Take Me Two Times Page 6

  His hands shook almost imperceptibly, and that small tell, the only one, broke Gwen’s heart.

  “I am not about to open that door,” Quinn said in a low but deadly voice. “I will not be shamed, not ever again. Whoever’s behind the theft of this mask has made a big mistake, because I will hunt him down like a dog. He can rip off a hundred art objects, he can cost me my job, but he will not steal my reputation and get away with it. I’ve worked way too hard to make it.”

  For the first time, Gwen saw again the tousled, rumpled, rough-around-the-edges guy who’d commanded an intense three months of her life. The unstoppable man who’d taken more than his share of her sexually, emotionally, spiritually. Taken her fast and almost ferociously, because nobody had ever given him a thing.

  Her skin broke out in goose bumps, and a frisson of pure sexual awareness skated down her spine.

  She was the girl who’d been raised to say please and wait politely for everything. She couldn’t help but be attracted to a man who didn’t ask anyone for permission. She’d been given far too much, and she’d never encountered anyone like Quinn.

  And yet, when he’d taken her, put her in a niche like the only precious object in his life, she’d felt trapped, unable to come out from behind the protective glass.

  Taken . . . Was it the right word? He’d given, really. Given his all, too much and too fast, with all the expectations that entailed. But she hadn’t wanted to be the center of his universe—she’d spent too long being the center of her parents’ world.

  Gwen hadn’t headed for the wilds of Brazil to be imprisoned again. And yet, as she stared at Quinn’s long, lean fingers with their short, square nails, she remembered them stroking her skin, slipping under her clothing, bringing her erotic joy.

  Warm. His hands had always been warm. Never cold, never clammy—just warm, steady, unerringly skilled. Patient—surprisingly patient, considering their first meeting and how it had ended with him under her skirt, her legs wrapped around his hips in the moonlight. Did he remember that night when he looked at her now? Or did he remember only how she’d disappeared?

  “So,” Quinn broke into her thoughts. “You’re going to call your boss?”

  “Yes. We’re going to recover the mask. And we’re going to recover your reputation—not to mention my own.”

  chapter 6

  Before she dialed, Gwen took a deep breath and then tried to exhale her sheer mortification, her guilt at having let Avy down. Avy had recruited her, hired her, staked her own reputation on her, trusted her more than Gwen trusted herself. She didn’t patronize her or treat her like a pinhead.

  Don’t you see? Your strength lies in the fact that nobody would ever think you’re dangerous. People are careful around me. They’re not on their guard with you.

  Yeah, great. A whole lot of good that had done her on this recovery so far.

  Gwen hit the autodial for Avy on her phone. It rang and rang, finally clicking into voice mail. “Avy Hunt. Leave a message.”

  “Hi, Ave, it’s me.” Fudge. How to encapsulate this situation in a sound bite? “Just touching base. Hope you’re having fun.” She ended the call.

  Quinn stared at her. “Just touching base?” he repeated, his tone scathing.

  “Look, I can’t leave that kind of message. I’ll wait till I can talk to her personally.” Her mind raced. “We’ll call Dante instead.” He was out of the office, but she’d call his cell.

  “Dante,” Quinn said dubiously. “Like Daunte Culpepper?”

  In spite of the circumstances, Gwen laughed. “I doubt it. He’s probably named for the Italian writer.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  Gwen dialed his number, relieved when he answered. “Dante, it’s Gwen. I have a big problem.”

  “What kind of a problem?” His rich voice exuded calm and logic.

  “I’m going to put you on speaker, since Quinn Lawson, the CEO of Jaworski Labs, is here with me.” Gwen swallowed her ego and filled him in on everything. Almost everything.

  “Madonna,” he said, after a long pause.

  Gwen resisted the urge to tell Quinn that it was just an Italian expression, not anything to do with the singer.

  Dante said, “Okay, so let’s try to narrow this down: Who knew the value of the mask?”

  “Mr. Lawson,” said Gwen. “His whole board of directors.”

  “All the shareholders,” added Quinn, “since mention was made of the piece in the company’s annual report.”

  “The previous owner,” Gwen continued. “And Jaworski’s art consultant and curator.”

  “Is that all?” Dante asked dryly.

  “Hundreds of people.”

  “Then we need to find a way to narrow it down. Get the Nerd Corps on it. I would look at the previous owner and the art consultant first. They have direct ties to the mask. Then I’d look at the board.”

  “Okay. And I’ll run checks on all the other executives at Jaworski, delve a little into their finances.”

  “Good. I’d go after the Velasquez brothers, too, and see if you can get them to talk.”

  “Uh-huh. How do I do that? Just walk up to them in their favorite bar and strike up a conversation?”

  “I doubt they’ll talk for tequila,” Dante said. “But they might respond well to a threat or a bribe. Tell them how you identified them. Hint that the police might be very interested in that information. But be very, very careful. Don’t meet them alone, even armed.”

  “You can rest assured that my ex-wife is not going near any thugs,” Quinn broke in. “I won’t allow it.”

  Silence came from Dante’s end of the connection.

  Gwen cringed and closed her eyes.

  “Your what?”

  “Quinn’s just kidding,” Gwen said hastily.

  “No, Quinn is not,” he said.

  Gwen narrowed her eyes on him. “And he has absolutely no control over whom I meet—or what I do regarding this case.”

  “The hell I don’t! It’s my case, too.”

  “You were married, Gwen?” Dante asked. “When?”

  “Um. Well, it happened in college, over the semester I went to Brazil. Quinn and I met there. We got married in California shortly afterward. Palo Alto, near the Stanford campus.”

  “I knocked her up,” Quinn said helpfully.

  Gwen felt the blood drain from her face.

  Dante said nothing.

  “Dante,” she said, hating the urgency in her voice. “Please, you have to promise me that you won’t say anything about any of this to Avy. I need to be the one to break it to her, all right?”

  He sighed. “It’s not me you need to worry about. It’s Sheila.”

  “Right. I’ll take care of that immediately. Thanks.” She hung up, whipped her head around to Quinn, and said ominously, “Stay here. I’ll be back in a sec. Then we’re going to chat.”

  Gwen walked to the reception area and stood over Sheila’s desk until she looked up. “Yeah?”

  “Sheila. You just overheard some personal information of mine. I’m here to ask you to keep it confidential. Please. And don’t mention this whole fiasco to Avy until I can tell her myself, okay?”

  “Hmmm.” Sheila lifted a heavily penciled eyebrow. “It’s really good gossip, though. Juicy.”

  “Yes, I know. That’s exactly why I don’t want it getting out!”

  Sheila tapped a pencil against her teeth, coating part of it with lipstick. “What’s it worth to ya?”

  “What do you mean, what’s it worth? Are you trying to extort money from me?”

  “That seems like an awfully harsh word. And it’s just that, well, I got this credit card to pay off.”

  Unbelievable. Gwen fought against stooping to her level, but was so mad she lost. “Listen, Sheila. Would that be the secret card that Marty doesn’t know about? The one with thousands of dollars on it that would give him a heart attack if he were to find out?”

  Sheila bit down on the pencil, and the eraser popped
out and onto her tongue. She hacked like an old cat to spit it out. When she could speak again, she said, “Get out of here. My lips are zipped, long as yours are.”

  Gwen blew her a kiss.

  Sheila shot her the finger.

  Gwen stomped back into her office, folded her arms, and glared at Quinn, which somewhat amused him. She tilted her head like a dainty, pint-sized bull about to charge. If she’d had horns, she would have tossed them. “How could you? How could you do that to me?”

  “Do what? Tell the damned truth?”

  “To my colleague!”

  “As long as we’re on this topic, let’s ask another question, Gwen. How could you have done me like that, fifteen years ago?”

  She swallowed, blinking rapidly. “You know why.”

  “No, I don’t. How could you disappear without a word?”

  “I left you a note,” she said, a funny catch in her voice.

  “Yeah, you sure fuckin’ did. That was such a great note, too. Explained a whole lot of nothing. That letter touched me so deeply—I fed it down the garbage disposal.” He’d then kicked the under-the-sink cabinet so hard that the door had splintered, but she didn’t need to know that.

  “This is all ancient history, Quinn. There’s no reason to rehash our relationship, and you still had no right to air my dirty laundry at work.”

  Quinn got out of the yellow armchair and paced to the window. “Well, tough, darlin’. I ain’t gonna apologize.”

  He could see her reflection superimposed over the cityscape, dominating hundreds of cocaine white buildings, all lined up in a wide, bleached, shake-your-moneymaker Miami leer. Gwen looked too pure for this city.

  She still disarmed him, this mouthwatering, stacked, slightly punk Audrey Hepburn. His gaze hovered at the vee of her blouse, on the smooth, enticing skin there. He remembered the feel of it against his lips. He remembered the scent of her, and her heat. The edge of his anger dulled, then sharpened again into something disturbingly like desire.

  He couldn’t help his next question. “Is that all I am to you, Daddy’s Girl? Dirty laundry?” Then he got mad all over again—this time at himself—for asking it.

  Gwen hunched her shoulders and pressed the toe of her shoe against the wall as if trying to push it back, escape the confines of the room and his presence. She didn’t answer.

  He continued to watch her reflection as she picked up the phone again and stabbed out the numbers for someone’s extension. But her gaze drifted from the phone. Was it Quinn’s imagination, or was she checking out his rear view?

  “Dígame,” he heard a voice say.

  “Hi, Miguel,” she said. “Can I come down and see you?”

  “We,” corrected Quinn, turning to face her. “Can we come down.”

  “Thanks,” Gwen said, and hung up. “Quinn, I can’t take you with me. There are things about this company—like our methods of gathering information—that we keep private. The Nerd Corps is off-limits to you.”

  Quinn opened his mouth to argue, but she cut him off. “Look, I understand that you’re a control freak and you’re used to running the show over there at Jaworski Labs. But let me make something clear to you: This is not your turf. Okay? This is my territory and my case and I will handle things my way.”

  “Yeah? Seems to me your way hasn’t worked too well,” he retorted. “And it’s my ass on the line here.”

  “Your ass is not on the line. Mine is,” Gwen said coolly. “Your ass has already been fired.”

  His jaw worked. “That was a real cheap shot.”

  “Quinn, I’m sorry. It was cheap. But I’m good at my job—despite this temporary setback—and you’re not going to tell me how to do it. You’re also not going to get in my way.”

  “I’m the goddamned client!”

  She leveled her gaze on him and he broke eye contact.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’m not the client anymore, but I have a vested interest in locating this mask, same as you. So let’s put the past behind us and pool our resources.”

  Gwen shook her head. “One quarterback, Quinn,” she said, bending forward to pull her huge handbag out of her desk drawer. “Only one.”

  Something twinkled at her navel as her blouse peeked open—and then it was gone as she straightened.

  Gwendolyn Celeste Davies had pierced her belly button since they’d last met. He stared, incredulous and ridiculously turned on.

  “Fine, one quarterback,” he repeated unwillingly. He really had no choice if he wanted access to her information—or her. “I’ll defer to your judgment. But don’t shut me out.”

  “I can’t take you to the Nerd Corps. So why don’t you focus on pulling together information on the Jaworski executives. You know them, after all.” She drummed her fingernails on her desk for a moment and then asked, a little too casually, “Quinn, where do you think the mask I recovered might be? The fake?”

  “Forget it,” he said. “They’ll have it locked up.”

  “Yes, but where?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I’m just curious, that’s all.” She put a hand up to her hair and fluffed the little orangey spikes.

  “There’s a heavy-duty safe in my old office,” he said. “If the mask’s not with Ed Jaworski, it’d probably be there.”

  “Heavy duty, huh? Too bad.”

  “You wouldn’t even think of breaking into a high-tech lab, right? You’re not insane.”

  She laughed. “Quinn, don’t be ridiculous. If I got caught I’d go to jail.” Gwen slipped off one of her shoes and massaged the ball of her foot.

  He couldn’t look away from the peach nail polish on her toes and the delicate gold band encircling her second one.

  “So,” she said, slipping her shoe back on. “We’ll meet back here tomorrow morning to compare notes.”

  He looked at her suspiciously. “And where will you be this afternoon?”

  “Out.” She shot him a tight little smile.

  “What do you mean, out?” He crossed the room and stood next to her desk.

  “Out working on something. I don’t know yet, okay? Back off.”

  Quinn almost swallowed his tongue as Gwen calmly removed a handgun from her la-di-da designer pocketbook and checked the clip.

  “Gwen, what the hell is that?” The very idea of his little boutique princess packing heat was ridiculous.

  “My SIG. I’m leaving right after I speak with Miguel.”

  “You can’t just . . . just . . . walk around with a gun!”

  She lifted her eyebrows. “Actually, I can.”

  “Do you have a permit?” he asked incredulously.

  “Of course I have a permit.”

  “When did you learn to shoot, for chrissakes?”

  “I took a class,” she said casually, as if it were basket weaving or macramé.

  “A class. Great.” He dragged his hands down his face. He suspected that his reaction amused her, and that pissed him off even more. “Well, the world is a safer place now, I’m sure.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Quinn.” But she said it without rancor, and as she uncrossed and recrossed her legs, his breath hitched in his throat as he got a flash of tiger print.

  Tiger print? What had happened to the white cotton panties he remembered? The white bras?

  His ex-wife was walking around in racy lingerie with a gun, for God’s sake. What was next, a grenade in her cleavage?

  Who did she think she was? Having an art history degree from Sweet Briar didn’t qualify her to be some secret agent. Or to carry a gun.

  What if she left the safety off on that SIG and accidentally blew off her fingers one day while she applied her lipstick? What idiot had issued her a gun permit?

  And why did the tiger-print panties and the SIG turn him on? He was a sick, sick man. Not to mention a stupid one.

  “Quinn. Relax. You’ll find that taking orders from a woman isn’t nearly as bad as you think. You’ll survive.”

  “I’
m not taking orders from my ex-wife,” he growled.

  “Okay, we’ll call them suggestions, then.” She smiled. “How’s that?”

  How dared she stand there and bat her eyelashes at him? Smug, sexy little nightmare of a woman.

  “In the meantime, get me some information on those executives and I’ll meet you back here tomorrow at nine. We’re going to find the mask, Quinn. Don’t worry.”

  He knew they’d find the mask. He was in no doubt. But he was torn about working with her. If he didn’t cooperate, he’d lose precious time and insight. If he did, they were inevitably going to have power struggles—not to mention that he might start to worry about her and the risks she was taking.

  Quinn repudiated that idea immediately. Because if you worried about someone, you cared. And he was long, long past caring about anything to do with Gwen Davies.

  chapter 7

  Revenge was a dish best served cold. The man’s temper ran hot. He kept it under control with difficulty. He had waited so long and plotted so intricately. How had this plan gotten derailed?

  He should have just killed her quickly and cleanly, as he had others when the need arose. But no, his uncle didn’t like to harm women and had insisted on humiliation, public disgrace. An elaborate scheme that involved too many people . . . people who could talk. People who must now be silenced proactively, before they were pressured or bribed.

  The old man was soft. He no longer had the stones for business, but he still called the shots.

  So much careful planning and money up in smoke because of the whims of a crazy bitch. A bitch who’d been predictable as hell up until now. A bitch whose arrogance knew no bounds.