Once a Thief (6 page)

Her favorite piece of jewelry, and the only piece of real value she owned, was a gold pendant she wore suspended on a fine gold chain. The pendant was a heart shape encrusted with numerous small rubies, a piece that could be casual or dressy depending on what she was wearing.

Tonight, it had been casual.

And it was gone.

Morgan let out a sound that couldn’t have been heard more than three feet away. Quinn, if he’d been privileged to hear it, would have had no difficulty interpreting it. And the quite lively sense of self-preservation that had kept him alive and at large for ten years would have started warning bells jangling.

If he really hadn’t intended to rouse Morgan’s considerable temper, he had failed wonderfully.

When Wolfe Nickerson stalked into the museum’s computer room in the middle of the following Tuesday afternoon, one look at his face should have warned anyone that he was not in a good mood. Unfortunately, the computer technician who was kneeling half under the main desk couldn’t see his face. So his brusque voice and somewhat imperious summons caused her to bump her head—hard—against the underside of the desk.

“Hey—you,” he growled, snapping his fingers as he looked around the somewhat cramped room that was filled with various machines, monitors, and control panels.

He heard the thud, and it effectively drew his attention to the desk. Then he saw the top of a rather wild blonde head being rubbed by one small hand, and a pair of fierce green eyes glaring up at him.

In a voice that was every bit as intense as her eyes and held a strong Southern accent, she said, “To summon a cab, you can snap your fingers. To call a forgiving dog, you can snap your fingers. But if you want a printable response from
me,
use my name.”

“I don’t know your name,” he retorted.

She let out a little sigh that sounded aggravated and climbed to her feet, still rubbing her head. Her expression remained somewhat annoyed, though her voice was milder. “That is true, but hardly an excuse. You might at least have said ‘Hey, lady,’ or ‘Excuse me, miss.’”

“I didn’t know you were a—woman,” Wolfe said. He realized he was being stared at and decided he’d better clarify that statement. “I mean, I wasn’t aware that Ace would be sending me a female technician. And I couldn’t see you when I came into the room.”

“Next time,” she said, “knock.”

For a little thing, she certainly had an attitude, he thought. He towered over her by nearly a foot, but she was obviously not in the least intimidated. In fact, there was something slightly mocking in her expression. Wolfe wasn’t used to being treated with mockery, especially by a woman.

“What
is
your name?” he demanded.

“Storm Tremaine.”

He didn’t immediately respond to the information, even though he’d asked for it. He wasn’t often caught off guard by a person or a situation, but this was one of the rare occasions. When Ace Security had promised to send him their very best computer technician to replace the one who had unintentionally sabotaged the museum’s new security system more than a week ago, Wolfe had expected another earnest young man whose language was so technical it hardly resembled English and who probably had no interest in anything except his computers.

What Wolfe had definitely
not
expected was a pint-size blonde somewhere in her twenties with very long and definitely wild hair, big eyes so haughty, fierce, and green any cat would have been proud to claim them, and a small but alive face that wasn’t exactly pretty but certainly wouldn’t be easily forgotten.

Wolfe had a thing about blondes, but he preferred them tall, sleek, and leggy. This one hardly fit the mold, in more ways than one. In fact, judging by what he’d seen of her temperament, her hair should have been red. He was almost certain it was meant to be red.

He eyed her, not entirely pleased, because she certainly didn’t look like his mental image of a crackerjack computer technician. “Your name is Storm?” he asked dryly.

She returned the stare, then put small hands on her hips and looked him up and down slowly and thoroughly—missing nothing along the way—with a total lack of self-consciousness. “Well, as I understand it, yours is Wolfe,” she drawled. “So let’s not cast stones, huh?”

There was too much justice in that for him to be able to take exception to it, but he was definitely annoyed by her attitude. “Look, in case nobody told you—you work for me.”

Without hesitation and in a very matter-of-fact way, she said, “My job is to complete the installation of a computerized security system in this museum. I work for Ace Security first because they are my employers, Max Bannister second because he hired us to do a job, and the San Francisco Museum of Historical Art third because the job is here. Fourth is Morgan West, who is the director of the
Mysteries Past
exhibit. You come in fifth, since being head of security for the exhibit is a narrow area of responsibility. And since Mr. Bannister is away—I believe on his honeymoon—I answer directly to you on any problems concerning security.” She smiled. “And I don’t need any of you hovering over me. In case nobody told
you
—I’m very good at what I do.”

“That remains to be seen,” Wolfe said. He felt very irritated at her. And couldn’t take his eyes off her vividly expressive face. It was a disconcerting combination of reactions.

She nodded slightly, clearly accepting his challenge. “Fair enough. I’ll be quite happy to prove myself. I’ll work, and work hard—but, as I said, not with you standing there glowering at me. To coin a phrase, this room’s too small for the both of us. Was there a reason you came in here?”

“Yes, there was a reason.” He knew he sounded as annoyed as he felt. “I wanted to know how long the door alarms will be deactivated; I need the guards stationed in the corridors, not on the doors, while the museum’s open.”

Storm sat down in the swivel chair behind the desk, leaned back, and propped her feet up on the desk. She was wearing very small, very scuffed Western boots with high heels.

She
was
little, Wolfe realized, noting that the heels had given her at least three inches of height.

“The door alarms are back on line,” she said. “I had to take them off line for half an hour because somebody had screwed up and mismatched four different cables, which was threatening to blow the whole system.”

“It wasn’t me,” he heard himself say, aware of a peculiar urge to defend himself because of the way she was looking at him. At the same time, he was relieved to know that she’d had a good reason for being underneath the desk. That had bothered him on some vague level of his mind.

Storm laced her fingers together across her middle, still looking at him. After a moment she said mildly, “Well, it hardly matters since I fixed it. Anyway, the door alarms will remain on line until the changeover to the new system.”

“Which will be . . . ?”

“I had to start all over with a new hard drive, if you’ll recall, so all the data has to be reentered, from the operating system on up. Then the new security program has to be written, installed, and integrated. It’ll take some time. A week. Ten days at the most.”

Wolfe felt his eyebrows climbing. If she could get the new security system on line in ten days or less, they would actually end up ahead of their original schedule. Skeptical by nature, he said, “Aren’t you being optimistic about that?”

“No.”

Totally against his will, he felt a flicker of amusement. She might be little, but there was certainly nothing small about Storm Tremaine’s self-confidence. It was a trait he tended to respect. “Then don’t you think you’d better get started?” he suggested dryly.

She nodded toward the main computer terminal atop the desk to the right of her boots. The screen was dark, but the drive system was humming quietly. “I have started. Until the operating system finishes loading, that thing’s nothing more than a very stupid, very expensive piece of junk waiting for somebody to tell it what to do. The OS is loading now.”

Wolfe wasn’t exactly computer-illiterate but, like most people, he just automatically assumed the machine wasn’t on if the screen was dark. Before he could either admit his ignorance or come up with a face-saving response, she tossed the subject into the limbo of unimportant things.

“How fast can you run?”

He blinked. “What?”

“Run. The mile, for instance. How fast can you run the mile?”

“About average, I suppose.”

She smiled. It suddenly made him
extremely
nervous. “That’s good,” she said.

Warily, he asked, “Why is that good?”

“I was state champ in college.”

Morgan had told herself at least a hundred times that there was nothing she could do to get her necklace back. Max had told her via phone, with his usual courtesy but with emphasis, that there were enough people after Quinn’s hide without her involvement.

Well, she knew that.

But. She wanted her necklace back. She had swallowed her pride and explained to Wolfe—with as few details as possible—how Quinn had stolen it from her. Rather surprisingly, Wolfe hadn’t given her a hard time about it; he had simply asked Max’s police inspector friend Keane Tyler to keep an eye out for the necklace. Without going into much detail as to how the necklace came to be “lost.” But if Quinn had sold the thing (the only reason Morgan could think of for him to have taken it—other than sheer devilry, which was admittedly just as likely), it had yet to surface at any fence or pawnshop.

She wanted it back.

That was why, she told herself. That was why she was sticking her nose in where it really didn’t belong despite Max’s warning and her own common sense. Because she wanted her necklace back.
Not
because she had any desire at all to meet up with that devious thief again.

He was still in the city, she knew that. Still too close by for comfort. At least twice in the last few days, she was absolutely positive he had been in the museum, lost among the crowd of visitors, and close enough to touch.

What she didn’t know was whether he’d been casing the joint—keeping an eye on the progress of preparations for the
Mysteries Past
exhibit—or had been hanging around playing invisible merely to annoy her.

He was capable of either motive. Dammit.

She had no idea what his face looked like, and though she caught herself studying several tall strangers with an intentness that had resulted in two indecent propositions and three requests for a date, she was reasonably sure she hadn’t actually seen him.

Reasonably sure.

But ever since her last encounter with him, she’d been looking for him. And not just in the museum here. She averaged spending at least a couple of hours every night in her car, parked outside some other museum or jewelry store—any likely target—waiting to see if he would show up. Trying to sense him.

It was dumb and reckless and she knew it . . . but she couldn’t help herself.

By Tuesday she was short on sleep and not in the best of moods, so when Keane Tyler called her to report no luck in turning up the necklace Quinn had stolen from her, she vented her feelings in what was a fairly minor explosion.

Keane listened in silence, then said sympathetically, “Well, if it makes you feel any better, Morgan, from all I’ve heard, Quinn can be a real devil. Not evil the way some thieves genuinely are, but more than sharp enough to cut himself.”

Morgan frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean he’s smart, off-the-chart smart. Wouldn’t surprise me to find out the guy was literally a genius. And men like that need challenges, need to push themselves harder than most of us ever will. They find what they need in their work, usually. His work happens to be thievery. So it’s not really surprising that he’s too good to leave any kind of a trail we might use to find him.”

“You almost sound like you admire him.”

“I almost do.” Keane laughed under his breath. “Look, I deal with the scum of the earth most days. Killers, drug pushers, pedophiles. And, yeah, thieves who don’t think twice about killing in the course of a robbery. But a thief like Quinn? He’s way down on my priority list of bad guys. He never uses weapons, has never hurt anyone in the course of a robbery—hell, he’s never even broken a window as far as I know.”

Morgan thought of Quinn’s own words on that subject, but all she said was, “Steals from the rich and gives to the poor?”

With another laugh, Keane said, “No, he hasn’t gone that far—or if he has, the giving part was anonymous. But he doesn’t steal from the poor, doesn’t take food out of the mouths of babes, and I count that as at least a point or two in his favor.”

Morgan hesitated, then said, “Keane, could you do
me
a favor? Could you find out all the information on Quinn that’s available to law-enforcement officials?”

“I figured you’d have researched him by now. I mean, since he’s a threat to Max’s exhibit.”

“I did research him. I read a lot of newspaper articles written by a whole bunch of journalists gleeful that the rich were getting it in the neck. None of them offered me anything in the way of hard information about Quinn.”

“There isn’t much, even for us,” Keane pointed out.

“Yeah, but can you get me what you have? Maybe there’s something that’ll help me figure out a way to defend the exhibit against him.”

“Maybe—if that new computer technician from Ace knows a trick or two the rest of the world doesn’t know.”

“Maybe she does. Anyway, I have to give her all the information I can. Will you do me the favor, Keane?”

“Sure. I’ll dig up everything I can and get back to you ASAP.”

“Thanks.” Morgan cradled the receiver, then sat there staring across her office at nothing.

And seeing green eyes filled with devilry.

CHAPTER

SIX

W
olfe wasn’t vain enough to instantly assume
that Storm had in mind a sexual pursuit—but he couldn’t think of any other reason why she’d be comparing their running abilities.

“Are we going to be running somewhere?” he asked.

“That,” she said, “depends on you.”

“Storm—you don’t mind if I call you Storm, do you?” His voice was very polite.

Hers was equally so. “Certainly not. After all, we’re both a force of nature—Wolfe.”

He crossed his arms over his chest and gazed down at her with what he hoped was an unreadable expression. His curiosity had gotten him into trouble in the past, but he was sure he could handle this diminutive blonde. Without commenting on the comparison of their names, he said, “Storm, are you implying that you’d like to mix business with pleasure?”

“Oh, no, I’d much rather keep the two separate. My business hours—like the museum’s—are nine to six. During those hours I fully intend to work. But that leaves a lot of time—and I understand San Francisco has a wonderful nightlife. I don’t need much sleep. How about you?”

As he gazed at her vivid face and bright eyes, Wolfe had the sudden wary feeling that there was an underlying guile in her voice or manner that he was missing, and that his instincts were trying to warn him to look beneath the surface. But what she was saying kept getting in the way.

“Somehow, I don’t think we’d suit each other,” he said finally.

“Why?” she drawled. “Because I’m not five-foot-nine and sleek? You should widen your horizons. To say nothing of your standards.”

In a voice that had more than once been termed dangerous, Wolfe said, “I’m going to strangle Morgan.”

“Oh, don’t blame her—she wasn’t the first person who told me about your obsession with Barbie dolls. That’s the worst-kept secret in the city—especially since you change them about as often as you change your socks.”

He realized his teeth were gritted only because his jaw began to ache. He didn’t like feeling on the defensive; it was an unusual and very uncomfortable sensation. Consciously relaxing taut muscles, he said, “Well, we all have our preferences, don’t we?”

“That’s put me in my place,” she said, not noticeably discouraged about it. “Most women would view that as a rejection. I’m not most women. And I really do think you owe it to yourself to at least give me a try.”

“Why?” he demanded bluntly. He could have sworn there was a fleeting gleam of laughter in her cat’s eyes, but her slightly drawling voice remained almost insultingly dispassionate.

“Because a steady diet of
anything
is going to taste awfully bland eventually. If it must be blondes, the least you can do is broaden the range a bit to include those of us who aren’t tall even on a stepladder and who don’t have blue eyes—which are very common, by the way. Why not put a little spice in your life? I can guarantee you won’t be bored.”

Before he could stop himself, Wolfe retorted, “That’s not what I’m worried about.”

A little laugh escaped her. “Afraid I’d cling and be demanding? Happily ever after and a white picket fence? Well, I don’t cling, and I tend to ask rather than demand, but as for the rest, I wouldn’t rule it out. In fact, small-town Southern girls have that goal drummed into them practically from birth. But I could hardly drag you to the altar bound and gagged, now, could I? And since you’re captain of your fate and master of your soul—to say nothing of being considerably larger than me—I imagine it wouldn’t do me much good to catch you. Unless you wanted to be caught, that is.”

Wolfe had another uneasy feeling, this time that his mouth was open. He was thirty-six, which meant that his interest in females—and vice versa—went back more than twenty years. If he’d wanted, he could have told some colorful stories; he was a scarred veteran of the sexual wars. But this was a first for him.

Was she simply a very honest woman? A woman who was attracted to a man she’d just met and said so without hesitation or any attempt to play games? Somehow, he wasn’t quite prepared to buy that. He wasn’t that vain—or that gullible. And he was a skeptical man.

So . . . what was she up to?

He frowned down at her, trying to listen to his instincts. “I’m getting a little confused. Are you after a date, a lover, or a husband?”

“Well, that depends on your stamina, doesn’t it? At least I assume that’s your problem. Judging by what I know of your track record, there must be
some
reason why you haven’t been able to go the distance—any distance at all, in fact—with any of your previous blondes.”

Whatever Wolfe’s instincts were trying to tell him was drowned in the roar of his temper. Biting every word off, he said, “Did it ever occur to you that the
problem
might simply be a lack of continuing interest on both sides?”

Storm pursed her lips thoughtfully. “I suppose it might have occurred to me, but I figure that any man who dates only carbon copies of one type of woman must be sure that he knows what he wants and certainly should know what makes him happy. Assuming that, you must be satisfied with brief, surface relationships—or else you’d make an effort to try something different. Ergo, if there is a problem . . . it’s yours.”

Wolfe didn’t really follow the logic of her argument, mostly because her drawling voice and dispassionate tone—not to mention her words—were feeding his temper steadily. If she’d set out to make him so mad he would act purely on impulse, she couldn’t have done a better job.

Almost growling the question, he asked, “Did you drive here this morning?”

“No, I took a cab.”

“Then meet me out front at six.”

“You’re on,” she said promptly.

Wolfe turned on his heel and stalked from the room.

After a few moments, Storm took her boots off the desk and got up. She went to the door and closed it quietly. She leaned against it, gazing at nothing in particular, until a beep from the computer terminal drew her back to the desk. Returning to her chair, she removed a CD from the computer’s CD-ROM drive tray and replaced it with another she took from a disk file beside the keyboard. She typed a short command, and the computer began humming softly once again.

Her actions were the automatic and unthinking ones of an expert in her field, and during most of the process she gazed absently toward the door. Finally, however, she leaned back in her chair and peered under the desk.

“Why didn’t you come out and provide a little distraction?” she asked in a chiding tone. “It might have saved me from the consequences of my own insanity.”

“Yaaah,” her companion answered in a voice so soft it was hardly a murmur, then he came out from under the desk to jump on top of it.

The cat was an almost eerie feline replica of Storm. It was very small and appeared delicate; its thick and rather wavy fur was the exact same shade of pale gold as her hair; and its eyes were a vibrant green. Even the small face held the same vivid
aliveness
that was in Storm’s expression.

A very superstitious, slightly drunk man had once fleetingly believed that Storm had actually turned herself into a cat. And a good thing too; his brief moment of alcohol-induced terror had given her the opportunity she’d needed to escape.

A close call, that.

Shrugging off the memory, Storm eyed her cat reprovingly. “Don’t tell me he scared you.”

The cat began to wash a blond forepaw with studied disinterest.

“Yeah, right,” Storm said. “Bear, you’re almost as good a liar as I am.” She frowned slightly. “He’s a wolf, you’re a bear, and I’m a storm. If any more feral names pop up, I’m going home. It wouldn’t exactly be a good omen.”

“Yaaah,” Bear replied, sounding, as always, the way he looked—like a very small and very meek kitten rather than a full-grown cat who had turned five on his last birthday.

“You’re just saying that because you love to watch me walking a high wire without a net.”

The cat lifted his chin and half closed his eyes in an expression any cat lover would have recognized. Utter contentment.

“Some pal you are,” Storm told him dryly. “It’d serve you right if we find out he’s allergic. Then where will you be?” She listened to her cat purr a response and sighed.

If the universe wanted to be kind to her, Wolfe would indeed have an allergy to cats—which would effectively keep him away from Storm.

The problem was, she didn’t have much faith in the kindness of the universe. Not this time.

The universe tended not to be kind to liars.

Carla’s nerve broke when she heard through the office grapevine that Jonathan had fucked up his job installing the new security system at the Museum of Historical Art, and that some hotshot programmer was being pulled off a job in Europe and rushed over to patch up Ace’s black eye.

And install a totally new security system to protect the building and the upcoming
Mysteries Past
exhibit.

A security system that would not be on file anywhere at the Ace offices.

Carla didn’t have to know anything about art or antiquities to know that the Bannister collection was the dream target of every thief that breathed. Including the one who was blackmailing her. And even though he had demanded the design plans of several other security systems, she didn’t doubt that getting his hands on the Bannister collection was his ultimate goal. She didn’t think he was going to be happy when he discovered that the schematics she’d gotten for him were worthless, and that she couldn’t possibly get the plans for the newly designed system.

Carla really didn’t want to wait around and find out just how unhappy he would be.

She went to work on that Tuesday as usual, her nerve gone but desperately trying to appear the same as usual even as her mind worked frantically.

Run? Or find something, anything, to placate the blackmailer?

She came within a whisper of going to her supervisor and confessing everything, but the memory of prison stopped her. After all, she couldn’t prove she’d been blackmailed, and at least one of the security systems whose diagrams she had copied for him had been breached. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gems had been stolen.

She’d take the fall for that, she knew. An accessory charge or something.

That realization was all it took. Carla was not going back to prison, not if she could do anything to stop it. Running was the only answer. She’d go, just start driving when she left work, and she’d start all over again somewhere else.

She could do that. She could.

It was an hour or so from quitting time when Carla made her decision. After that, she watched the clock and counted down the minutes until she could leave.

Storm was a bit late in leaving the museum, mostly because she had wanted to finish loading the operating system so she’d be ready for the other programs first thing next morning. As a result, she locked the door of the computer room at half past six and found one of the security guards waiting for her at the front door.

“The boss said to wait and let you out,” the man said.

She paused to regard him thoughtfully. “Which boss?”

“Ma’am?”

“I’m trying to figure out who runs things around here. So, which boss told you to wait for me?”

“Oh. Well—Mr. Nickerson. He’s in charge of security.”

Storm found the response interesting. Technically, Wolfe was not, in fact, in charge of security for the
museum
—only for the
Mysteries Past
exhibit. Which wasn’t even in place yet. However, it was natural he would be concerned with the museum’s security, since the building would house the exhibit. What Storm found interesting was the fact that the guards—and not just this man, because she’d asked a couple of others as well—really did consider Wolfe’s word law. Which meant that in an emergency it would be Wolfe the guards would look to, no matter who else was present.

Thoughtful, she nodded to the guard and passed through the door when he opened it for her. She paused just outside at the top of the wide steps, looking down toward the curb.

He was waiting for her, leaning against the hood of a late-model sports car that was, she knew, a rental.

As she started down the steps toward him, she thought about the fact that both he and she were visitors to this city, both living transient lives here. Wolfe had a sublet apartment, she knew; he was set to be here for months while the Bannister collection of artworks and gems was being exhibited at the museum. She, on the other hand, was scheduled to be in San Francisco only a matter of a few weeks, just long enough to get the security system on line and functioning properly; her temporary home here was a small suite in a nearby hotel.

Storm hadn’t been granted a lot of time to check out the situation here before she arrived—which was her habit—because she’d gotten her orders on fairly short notice. But she was a resourceful woman, and she’d managed to find out quite a lot, certainly more than Wolfe realized; she’d been most interested in checking him out, since he was head of security. She had found out that the two of them had some things in common—and a number of differences.

Wolfe was based in New York and London; the only place she’d lived for more than a few weeks at a time during the past ten years was Paris, so if she had a base that was probably it. They were both accustomed to living out of a suitcase.

Wolfe had a thing about blondes. That was true enough, and she’d goaded him about it—but she hadn’t mentioned one very important point about his seeming fixation. All the blondes he’d dated—for want of a better word—since arriving in San Francisco were in some way involved with foundations, trusts, charities, art societies, museums, or private collections of artworks, gems, and other valuables.

Smart man, she had realized with an inner salute of respect when that pattern became apparent to her.
He
was mixing business and pleasure quite effectively, enjoying the company of his blondes while he picked their brains. In the past months he’d been in and out of San Francisco and, particularly in recent weeks when he’d been living here, he had undoubtedly gathered an impressive amount of intelligence about the close-knit art world in this city—to say nothing of having fun while he did it.