask you the same questions, but I mentioned some words like harassment and attorney, and he agreed to put it off.”

“So is Etienne officially a suspect now?”

“Yes. He flew into Miami three days before the robbery, and they found copper wire in his hotel room, the same stuff that wired the bomb to the walls.”

Even with the evidence and his own sort-of confession, she still couldn’t believe the witty, self-centered Frenchman had tried to kill her. “What about the woman you saw?”

“Apparently I might have been hallucinating.”

“Apparently.”

“All they need is the tablet, and I think they’d be satisfied with the whole thing.” He sat opposite her. “And why were you smiling?”

“Oh. I just thought it was funny that I tried to steal the tablet, and now I’m sitting out here protecting it.”

His gaze sharpened. “Protecting it? What did you find out?”

“I just didn’t want to look at it without you here,” she returned, noting that today he looked more like a billionaire than a jock, with tan slacks and a white shirt open at the neck and the cuffs rolled up. Loafers with no socks completed the image, though she had the feeling he used clothes like she used personalities. “I have a couple of theories, though.”

As for her, she needed to decide if her image was going to
be rich guy’s date or his security consultant. The way he had looked her up and down in this morning’s shorts and tank top, overlaid with a shirt to hide the shrapnel scrapes on her back, the date attire worked better on him. But she needed to find her own balance.

“Tell me.”

“My duffel bag. Aside from the wanting me to look guilty thing, the only time somebody could have gotten to it was between when we left your car out front and when we went into the garage this morning.”

“Somebody got onto the property again. I figured that. We’ll go through the video in a few minutes.”

“I’m not so sure he hasn’t been here all along,” she said slowly, watching his expression.

“Explain.”

He didn’t scoff, only demanded to know her reasoning. It was something of a relief, she realized. “Etienne didn’t come back and plant the tablet. Someone else did.”

A muscle in his jaw jumped. “You think it’s one of my staff. But you’d never even met them until two days ago. Why frame you?”

“I don’t know. But the only people who were here for both events are you and me—and maybe somebody who works here.”

His eyes narrowed, and he stood to look over the veranda at the spread of his estate. “For a few hours I thought I could get away with just suspecting DeVore. But you’re right. The bloody tablet never left the estate. Shit.”

“I’d like to look at it and the file more closely. Maybe we’ll find there’s a history we’re missing, or…I don’t know. Or we can sit on our asses and wait for the cops to settle for blaming me.”

“I don’t like sitting on my ass. Especially when you’re being targeted.” Rick pulled open the veranda door and ushered her back into his suite. They sat on the couch, and she flipped open the file.

“Were you selling the tablet to the British Museum, or do
nating it?” she asked, spreading the photos out around the tablet and concentrating on the detailed trail the tablet had taken since its unearthing. Several century-long blank spaces didn’t even bother with suppositions about the stone’s whereabouts between its more public appearances.

“I’m donating it. Does that make a difference?”

“I don’t know. This is all so…strange.” She flipped another page. “Yeesh. According to this, your tablet’s one of the things that persuaded Calvert and Schliemann about the location of Troy. This is why they dug in Hisarlik in 1868.”

Rick smiled. “I know that.”

“I didn’t. I had a short timetable. Not enough time to do as much research as I’d like.” Scowling, she turned from gazing at the tablet to pick up one of the photos. “I’d never use it to frame somebody, not when I wasn’t even a suspect. It’s way too cool for that. Too…” She trailed off, staring. Something in the photo caught her eye, and she shifted it closer to the tablet. “I’ll be damned.”

“That’s not right,” Rick said a moment later, leaning against her shoulder to look. He gestured at the photo, then at one of the symbols on the tablet. “On the photo the engravings here are faded almost to nothing. On the tablet you can see both of them.”

“The carvings are all deeper than they look in the photos,” she said half to herself, picking up another picture to make certain the shallow look of the original carvings wasn’t just a trick of the light or the camera. “Wow. I don’t believe it. This is a—”

“It’s a fake,” he cut in, picking the tablet up and turning it over in his hands.

The ramifications left her distinctly light-headed. “You have a good eye for detail,” she said slowly, her mind retracing everything they’d learned so far about the robbery.

“You’re not surprised, are you, Samantha?” he asked, his thigh brushing hers.

“Like I said, I’d be more surprised at somebody pitching the original at me for no good reason. But the question is, is
this a good enough counterfeit to work as a donation to the British Museum?”

He glanced at her. “For a while, probably. With only three in the world they were gobsmacked to be getting it. And before the robbery, they—and I—wouldn’t have had any reason to suspect anything. After display, though, they’d do some studies. That’s why I was donating it.” Richard straightened. “You’re not suggesting I tell the police that I temporarily misplaced the tablet, then go ahead with donating the fake.”

With a quick grin, she shook her head.
As if he would
. “No. But I’m wondering if someone had that in mind. The real one isn’t here, but that might explain why the fake is.”

“So framing you was just convenient? ‘Oops, I forgot to make the switch?’ That puts the reason for the bomb back into question again.”

“Yep. And how about this?” she countered, shuffling the photos again. “Why make a good-quality fake if you’re just going to blow it up?”

“You don’t,” he said slowly. “My estate gets recompensed the same amount whether the thing is stolen or lost or destroyed.”

Rick stood. She thought he meant to pace, as she did when she was trying to decipher a particularly complicated knot, but instead he went to the phone and dialed. She made herself sit still, trusting him not to do something that would endanger them—or her freedom.

“Kate? Hi, it’s Rick. Is Tom in?”

Sam rolled her eyes. Even if she didn’t half suspect him, she had to admit that she liked antagonizing Donner. Besides being fun, it might piss him off enough to get him to make a mistake.

“Tom. Who the devil does my payroll? No, not mine personally. The payroll for the estate. I need to know who’s been here over the past…three weeks, say.”

Sitting forward, Samantha slid the photos back into their file. “You might also check outside services who have the same person here on a regular basis.”

“Right. Tom, no, you don’t need to bring it by in person. Just fax it to me. But I need it today, so you’ll have to go into the office. And I also want a list of outside services personnel who are regularly assigned here.” He paused again, listening, his stance going from alert to aggressive. “None of your bloody business.”

“He’s talking about me, right?”

“Hush.” He turned his back on her, striding to the veranda door with phone in hand. “All right, all right, yes—something new’s come up. Be here at ten tomorrow morning with a trial attorney—Macon, maybe—somebody who takes client-attorney privilege seriously.”

As he punched the phone off, he walked back to the couch. “Don’t argue,” he said, before she could open her mouth. “I believe in being prepared for any contingency. If Castillo or somebody gets hold of this”—and he gestured at the tablet—“you are going to be in serious trouble. Fake or not, I don’t want you caught with it.”

“That was probably the thinking of whoever dumped it on me. Do you want me to hide it somewhere?”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“Rick, with all due respect, you’re a smart guy, but you don’t have some of my talents. I know how to hide things. I’m in this shit deeper than you are, and I’d just as soon you not end up in jail because I asked you for help.”

“Bit late for that, my dear,” he said, brushing hair back over her shoulder. “As we say in Britain, in for a penny, in for a pound.”

God, just the touch of his hand on her hair made her all shivery. On impulse she leaned over and kissed him. Rick wrapped an arm around her shoulder, pulling her in closer and deepening the embrace of their mouths. As before when he began touching her like that, her mind shut down. It was so tempting, just to sink into him, to let everything go away. Everything but pleasure and heat and Richard Addison. It would work for a while, until someone decided to drop the gun that had killed Etienne into her purse or something.

She pulled back, but he pursued her, sliding her down onto her back with her head resting against the duffel bag. A warm hand slid up under her shirt, cupping her breast.

“Rick, stop,” she protested, in a choked-off moan of pleasure.

“I want you,” he murmured, ducking his face into her neck.

“Good God.” Shuddering, she shoved at him. “We fucked all night. Stop distracting me,” she muttered, pulling back through his arms.

“I think that’s a compliment.”

“I want to see the videos for last night and this morning, Rick.”

“Later.”

“Whoever this is, he’s been a step ahead of us all the way,” she said, putting a hand over his sensuous mouth when he would have argued with her. “I want to at least pull even. Ahead would be nice, too, don’t you think?”

With a curse, he blew out his breath and sat up again. “All right. We’ll look at the video.” He looked over at the tablet. “And where do you recommend we put this? Under the bed?”

“I don’t think so.”

After she wrapped it back in its protective cloth, she dumped out her knapsack, folded a shirt around the bundle, and slid it in. “There. That’ll do until we get it out of your room and somewhere safer.”

Rick, though, was toeing through her knapsack refuse. He bent and picked up a broken computer board. “And this is?”

“Part of my home computer. I heard the police coming, and I didn’t want them accessing the system.”

He gazed at her, his expression part lustful and part worried. “We are seriously going to consider another line of work for you when this is over with,” he murmured.

At the moment, it almost sounded like a good idea.

Sunday, 11:54 a.m.

Ronald Clark had been moved to the day shift after the break-in, and he was seated in his chair before the bank of video monitors and computers when Richard led Samantha into the security room.

“Mister Addison,” the guard said, standing. The Adam’s apple bobbed above his tie, and his thinning blond hair was slicked back in a distinctly unflattering style. A cop wannabe, she decided immediately, who probably couldn’t figure out why he kept failing the psych profile part of the entrance exam.

“Clark. Miss Jellicoe and I would like to review the tapes for the garage, starting at about nine last night and up through ten this morning.”

“And for the front drive at the same time,” Samantha added.

Clark sat again. “Um, okay. I’ll put ’em up on those screens over there. It’ll take me a minute.”

“What time did you start your shift this morning, Clark?”
Samantha pursued, brushing a hand against Richard’s arm as she passed him.

She intoxicated him just by being in the room. And she’d accused
him
of being too distracting. Since she’d dropped into his office to ask for his help, she’d become his obsession. To date he’d canceled three meetings, four conference calls, and a flight to Miami. The cost of his neglect could potentially come to millions, but a few one way or the other didn’t matter all that much. It seemed more important that when Samantha was around his heart raced, his pulse heated, and life became more…alive. The glimpses of the clever, funny woman beneath the cool, professional facade fascinated him.

“I came in at six,” Clark answered, looking from his employer to Samantha. “Louie Mourson had the night shift. Why?”

“No reason,” Richard answered, following Samantha to the monitors in the corner.

The look she aimed at him said otherwise, but he wasn’t about to accuse people who worked for him without a damned good reason. She gripped his shoulder, going up on her toes to reach his ear. “He was here both times,” she whispered. “Don’t be so quick to dismiss coincidence.”

“I dismissed it where you’re concerned,” he returned in the same soft voice.

Samantha grimaced. “Yeah, well, you were here both times, too.”

The monitor flickered to life. They were looking at a video of the garage taken from the southeast corner, giving the camera a view of both the wide front doors and the smaller door leading to the house. Unlike the outdoor cameras this one was fixed, rather than rotating back and forth.

Samantha nodded her approval. “That’s good placement,” she said, “except you don’t have a redundant camera. If someone figures out how to get past this one, they’re in.”

“Not everybody is an expert at electronics and burglary,” he muttered, keeping his voice low so Clark couldn’t overhear.

“Anybody who could get this far into the estate without being detected would be an expert,” she shot back at him huffily.

“Could you get in and out of there without anyone knowing?”

“Oh, they’d know I’d been there, but not until after I stole that hot blue Bentley Continental GT and left again.”

So she liked the Bentley. Next time they went somewhere together, he’d let her drive. Of course she apparently didn’t have a driver’s license, but that seemed the least of their worries. “Can we speed up the tape from here?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Yep. Just use the keyboard there under the desk. It’s all set, Mr. Addison.”

From the meter in the corner of the screen, it was three minutes after nine o’clock, and the Mercedes hadn’t yet been returned to the garage. Samantha pulled out the keyboard and tapped a key, and the tape glided into high speed. After about forty-five minutes, the car zoomed into view, taking its place among the others.

Samantha backed the tape up again to watch the entry at regular speed. Ben Hinnock drove the SLK into its spot, got out, wiped a smudge off the windshield, and left through the wide doors, which closed behind him. At eleven the preprogrammed lights dimmed, leaving the garage in heavy shadows.

“That’s stupid,” she muttered, keying the tape into high speed again. “Like the cars need dark so they can sleep or something.”

“How can you see anything with the tape going that fast?”

“Just watch the trunk. That’s all we need to see, unless you want to sit here for thirteen hours.”

“Okay. But what do you suggest we do if we find something, Samantha?”

“If we find something, then we show it to Castillo, say we looked in my bag because of it, and ‘wow, look what we found.’”

He lifted an eyebrow. “You’re frightening.”

She kept her eyes on the screen, but her lips twitched in a fleeting smile. “You scare the hell out of me, too.”

Richard leaned his hip against the table, settling in for a long, nonblinking surveillance. “We should have had breakfast first. Or at least coffee.”

“Soda. Coffee’s for amateurs.”

“Did I mention that you’re very stra—”

“Whoa.” Moving fast, Samantha froze the tape. “Did you see that?”

Richard stiffened. “What? Nothing moved.”

“No, not that. The time.” She backed the tape up, then sent it forward again at normal speed. At seven-fifteen the tape bumped and jumped to seven-nineteen. Nothing else in the picture changed. “Four minutes.”

“That’s what happened with the secure room’s video the night of the robbery.” He looked at her. “How easy is that to do?”

Samantha shrugged. “If you know the system, it’s fairly simple. If you’re sure it’s not our friend Clark,” she whispered, gesturing, “then it was done somewhere between here and there, and done so that it didn’t set off any alarms.”

“Wouldn’t Clark see that the screen was blank?”

“The camera picture might have looked normal, and it just wasn’t recording. Or the image might just freeze, or something.” She swiveled in her chair. “Clark, what time do you take your morning break?”

The guard ran a hand across his balding pate. “I’ve been going up to the kitchen for coffee at about seven-fifteen, but just for five minutes or so. Then I usually don’t take another break until nine-thirty.”

“You’re pretty consistent, then?”

“Well, yeah. Hans said he’d shoot me if I tried to make my own coffee in there, and he doesn’t have the first pot ready until after seven, most mornings.”

“Hans is very protective about the reputation of his cof
fee,” Richard supplied with a slight smile. “He won an award for it, once.”

“Too bad I don’t drink it, then.”

She pushed the tape into fast-forward again, but nothing moved until after ten o’clock, when the two of them strolled into the garage, hand in hand and wearing their dressing robes. Richard watched as they flirted in fast motion, noting with a deep rush of satisfaction the way she gazed at him when he wasn’t looking. Castillo came into the picture as they were both bent over the boot, and thankfully nothing of the tablet showed in the video.

Sam stopped the playback. “Just in case, we should look at the front drive video, too,” she said. “Maybe whoever it was walked by on their way in or out.”

“Except that you don’t think whoever it was has been going in and out,” he reminded her. “They’ve been here all along.”

“It’s looking more and more like somebody who knows the household routine and has a good working knowledge of the security system.”

“The part I still don’t get is the bomb,” Richard said, taking her hand as she rose. Perhaps it was sappy, but he felt the need to touch her every few minutes, to make certain she was still there, and to show whoever might be watching, himself included, that she belonged to him—whether she realized it yet or not.

“May I please have some breakfast? Or it’s brunch now, I guess,” she asked in an exaggerated pleading voice as they returned to the hallway. “I’ll think better when I’m not starving.”

“On my veranda,” he agreed.

“On
my
veranda,” she countered. “I can see the front drive from there.”

He couldn’t blame her for being paranoid. If she hadn’t been good at what she did, she’d be dead. “I’ll put in an order with Hans and check my office to see if Donner’s sent me that fax yet.”

She nodded and would have headed up the stairs, except that he took her wrist and turned her back to face him. “What?” she asked.

“I can’t seem to get enough of you,” he muttered, and touched his mouth to hers again.

“You’re not so bad yourself, for a rich-guy Brit,” she replied a little breathlessly. “Mind if I stop off in your room for my stuff?”

Her stuff—which would include the fake tablet
. “Samantha. You—”

“I don’t want that thing found in your private rooms, regardless,” she said in a tone that surprised him with its seriousness. “I won’t do anything with it until you get there.”

Richard knew better than to fight a battle he couldn’t possibly win. “All right. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

She smiled a little at him. “I’m not going anywhere. Partners, remember?”

He
remembered. He just hoped she did.

Rick had missed the main difficulty in all this mess, Samantha mused as she strolled toward his private rooms. Him. She made her lifestyle an excuse for not dating much, though she had to admit that most men she ran across seemed rather…dull. When their most exciting activity was Pilates, they really couldn’t compete with her evenings. Rick Addison could compete, and in spades. And he intoxicated her. She’d known him for less than a week, and already she felt like an addict. How would she make herself leave at the end of this?

“Miss Jellicoe.”

With a start, Samantha turned around. The prissy Italian acquisitions manager, his curling black hair styled to perfection, strode up to her. “Partino?”

“Si. I just wanted to welcome you to the company.”

She frowned. “Beg pardon?”

“I saw the newspaper this morning. Rick has hired you for art security.”

“Oh, that. Yes, just until we get this mess figured out.”

“I made some calls. You work for the Norton. You are an expert in art and antiquities.”

He almost made it sound like an accusation, so she smiled.
Charm time
. “I’m not trying to take your job or anything. I’m here for security, and that’s it. And just temporarily.”

Partino smiled brightly back at her, though she couldn’t help noticing that the expression didn’t touch his dark eyes. “Of course. That’s just as well, anyway.”

“And why is that?”

His smile deepened. “You are not the first employee to try sleeping with the boss, Miss Jellicoe. None of them still work here.”

She narrowed her eyes. “I think that’s more my business than yours.”

He nodded. “Yes. You understand, we must all look out for our best interests.”

“Oh, I understand that.”

“Good day, then.” With a bow, he turned on his heel.

She shrugged off the slightly slimy feeling the odd little man left behind. He probably wasn’t feeling quite his best, anyway. An acquisitions manager who allowed art objects to get stolen couldn’t feel very secure about his own continued employment.

At the same time, as far as she knew it was the first time anything had gone missing from the property—a pretty good track record, considering the quality of the stuff Rick collected. And Partino had worked for Rick for a good ten years. What happened to the little Italian wasn’t any of her business, though if she’d been the one to take the tablet, she supposed it would be her fault if he were fired. Too weird.

Her room and Rick’s were in opposite wings of the house, and she was out of breath by the time she’d hauled her knapsack, duffel, and kit down what felt like a mile of hallways and galleries. Yeesh. She was going to have to hit the gym—though if she and Rick continued exercising as they had last night, that would probably take care of her daily workout.

She smiled as she shouldered open her suite door and dragged the duffel inside. If they continued as they had last night, she’d be dead in a week. What a way to go, though.

The knapsack would have to stay packed until Rick came in, since she remained determined not to touch the tablet outside of his presence. She had more clean underwear and clothes in the duffel, though, and nice as the things were that Rick provided, she felt more…independent in her own clothes.

Hefting the heavy duffel again, she dragged it to the bedroom. In the entryway something pressed against her thigh, and she instinctively backed away an inch.

It was too late. With a faint pop the safety pin at the end of a wire pulled out of the grenade taped to the inside bedroom wall. Gasping, she slammed her hand around, just catching the lever against the grenade as it started to spring away.

The movement overbalanced her, but she managed to keep her fingertips pressed against the lever as she stumbled against the doorjamb and fell to the floor. “Oh, my God,” she rasped, not daring even to breathe. On the far side of the door another grenade wobbled, the pin hanging on by a fraction. Her leg, tangled in the wire, jerked, and the pin slipped another millimeter. “
Rick
!”

Richard whistled as he strolled toward Samantha’s private rooms. A bowl of sugared strawberries in his hand, he couldn’t believe he would be in such a good mood with a thief and a murderer potentially loose on his estate. But neither situation could quell the thought that last night he’d had what was probably the best sex of his life. And come hell or high water, he was going to have more within the hour.

“
Rick
!”

The fear in the scream froze his blood. Dropping the strawberries, he sprinted to Samantha’s room. The door was half-open, and he charged in. “Samantha?”

“Here!”

He saw her legs across the bedroom doorway, one of
them at an odd angle. “What happened?” he barked, lunging forward.

“
Stop!
It’s a grenade!”

Stopping at the doorway, he leaned into the room. She lay on the floor, half on her back, one hand pressed against a grenade secured with duct tape to the wall at about thigh level. On the other side, another grenade teetered, still with the safety pin in—but only because the wire hadn’t pulled it completely free. Her left leg was tangled in the wire.