Keepsake (21 page)

Big sigh. Back she went. They waited. She returned.

"Nope."

"Do you mind if I look?" Quinn offered.

She had no objection, and he went through every coat on every wheeled rack in the room. He came back out just in time to hear the hatcheck girl say to Olivia, "Now that I think about it, there
was
a guy in here earlier, poking around. I assumed that he came back to put away his gloves or something. Do you think he stole your cape? Why would he steal it?"

"You know," said Quinn, gritting his teeth, "the whole point of a hatcheck girl is to check on the hats."

"I know that, sir," she said with sullen courtesy.

"Oh, never mind, Quinn. It'll show up somewhere. I'll be warm in your car," she said, but she was shivering already as the nearby doors opened and closed.

Something felt very wrong. The cloakroom was filled
with furs, and any thief worth his salt should have gone for one of them, not some funky cape.

"Can you describe the man you saw?" he asked the sulking help.

"No. I only saw him from the back. I couldn't even say if he was wearing a mask, but he was definitely wearing a tux."

"How did he get out of the room without you seeing him?"

"Is this an inquisition?" she huffed.

"Quinn, let it go," Olivia said, clearly anxious to leave.

Fed up himself, Quinn took his coat and wrapped it around Olivia and said, "I'll bring the car around myself."

When he pulled up, Olivia was waiting outside, looking waiflike and lost in his big black coat. Her face brightened when he pulled up, and he felt a surge of odd, unexpected triumph. She was throwing her lot in with him. Olivia Bennett, Princess of Keepsake, was about to take up with Quinn Leary, the gardener's son. Him!

How could he not feel triumphant?

As
they
drove
away from the estate, he could see Olivia's spirits begin to rise. She didn't ask Quinn about the meeting with her father, and he didn't offer to fill her in. Maybe she knew that Owen Bennett tended to be free and easy with his checkbook whenever things got sticky. If she didn't, then someone else was going to have to tell her. It sure wasn't going to be Quinn.

In any case, by the time the Mercedes began the steep climb up the hill to her townhouse, Olivia seemed to have shaken off her jittery mood and had become, once again, the warm and alluring woman who'd had him going around in circles of lust and longing for the past few hours.

In the hall she dumped his coat over a tall-backed chair and slipped off her shoes, then said, "Turn around."

Puzzled, Quinn did as he was told. When he turned back to her, he saw a pair of gray pantyhose lying
on top of his coat. Good news: t
here wasn't a whole lot of clothi
ng left on her body. Bad news: w
hy had she made him turn around?

Glancing at a small brass clock on the mantel, Olivia said, "Not long to midnight. I'll make tea."

More bad news. He'd been thinking wine.

"Fine with me," he lied, and he followed her into the kitchen. He watched her put on a kettle, taking satisfaction from the sight of her moving, unbound, in that silvery, clingy dress. She was as fluid as liquid mercury, and probably as tricky to hold.

"Too bad I never got the chance to meet Eileen," he said, trying hard to keep his hands off those hips as she glided barefoot past him. "She sounds like someone I'd like to know."

"Eileen would never come with Zack having a temperature," Olivia said as she took out two mugs. "Frankly, I was surprised to see
Rand
there; he worries about the kids as much as she does. They're incredibly dear to him."

She added, "I suppose he felt obliged to put in at least a token appearance. New Year's Eve means a lot to my mother. My father proposed on New Year's Eve."

"A time for new beginnings," Quinn agreed, hoping fervently that this was one of them.

She brushed his sleeve as she reached for the tea canister. He turned and brought his arm around her, flattening his hands on the counter on either side of her. Penned in like that, she might have turned skittish, or even hostile.

No siree. "Hey, aren't you cramped in that monkey suit?" she asked, reaching up to his bow tie. With ease she undid the knot, then tossed the strip of black cloth on the counter—and furthermore, went on to undo the top three studs of his shirt.

Good
news.

"All better," she said lightly.

"Much better," he said, lowering his mouth to hers.

Their lips met, their tongues touched. Her arms came up around his neck and he found himself sliding his hands along them, simply to savor the soft, smooth surface of her skin. He was used to working with stone—hard, rough, resistant—and she was everything that his work was not.

Liquid mercury she may have been, but she was turning him into a puddle of molten iron as he deepened the kiss, pinning her in his arms, all the while listening to the shriek of his blood roaring through his veins.

"Boi
-
ling," she
murmured.

"Oh God
... you bet
."

"I mean—" She pointed limply toward the stove. The chrome kettle, spouting steam, was doing it with a vengeful screech.

He let her go, reluctantly, and she filled the poppy-red mugs. After that she set them with symmetrical precision on a small wood tray. She put a cobalt blue plate between the mugs. She laid two spoons, like a pair of oars, one on each side of the tray. And then, very carefully, she began carrying the tray out of the room.

"Should we think about tea bags?" he asked at last.

"Oh! Those. Right," she said, frowning into the mugs of boiled water. She looked up at Quinn and the frown remained.
"You.
Into the living room and stay there until I bring the tea."

Quinn smiled and took himself out of her sight, convinced that he was about to experience the best New Year's Eve he'd ever had. He tossed off his jacket—the place was nicely warm—and rolled up his shirtsleeves. Free from the distraction that was Olivia, Quinn was able to focus on the efficient majesty of her townhouse. It wasn't large, but all the glass sure as hell made it look spacious. During the day it probably seemed twice as big, because the floor-to-ceiling windows would bring much of the outside in.

He was standing at one of those bare, oversized windows, looking out into an unnervingly black landscape, when Olivia came in with the tray and set it on a
glass-topped
table in front of a sinfully
deep-cushioned
couch.

Quinn stayed where he was, thinking now about that blackness and about the missing cape. Who took it, and where was it now? More important, where was
he
now?

"I found some cookies that are hardly soggy at all. Come sit. We don't have much time until they drop the ball," she said, flipping through the
channels
with her remote.

He walked back to the sofa and sank into a cloud-soft cushion beside her. The TV was broadcasting merriment from
Times Square
, but his mind was in computer mode now.

Why steal it? Did so
meone know it was hers? How? Ei
ther he had seen her arrive in it, or he had watched the two of them leave
Olivia's
townhouse earlier. Of course, someone could have known from the get-go that the cape was Olivia's. A friend or a relative. Quinn decided to put that possibility aside for the moment. It didn't make sense, and he didn't want it to make sense.

"Quinn! Really! Where did I lose you?" Olivia asked, waving her hand in front of his face as if she were a hypnotist whose act had gone wrong.

"Hmm? Sorry," he said. "My mind was somewhere else."

"So I see," she said, standing back up. With a look of pure, devilish mischief she hiked her silver slip of a dress to mid-thigh and brought one knee down on each side of him, straddling him. She began working the lower buttons of his shirt.

"Now you're trying to shock me," he said mildly.

"Am I succeeding?"

"Real well." He had a hard-on that felt the size of his forearm. What was it that a great historian had once said? God gave man a brain and a penis, with only enough blood to run one at a time?

Right now, Quinn knew just where all the blood was pooled.

He looked up into Olivia's eyes, dark and dancing and inviting, and he decided, what the heck, first things first. "You're a witch, you know that?" he murmured, slipping his hand behind her dress. He gave a tug at the zipper and listened to the satisfying sound of its effortless slide as the fabric loosed what little hold it had on her body.

He had the sense that he was testing her and she was testing him, but no one flinched. She smiled, and Quinn realized that the smile had been seventeen years in coming.

"Sweet Olivia," he whispered, sliding the thin sparkly strap off her shoulder. He watched with pleasure as her eyes fluttered lower and her lips parted in a sigh. Greedy for her flesh, he nuzzled, then nipped her shoulder, marveling that it was like no other, and peeled her dress lower still, exposing bare breast. With his tongue he tasted its rosy tip, making her moan.

His craving for her was wide and deep, and it left him shaky. "Liv
... ah, Liv," he said, unable now to utter more than the essence of her. He peeled away the silver fabric like a wrapper from a candy bar, exposing her other breast, sending his own hunger to a new level of anticipation, a boy with a KitKat bar all for his own.

Make it last,
he thought, but he couldn't get at her fast enough. He began to devour her, dragging his mouth from one breast to the other, thrilling to the sound of her breaths coming fast, always in fear that, like a candy bar, she would somehow vanish in no time flat.

Her moans became shudders; her shudders, a series of whimpering pants, until she caught his face between her splayed fingers and kissed him hard. He met and circled
her tongue
with his own, in a dance as predestined as any in the animal kingdom.
Come to me, come to me
was the song on both their lips.

In one easy motion he twisted her up from his lap and onto her back, her left side lost in the seafoam-colored pillows that lined the sofa and tumbled over her like surf. Her face was flushed, her lips puffy and wet; he could not imagine a more desirable countenance.

"Let me love you," he said in a besotted voice.

"Quinn
... oh yes," she answered, lifting her arms to him. The gesture was so completely without guile that it pierced his heart with its devastating directness. Quinn found himself sitting up and sucking in a lungful of air, simply to get past the blow.

And that was his undoing.

Because as he did it, the beam of a car's lights cut across them like the sweep from a lighthouse. He couldn't believe it. Out there, somewhere below them, was a curving drive where cars were free to roam. Olivia's house was on a knoll
,
and the windows were low enough that the combination
provided ringside viewing for the curious as well as the calculating.

"
My God
!" he said. "We're on stage!"

"No, we're not. No one can see us. No one cares," she argued breathlessly, tugging at his sleeve.

An incredulous laugh escaped him. "Olivia—a car just went by. I practically saw the whites of the driver's eyes." He pulled her dress back up, as if he'd been caught doing something wrong, and felt a sudden surge of irritation at his guilty response. Damn it! It was the last feeling he wanted.

He stood up, determined to get past the welter of bad emotions stuck in his craw like lousy pizza. "Hey, kiddo," he said softly, "unless we tape newspapers over those windows, this is not going to happen. Not here, not on this couch."

Her smile was edgy; she was taking it personally. "No problem," she said, sitting up and pulling the sparkly spaghetti straps over her shoulders again.

It was absolutely the wrong time to ask the question, but it came flying out: "Have you ever worn that cape before?"

Obviously the blood had returned to his brain.

She stared at him. "Why are you asking me
that
now?"

"Just
... have you?"

"Yes," she said, clearly annoyed at the shift in his mood. "Once. To the Met, five years ago. Why?" she repeated.

He knew he shouldn't continue to obsess over the cape, but the blood was where it was. "If no one knew that you owned that cape—if it wasn't your trademark, say, during the holidays—then someone must have seen you in it for the first time tonight."

"Your point being?"

"My point being, it couldn't have been stolen for its value, not with all those furs around. Someone wanted it because it was
your
cape, Olivia."