Take Me for a Ride (2 page)

His opinion of her went up a notch—at least she hadn’t ordered a white Zinfandel in an Irish pub. Of course, his opinion of her didn’t matter much—he’d get what he came for, regardless. He always did.

In all that black, Natalie looked as if she’d smell of sulfur or mothballs, but as she dug into her nylon messenger bag for a tissue, he caught a waft of fresh laundry detergent and a tinge of 4711, a cologne his sisters used to wear.

Over the bar hung a four-foot-by-eight-foot mirror that reflected, among other things, Natalie’s drawn, downcast face. Something was on the lady’s mind.

McDougal nodded to the bartender and mounted the stool next to hers. It was covered in cheap green vinyl and had seen better days, but the upside of worn was comfortable. It announced his presence by creaking under his solid 180 pounds, but Natalie didn’t look at him.

Didn’t matter. She would. Women always did, eventually—not that in every case they liked what they saw. Some of the smarter ones summed him up as a player in one glance and dismissed him. Others focused on the bare fourth finger of his left hand. The fun ones started shovel ing verbal shit at him immediately. Which type was she?

As Eric casually ordered a Guinness, he watched her in the mirror. Watched as her pointed little chin came up and she pushed some hair out of her face and cut her eyes toward him, her lashes at half-mast.

Then came her first impression, the undercover evaluation of his six-foot-two frame, his muscular forearms sprinkled with freckles and golden hair, his denim-clad legs. She took in the brown leather jacket and the reddish brown stubble on his chin, then the grin that widened as he watched her.

That was when she realized that he’d seen her inspecting him in the mirror. Her gaze flew to his in the reflected surface and froze. A slow blush crept up her neck—a blush so fierce he could see it even in the dim light of Reif’s.

“Hi,” McDougal said, turning to face her with the full wattage of his grin.

She blinked, stared, then looked away as the blush intensified. She put a hand up to her neck as if to cool the skin off. “H-hi.”

She was a babe in the woods . . . without mosquito repellent. He prepared to feast on her tender young naïveté.

“I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” McDougal said, taking his grin down a few notches, from wolfish to disarming.

She seemed to have no adequate response to that.

“It’s very normal to check out the guy sitting next to you. He could be a vagrant, a pervert, or a serial killer.”

She laughed reluctantly at that, and it transformed her face from mildly pretty to dazzling. She’d gone from librarian to . . . to . . .
Carla Bruni
in a half second flat. It was McDougal’s turn to stare. The French First Lady had nothing on her.

“So, which one are you?” she asked, evidently emboldened.

“Me? I’m just a tourist, sweetheart. The only cereal killing I do involves a bowl of raisin bran or cornflakes.”

That got a smile. “Where are you from?”

“Miami.”

“Florida,” she said, sounding wistful. “I’d love to be on a beach right now, not in the city.”

“You work here?”

Natalie nodded. “I’m a restoration artist.”

“A restoration artist,” McDougal repeated. “As in, they call you to touch up the Sistine Chapel?” He nodded at the bartender and pointed to her glass.

“Something like that. But I specialize in rugs and tapestries, not painting.” A wary expression crossed her face as the drink was set in front of her. “Um, I didn’t order—”

“It’s on me,” McDougal said.

“Oh, but . . .”

“What’s your name?”

She hesitated. “Natalie.”

“Natalie, it’s just a drink. Not a big deal. ’Kay?”

“Thank you,” she said after a long pause. She curled her small but competent hand around the glass. “Actually, you have no idea how much I need this.”

Yes, I do. First heist, honey? It always shreds your nerves.
But all McDougal said was, “You’re welcome. I’m Eric.” And he proceeded to chat her up while she got tipsy on her second whiskey.

Really, he should be ashamed of himself.

Natalie Rosen’s eyes had gone just a little fuzzy, her gestures loose and her posture relaxed. She’d also gotten wittier. “So, you said you’re a tourist. Are you an accidental one?”

He smiled. “Nope. I do have a purpose. Are you an accidental barfly?”

“No.” She averted her gaze, then looked down into her whiskey and murmured, “I’m an accidental thief.”

“Do tell,” McDougal said, showing his teeth and signaling the bartender again. If he had his wicked way, she’d soon be a naked thief.

 

Natalie took a sip of her third Jameson’s whiskey and had a short debate with her smarter, more sober side. Hadn’t her parents always told her not to talk to strangers? Not to accept candy—or whiskey—from them?

However, the drink had come straight from the hand of the bartender, so she knew there was nothing funny in it. And she desperately, urgently needed to talk to someone about the crisis she faced. She could pay a shrink . . . or she could talk to this startlingly good-looking stranger with the laser blue eyes. Not like she’d ever see the man again after tonight, which was kind of a shame.

Eric had a young Paul Newman’s features but not his cool, distant countenance. Instead he possessed the freckles and warm mischief of Prince Harry. He also had the prince’s ginger hair, but his skin was unusually bronzed for a redhead, rather than milk white. His looks bordered on irresistible, made even more so by his air of total confidence.

If Natalie was being honest, she didn’t know whether she was slightly drunk on the stranger’s looks or on the whiskey. Probably both. There he sat, one reddish eyebrow raised, looking intrigued and attracted—to her, of all people—and inviting her to tell her story. She had the sensation of acting out someone else’s page in a script.

But for once she did have an unusual tale to tell, one that set her apart from all the other worker bees swarming the concrete sidewalks of Manhattan.

“How can anyone be an accidental thief?” Eric asked. “Seems to me that you either are one or you aren’t.”

Natalie swirled the ice counterclockwise in her glass, which made a small rumble as its base rubbed against the worn wood of the bar. “Not true. Let’s say that you borrowed something to show it to someone, but she refused to give it back.”

Eric took a swig of the Guinness and eyed her reflectively. “Well, I personally would insist on its return.”

“I tried,” said Natalie.

“Failing that, I’d probably ‘borrow’ it back.”

“What if the person has hidden it?”

“Then I’d think about using force.”

Natalie sighed. “What if the person who won’t give back what you borrowed is seventy years old and fragile?”

“Hmm,” said Eric. “That does complicate things.”

“And worse, what if she’s your grandmother and she helped raise you?”

“I see your point. You’re kind of screwed.”

Natalie turned to him and spread her hands wide. “I am completely, utterly, totally screwed.”

Those Newman eyes seemed to deepen in color, and the corner of his mouth quirked. Belatedly, she thought about the literal meaning of her words and had a sudden image of a bedspread pulled back in invitation. Her pulse quickened and she crossed her legs.

He took note of the movement, his gaze moving to her thighs, outlined under her skirt. A silken shame slid along her spine, and she shifted on the barstool.

“What am I supposed to do, knock her down?” Natalie continued. “She won’t even open the door to me now.” She took a large swallow of her whiskey.

“I’m a little confused,” McDougal said. “Why don’t you start from the beginning?”

Sexual attraction aside, decency and integrity seemed to shine out of his eyes. Deep blue. The color of truth. She wavered. “You have to promise not to tell anyone,” she said, pushing the hair off her forehead.

“Scout’s honor. Who am I going to tell? And you’ve shared only your first name. You’re practically incognito.”

That comforted her. In a city of eight million people, his not knowing her last name
was
like a cloak of invisibility.

“Talk to me, baby, won’t you talk to me . . . ,” he crooned cheesily, making her laugh.

“Fine,” she said, and inhaled some more whiskey. “Three days ago, I went in to work, and there it was: the most unusual necklace I’ve ever seen . . .”

 

The holidays had come and gone their merry way, leaving behind a lugubrious, definitely insalubrious early March in Manhattan. Luc Ricard Conservation and Restoration Associates, where Natalie worked, was housed in a dignified, if moody, old brownstone that seemed reluctant to suffer the company’s presence inside it.

Nat wrapped her sweater more tightly around her body as a frigid draft blew under the windowsill at the second-floor landing. The draft seemed to have chosen just the moment when she walked by on her way to the kitchen on the first floor.

A fresh blast of arctic air assaulted her as she grimaced out at the gray, slushy daylight repressed by cranky, cumbersome clouds.

Tea. She needed some hot green tea and she needed a new set of eyeballs, since her current ones ached and had gone blurry under the strain of focusing on tiny embroidery stitches for hours on end.

The piece she was restoring was an eighteenth-century Susani tapestry, which was doing its best to disintegrate after generations of being carelessly draped over console tables and hung on smoky dining room walls. The tapestry was tired and worn. Her job was to rejuvenate it, smack some color back into its cheeks, and then mount it under Plexiglas for future generations to enjoy—or sell it at auction for a tidy profit.

Natalie yawned and then knelt down near the windowsill so that the next whoosh of freezing air would blow right into her face and wake her up. Below, on the street, a heavyset man in a dark wool coat looked behind him and then to the left as he rounded the corner of the building. Natalie heard the familiar light jangle of the bells at the door.

As she descended the stairs from the second floor to the first, she saw the heavyset man in conversation with her boss, Luc, and Selia Markovic, an associate who specialized in fine jewelry repair. Luc laughed a little too hard at something the bulky man said, and then nodded like a bobble-head. The bobble-head thing was very uncharacteristic, since Luc usually glided around in abstraction as if he were part of an alternate universe. He moved slowly, as if he were underwater.

Pinch-lipped Selia, who wore standard-issue white cotton gloves that protected valuable items from the oils and acids in the human hand, examined a piece lying on a bed of black velvet.

Natalie couldn’t make out much about the piece except that it was gold in color. She kept going toward the kitchen, rounding the base of the stairs and walking under them in search of her green tea and, if she was lucky, an oatmeal cookie.

She set the old copper kettle to boil, ignoring the brand-new white plastic hot pot that Drake, their receptionist, had brought in. Nat refused to use it on the grounds that hot plastic was poison. She didn’t like microwave ovens, either.

So she stood and tapped her foot for a good five minutes before the water even showed an inclination to steam, much less boil. Then she rooted around in the cabinet for the two oatmeal cookies she’d cleverly hidden between pieces of stale low-carb bread in the bread’s original bag. Surely the food bandit wouldn’t have found them there?

But the bag was suspiciously light. Natalie narrowed her eyes and untwisted the tie that sealed the mouth of it from the air. She looked inside, lifted the top piece of camouflage bread.

Gone.

Her cookies were gone.

How on earth had the food bandit thought to look in her bread bag? Natalie’s stomach growled, adding insult to injury. Though they held little appeal, she removed the two slices of dry bread and tossed them into the toaster, not that there’d be any butter in the refrigerator.

She double-checked that, but her prediction was accurate. All she found was a lonely packet of duck sauce lurking behind someone’s miraculously unfilched yogurt. Natalie grabbed the packet and squirted the contents onto one of the pieces of toast when it popped up. She sandwiched the other one on top of it and took a bite, just as the kettle whistled.

She poured boiling water into an oversize mug, added a tea bag, and kept munching, though as far as snacks went, this one was highly unsatisfactory. If she hadn’t been the daughter of two professors who discouraged such language, she would have said it sucked. But she was, and she remembered all too well her mother’s reaction when she’d used the word at age ten.

First they’d had to define the subject of the sentence,
this
, which Nat had used in reference to homemade sugar-free peanut butter. Then her mother had forced her to contemplate the missing object of the sentence. The peanut butter sucked what, exactly?

Well, gee, ten-year-old Natalie didn’t know.

So they had to examine the origins of the verb and its missing object, follow the trail of the obscene slang. Once Nat had found out what, in actuality,
got
sucked, she’d made the mistake of saying she was completely “grossed out.”

And by the time she’d closed the dictionary on the etymology of
that
term, Nat had resolved to just go mute for life—at least around her parents. The alternative was to speak nothing but Latin.

Luc wandered in with a faraway look on his broad face, his white hair sticking up at the back of his head in an alfalfa sprout. He was dressed in a navy cashmere sweater that had visible moth holes in it, and a dark green scarf that had shed a little tuft onto one of the bristles under his chin. Natalie resisted the urge to pick it off.