Red-Hot & Reckless Page 13

  Her turnoff was coming up and she was way in the wrong lane. She flicked on the blinker and edged a path over two lanes before sloping down the off-ramp. Her palms were sweaty as hell, which could be a result of the hairy driving experience or of what lay ahead. She wiped them one at a time against her simple black cotton dress then took a deep breath.

  An hour and this will be over with, she repeated like a drowning man clinging to a buoy and hoping the coast guard would happen by.

  Fifteen minutes later she had parked, squeaked through the thorough security and was sitting at a metal table with bolted down chairs in the meeting area of Shawongunk Correctional Facility in Wallkill, New York, waiting for her father to be led in.

  “What am I doing here?” she whispered, staring at the armed guards at either door to the room, another pair of visitors to her right. Merely being in the place made her skin itch and coated her stomach with mercury.

  “Hi.”

  Nicole hadn’t realized her father had been brought in until he stood before her, grinning like she’d just done something monumentally important like taken home the Nobel Peace Prize. Of course, she didn’t think the committee had a prize named for thievery.

  “Hi, yourself,” she whispered, awkwardly hugging him.

  In the worn denim shirt and blue work pants her father looked closer to the plumber she remembered rather than an accomplished thief. She couldn’t help thinking that if he had remained a plumber, he wouldn’t be sitting in prison.

  Still, love filled her to overflowing for the man who had raised her and her brother as best as he could. He’d quietly dealt with his own pain after his wife had died and instead dealt with the pain of their children, a son and daughter who were by his side, witnessing their mother’s slow death and now only had him to rely on. And in the months, then years, following that awful day, he’d never taken his frustration out on them.

  She smiled softly. And there certainly had never been a dull moment.

  Her father took a seat across from her and rested his hands on the table. “I’m surprised to see you. Surprised, but glad.”

  Nicole stared at her own hands, guilt melding with her discomfort at being inside the drab prison even if it was only for a visit. “I would have come earlier, but…”

  But what? She hadn’t been able to bolster the courage to see her father sitting behind bars for a crime he’d committed? Hadn’t been able to handle visiting a place that she could very well end up in herself one day?

  Her father touched her hands. “Hey, it’s okay.”

  Nicole slid her hands out of reach. “No, Dad, it’s not okay.” She sat back and crossed her arms over her chest to ward off a chill as much as to prevent him from touching her in a way that reminded her too much of the father she’d once known. “I hate seeing you in this place. I hate seeing you wearing…that.” She shuddered. “I wish…”

  She fell silent.

  At the far corner of the room metal clanked and she could just make out the quiet conversation of the couple nearby.

  She wished what? That her mother had never died? That he had never hung up his plumber’s belt and that even now she was lying under someone’s sink repairing a clogged drain?

  She absently rubbed her forehead. This was so not like her. She’d never had much time for what if’s and what could have been’s. She’d always been firmly planted in reality.

  “I wish things could have worked out differently,” she finally finished her sentence.

  “So do I.”

  She looked at him, all too aware that they weren’t talking about the same thing. More than likely he was wishing that his lawyer had been able to plea bargain a better deal or had been able to find a technicality to get him off on.

  “Hey, why the long face, Hal?” Her father used the shortened version of her real name then chuckled in that way that had always made her feel like everything was going to be all right. “We all know the nature of this business. What’s the first thing I taught you and Jeremy when you both decided to follow in your old man’s footsteps?”

  She sighed, thinking about how long ago that had been. “You get caught doing the crime, you do the time.”

  “That’s right.” He folded his hands. “Besides, all told even this detour makes it worth it, you know? I mean even though I’m out of commission, I’ll make more per annum than I ever would have as a plumber.”

  Nicole rolled her eyes and laughed. “Trust you to find a silver lining.”

  He shrugged.

  She cleared her throat. “The problem is I’m having a little more trouble finding any precious metal these days.”

  He squinted at her for a long time. “This, my being sent up, really got to you, didn’t it?”

  “That and a few other things.”

  “Ah. You’ve met someone.”

  Nicole’s gaze snapped to his face.

  “What, you seem surprised.”

  She folded her own hands on the table. “Maybe it’s because I am.”

  He pointed a finger at her. “The expression you’re wearing? That’s the way I looked when I met your mom.”

  Nicole’s throat felt suddenly thick.

  He sighed in memory. “Oh, there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t have done for your mom, Hal. There was this special something about her, you know? The moment she asked me to stop, I knew I would.”

  Nicole blinked. “What? Mom knew?”

  He grinned. “Your mom knew everything. Even if I hadn’t told her, she would have figured it out.” He seemed to be looking through Nicole rather than at her. “I remember the first time I tried to give her a piece of stolen jewelry. It was a beautiful necklace. Sapphires that exactly matched the color of her eyes.” He seemed to focus on his daughter now. “She made me take it back to where I got it and promise that I would never do anything like that again. And I didn’t. At least not until—”

  “Not until she died,” Nicole whispered.

  Her mother had known. The information made her head spin. She’d always assumed that her mother had never known what her father had done before meeting her, that her knowing would have ruined their relationship. Had her mother seen something in her father that went beyond his illegal activities? Or had it been love that had made her believe he was redeemable?

  A guard walked by their table. “Five minutes.”

  Her father nodded, his expression growing more intense as he looked at Nicole. “I’m sorry this had to happen, Hal. And I’m sorry you’re having such a hard time with it.” He ran his hands over his thick, graying hair several times. “Had I known I was being set up…”

  Nicole felt the air rush from her lungs. “Dad? Do you know the name of the man who set you up? D.M.?”

  He nodded. “Of course. I don’t work with anyone I don’t know.” He frowned. “I only wished I had known him a little better.” He rattled off a name.

  For the past six days she and Alex had been trying to uncover D.M.’s identity. And here her father had just handed it to her during casual conversation.

  She got up from the chair then curved her arms around his neck and gave him a loud kiss on the cheek. “Thank you, Dad.”

  She tried to draw away, but he held her close. “God, Hal, do you know how much it hurts me to see you hurting?” His breath stirred her hair. “I love you, you know? You and your brother.” He pulled back slightly to smile into her face, his eyes damp. “You remember that, you hear? Always.”

  Nicole smiled back. She’d always known and she always would.

  10

  WHERE WAS SHE?

  Alex stepped past his secretary without acknowledging her, then stopped himself with a hand on the doorjamb of his office. “Any calls?” he asked.

  Dorothy blinked at him. “Yes. I just told you there were three—”

  Alex was at her desk before she could finish and took the three message slips from her hand. His superior wanting a status report. A return call from the private detective agency saying nothing had
moved on the stakeout of the faux policy. The third from his sister that just said she’d try again.

  Nothing from Nicole.

  He started back to his office, then remembered to thank Dorothy.

  “You’re welcome,” she said as he closed the door.

  He shrugged out of his jacket and hung it on the back of his chair before sitting down. At lunchtime he’d gone by the loft with takeout Chinese to see if she wanted to find inventive things to do with the chop-sticks, only to find her gone. Cat hadn’t even been there, but, then again, that wasn’t saying too much because the open window allowed the fearless feline to come and go as he pleased via the fire escape.

  When Alex had finally left Nicole this morning she’d been smiling, happily stretched out between his sheets. He’d fully expected to find her still there, catching up on much-needed sleep. But the bed had been made, the loft cleaned up and she had been long gone.

  Okay, so Nicole wasn’t the type to account for her whereabouts to anybody. But with everything coming to a head in the investigation, and given where things stood between them on a more personal front, he at least thought she’d give him a call, let him know what she was up to, what she had in mind.

  The phone rang at his elbow. He snatched it up on the first ring.

  “Cassavetes,” he barked.

  “Alex?”

  Not Nicole. He grimaced. And not only was it not Nicole, it was his mother.

  He switched the receiver to his other ear and reached for the D.M. file. “Did you expect Dad to be at the number you dialed, Ma?”

  He expected a laugh. Instead he got silence.

  “What is it?” he asked grudgingly. Whenever his mom was serious, something was wrong. “Is it Athena again? Don’t tell me. She didn’t come home last night.”

  “No, no. I mean, yes, she didn’t come home again last night, but that’s not why I’m calling.”

  Alex waited for her to continue.

  Then it hit him. The reason she was calling.

  Nicole.

  Damn.

  He really wasn’t up for this conversation right now. Not when his own emotions were still up in the air concerning the sexy, reckless brunette. “Mom, I can explain…”

  He could? This, he’d like to hear.

  Only he didn’t get a chance to say anything, because his mother beat him to the punch.

  “Alex, my dowry is missing.”

  His brows shot up high on his forehead.

  Okay, that hadn’t been what he’d expected at all.

  Nor was the pain in his solar plexus as if someone had just hit him square with a sucker punch.

  His mother’s dowry, as she called it, was a set of antique black pearl jewelry that had been a gift from her mother, and her grandmother before that. In Greece, dowries were still expected when a daughter married. But in his mother’s case, the only items of worth his grandparents had owned had been the jewelry set. And it had been worth far more than anyone would have believed. After coming to New York, his mother had taken it in to sell to pay a portion of the rent they were behind. But the appraisal had been so high, she’d insured the jewelry instead and used it as collateral for a loan. A loan large enough to pay the rent, lease shop space and give the Cassavetes the financial boost they’d needed.

  And now the jewelry was missing.

  “What do you mean it’s missing?” he asked, telling himself this couldn’t be happening. That his mother had to have moved it and forgotten where she had moved it to.

  “I mean it’s gone, Alexanthros. What else does ‘missing’ mean?”

  A dull ache started at his temples. His parents should have listened to him when he told them they should put the pieces in a safety deposit box at their bank. But no, his mother hadn’t trusted the bank. Besides, she’d argued, what point was there in having something if you didn’t have it?

  “Have you talked to Dad?”

  “Of course I talked to your father. He wants to call the police.”

  “Is there anything else missing?” Alex asked, going into professional mode and trying to forget that he was talking to his mother, and that the pieces meant so much to his family.

  “No.”

  “When’s the last time you saw the pieces?”

  “Two days ago.”

  With each response, Alex’s heart dropped lower and lower in his chest.

  “You don’t suppose…” his mother said. “I mean, you don’t think…” Alex closed his eyes. “That girl you brought over…she was a bit on the strange side, don’t you think? You don’t suppose…”

  Alex pushed his chair back and stood up. “I’ve got to go, Ma. I’ll…I’ll call you later, okay?”

  “Should I call the police, like your father wants?”

  “No,” he said. “Not yet.”

  “Okay. Okay.”

  He began to say goodbye.

  “You know how very much that jewelry means to me, Alexandros? Means to this family? I planned to give it to your sister on her wedding day….”

  “I know, Ma. I know.”

  Minutes later, Alex slowly replaced the receiver sure of two things: Nicole had taken his mother’s jewelry, and he would never forgive her for it.

  NICOLE LET HERSELF into the loft, dropped her backpack to the floor then carried the bags of groceries she’d bought into the kitchen area. Cat wiggled through the narrow window opening and hurried across the loft to her, silently pounding on the black wood floor. The cat leapt onto the counter and meowed loudly, either welcoming Nicole back, or complaining that she’d been gone too long. Nicole chose to believe the former.

  “Were you watching for me, C?” she asked, putting the bags down then scratching the temperamental tom behind the ears. “You were, weren’t you, you little devil you?”

  She began lining up the items from the bags, smiling as she did so.

  The visit with her father had given her plenty to mull over during the ninety-minute drive back into the city. With each mile that had disappeared under the tires, her uneasiness had dissipated. Not because she was no longer within the prison walls, but because she had visited her dad there.

  Her father didn’t make any excuses. He never had. She suspected she’d gone in projecting her own growing fear of incarceration onto him, expecting to find him broken, repentant or, like so many others she knew, a bible-thumping born-again Christian damning his prior sins. But she had found only him, the same man she had known all of her life. The grinning, shrugging, easygoing man who had helped shape her into the independent, strong woman she was today.

  He was also the man who had just set her free. The man who had shared the story of his past and offered promising possibility for Nicole’s future.

  She tucked her hair behind her ear. Fear had fueled what she’d done at Alex’s parents’ yesterday. But she now knew that fear itself had been fueled by concern that their relationship could never go further than it already had.

  She made a face. Why did life always have to be so complicated?

  Of course, she’d never really realized how complicated it could be until she’d met Alex. Only she would fall in love with the one man opposite from her in so many ways. She was a thief; he was an ex-cop/insurance investigator. She prided herself on being original; he was as conventional as they came.

  And he had touched her heart in a way no other man before him had ever come close to doing.

  Cat meowed, watching her with first curiosity, then growing wariness.

  “What? You don’t trust me to cook?”

  Cat plopped his butt down on the counter and narrowed his eyes at her.

  If Nicole didn’t know better, she’d think he remembered the last time she’d tried her hand at cooking. It had been last Easter, Jeremy and Joanna had just had Justine, and her father had yet to be sentenced. For some godforsaken reason, she’d decided to do dinner. What she’d ended up with even Cat had refused to touch.

  “I’m doing something simple this time. See?” she ask
ed, showing the hypercritical feline the package of fresh pasta. “Spaghetti with garlic bread. Even I can handle that.”

  Cat was doubtful.

  Not that she blamed him. While she talked a good game, she was scared to death that something would still go wrong.

  She found herself rubbing the back of her neck, smoothing the small hairs there. All day she’d felt ill at ease. Initially she’d thought it was because of the anxiety surrounding her visit to her father. And now she considered that it might be worry that she would muck up even this simple dinner. But neither explanation seemed to do the trick.

  Instead she had that eerie feeling that someone was following her again.

  Ridiculous. The only one who had been looking for her had already found her.

  Something seemed to tickle her from the inside out as her sigh filled the interior of the large loft. She switched on the portable radio behind her that was set to an oldies station, then searched the lower cupboards for the pans she would need.

  For the next twenty minutes she worked steadily, putting a large pot of water on to boil for the pasta, then carefully chopping and measuring the ingredients she would need for the simple tomato sauce and putting them in a smaller pan. She turned around to check for salad fixings in the refrigerator and jumped.

  “Alex!”

  Standing off to the side of the kitchen, his arms crossed over his wide chest, Alex silently watched her.

  Nicole’s heart leapt in her chest and she began to smile.

  Until she realized he wasn’t smiling back.

  HOURS LATER Alex sat on the empty, neatly made bed, his head heavy in his hands. Behind him the sun was setting through the windows, the only barometer of the passage of time. Strangely he felt caught in a time warp, his brain frozen, his body oddly incapable of movement. He felt as if he were trapped in a human-size trash compactor and the sides were pushing in on him. He wanted to swear, shout, hit something, but mostly he wanted to escape from the intense emotions roiling in him like building steam.

  “I didn’t take your mother’s jewelry, Alex.”

  Nicole’s recent words echoed through his mind again and again as did his refusal to believe her.