Take Me Two Times Page 9

  The strappy, lacy thing that covered her upper body had been designed by the devil, who was clearly a female. Covered didn’t really do justice to what was going on here. Covered was an entirely inadequate verb.

  No, the lacy thing clung, and it thrust up her curves, and it created deep, shadowy cleavage that might make a lesser man gnaw on his knuckles and shed tears into his beer.

  Quinn was better than that. He had self-discipline. And he was madder than hell at this woman, so nothing she could offer would tempt him. . . .

  “Quinn?” she asked uncertainly. “Quinn! What are you—”

  He blocked her questions with his mouth. She tasted the same. Better. Like ripe bing cherries, firm on the outside, soft inside, dark and sweet. She was pliant under him; she made an unintelligible, shocked noise and it gave him a woody.

  His hands moved to her face, then down her neck to those gorgeous shoulders, sliding the length of her sleek, defined arms. He reached her slim hips, circled around them to Gwen’s so-sexy ass. He copped a good handful, but the stupid spandex stockings made things difficult.

  Gwen kissed him back fervently, and as he dipped his fingers under the elastic waistband of the infernal, diabolical hose, he concluded that they were both lunatics. Stark, raving—Oh, sweet Jesus, that ass. So smooth, so warm, so beautiful. His eyes just about rolled back in his head as he pressed his body into hers and remembered what it felt like to be inside her.

  Slowly, unwillingly, he became aware that Gwen was tugging on his wrist, that she’d pulled her mouth away from his and was shoving at his chest with her free hand. “Back off, Quinn. This is the worst idea ever to come along in the history of bad ideas.”

  If she were smart, she’d let him keep going. If she were smart, she’d use his unholy attraction for her to manipulate him into doing her bidding. But she wasn’t that kind of girl. She was too . . . honest?

  Quinn almost laughed at that. Then he decided he didn’t care. He came within a hair of burying his face in her cleavage. He almost said please. He thought about begging.

  “Hey!” Gwen said, out of breath.

  He stared at her hopelessly, groping around in the recesses of his mind for his righteous anger, his rage that she’d broken in here alone, without telling him. He scrubbed a hand over his face and muttered an apology, a justification, an excuse—something, he didn’t know what.

  Gwen said, “You taste the same.” Her color was high and she wouldn’t meet his eyes. After a long moment she said, “We need to focus on the mask.”

  Feeling poleaxed, he nodded his head. Mask? What mask? Oh, that mask.

  “I can’t find the safe. Do you know where it is?”

  He inhaled, then exhaled. “Of course I know where it is.”

  “Well, show me.”

  He looked at her for a long moment, his Gwen. Messy hair, entreating eyes, swollen mouth, beard burn. Because he almost choked on whatever it was that he felt, he fell back on being flip. “Make it worth my while,” he said, with a waggle of his eyebrows and a leer.

  Gwen’s face changed, the sweetness and the entreaty dissolving. She eyed him scathingly. “I don’t think so.” She picked up the uniform he’d so rudely stripped off of her and stepped into it. Her hands shook as she pulled the edges together to cover herself.

  “I didn’t mean it like that, Gwen. I was kidding. It was . . . a fantasy. All right?”

  “Do you tie me up in this fantasy, Quinn?” she asked, in those soft, perfectly modulated tones of hers.

  Uh . . . that doesn’t sound so bad.

  “Get your revenge for the past, maybe spank me a little?”

  He almost choked on his own spit.

  “Well, dream on.” Gwen released the plackets of her dress and put her hands on her hips. The dress gaped open and he tried not to stare at her breasts, at the clearly outlined nipples.

  “Quinn, could you have left me one button? Just one? How am I supposed to get home like this?”

  He stared absently at the scattered gray plastic buttons on his beige carpet. “Sorry,” he muttered.

  Had he really just said that? Was he really bending down now, picking up the buttons, and handing them to her? He was a chump.

  Quinn stepped around her and went to the grizzly bear’s head. He lifted it off the wall and exposed the safe.

  Gwen seemed to forget all about her dress. “I should have known it was behind that thing,” she said, hands on her hips. “Please tell me you didn’t shoot that. Please tell me you don’t literally have a bearskin rug in your house.”

  “No, it’s not mine. It was Shankton’s—the former CEO’s. I don’t like killing animals for sport.” His grandpa Jack had loved to ramble around in a drunken stupor, shooting at whatever moved. A damned miracle he hadn’t shot off his own nuts.

  Quinn input the combination that he’d always used, and tugged at the safe door. No dice. “They’ve changed the combination. Not surprising.” But he banged his forehead on the steel door.

  “It’s not a problem,” she said.

  “Of course it’s a problem.”

  “Move, please.” Gwen pulled a strange little electronic device from the pocket of her dress and affixed it to the door of the safe. She programmed a series of numbers into it and then waited, stretching her arms behind her back.

  This, of course, pushed her breasts forward and up, and Quinn found himself staring at them again like the village idiot. He tore his gaze away. “Sweetheart,” he asked as casually as possible, “when did you learn the fine art of safecracking? Did you take a class on that, too?”

  She nodded. Gave him that sweet, endearing smile of hers. The one that had devastated him the very first time he’d ever seen it—glowing under a silver mask with her hair flying in the breeze.

  He’d grinned helplessly back.

  She’d extended a delicate hand.

  He’d taken it and pulled her to him.

  They hadn’t exchanged a single word. Their two smiles had met in that moment, shimmered in the night, connected in bliss, and spoken volumes. They’d replayed the whole history of male and female up against that wall . . . and then rejoined the crazy, raucous crowd.

  They didn’t try to speak at all that night, surrounded as they were by laughter and music and thousands of other voices.

  He still didn’t know how he’d held on to her for the next few hours, but he had. He’d woken with her in his arms; she lay spooned against him. Her hair smelled of jojoba. The silver mask lay on the floor.

  She stirred sleepily, and he’d tightened his arms around her, kissed the back of her neck. She woke with a start, turned slowly, and stared at his face.

  A rosy tinge of shame swept up her cheeks and she closed her eyes for a moment. He reached out and touched her nose, and she rewarded him with a curve of those gorgeous, dirty-angel lips. She opened her eyes again and he fell, headlong and helpless, into them. He’d loved her from that moment on. Before he’d even known she could speak English.

  A tiny beep alerted him that the little red numbers on Gwen’s safecracking gadget had stopped.

  “What were you thinking about just now?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  She nodded and turned to the safe.

  “What is that thing?”

  “Nothing.” She detached it, dropped it back into the pocket of her ripped maid’s uniform, and pulled open the door of the safe.

  Inside, the mask smirked up at them, sparkling and gleaming under the concentrated beam of Gwen’s flashlight. The peacock eyes spoke of preening vanity, pulsing ego, primal jealousy, and simple revenge. Again, she felt evil emanating from the thing—which was ridiculous, especially since this was only a copy.

  Quinn stood silent, gazing at it.

  She didn’t want to touch it. Silly, but she remembered the horrible images that had come to her the last time she’d picked it up. Copy or not, she couldn’t forget the driving force behind the original. Carnevale. Dante’s voice, saying Voilà . . .
the husband’s rival meat was removed. Castration. Vengeance. Death.

  “That damned thing gives me the creeps,” Quinn said.

  “Yeah. Me, too.”

  Gwen inhaled, mentally braced herself, and then stuck her fingers right into the eyes of the mask. She turned it over and examined the back. Real gold—no mistaking the color or the shine. But if she had to make a guess, it was eighteen-karat plate.

  Using the safe door to hide the beam of the flashlight, Gwen propped it between her chin and shoulder and scratched at the surface of the mask with a fingernail. That told her nothing, so she reached out and palmed a pen from Quinn’s desk.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Just bear with me.” She made sure the pen’s nub was safely inside and scratched at the gold surface with the end of it. Nothing—no sign of a mark. Gwen unpinned the plastic name tag from her uniform and used that to make a deep gouge. She still couldn’t be sure. She then poked the point of the pin into a tiny gap in a seam of the mask, a place where it had been soldered.

  Quinn just watched.

  The pin sank deeply into a material that seemed softer than the surface. She tried to scrape some out. After several tries, she pulled up a soft curl of grayish metal. She didn’t know what it was, but she knew what it wasn’t: gold.

  Carefully, she placed the tiny curl of metal into a tissue and dropped it into her pocket. She noticed a funny smell, sweet and a little like hot asphalt. And also . . . what was it? Maybe turpentine?

  This was definitely no solid-gold mask . . . but it had to have been made by someone skilled. A jeweler or goldsmith of some kind. The thing had been dipped into gold, and skillfully. Or the gold had been layered on somehow. Someone had also set the gems into the face of it, which required a good deal of skill and patience. The copy wasn’t worth a fraction of what the original was, but it couldn’t have come cheap, considering the expertise required to make it.

  Knowing a jeweler was involved narrowed the field . . . but which jeweler? One in Miami? South America? Gwen sighed audibly and searched the back of the mask for any identifying marks. She peered closely at an odd crosshatched area near the upper left corner. She made out what she thought was the letter B.

  She took detailed pictures with the camera on her cell phone and then put the mask carefully back into the safe in the exact same position they’d found it.

  Quinn shut the door, and Gwen restored the sequence of numbers on the combination to what they’d been before.

  He stuffed his hands into his pockets. “I liked your silver mask a lot better.”

  She smiled wistfully. “Me, too.”

  Then he added, “I still have it.” He reached out and traced the line of her jaw with his index finger. He brushed her lower lip with the pad of his thumb.

  Heat streaked through her body and eviscerated her breath. Knowing that he’d kept her mask all these years both touched her and scared her. “You do?” she whispered.

  Quinn nodded. He closed the rest of the distance between them and tilted up her chin. Whisper light, his lips brushed hers, swept across them again, returned a third time. She opened to him and he deepened the kiss, licking inside her mouth, stroking her with his tongue.

  Her bones turned to butter and her knees began to quiver. Heat, her own response to him, softened her. He groaned and picked her up. She wrapped her legs around his waist, a pulse throbbing at her core without shame.

  He settled his hands under her bottom to support her and kissed her some more. He buried his face in her cleavage.

  How good it felt; how right it felt . . . except he was Quinn. And they couldn’t do this here. They were both guilty of breaking and entering. They could be discovered at any moment.

  Gwen pushed at his chest and broke the kiss.

  “What?” He leaned his forehead against hers.

  “We have to get out of here.”

  “In a minute . . .” He tried to kiss her again, but she dodged.

  “No. Now. Put me down.”

  He deliberately slid her down the front of him before he set her on her feet. He was more than aroused. “Sure you don’t want some of that, honey?”

  God, did she want it. Slick and hard between her thighs. Driving inside her until she shattered.

  “We have to get out of here,” she repeated, double-checking with the flashlight to make sure she still had the tiny, wrapped curl of metal in her pocket. That and all her little B-and-E toys.

  She rounded up the discarded body padding and stuffed it into one of the trash bags she’d brought in with her. She added the wig and the old-fashioned feather duster, pulled the plackets of her dress together, and made for the door.

  “Coward,” he whispered in the dark.

  “I’m not a coward. I just think it’s a bad idea, that’s all.”

  They left Quinn’s old office and headed for the elevators in silence. She tried to step into the main car when it arrived.

  “No, we’ll take the freight elevator,” Quinn directed. “No cameras in that one, and I’ll get us out the back way.” Once inside, he leaned against the grungy padded wall, folded his arms, and semiglowered at her. “You know you want me, Gwen.”

  Her gaze flew to his and she got drunk immediately on those tawny-port eyes of his. Fudge. He could read her like a book.

  “Yes, Quinn,” she said slowly. “I do want you.”

  A look of triumph crossed his face, and he took a step toward her.

  Her defenses went into high gear and she stepped back. “I want you in my body, but not in my life.”

  His pupils widened. Other than a swift intake of breath, though, Quinn didn’t comment. The elevator opened and he got out, stone-faced.

  He shepherded her through a back passageway and out a door marked LOADING DOCK ACCESS. He reset the alarm code. “Where’s your car?”

  “I don’t need—”

  “Where’s your damned car?”

  He walked her to the Prius, two blocks away, in silence.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome.” His tone said she was anything but.

  “Quinn, I didn’t mean—”

  “I know exactly what you meant, Gwen,” he said. “And so do you. Good night.”

  chapter 11

  “I’m so terribly sorry,” Sir Liam James said to a middle-aged couple from Chicago. “But this room is temporarily closed.” To all appearances a gentleman tour guide, he stood in front of the double doors to the grand dining room at Château de Cheverny in France’s Loire Valley.

  Liam looked pleasantly absentminded and professorial, with the addition of some stodgy spectacles and a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows. He certainly didn’t seem the sort of dastardly fellow who’d disarm the château’s metal detectors to smuggle something inside.

  Cheverny, a stately home of white stone built in the style of Louis XIII, received tens of thousands of visitors a year. It was notable for its clean, classic lines and lack of any defensive structures. There were no battlements or turrets here, just simple elegance, the house a jewel set into the countryside.

  The largest room in the château was the salle d’armes, which was full of armor and battle paraphernalia, swords that made Liam think fondly of how he’d met and tussled with Avy over the sword of Alexander.

  An aristocratic country house, Cheverny also boasted a trophy room hung with two thousand pairs of antlers. In the winter Cheverny’s seventy hounds were released twice a week for its famous hunt. Liam had participated in it several years before, but had conveniently fallen and walked back to the house so that he could accomplish other things on his then-nefarious agenda.

  The tourist couple from Chicago were not pleased to be barred from the grand dining room. “But we wanted to see the magnificent Don Quixote scenes by Mosnier—”

  “And I assure you that you will. However, we’re trying to revive a lady who fainted,” he confided. “The room will be open again in just a few minutes. I�
�m sure you understand.” He aimed a charming smile at them.

  “Why not visit the king’s bedroom or the Teniers tapestry room first?” he suggested. “The wall hangings are truly breathtaking—you won’t want to miss them. Or you might take a peek at the Mignard portrait of the Countess of Cheverny, which hangs in the large drawing room. Lovely girl, that Marie-Johanne.”

  The couple nodded and went on their way, while Liam repeated his story to the next tour group. And the next and the next. What was taking Avy so bloody long?

  After another couple of minutes, Liam slipped inside the room and simply bolted the doors behind him. Avy stood near one of the magnificent built-in sideboards, part of her skirt bunched up around her waist, and her head down. She was rummaging in the left of a pair of thigh-high black leather boots, and she made quite a stunning picture.

  Her light brown hair streamed over her shoulders, catching the sunlight and turning to honey. He glimpsed about two inches of taut, bare thigh emerging from her boots, and this provoked wicked thoughts in him. Who gave a fig for Don Quixote or Pancho Villa when his fiancée was in the room?

  “Avy, my love. Whatever is taking you so long?”

  She swung around and glared at him. “These damned fish forks are stuck in the lining of my boot—and I can’t get it off!”

  His mouth worked. “Those dastardly fish forks. Here, allow me to assist you.” He walked toward her and knelt in front of her. “Foot, please, madam.”

  She extended it to him, scowling. “Only you could talk me into this. Only you, Liam, could convince me to help you put back everything you’ve stolen over the years. Only you could convince me to load up a pair of thigh-high boots with thousands of dollars of heisted silver! I must be insane.”

  “Well, I truly don’t understand why we have to be in such a tearing hurry. You’ll be the death of me if we have to replace everything before our wedding.”

  “Liam, you don’t get it, do you? My dad’s a U.S. marshal. As soon as he gets wind of you, he’ll use anything he can to take you down. That get-out-of-jail-free card that you have with the FBI doesn’t apply in Europe! Have you heard of Interpol? Dad’s got some good buddies who will be happy to help him out.”