Once a Thief (15 page)

“Don’t move,” he told her.

“Don’t worry.”

He had to smile a little at her tart response, but his sense of danger urged him to move swiftly. Testing each foothold cautiously, he eased ahead toward the corner of the building. At least twice, the ledge beneath him crumbled, and he knew even before he reached it that the corner was badly cracked and unlikely to be able to hold his weight. He paused, still some feet from the corner, and considered rapidly.

“I’m going to climb up to the next ledge,” he said finally. “All the windows on this floor are boarded up, but there may be one uncovered above us.”

“Great,” she said faintly.

Despite his assured statement, Quinn wasn’t looking forward to what he had to do. There was no way to anchor himself and precious little to hold on to since there was no catwalk, crumbling or otherwise, for the floor above. Aside from which the building was cursed with jutting bits of stonework guaranteed to do nothing except get in his way. By reaching up, he could grasp the ledge above them, but it was smooth and slippery, offering no purchase for his grip.

It was a long way to the ground.

Quinn closed his mind to that and concentrated on necessity. He managed to turn his body, balancing sideways on the narrow ledge with his feet wide apart to more evenly distribute his weight. He reached up with both hands and carefully explored the ledge, hoping for a tiny projection that would give him a better grip. He had to take a step back toward Morgan before he found what he sought, and the ledge crumbled beneath his foot just as his fingers closed over the sharp projection.

It held. Hardly breathing, Quinn boosted himself up by using the strength of one arm, his soft-soled boots scrabbling for a foothold against the side of the building, until he could get the other arm over the ledge. Moments later, he was lying full-length against the building on a ledge less than a foot wide.

“Quinn?”

“Hmmm?” Still holding to his tiny projection, he rested his forehead on his arm and wondered idly how he got into situations like this one. His head was throbbing from the earlier blow, several parts of his face hurt, his wrists were raw, and he had the suspicion that at least two ribs were cracked.

Not one of his better days.

“Are you all right?” Morgan’s voice was beginning to show signs of strain.

“Peachy.” He lifted his head and then sat up carefully, looking around. Ah. Just as he’d hoped—an uncovered window. And it was directly above Morgan’s position. “Let me get set,” he said, “and I’ll pull you up.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t want to be a bother,” she said conversationally, “but I feel I should mention I have this thing about heights.”

Feeling relatively secure on his perch, Quinn leaned out a bit so that he could look down at her. “Now’s a fine time to tell me.”

“I was hoping it wouldn’t come up,” she murmured.

“Lousy pun.”

She made an odd sound that might have been a laugh on the edge of breaking. “Unintentional, I promise you. Look—why don’t you get yourself down and then send for the fire department. They have nice ladders.”

Quinn didn’t bother to remind her that they couldn’t afford the time. Instead, he slid along the ledge until he was directly above her. He had the window open in seconds, though it took considerable muscle to force the ancient sash upward. He moved as quickly as he could, virtually certain that Morgan’s calm was tenuous; she had a great deal of courage, he thought, but phobias could turn even the stoutest hearts to jelly.

The room he found himself in was empty of anything he might have used to help her. He braced himself as well as he was able, then leaned out the window and across the ledge, stretching one hand down to her.

“Give me your hand, Morgana.”

“Sorry. I can’t move.”

“You won’t lose your balance. Just reach directly above your head with one hand.”

“No. I’ll fall.”

Quinn’s voice remained calm and certain. “Sweetheart, I won’t let you fall. I promise. You know I keep my promises.”

She was still for a moment, then slowly reached upward with her right hand until her fingers closed convulsively around his wrist. He locked his fingers around her far more delicate wrist, making sure he had a good grip.

“All right. I’ve got you. Now, I want you to turn around until you’re facing the wall. You’ll be able to climb more easily if you can use your feet.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Yes, you can. Just—”

“What am I doing here?” she said in a voice of total bewilderment. “I’m on the side of a building. This is absurd. I don’t do things like this.”

“Of course not. Turn around and face the building, like a good girl.”

Irritably, she said, “I’m not a child.”

“Then stop acting like one,” he told her sharply. He could feel her stiffen, and a jolt of relief went through him when she began to turn around. He had infinite patience as well as genuine sympathy for her feelings and would have hung out the window for hours if necessary—but from this position he could see a crack in the ledge between her feet, and it was widening.

She began to unbalance as she turned, but he was ready for that possibility. It wasn’t the first time he’d lifted her weight, and since she was a small woman he had no trouble supporting her, even though his ribs gave him merry hell. And, unfortunately, Morgan’s anatomy made it somewhat painful for her to be dragged over the edge of the ledge and through the window.

Several breathless moments later, she was standing inside the dim room with him, half consciously rubbing the parts of her that had been abused.

“Shall I kiss it and make it better?” Quinn asked, entirely his insouciant self again.

Morgan shrugged off his supporting arm and took a pointed step away from him. “No, you shall not.” Her retort was more automatic than annoyed, and she followed it by saying sincerely, “But thanks for not leaving me out there to roost.”

“It was the least I could do, since you saved my hide earlier. And now I think we should vacate this firetrap before our friends come back.”

“You won’t get an argument. Lead on, Macduff.” She followed him in silence as he moved through the dark hall of the ninth floor toward the stairwell. Her panic out on the ledge had been the frozen kind, and with relatively solid flooring underneath her now, even the ghostly echoes of fear were gone. In any case, she was wrestling with other ghosts now.

Loyalty, for one.

Quinn had, in all probability, saved her life. Perhaps, as he’d said, he had felt that he owed her that, but the fact remained that she probably would have died without him. (Never mind that she wouldn’t have been here in the first place if she hadn’t gone haring after him.) The ledge beneath her had been crumbling, she knew. He had saved her from certain death; she had merely untied him—something he probably could have done himself, given time.

She owed him. But she owed Max Bannister her loyalty.

“You’re very quiet,” Quinn noted as he opened the door of the stairwell and began descending with the cautious speed of a man who knows the building’s unsafe.

Morgan wrestled the ghosts for two more flights downward, then sighed. Holding her voice steady, she said, “Stay away from Bannister’s collection, Quinn.”

He was silent himself for another flight, then stopped on a shadowy landing and turned to look at her. “Is there any reason aside from the obvious one why I should?”

“Yes. Because it’s a trap.” She drew a deep breath and gazed up at him. “There’s an Interpol agent working with Max. They want to catch you.”

CHAPTER

FOURTEEN

Q
uinn looked down at her, expressionless. “I see.
The collection is bait.”

She nodded. “The only bait virtually guaranteed to draw a world-famous thief across an ocean and a continent.” It was difficult to read his face, still an unfamiliar one to her, but she thought his handsome features held a curious sort of admiration.

“Why warn me, Morgana?”

“I pay my debts,” she answered stiffly.

“Even if the price is loyalty?”

His soft voice was like salt rubbed in a wound, and she lifted her chin higher as she stared up at him. “I’ll make peace with my conscience in my own way,” she said. “And peace with Max. Maybe he’ll forgive me. Maybe he won’t. But I owed you something. Now we’re even.”

“Not quite,” he said, and pulled her into his arms.

In the back of Morgan’s mind was the realization that this was no sneaky distraction from a thief who wanted to steal some bauble she wore; this was something else.

It was also insane, and she knew it. She knew it when a strange, feverish tremor rippled through her body, when her arms went around his waist, when her mouth opened eagerly beneath his.

She knew it when she realized he had stolen more from her than a simple ruby necklace.

It was dumb, and reckless, and hopelessly irrational—and Morgan didn’t fight it because she couldn’t.

He lifted his head at last, and his voice was a bit husky when he said, “We have to get out of here.”

She nodded silently and didn’t protest when he stepped back, but she felt grateful when he reached for her hand and held it the rest of the way down the stairwell. She didn’t want to think at all, because she was coping with the shock of realizing that she was falling for a thief.

Quinn didn’t waste any time getting them out of the building, moving swiftly but cautiously. As soon as they were outside, he said, “Where’s your car?”

Morgan gestured silently and walked beside him down the block to the side street where she’d parked. He released her hand and waited while she unlocked and opened the driver’s side door. Then, softly, he said, “Get out of here, Morgana.”

She blinked up at him. “You . . . ?”

“I’ll be fine. You go home. And—thank you for charging to my rescue. It almost gives me hope . . .”

She thought for a minute that he was slipping into his teasing, Don Juan persona, and she thought she would never forgive him if he did.

But then he stepped closer and bent his head to kiss her with a gentleness that made her throat ache. “I think you’re going to break my heart,” he murmured. Before she could respond, he had faded back into the fog and darkness of the night.

After a long moment, Morgan got into her car and drove away from the shattered buildings.

Wolfe had made an effort to charm Storm’s enigmatic cat, scratching him under the chin and feeding him bits of meat from their Sunday night dinner in the suite, but he didn’t think he’d made much of an impression.

Until Monday morning. That was when he woke up in Storm’s bed, with her cuddled up to his side as usual, and found the little blond cat curled up in the crook of her arm—which was flung across his chest. Wolfe had felt the most absurd sense of triumph as he’d lain there with Storm in his arms and her cat sleeping on his chest.

He didn’t want to disturb either of them, but since neither he nor Storm could afford to spend a weekday away from the museum with the scheduled opening of the
Mysteries Past
exhibit so near, he didn’t have much choice.

One discovery he had made was that Storm wasn’t a morning person. She was never grumpy, just sleepy and utterly limp—and he was amused to find that her cat was just the same. When he lifted Bear from his chest, the small golden cat hung from his hand as though he were boneless, enigmatic green eyes closed.

“Wake up, you ridiculous cat,” Wolfe said, gently shaking the dangling handful of fur.

Sleepily, Storm murmured, “He’s not a morning person either.”

“Well, he has to wake up. You too; I want to take you out for breakfast on the way to the museum.”

She levered herself up on an elbow and peered at him, her green eyes drowsy. “Oh, God, it’s Monday, isn’t it?”

“Afraid so.” He thought about spending eight or nine hours with her at the museum, frustrated by people coming and going all around them, and wondered if he could talk her into returning to his apartment or coming back here at lunchtime.

Storm sighed gustily. “It’s going to be a long day.”

Wolfe wondered if she meant it the same way he thought, but didn’t ask. He slid a hand into her wild, tumbled hair and raised his head to kiss her, absently returning Bear to his chest.

She smiled at him when the kiss ended. “Let’s come back here for lunch.”

“You’re on.”

She pushed herself up until she was half sitting, her long hair veiling her nakedness, and Wolfe tried to distract himself before the urge to haul her back down beside him became too strong to fight. The distraction he found was when he realized that Bear was still on his chest, sprawled out now with boneless legs and one ear folded under, snoring softly.

“He’s still asleep?”

“I told you, he’s not a morning person.” Storm reached over and found the tip of the cat’s tail, then pinched it gently.

Bear’s head jerked up, his eyes blinking sleepily, and his vivid little face was such a feline replica of Storm’s that Wolfe burst out laughing. Jostled a bit by the chest moving under him, Bear sort of moaned, “Yahhh,” and tumbled off Wolfe to the bed beside him.

Still chuckling, Wolfe said, “I’m glad at least one of us is easy to wake up.”

“All he needs is food,” Storm said. “And all I need is a shower and coffee.”

They shared the shower, and despite Wolfe’s good intentions, the steamy heat in the stall had less to do with hot water than with their response to each other. It was the second time he had wanted her so badly that he hadn’t been able to wait long enough to get them out of the shower, and since Storm was every bit as urgent, their joining was so explosive it left them drained and clinging to each other.

“Or maybe I don’t need coffee,” she murmured, rubbing her wet, rosy cheek against his chest.

“If we keep doing this,” he told her ruefully, “what I’m going to need is a chiropractor.”

“Are you complaining?”

“Hell, no.”

He didn’t feel like complaining about anything—except the fact that both of them had to go to work. They stopped at a small restaurant for breakfast, and Wolfe amused Storm by saving a piece of his bacon to take to the little cat waiting patiently for them in the car.

“I fed him at the hotel,” she reminded him.

“I know. He just looked so . . . woeful when we left him out there.”

Storm chuckled. “If you let him brainwash you with those pathetic looks, he’ll have you right where he wants you. Cats are the world’s worst opportunists.”

Wolfe didn’t argue with her; he had the sheepish idea that she was right. But he took the bacon out to Bear anyway.

It was after nine when they got to the museum, and Wolfe found himself unusually conscious of the guards’ impassive observation as he carried most of Storm’s homework in for her. It bothered him only because those same guards had watched him, during the course of the past months, being dropped off or picked up by a succession of blondes, and he wanted to tell them this was something entirely different. Except that it wasn’t any of their business anyway.

When she unlocked the door of the computer room, he carried her stuff in and piled it on the desk. “Are you going to be stuck in here all day?” he asked her.

“Pretty much,” she said, smiling up at him. “I have to load all the floor plans and security hardware diagrams into the computer to form the basis of the security program, so that means I have to stay close.”

He sighed. “I’ll be on the phone all morning with Lloyd’s. And this afternoon I need to go and talk to the police about that robbery Saturday night.” The morning paper delivered to Storm’s hotel suite had told them the bare facts of the robbery, but Wolfe believed he could get more information from his police contacts.

Storm had brought the paper with her, since she wanted to study it more carefully, and glanced at it where it lay on her desk. “Did that museum have a modern security system?” she asked, thinking he’d know.

“Yeah, very modern. And I want to find out how they got past it.”

“They?” Storm looked up at him curiously. “The article said only a few large pieces were taken and that there was no way to know who the thief was. Do you have some idea?”

Wolfe shrugged. “The way things have been vanishing in this city, you’d think we had a wandering black hole. Do I have an idea? Sure, plenty of them. But all I know for certain is that we have at least one gang of thieves operating in San Francisco and God knows how many independent contractors or collectors.”

“And Quinn,” Storm said.

“And Quinn.” Wolfe frowned. “I’ve been meaning to ask how you knew he was in town. The police haven’t publicly linked him to any theft so far, and neither have the newspapers.”

Silently cursing the slip, Storm shrugged and said, “Morgan told me he was in town.”

“She would.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but since he’s been in the city for weeks, apparently, and all we can be sure he’s stolen is a single jeweled dagger, shouldn’t he be pretty high up on our list of concerns? I mean, he must be waiting for something, and if it’s the opening of
Mysteries Past
. . .”

Wolfe looked a bit grim. “Yeah, I know. That’s one reason I want to talk to the cops, to find out if they have any suspicions it might have been him Saturday night. Since only a few choice pieces were taken, it sounds more like him or one of the other collectors than that gang. I need to know.”

She nodded. “Makes sense. Let me know what you find out?”

“Of course.” He leaned down to kiss her, ending up with both arms wrapped around her when he lifted her completely off her feet, a position Storm clearly enjoyed as much as he did.

Reluctantly, he leaned back down to set her on her feet, and when he released her and straightened he found he’d acquired a passenger.

Obviously surprised that her cat had transferred to Wolfe’s shoulder from her own, Storm said, “If it bothers you, just set him on the desk.”

Wolfe hesitated, but he liked the slight, warm weight of the little cat and he was still feeling a bit proud at having won over Storm’s familiar. “No, it’s okay. At least—he won’t dig his claws in every time I move, will he?”

“Only if you startle him by moving suddenly. Actually, his balance is pretty good, so he hardly needs to hold on. If he wants down, he’ll tell you, and that’s when you should bring him back here. I’ve got his litter box in here, remember.”

He knew that; it was over in a corner of the room and matched the one she kept in her hotel suite.

“I’ll remember.” Still, he hesitated, finally bending to kiss her again, this time briefly.

When he left, she went slowly around the desk and got settled, turning on the computer and trying to arrange the clutter into some kind of order. When the computer was ready for input, she set it up to begin receiving all the data concerning specific details of the museum and the various security hardware. All that was ready to be transferred from disks, which the previous computer programmer had prepared and which Storm had found to be perfectly acceptable.

While the computer began digesting data, Storm eyed her telephone, mentally decided to postpone the necessary call, and drew the newspaper toward her. She was very curious about the Saturday night robbery.

She had just read the short article through for the second time when a light voice said, “Buy you a cup of coffee?”

Her first thought was that Morgan was upset about something, though it was more a perception than a certainty. The brunette seemed both keyed up and curiously calm, as if she had dragged on a surface tranquility to mask a deep turmoil. And it was that more than anything else that caused Storm to agree affably and accept the cup Morgan had brought with her.

“Thanks. Have a seat,” she invited.

The computer room’s one visitor’s chair was shoved over into a corner to be out of the way, so Morgan casually sat on the edge of the big desk. “Where’s your cat?” she asked.

“With Wolfe.”

“Oh-ho—is that as promising as I think it is?”

Storm widened her eyes innocently.

Smiling slightly, Morgan said, “Listen, I know it’s none of my business, but I’ve got to know. When he went tearing out of here Friday after I delivered your message, Wolfe was madder than I’ve ever seen him. He looked like he wanted to strangle you. Or something.”

Clearing her throat, Storm murmured, “He didn’t strangle me.”

“So I see. Would I be far off in assuming that you two spent the weekend together?”

“Let’s put it this way,” Storm said. “When Wolfe woke up this morning—Bear was on his chest.”

“Do I offer congratulations?” Morgan asked solemnly.

“Not just yet. We have a few hurdles to get over before anything’s settled.”

A bit dryly, Morgan said, “Some of his past ladies had pets, and, believe me, Wolfe kept his distance. He didn’t want to get involved, and it showed. If he’s wearing your cat on his shoulder, it’s just a matter of time.”

Storm had felt hopeful about that herself, but since the hurdles looming ahead were bad ones, she didn’t let herself hope too much. With a slight shrug, she said, “Maybe. But, speaking of his past ladies, did you see Nyssa Armstrong leave here on Friday?”

“No, why?”

“It’s kind of a funny thing.” Storm hesitated, but she didn’t see any reason not to tell Morgan about it. “Wolfe and I went out to the ballpark Saturday night to see the Giants, and I could have sworn I saw her in the crowd.”

“Nyssa? At a
baseball
game?”

“Like I said—kind of funny, huh? There was a home run hit just then that distracted me, and when I looked again I couldn’t see her. But I’m pretty sure it was her. I didn’t tell Wolfe, but I wondered about it.”