White Heat (7 page)

No. What he’d like to do was take her up to one of the bedrooms upstairs and strip her naked, then bury himself in her soft warm body and fall asleep that way. “Sure.”

“I’ll turn on the heat on the way. It’s freezing in here.” She started removing her coat, but a strand of dark hair got tangled on a button.

“Here, let me’ Max said before she ripped her hair out at the root. Touching her could be a big mistake. Gritting his teeth, he reached out, freeing her hair of the button. The scent of roses and linseed oil, the most unlikely combination of seductive fragrances, made his body stiffen.

He stepped away from her. “One cup and we’re going to bed.” He only noticed her shoulders tense because he was so acutely aware of her. “Five bedrooms upstairs, right?”

They entered the vast kitchen, where he’d left all the lights on after his search.

“There’s a bedroom down here, too.”

Max knew. He’d been through the kitchen and bedroom and large walk—in pantry on his sweep. Emily tossed her yellow rain slicker over a chair at the big farmhouse table in the middle of the room and went to fill the kettle.

Clearly she was familiar with the kitchen, as she took out cups a bowl of sugar. Watching her graceful movements, he pulled out a chair, sitting down cautiously. His balls still ached from her knee action.

“I’ll take that one.”

She glanced over her shoulder, eyes shadowed. “What one?”

“Bedroom downstairs.”

“Damn,” she muttered, obviously suddenly remembering something. “I have to make a phone call.”

“At three—thirty in the morning?”

“Oh.” She looked at her watch. Biting the corner of her lower , she shook her head. “I’ll call him later.”

Her lips were beautifully shaped. He’d like to be the one doing e biting. “Him?”

“My friend, Franco, is coming with me to Seattle.”

“Taking him home to meet the folks?”

She gave him a cool look from large, hot-chocolate-colored eyes. “None of your business.”

Didn’t mean he couldn’t make it his fucking business, Max ought with unexpected savagery. What had he expected? That she’d wait for him to come back? Indefinitely? Hell, ever? And after he hadn’t bothered to call her?

Since he’d had absolutely zero intention of returning—ever— wondered almost abstractly why the thought that she hadn’t waited pissed him off. He was a logical, rational man. His reaction this woman was anything but.

Still, it pissed him off royally knowing that she’d found some other man to warm her bed. “Does Frank have a last name?” he asked as pleasantly as he could through gritted teeth.

“Franco
Bozzato.” She took a pack of cookies out of an enameled tin on the counter, then moved the kettle off the burner before it whistled. “You wouldn’t know him.”

Max would know more about Signore Franco Bozzato by morning than Emily ever would. “Probably not,” he said agreeably as she filled their cups, added sugar to both, and brought them to the table. She went back for the cookies.

“We don’t need a plate’ he muttered as she reached into the upper cupboard for one. “What does your boyfriend do?” Max felt an insane spurt of jealousy, which he quickly interpreted as heartburn. The woman had a life that had nothing to do with him. He felt mildly guilty about using her last year to get a low key intro to Arkady Strugatsky, a high-level Russian terrorist who considered himself a patron of the arts.

T-FLAC had tried various ways to separate the Russian from his bodyguards. The man had been as inviolable as Fort Knox. The party, a high-society, high-profile black-tie event with a silent auction, had been held at a private castle on the outskirts of Rome. Because many of the items up for bid had been valued in the millions, security had been straitjacket tight. Even Strugatsky’s phalanx of guards had been instructed to wait for him outside. No arms were permitted through the metal detectors.

Getting in undetected would have been impossible. Getting out wasn’t that big a problem. Not for someone whose name was on the printed guest list. Photographed, fingerprinted, and vouched for by the highly respectable Miss Emily Greene. Talk about provenance.

He and his team had gotten what they wanted, Strugatsky without his bodyguards. It had been a relatively simple matter to escort him out of the party and into the limo waiting at the back door. Max hadn’t needed to return to the party, or to Emily. Nor had he needed to spend the next couple of days with her.

He considered the extra time he’d spent with her a bonus. He’d liked her, she’d liked him—two consenting adults.

Thanks to her, Strugatsky was some Bubba’s bitch in Leavenworth.

The end had justified the means. No harm, no foul.

Nobody needed to know how hard it had been to walk away from her when the job had been done. And if he hadn’t been called suddenly to another op, he might have stayed a few more days if she’d been willing. And she would have been.

Still. It had all worked out in the end.

“Franco is an investment banker.” Emily remained standing, cradling her cup between her hands as she inhaled the fragrant steam. Light refracted off the studs in her ears, and Max noticed one was missing, and another had green paint on it. “It’s weird being here when there isn’t anyone around. Your father always had a house full of people.”

“I’m sure he did.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You don’t have to say it as though this was the . . .
Kasbah,
and he had a smorgasbord of drugs, and hot and cold naked women running around. He didn’t have wild sex parties. He was a sophisticated, well—educated man. His social circle was filled with people who were smart and interesting. People admired him. Loved him. He had a lot—” her breath caught. “A
lot
of friends.”

He was an asshole, a womanizer, and a sorry excuse for a human being. And f you believe he didn’t have a parade of women in and out of this mausoleum, you were sadly duped. He was just smart enough to keep his two lives separate, one behind closed doors.
Just because he and Daniel didn’t have any contact, didn’t mean Max hadn’t kept a weather eye on him. Not out of any personal interest. But Max hadn’t wanted the son of a bitch to suddenly show up on his mother’s doorstep one day.

She’d died two years ago, and then he just didn’t give a damn what the man did or to whom. But the reports still came in. He hadn’t bothered reading any of them in years. Their tenuous tie was gone.

He’d known just enough to “convince” the bastard to invite him to the party last year. He hadn’t told him why he wanted to go, and Daniel had never asked. He’d thrown Emily to his son without knowing who or what Max was, or why he wanted to be accompanied to the event by someone everyone there knew and liked.

“I didn’t say anything,” Max said mildly, drinking the tepid tea he didn’t want. Emily’s loyalty to Daniel was sorely misplaced. But he wasn’t going to be the one to burst her bubble.
“You didn’t have to. Your eyes sneered.”

“Eyes can sneer?”

She covered a yawn with her hand. “Yours do.”

He’d heard worse. Did Frank Bozzo’s eyes sneer? Max bet not.

Emily sipped from her cup, watching him over the rim. She had gorgeous eyes, but right now they were heavy-lidded with exhaustion. He could go another couple of hours. But he was going to need to sleep soon. He had an unexpected but familiar itch that told him something murky, and relevant, was rearing its ugly head out of his sperm donor’s past. Max didn’t know what, or where, but he sure as shit suspected that there was something going on. Something bad. Something urgent.

He’d arranged to get copies of those reports he hadn’t bothered reading. Perhaps there’d be some clues to be found there. It was a start.

“You speak Italian very well.” Emily rubbed her eye and yawned. “You had an excellent teacher. You know all the nuances of the language. Did you learn at—where was that? Stanford?”

Max hadn’t shared that information with her. A year ago, he’d made sure she’d done most of the talking. That nugget could only have come from her mentor. The old man had known that much about him. Interesting. He wondered if her source had also known he’d attended MIT.

“Yeah. Turns out that I have a natural aptitude for languages.”
Especially after T-FLAC recruited me in my first year of college.

“Do you still live in San Francisco?” she asked, her speech a little slurred with exhaustion. Max knew he was postponing going heir separate ways to get some sleep. But looking at this woman was enough to turn a saint into a sinner. And he’d never been a saint.
“Yeah. Off and on. More off. I travel a lot.”

He knew she’d been born in Seattle, Washington. But with her dark hair and eyes she could easily pass as Italian. He knew more about her than he’d let on in the car. He knew her mother had been a model. He knew where and when she’d gone to her fancy, overpriced boarding school, and that she’d stayed to attend Istituto tatale d’arte diVenezi, the art school in Venice, followed by several rears at Accademia di belle arti di Roma.

She’d graduated top of her class and been sought after, and fought over, by top museums all over the world. She was
that
good s a fine art restorer. Her CV was long and impressive. In art circles he was considered number one, having surpassed her mentor several years ago.

And through it all, Daniel Aries had been beside her. Teaching and guiding her. Her mentor and surrogate father.

Max wondered if her mother and his sperm donor had had an affair fifteen years ago. Probably, if the mother looked anything like the daughter.

Emily yawned again, then lifted her arms over her head, hands clasped, and arched her back, stretching like a lazy cat. Dropping her arms she leaned a jean-clad hip on the table. She waved a vague and around the room. “Would you consider living here?”

“Hell no.”

She gave him a disapproving look. “Then you should sell. Everything in the villa should be donated to museums. Your father’s talent made him an extremely wealthy man. He spent his money on what he loved most—”

Wine, women
. . . “Himself?”

“Art,”
she said crossly. “He has—had—an enviable collection that people would kill for—” Her eyes widened. “Lord, Max. Do you think that—no. Now I’m believing your nonsense. Nobody killed your father. Not for his art collection,” she trailed off, shaking her head. “Of
course
nobody killed him for his collection. Nothing was stolen?’

She had a clever imagination, and the ability to rein in the quantum leap of logic her tired brain had just made. At least she was now tacitly acknowledging that the man had been murdered.

She rubbed a hand over her face, fatigue evident in every line of her slender body. The early morning events had taken a toll on her. In the last couple of hours, she’d knocked a would-be assassin out cold and brought a highly trained T-FLAC operative to his knees. It wouldn’t take long for her to believe as he did, that her intruder had come to kill her.

And while Max felt zero emotion over the death, accidental or otherwise, of Daniel, a man he’d never known, Emily had loved the son of a bitch. She was hurting, exhausted, and scared.

And Max suspected it wasn’t going to get better real soon. He glanced away from the distracting glossy shine of her hair in the soft lighting above the table, the sparkle of the diamond studs in her ears, and the way her wide eyes looked weighted with sleep as she valiantly tried to stay awake.

His pulse kicked. Beneath those jeans and sweater were three little dolphins waiting to be rediscovered.

Christ.

She rotated her head. Max wanted to run his tongue over the tendons and nerves there. He reminded himself that he wasn’t here for
her.
He was here because she’d called him. That was the
only
reason. Oh, yeah. Minor detail. And because someone had tried to kill her tonight.

“God. I don’t know anymore.” she pushed her cup aside, her dark gaze drifting over him, and shifted away a little too quickly. “I need some sleep. Maybe we can think more cohesively in the morning.”

She met his gaze. “I loved your father, and I love this villa. Not for the value, but for the history and beauty of the things it took him forty years to collect.”

“Fine with me. If he didn’t leave it to you outright, you could pay me a buck, and all this Liberace-esque splendor will be yours.”

Emily straightened. “You’re a Philistine, do you know that?” Max’s lips quirked. He’d been called much, much worse.

EMILY WOKE TO FIND THE SUN SHINING THROUGH THE WINDOW TO warm her bare skin. She’d been so tired by the time she’d gone upstairs to bed that she’d stripped and fallen face-first between the lavender—scented sheets.

She blinked open her eyes. The room was golden and toasty warm, tempting her to go back to sleep. She pulled the covers up to her shoulders, knowing she had to get up.

For one thing she still had a plane to catch.
If
she was cleared of any dire disease. She also wanted to call Franco and let him know she might have to meet him in Pisa instead of having him pick her up at her palazzo.

She didn’t want to consider the ramifications if she had to cancel her flight. She felt fine though. Better than fine. Surely if she’d contracted something god-awful it would have manifested itself by now?

She smelled coffee and sat up.

Uh-oh. The clothes she’d left on the floor were now neatly folded on a chair. Her suitcase, last seen in the trunk of her car, was now on the bench at the foot of the bed.

Max had apparently paid her an early morning visit while she slept. She hoped she’d kicked off the covers
after
his visit. Her face went hot. Silly to blush like a teenager because Max might possibly have seen her naked.

“It’s not like he hasn’t seen my naked parts before,” she reminded herself out loud, jumping down off the high mattress and heading for the en suite bathroom with its walls of mirrors. As she inspected her body—front and back—for anything out of the ordinary, she remembered the roughness of his jaw as he’d kissed his way up her body a year ago. The sensual memory solicited almost the same response from her body as the real thing. Her nipples remembered the wet heat of his mouth, and the exquisite sensation of his teeth scouring the tight buds.