I wasn’t the only one there with a grappling hook.”
The line moved forward a few inches, the art students behind them overshooting and standing too close for comfort. On impulse, Jack took Lisette’s arm and turned her toward the sculpture garden. “Walk with me.”
“I have work—”
“Tell David I asked you for a personal tour. How did you even know I was out here?”
“Mr. Chen saw you on the surveillance cameras. He sent me to retrieve you.”
The gentleman with the damp palms, according to Aunt Gloria. “Is surveilling visitors part of your job?”
“No. But he’d noticed a few female security officers drooling over the monitors. Is it fun, turning heads everywhere you go?”
“You tell me.”
With a laugh, she shrugged off the answer. The path they were following wound from sculpture to sculpture, the material ranging from marble to concrete, granite and weathering steel. The mountain scene in front of them—cabin, tumbling river and boulders—created from weathering steel looked as if it had been rusting in its spot for at least a hundred years, even though it had been installed only five years ago.
“So...Shepherdess.”
A breeze stirred Lisette’s hair, and she brushed it back before he’d finished the thought that he’d like to do it himself. “Considering the level of security at the Castle, I’m surprised anyone would think about stealing even a napkin.”
He’d thought about it—not with serious intent. But on his visits, he always looked for weak spots, vulnerabilities. Hell, he did that everywhere he went.
And Bella/Lisette had done more than think about it. She’d stolen a twenty-four-by-thirty-inch painting and somehow gotten it out of the house and, presumably, off the property.
“How did you do it?”
Again she tilted her head to look at him. “Mr. Chen kept me busy most of the evening. The only moment I had to myself was on the balcony, and you interrupted that. And you saw what I was wearing. I certainly didn’t smuggle a painting out with me.”
Yes, he’d admired what she was barely wearing. But she’d concealed at least a pair of gloves beneath that dress. But no painting. “You had a partner.”
“Was that why you were there? To steal Shepherdess? Is that why you’re pointing fingers at me, to divert suspicion from yourself?”
Slowly she started walking again, leaving the cabin behind, and Jack stayed with her. He held up one hand. “My fingers aren’t pointing. I would never cast suspicion on an associate. Consider my curiosity professional interest, but if it makes you uncomfortable... I want you to be comfortable with me.”
He laid his hand on her arm to stop her, making her face him. “Are you, Lisette?”
* * *
Her gaze on his hand, Lisette considered his question. Comfortable? Under different circumstances, definitely. Their worlds were galaxies apart, but common interests and opinions could render that inconsequential. At his core, he was a handsome, charming man whose mere look could stir a sizzle deep inside her. At her core, she was an unattached woman with a fine appreciation of sizzles.
“Is comfort what you look for in a woman?”
“Aw, you know what I mean.”
“Then you should say what you mean.”
“I do...at least I mean what I say.”
She began walking, and his fingers slid away from her arm. Even though her sleeves covered her to her wrists, she missed the contact. It was a sad state of affairs when a simple touch from a man could be so significant.
A dangerous man. A man who was convinced she was a thief. A man she had to use to complete her job. She needed to be coldhearted enough to pull this off.
Lisette retrained her focus on the conversation. “Did your nanny read Alice in Wonderland to you when you were a child?”
“Mom did. I never had a nanny. When she had to go somewhere, one of the servants got stuck keeping an eye on me. I’ve been told not even a bonus in their paychecks was enough incentive to make anyone volunteer, but because they liked working for my parents, they gritted their teeth and bore it.”
With the sun highlighting his blond hair and tanned skin, his eyes twinkling and his smile perfect and improbably innocent, it should have been difficult to picture him as a rambunctious little hellion. It wasn’t. Add in well-fitted gray trousers, a paler gray shirt, a pair of sigh-inducingly expensive loafers and all the spendy trendy sophistication about him, she found it impossible to believe he’d been anything but the pirate that flowed through generations of his blood.
“I can see that,” she said, and his smile grew into a grin that was anything but innocent. She was acutely aware when his gaze settled on her. It warmed her skin and sent tiny electric shivers through her.
“I bet you were a perfect child.”
“I was.”
“An only?”
“Yes. But my best friend lived down the block. Now she’s my roommate. We’re better than sisters.”
“Thick as thieves, eh?”
More heat washed through her, as intense as before, but this time all that current gathered in her stomach to send an unpleasant jolt through her. With sheer will, she kept her gaze steady, her manner easy, her voice serene. “You’d know more about thieves than I would.”
“Okay, let’s suppose you had a perfectly innocent reason for being on David’s balcony with a grappling hook and gloves. What was it?”
Damn, where were innocent reasons when she needed them?
She did the only thing she could: she lied. “Someone asked me to meet him there.”
“With a grappling hook?”
“He had some...quirks.”
Jack laughed out loud. “So you and this guy were going to indulge in monkey sex from David’s chandelier?”
“For some people, the stranger the place they do it, the more they like it.”
His fingers brushed her arm, then slid down to wrap around her hand. “So I’ve heard, but I’d bet my next trust-fund payment you’re not one of them.”
Trust fund. Briefly she reconsidered the notion that common interests could make vast differences meaningless. In theory, she supposed. But then, he was paid regularly from a large trust fund, while she got paychecks, finder’s fees and occasional influxes of operating capital. It sounded better that way than admitting that sometimes she stole modest pieces from other thieves to help fund her retrieval business.
Had Candalaria noticed the fancy red was missing? All the gossip she’d heard so far limited the loss to Shepherdess,
