right of the bed. She opened and closed the three drawers there, then rounded the bed and checked the drawers on the other side.
No condoms.
What kind of hosts were the Theismans, anyway?
She felt Alex’s heat against her back where she stood staring at the nightstand. She wanted to scream with the frustration of it all. Until she felt something cold encircle her left wrist, then heard the unmistakable sound of metal teeth ratcheting against each other.
“Sorry,” Alex said into her ear. “But once I say what I have to, I think you’ll understand.”
Handcuffs.
Nicole turned and watched as he fastened the other side of the handcuffs to his right wrist. Not to the bedpost.
Not that it made a difference. Without a condom, sex was out of the question. She loved sex, and seriously wanted to indulge in some major mind-blowing sex with Alex, but she wasn’t stupid. Intimacy without a rubber was like playing Russian roulette with half the chambers filled.
She collapsed to sit on the mattress and sighed. “You don’t have a condom, but you have handcuffs,” she said absently, considering the heavy metal weighing down her wrist.
She blinked up at him. “You seriously need to reevaluate your priorities, man.”
He chuckled softly then took out his cell phone and called a taxi.
“Where are you taking me?” Nicole was afraid he was going to say the nearest police station. Although she knew that he had nothing on her, and she certainly didn’t have any stolen goods on her person, that didn’t mean he didn’t intend to have her arrested. After all, he still had to tell her what he was doing watching her.
He slid the phone back into his inside jacket pocket. “Home.”
FIVE HOURS and a plane trip later, Alex cursed his decision not to stop at the nearest drug store to stock up on, um, certain supplies before taking Nicole to his recently and very roughly renovated loft in lower Manhattan. Just seeing Nicole handcuffed to the headboard of his old iron bed made him hard as a rock, despite the majorly annoyed expression on her face as she tried to cross her arms over her chest but could only cross one. A loud thwap sounded when she slapped her free hand against the mattress. “This really stinks, you know.”
Didn’t it just.
Never had been the time that Alex had regretted who he was. But in that one moment, he’d have given his pension not to be an insurance investigator. Instead he wished he was a regular guy free to do what he would with the walking sexpot looking at him with barely contained rage.
Then again, if he were a regular guy with no professional interest in Nicole, he wouldn’t be standing where he was, either, essentially having kidnapped Nicole Bennett. If anyone knew the repercussions of his actions, he did, no matter how desperate he was for her help. Although he sensed Nicole would be the last one to press charges.
He hated catch-22s. The problem was that lately life had turned into one huge catch-22 for him.
Standing at the end of the bed, he dragged toward him Nicole’s ever-present black leather backpack, which he’d retrieved from the Theisman’s neighbor’s shrubs before leaving the wealthy Baltimore subdivision in a taxi.
Nicole sighed and rolled her eyes to stare at the ceiling.
Alex ignored the stretch of elegant neck she presented him with, and the way one side of her dress dipped dangerously low from where he’d torn the strap. He looked down at where he was pulling items out of the pack. A small bag of toiletries. Black leather pants, vest, coat and boots and…God was that a leather thong? He let the scrap of material hang from his index finger and decided that it must be. He looked at her. She glared back.
“Interesting.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sure I could find an interesting item of clothing or two if I went through your stuff, too.”
He checked the empty bag. “No pajamas?”
She hiked a brow. “You’re holding them.”
Alex let the thong drop to the bed.
His gaze slid up to where she had her long, long legs crossed at the ankles on the bed, lingering around the hemline and the bare area in question just beyond.
Oh, boy. This wasn’t going exactly the way he planned.
He stuffed her things back into her bag then tossed it to a nearby chair. Moments later, he threw a pair of lightweight summer pajamas to her from his top drawer.
Nicole picked them up. “Are these for me or you?”
“Both,” he muttered under his breath, thinking he should have cuffed her to the dormant radiator. “You.”
“They still have the tags on them.”
That was because his mother had bought them for him and, like Nicole, he wasn’t much of a pajama man.
“They’re new,” he told her. “Put them on.”
She tossed them to lay on top of her bag across the room. He had to give her credit for her aim. “I’m not doing anything until you tell me what’s going on.”
Alex grinned. There it was. The demand he’d been waiting for since he’d snapped the cuffs on her in Maryland.
Throughout the two taxi rides and a plane flight back to New York, he had waited for Nicole to ask the question. She hadn’t, of course. Instead she’d sat like a she-cat, alternately glaring at him then licking her lips in a way that made him forget his own name, much less what his objective was.
And his objective was very simple.
He crossed his arms over his chest and stared at her across the foot of the bed. “I need you to help me catch Dark Man.”
She squinted at him with those unsettling eyes, then snapped her mouth shut, trying again to cross her arms over her chest, causing the cuffs to rattle.
He didn’t have to explain who Dark Man was. Most thieves, once they reached a certain level of success and notoriety, were known by nicknames. He absently rubbed his chin. He’d taken to calling Nicole Black Cat. Some other names included Pablo, for the English thief who stole strictly Picassos, and there was even a Mr. Ed, who concentrated his extracurricular activities on rustling highly insured thoroughbred racehorses.
Bestowing the nickname Dark Man, however, hadn’t been done in a light or amusing way. Dark Man was named as such because he was utterly and totally dark. When he was involved in a theft, people usually ended up hurt. Or dead.
And no one seemed to know who he was.
Alex went on. “Two months ago he was involved in the Norton Museum job in Omaha. Two security guards and an assistant curator—who was father to twin two-year-old boys—were shot dead at point-blank range.”
Nicole stared at where she was running her palm along the length of her skirt then back again. Stress lines bracketed the sides of her naughty mouth, but otherwise he couldn’t tell how she was taking
