resort to Plan B.”
“What Plan B?” A.J. asked.
“We can hang Tavish out the window by his ankles until he agrees to sublet his apartment to us.”
A.J. grinned. “A regular win-win situation.” Then she turned her attention to Samantha as she advanced slowly on Tavish Mclain. With each step, she wiggled her hips. A.J. could have sworn the skirt caught the light and glimmered.
“I’m Samantha Baldwin.” One last step and wiggle brought Samantha within an arm’s length of the man in the green fringed vest.
“Tavish Mclain,” he said as he grasped her extended hand.
“You have the perfect apartment,” Samantha said, beaming a smile at him.
“I call…it…home,” Tavish stuttered as he pumped her hand.
For a moment neither of them said a thing. They just stood there, hands clasped and staring at each other.
“I’d like to call it home, too, for the summer,” Samantha finally said.
“Well, I…Well, I’m sure—” Tavish began.
Then Roger Whitfield and another broker crowded forward, introducing themselves, but Tavish didn’t relinquish Samantha’s hand.
Eyes narrowed, A.J. took a minute to size up the situation. The three men had their eyes locked on Samantha. Even the other women were beginning to notice it.
The blonde in black lipstick waved her check. “Just a minute. I’ve given you a check for forty-five hundred.”
“Roger, give Meredith back her check,” Tavish murmured, never taking his eyes off Samantha.
“So I’ll give you another for six thousand,” the blonde said.
Quickly, A.J. scribbled out a check and tucked it in Samantha’s free hand. Two thousand for the first month would match the blonde’s offer.
“Here you go…” Samantha glanced at A.J.’s check. “Two thousand dollars.”
Tavish smiled. “So you did want to pay all the rent up front after all?”
All the rent? A.J. glanced at the skirt. Had they just rented a Central Park West apartment for the summer for two thousand dollars?
Tavish stuck the check in his vest pocket. “The perfect tenant, wouldn’t you say, Roger?”
“I’d…say…so.”
A.J. tore her eyes from the skirt to check out the broker. Any minute now, Roger was going to drool. The other broker was doing that already. It was time to make her move. “Gentlemen, which one of you has the papers we should sign?” She was pretty sure it was Roger, but at the moment she’d settle for someone who wasn’t catatonic.
“Papers?” Roger asked.
A.J. snapped her fingers in front of his face. “An indemnity clause? Terms of lease? Liability release?”
To her relief, Roger blinked, then fumbled in his pocket for papers. Ruthlessly, A.J. pulled him aside, and made him focus on the lease agreement. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Claire take the other broker by the arm. “You and I are on crowd control. Thanks for coming, everybody.”
The only ones in the room who hadn’t moved were Samantha and Tavish. They were still gripping hands, still staring into each other’s eyes. But Samantha seemed to be perfectly all right as she explained to Tavish that she had two roommates. A.J. glanced once more at the skirt before she focused her entire attention on the lease agreement.
“It’s standard, although I should probably mention Cleo,” Roger said, his gaze drifting back to Samantha. “Could you introduce me?”
“To Cleo?” A.J. asked.
“No,” Roger said, gesturing vaguely toward the woman with the bouffant hair and the rock on her hand. “Cleo’s the poodle, lives in 6B. You’re expected to walk her. It’s part of Tavish’s arrangement with his neighbors.”
“No problem,” A.J. said. She’d see to it that it wasn’t. She wanted signatures on the bottom line before Tavish Mclain could come out of his skirt trance and change his mind.
And she got them! An hour later when A.J. stepped out into the bright sunlight on Central Park West, she gave a little jump of pure pleasure. Not only did she have a new place to live, but she had two new roommates—women she’d seemed to click with immediately. She hugged the knowledge to her.
Not bad for the day that she’d chosen to build a new life for herself.
And then there was the skirt. Samantha had put it in her bedroom closet before she’d taken off for work. If A.J. hadn’t seen it, she never would have believed it.
There was definitely something about that skirt—something that might come in handy if she couldn’t solve the problem of being taken seriously at Hancock, Potter and King by herself.
Pushing the thought out of her mind, A.J. strode toward the corner. She preferred solving things by herself.
1
SHE WAS LATE.
The fact that the pretty, petite and very punctual blonde had not burst through the door of her apartment building at seven-fifteen sharp had Sam Romano’s fingers tingling, and that was a sign that something bad was about to go down. In his ten years as a P.I., his fingers had never failed him.
Nerves. He couldn’t afford them now. Nor could he afford to be thinking about that tiny little blonde with the initials A.J.P. embossed on her handbag. She had nothing to do with the case he was supposed to be focusing on.
Rubbing his hands on his threadbare jeans, Sam shifted his gaze to the Grenelle Museum across the street. He’d had it staked out for five days, ever since the Abelard necklace had gone on display. The museum had hired Sterling Security, the firm he worked for, because they’d wanted to take some extra precautions with a five million-dollar necklace on display.
They’d made a wise decision. Sam knew from the two assistants he’d stationed at the side and back of the building that someone had climbed up the back of the building at 6:30 a.m.
What he hadn’t known until he’d seen for himself was that the man was none other than his godfather, Pierre Rabaut, a prominent New York jazz club owner and retired jewel thief. Sam had gotten a good glimpse of Pierre through his binoculars just before he’d seen the thin, wiry man disappear through the skylight at six-thirty-five.
That had been forty minutes ago. The museum’s alarms would be turned off at seven-thirty to allow for a shift change in the security staff, and Sam was banking on the fact that Pierre would choose that moment to make his escape through the front doors.
Always do the unexpected.
It was one of the mottoes that Pierre Rabaut lived by. And because he had shared that piece of advice and more with the youngest son of an old friend, Pierre
