Take Me for a Ride (5 page)

Half of him was provoked, half relieved. Finally he just laughed, slid in beside her, and turned off the light. She didn’t stir at all, and he listened to her deep, even breathing, trying to banish his lust.

Irony of ironies—he, Eric McDougal, had a naked woman in his bed and nothing to do. He groaned and rolled over onto his stomach.

Was she completely naked? Or did she still have those lacy black panties on?

She’d clearly taken off her bra, since no straps appeared over her delectable shoulders. And he hadn’t even gotten to see her breasts.

Were they round or pear-shaped? Dusky nipples or rosy? McDougal groaned into his pillow. Why he was torturing himself, he didn’t know. He could have just raised the covers and taken a peek, but that seemed slimy. Ungentlemanly.

His last girlfriend had walked in on him while he was . . . er . . . entertaining two dancers at the same time. Bad scene. One never to be repeated. Not only did he not give anyone a key now, but he also made no promises and never would again. He was just like his father—it was in his blood, inescapable. McDougal men weren’t faithful to their women.

Did it make him a dirtbag? Probably. But that was why he didn’t make promises or give out rings. He never wanted to hurt anyone as his mother had been hurt. He never wanted to see that hunted, regretful shame on his own face—he’d seen it too often on his father’s. And it just drove Dad to drink again, during which the cycle got repeated.

As McDougal lay there in the dark, Natalie rolled over, and her smooth, warm leg brushed against his hairy one. He caught a whiff of her shampoo and resisted the urge to pull her into his arms.

When he looked at it that way, it sure took him down a peg.

Oleg Litsky, née Weimar von Bruegel, had enjoyed a very pleasant three-week visit to Paris with his son and daughter-in-law when he returned to his Moscow home. His paranoia of years past had mostly dissipated, and he had no reason to think that anything might be amiss.

So when he walked into his home office on the ground floor and found his safe wide-open, it was something of a shock. The painting that had hidden the safe from view, a very fine Cézanne landscape, was missing. But worse, the cash, silver, and jewelry from the safe were gone—his late wife’s diamonds, several heavy gold bracelets, and a platinum Piaget watch.

Worst of all, the St. George necklace had vanished.

Oleg stood there like an idiot, his mouth working, until the telephone rang and scared the life out of him. He let it ring and ring, the noise adding to the pandemonium in his brain. His chest tightened, his pulse spiked, and he felt light-headed. He hobbled to a favorite wing chair and sank weakly into it while he tried to think, but as soon as the telephone stopped he heard the screams of a traumatized child, over and over. He tried to block her face from his mind but couldn’t.

Bile rose in his throat, and his chest now felt too tight to take in air. Maybe he would drop dead right here, right now, and his secrets would die with him.

But slowly his breathing returned to normal, the dizziness faded, and he was left with only the bile. Instead of the child’s horror-stricken expression as he shot her father dead, he saw the faces of his own granddaughters, dear little girls who’d inherited his blue eyes.

But in this vision, instead of running to him and taking his hands, laughing and searching his pockets for candies, they stood like statues across the room with blank expressions. And they asked him, “Why?”

Why, indeed.

He’d killed a man who’d simply tried to protect his wife and daughters. Killed him because of his race, his religion, because he was in the way.

He had no other explanation, and that seemed the worst crime of all. He’d been seventeen, eager to show that he was a man, and so he’d engaged in acts that rendered him unfit to live as a cockroach. He’d confused brutality with courage, narcissism with pride, and a Nazi uniform with honor. Had he become a man that day?

Oh, yes. He’d become a weak, evil, greedy opportunist of a man. And he’d celebrated by getting stinking drunk, so drunk that he almost succeeded in forgetting that he’d crowned himself a murderer, a thief, and then a rapist.

These were things that he could never, ever allow his family to know. And if he didn’t find the St. George necklace immediately, he may as well kiss his son and his granddaughters good-bye. He would die miserably, alone, and in shame.

Litsky walked on rubbery legs to the telephone and curled the receiver into his shaking, sweaty palm. He knew of only one agency that could recover the St. George necklace quickly, with few questions asked: the U.S.-based ARTemis, Inc.

Avy Hunt didn’t feel like the wealthy, successful, daring owner of a thriving art-recovery business. At the moment she felt small, defeated, and infinitely weary after hours of being held and interrogated by security at Venice’s Marco Polo Airport.

It was her own fault, which made it worse. She’d gotten onto a flight, then forced her way off of it—and who could blame the officials for thinking she must have planted a bomb?

Over and over again she denied it, explaining in her passable Italian that she’d gotten an urgent message that caused her to abruptly change her travel plans. She’d been searched from head to toe, her documents and personal belongings had been scrutinized, and she’d been grilled on the same questions by four different security people, who tried to catch her in any form of half-truth or lie. Only a well-placed contact at the American embassy who vouched for her personally and professionally had prevented her from spending the night in jail.

She’d been able to board a late flight to London out of Venice, and now she attempted to sleep on one from London to Moscow. But though she was exhausted and emotionally tapped out, her brain refused to cooperate and shut down.

Why did Liam, her fiancé and a former master thief, want her to meet him in Moscow? What he needed was to get back to the U.S., where thanks to a joint sting operation with the FBI, he had a get-out-of-jail card, free and clear.

But Liam had taken very seriously her refusal to marry him until he’d replaced every item he’d ever stolen—and he’d filched things from all over the world.

What had he taken in Russia? A painting? A reliquary? A ceremonial weapon? Who knew? But the stakes had risen. In Europe, if caught, Liam would go to jail. In Russia, he could simply disappear—and even if the British embassy made inquiries, everyone would assume that he’d just gone back to his old ways of living off the grid under a variety of aliases.

Not for the first time, Avy cursed the day she’d ever met Sir Liam James, when she’d pitted her skill set against his in the recovery of the Sword of Alexander.

He was the love of her life . . . and the bane of her existence. He was her weakness, and she’d always prided herself on having none. She’d been calm, confident, and clearheaded before the handsome, silver-tongued bastard entered her life. And now? She’d become a blithering idiot, a quivering Jell-O of indecision. She was betraying all the principles her U.S. Marshal father had raised her to believe in.

All because Liam had shown her that the world and her values weren’t a simple matter of black and white. That even the letter of the law and its intent could be pulled and stretched like taffy. And that several wrongs could indeed, in the end, add up to a right.

But could she really trust Liam? The question tortured her, especially under the circumstances. Her father and his cohorts had almost closed in on them in Venice—whether for “her own good” or for justice or for the huge bounty Liam had on his head. Probably for all three. The bottom line, though, was that her dad wanted her fiancé behind bars and away from her.

Avy had gone up against
her own father
for Liam. She still couldn’t quite bend her mind around that—or the fact that she’d won—temporarily anyway. She took no joy in the victory.

What she wanted at the moment was to get well and truly drunk, to let alcohol close in and pickle her brain, soak her conscience and logic—shut them down. But getting drunk would solve absolutely nothing. She’d merely wake with a pounding headache and a chaser of depression.

So she sipped bottled water instead and wondered when Liam would send her further information on where, exactly, in Moscow to meet him. She paged through a pocket Russian dictionary she’d picked up in London, since she didn’t speak a word of the language.

The Cyrillic alphabet immediately made her cross-eyed, so she focused instead on the phonetic pronunciation of the strange letters and words.

Riiiiiiight. Avy could barely wrap her tongue around the foreign words. But supposedly there was a huge American population in Moscow—she could only hope to run into some of them.

Eventually the constant bass whine of the bird’s big engines lulled her into an uneasy sleep. She had the sensation of her eyes rolling back in their sockets and then tumbling over and over as they dropped down the well of unconsciousness. When she stopped falling, she was skating on a frozen lake in the middle of a frosty winter landscape. She wore a heavy parka buttoned to her throat, a long red woolly scarf, and a knit cap with a silly pom-pom dangling from its apex.

She glided along on her skates, feeling the wind in her face and hearing the laughter and shouts of clusters of people around her. She zipped in and out and around them, performing turns and dips that would make an Olympic skater proud.

As she came off a dramatic triple axel, a dark figure in a topcoat and a tall fur hat gripped her hand and pulled her to him. Liam’s face laughed down at her and pulled her reluctant lips into a smile of their own. He swept her off her feet and skated across the lake with her, then set her down, grasped her hands, and spun with her so that her body flew outward like a child’s. And like a child, she laughed in delight.

Then he let go, and she went hurtling backward until her belly hit the ice. She skidded, her hands still outstretched toward him.

In the next sequence of her dream, they were still on the ice, but Liam had dropped to one knee and extended a velvet ring box toward her, while she shook her head and skated away. But he had some kind of homing device or some strange power over her, because despite her intent to leave, she was pulled back by a magnetic force.

He quizzically lifted one eyebrow and plucked the ring from its velvet bed. He doffed his tall fur hat and sent it spinning over the ice. Then he got to his feet and skated toward her. He took her left hand and slid the ring over the knuckle of the fourth finger.

No sooner had he done so than the ice came ablaze with red and blue lights. Men in SWAT team jackets with sniper rifles swarmed the lake. She held up her hands, palms forward, and stared in anguish at the sparkling rock on her hand.

Liam had disappeared altogether, and she was arrested for receiving stolen property. She tried to explain that she was innocent, but they wouldn’t listen to her. They cuffed her and stuffed her into the back of a squad car . . .

Avy awakened with a start as the captain’s voice announced their initial descent into Moscow. There were no cuffs on her wrists, and though the ring on her finger had indeed been placed there by Liam, it wasn’t a big, flashy diamond. It was elegant, understated, a square-cut emerald set in platinum.

Still, the dream had been from her gut, issuing a warning. She stared at her engagement ring until the flight landed, jolting her back to reality. The flaps on the aircraft came up, and the roar of the braking mechanisms screamed into her consciousness.

When the captain turned off the seat-belt signs and the plane erupted into passenger bustle—the clack and thud of overhead compartments and groans as travelers heaved out their hand luggage—she sat still as long as she could. But eventually, along with everyone else, she was disgorged from the belly of the winged beast and stepped out into Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport.

 

Liam James idly ran his gaze over his lavishly appointed room at the Metropol hotel in Moscow’s city center. Really, the place was a bit over the top, with prices to match, but the luxury soothed him. Built in the Style Moderne of the early twentieth century, it was full of stained glass, mosaics, and fabulous chandeliers.

His own room was located on the VIP floor and furnished with classic dark wood furniture set against beige, silk-flocked wallpaper. Blue silk bedcovers covered top-quality sheets, and blue silk decorative pillows lounged artfully against the bed’s headboard. To the right was a spacious seating area with a desk that held a complimentary fruit basket.

Despite his top-notch quarters, Liam was in something of a quandary. In a spot where the lines of politics and history and law and ethics blurred and swirled into a sort of abstract expressionism.

This particular ethical dilemma involved Liam stealing something of a whole different magnitude from anything he’d ever taken before. The situation would need to be handled with elegance, discretion, and great care. It involved crossing international boundaries and thinking on his feet. It also required nerves of steel and a capacity for deception and perhaps disguise.

Worst of all, this little mission of his required a partner that he could trust with his life. A partner like his fiancée, Avy Hunt.

Unfortunately, he’d promised this woman he loved that he’d go arrow straight, while he’d been charged by a worldwide organization to do something a little . . . ah . . . skewed.

A bit crooked.