Take Me Two Times Page 12

  “Avy,” he groaned. “You can’t have fallen for that crap. You’re smarter than that, baby girl. I didn’t raise the kind of fool you’re bein’!”

  “Let me talk with him,” Liam said. “Man-to-man. I’ll get this straightened out, my love.”

  Avy shook her head at him. “Dad, this is hard for you. But you have to trust me. You raised me to make my own informed decisions. I’ve read Liam’s file. I know all of this. I didn’t walk blind into the situation. And I’m telling you, he’s all right.”

  Liam rubbed at his chin. “It occurs to me why Papa’s nose may be out of joint. I didn’t ask him for your hand!”

  Avy waved dismissively at him, and his expression became annoyed.

  “He’s not all right!” her father shouted. She held the phone away from her ear.

  Before Avy figured out his intention, Liam stood up in one lithe, muscular motion, crossed the room, and neatly twitched the phone out of her fingers.

  “Hey!” She lunged at him, but he sidestepped and pirouetted, playing keep-away with it.

  “Mr. Hunt,” he said. “Liam James here. How are you, sir?”

  “Liam James?” her father barked. “Or Trenton Smathers? Or Clifford Mansfield? Or Dag Friedlander?”

  Liam had the grace to blush, but only faintly. “Very good, sir. We are indeed one and the same man, which I daresay is somewhat off-putting. Yet I assure you that we’re frightfully good fellows when you get to the bottom of us all. . . . ”

  Was that an actual snarl coming from the phone?

  “At any rate,” Liam continued blithely, “we should all like to request your permission to marry your daughter. We love her, you see.”

  “Over my dead body, you scum-sucking bottom-feeder. Get the hell away from her!”

  Avy winced.

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Mr. Hunt. I’m going to marry her with or without your permission. But we’d like you to—”

  “You’re gonna marry the Remington twelve-gauge I shove up your ass, you dirtbag.”

  “—walk her down the aisle and give her away at the wedding.”

  “Throw her away, you mean? Uh-uh. You leave her alone. Don’t you so much as touch my little girl, do you hear me? Don’t even look in her direction, or I will hunt you down like the belly-dragging rodent you are, James.”

  Liam paused, lifted an eyebrow, opened his mouth to respond, and then decided against it. He pursed his lips. “Right. Well. I don’t believe we need any further clarification of your position on this matter, sir. It’s been a sheer pleasure to speak with you.”

  “Put my daughter back on the phone and fuck off.”

  Liam ruefully handed the phone back to Avy. “That went well, did it not?”

  “You had no right to butt in that way,” Avy said, as they cased a Renaissance villa in Florence. Brunelleschi’s great Duomo was only a hundred yards away, soaring into the evening sky over the red-roofed buildings of the ancient city. She wished she could enjoy the view, but she was too upset.

  She had refused to speak to Liam all during the train ride from Tours to Paris and during the drive from there to Firenze. “You knew the situation with my father was already volatile. How could you have done that?”

  “Because I’m a bloody idiot?” Liam asked.

  “Exactly!”

  “Do you have to agree with such alacrity, my love? In truth, I disliked him shouting at you. I disliked you being forced to defend me. It made me feel quite flimsy in the bollocks department. I thought he and I should sort it out ourselves.”

  “Oh, so you rode to my rescue with apparent schizophrenia? What the hell was that, Liam? ‘We should all like to request your permission to marry your daughter.’” She smacked her forehead. “What possible positive outcome could that have had?”

  Liam cast her a downtrodden glance. “Had the man possessed a sense of the ridiculous, he might have seen the humor in it.”

  “Well, he doesn’t!”

  “That much is evident. ‘Belly-dragging rodent,’ indeed.” Liam ran a hand over his rock-hard, flat abdomen, looking insulted.

  Avy sighed. “Look, if it’s any consolation, I could probably bring home a marine who’s also a doctor and a lawyer and my dad still wouldn’t think he was good enough for me.”

  “Thank you. That’s ever so comforting, since I’m none of the above. And as you can tell, my poor ego is positively shattered.” He calmly raised his binoculars and squinted into the middle distance.

  “Nothing could shatter your ego, Liam. And I’m worried . . . as a U.S. Marshal my father can make things very uncomfortable for us. You don’t know what he’s capable of.” Avy had decided not to share Kelso’s warning that someone else—someone affiliated with the disgraced Greek ambassador—might be gunning for her. After all, looking over her shoulder was all in a day’s work, and Liam lived the same way.

  “Excellent,” he said, ignoring her words about her father. “That moonfaced, stoop-shouldered fellow in the Gucci shoes is locking up the building. Now he’ll toddle off and we’ll wait a few hours. Then we’ll make our move, and voilà! In the morning, the public will awake to their Bernini again.” He chuckled. “I must say, this replacing things is much more fun than stealing them ever was.”

  “That Bernini bust weighs a ton,” Avy said, a little bitterly.

  Liam grinned at her. “Yes, and it was the small one.”

  “How did you . . . ?” Avy stopped. “I’m not sure I want to know.”

  “Of course you do, love. Natural curiosity. I put on a deliveryman’s uniform. Then I simply loaded the Bernini into a padded carton, stacked another on top of it, and walked them out with a handtruck.” He looked delighted with himself.

  “Nothing about it was simple. You had to contend with infrared sensors, alarms, security cameras. . . .”

  “Yes, but I have my ways around those things, my darling. You know that.”

  Avy shook her head and looked at her watch. “Well, what’s your ingenious plan for getting the bust back in?”

  “It’s truly brilliant,” Liam said immodestly.

  “Right. I get that part. Can you fill me in on the rest?”

  Liam tsked. “Cheeky, cheeky.”

  Avy raised her brows. “The details?”

  “We’re caterers, my dear. We specialize in Italian wedding cakes, and someone has ordered one of our confections for the Capozzo reception, to be held here at eight p.m.”

  “You’re not telling me—”

  “Yes! We’re going to waltz right in with the most spectacular cake you’ve ever seen. Underneath it will be the Bernini.”

  Avy gaped at him. “Liam, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “Never, my love.”

  “This isn’t going to work. . . . Is the actual baker in on it?”

  “Of course not. Do you think I’m a fool? There’s a compartment under the service trolley.”

  “You did just call yourself a bloody idiot.”

  “Very different context.”

  “Ah.”

  “So at any rate, we deliver the cake and fade into the woodwork. Later, during cleanup, the cloth is removed and the bust is found in the service compartment. We’re long gone.”

  “Disguises?”

  “Taken care of.”

  Avy nodded. “Okay. This might work.”

  “Of course it will work. It’s altogether too outrageous not to work.” Liam flashed her his sin grin.

  “Yeah,” Avy said. “I can’t wait for you to carry me over the threshold—”

  He eyed her fondly. “Neither can I, my love. . . .”

  “—of some European jail.”

  chapter 15

  An ocean, a continent, and a culture away from Florence, Quinn felt drunk on the cognac color of Gwen’s eyes. Her citrusy perfume had addled his brain and he wanted to taste her again. He wanted to taste her in places that he shouldn’t be thinking about: dark, shadowy, and forbidden places. He wanted her stark naked, wear
ing nothing but a simple silver mask—to hell with this jewel-encrusted gold fake that was causing both of them so much trouble.

  Quinn ran his hands down her bare arms. She shivered, and her skin erupted in goose bumps. He took her hands.

  “Quinn . . .” But she didn’t pull them away.

  He kissed her neck, then moved his lips up to her jaw, feathering kisses in a trail to her mouth. She opened to him and he licked inside, whispered across her lips, and moved on to her ear. She gave a deep shudder as he dwelled there for a moment, releasing her hands to caress the nape of her neck.

  She wore a camisole of cream lace with beige ribbon woven through the fabric. It barely skimmed the waistband of her low-rise jeans and made that olive skin of hers glow.

  The camisole had thin spaghetti straps that left no coverage for a normal bra, and judging by the range of movement he saw, she wasn’t wearing a strapless one. Quinn wanted badly to prove this scientific hypothesis. He also wanted to feel the texture of her nipples in his mouth.

  He remembered making her come once just by toying with her breasts, suckling them until she was begging for release . . . and then with one single touch of his tongue at her center, she’d been all his.

  “Gwen,” he said softly. “You can’t get around me. I can’t get around you.”

  A sound of distress came from her throat. The protector in him wanted to comfort her, but the wolf in him closed on his wounded prey.

  “We can’t get around this,” he said. “This thing between us. You can’t dodge it—neither can I. Even though that pisses me off.”

  She started to say something but he kissed her again, tired of grappling with language that always came up short at expressing what he felt. Whatever was between them had to do with biology, with chemistry. Their formula was correct, plain and simple.

  She gave in for a moment, but then her small hands pressed firmly against his chest and pushed. She packed a lot of power for her size. His onetime debutante could damn near bench-press a Volkswagen.

  “Quinn, this is not going to happen. Turn off the thrusters, because that rocket is staying in your shorts. We have a job to do, and this . . . this . . . attraction we feel for each other is only getting in the way.”

  She ducked out of his arms, dropped her purse on a chair, and walked across the room to lean against the door-jamb that led to the kitchen. Shit, his heart moved with her hips. He sat back down on the couch, squinting at her through his one functional eye and feeling like a jackass. A question still burned in his mind: What did she mean, that he’d loved her for the wrong reasons? What the hell was that all about?

  She took a deep breath. “Okay. Back to business. You want your name out of the mud. I want to save my reputation—and my firm’s. If I don’t, ARTemis will be sorry they ever hired me, and I’ll make Avy look bad, too, for recommending me. That’s not acceptable, so I’m going to focus on solving this mystery and tracking down the original mask—and you are not going to distract me. Got it?”

  Quinn just looked at her.

  “Are you going to say something?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Finding the damned mask shouldn’t be difficult. Because you know who’s responsible for taking it. They just set you up.”

  She shook her head.

  “You recovered the fake from someone, Gwen. Who?”

  “That’s not important. They’re minor players. Someone else is behind the scenes, calling the shots.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because this is a sophisticated crime, Quinn. The guys who broke into Jaworski Labs are burglars, smash-and-grab guys. One of the reasons I needed to see the duplicate so badly was to examine how it was constructed.”

  “And?”

  “Most Venetian masks are handmade of paper and painted. This one is different, made of gold, or it wouldn’t have survived the centuries. If I’m right, the technique used to make it is ancient and takes a lot of skill and knowledge. I want to take that little curl of metal and the photos to a jeweler I know and see if she can give me any clues as to who might have made the mask.”

  Quinn nodded. “All right. We’ll do it first thing in the morning. But something is bothering me about this whole situation, and that’s motive. Why would someone go to all the trouble of doing this when it would be much easier to have grabbed that Matisse? Or the Brancusi sculpture? Those are worth just as much.”

  Gwen said slowly, “I don’t think this is a financially motivated crime.”

  Quinn frowned. “What other motive could there be?”

  She shrugged. “Art collectors get passionate about things. Some of them will stop at nothing to get what they want.”

  “But . . . they’d never be able to display stolen work.”

  “Sometimes that doesn’t matter. They just want to own it, have an object all to themselves and enjoy it in private.”

  “But why bother with duplicating it, then?”

  “The obvious: They thought we’d recover the fake, put it back in the collection, and not discover the difference for years. By then the trail would be cold and they’d be home free.”

  Gwen frowned and tapped her fingernails on the windowsill. “But something about this feels personal. . . . The mask is such an unusual object.”

  Quinn shrugged. “It’s gold. Studded with jewels. Worth quite a bit, even melted down. I doubt the motive is personal. I’d say it’s financial.”

  “Unless, as you said before, someone at Jaworski is trying to make you look bad.”

  “Or someone’s trying to make you look bad, Gwen. Have you thought about that?”

  She walked to the kitchen counter and picked up an open bottle of wine, poured some into a glass, raised it to her lips, and drank. “I suppose there’s a possibility that Kelso cooked this up to test me.”

  “Who’s Kelso?”

  Gwen grimaced. “Kelso is the ghost who owns fifty-one percent of ARTemis. Nobody’s ever met him, but he’s known for his practical jokes. If you ask me, he’s a human headache.”

  “What do you mean, no one’s met him?”

  She sipped some wine and held it on her tongue before swallowing. “Exactly that. The guy is a faceless presence. He issues orders and dispenses unwelcome advice from the ether.”

  “C’mon,” Quinn said. “You’re telling me that ARTemis is a bunch of Charlie’s Angels?”

  Gwen choked. “Hardly. First of all, we employ men, too. Second, we’ve never even heard his voice. But he does like to pull strings behind the scenes.” She made a sound of mild disgust.

  “Meaning what?”

  She walked into the living room, sank into the chair opposite the sofa, and crossed her legs. “Do you want to know what Kelso had me do as an initiation rite? To prove my competence and value to ARTemis? You won’t believe it.”

  He waited.

  “Kelso had me break into a palazzo in Rome. Sid Thresher’s palazzo, to be exact. To steal his dog—and then replace it.”

  “Sid Thresher of Subversion?”

  Gwen nodded.

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Nope.”

  “That was you?” Quinn laughed in disbelief.

  “That was me. But if you tell anyone, I’ll deny we ever had this conversation.”

  Quinn shook his head. Then he looked at Gwen. “You’re having fun with this job.”

  Her lips parted and she shot him a wry smile. “Yes. Seventy percent of the time, Quinn, my knees are knocking together. But I feel alive. Not suffocated and overprotected and insulated.”

  He sat back and evaluated her words, turning them over in his mind. “You zigzag,” he said finally.

  “Pardon?”

  “You veer wildly between wanting adventure and wanting safety. You ran off to Brazil at age nineteen, but then ran into marriage with me—”

  Her mouth tightened.

  “—then you ran out of the marriage and back into high society. It took you, what, a year to flee again from that environ
ment, and you went careening off to the projects to teach art to at-risk kids. . . .”

  “How do you know all that?” she demanded.

  Quinn shrugged. “I kept tabs on you for a while.”

  “Kept tabs,” she repeated, not looking as though she liked the sound of that.

  “Yeah.”

  Gwen’s eyes glittered with hostility. “You mean you spied on me.”

  “I didn’t spy. I just wanted to know how your life was going. I almost called you, but you got engaged to that putz.”

  She glowered at him. “Putz?”

  “C’mon, Gwen. Mr. Mayonnaise? You can’t tell me you loved that guy.” She’d been briefly engaged to the heir of a condiment fortune, a rumpled-looking sap with a weak chin who’d mooned at her adoringly in the newspaper photo. Quinn had stuffed the paper into his grill and held a match to it.

  She flushed. “He was sweet.”

  “And you could push him around.”

  “Shut up, Quinn! I didn’t marry him. I made a mistake, okay? Haven’t you ever made a mistake?”

  He looked her dead in the eyes. “Yeah.”

  Gwen broke eye contact and got up. She walked to the kitchen and splashed more wine into her glass, her hand shaking almost imperceptibly. She set the bottle down with a thud. Unlike her.

  “So what happened next?” he continued. “You got roughed up one day by some delinquents and that was the end of art in the projects. Next thing I hear you’re taking self-defense classes and you’ve gone back to school in interior design. Zig, zag, zig.”

  Gwen rubbed at her neck and rolled her head back and forth. As she came back to the living room, her expression was ominous.

  “Then zag: You’ve left the fabric swatches behind; you’re working for ARTemis and stealing rock stars’ dogs. What’s the next zig?”

  “There is no ‘next zig,’ Quinn, and I don’t like the implication that I’m flighty—it just took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do. I’m happy at ARTemis. Assuming Avy doesn’t can me for screwing up this recovery, I’m staying here. What’s your next ‘zig’?”

  “Good question. I’ll think more about it once we find the mask.”