Red-Hot & Reckless

“Yeah,” Nicole said with a knowing look at Venus. They finished the thought in unison. “At least you were wearing ’em.”

The three of them, strangers until ten minutes before, but sisters just the same, shared a moment of soft laughter. It had been a long time since Nicole had felt so connected to other women, and she enjoyed it. If only for a moment.

Venus said, “I guess we’ve been members of the bad girls’ club since birth, huh?”

Sydney silently lifted her glass in salute, and Nicole followed suit. Venus popped the cap off a beer and joined them.

The door opened again, reminding Nicole what she was doing there. Two young women wearing business suits barely spared her and her new friends a glance as they joined the men in the booth.

“Oh, no, a good girl’s in sight, reign in the lust,” Venus whispered.

Nicole picked up her drink and moved next to Sydney, then introduced herself. They chatted for several more minutes, until the ring of Sydney’s cell phone interrupted.

Venus moved away to wait on the two newcomers, then returned just as Sydney was finishing her call. The woman drained her glass and dropped a bill on the counter. Nicole noted the crisp one hundred dollar bill.

Venus picked it up. “I’ll get your change.”

Sydney told her to keep it and get Nicole good and drunk. Then, with a cheery wave, she walked toward the door. But before she could reach for the handle, the door opened and Nicole watched a man come in. She narrowed her eyes, taking in the big brown-haired man who had the solid build of a cop.

Number one weakness at ten o’clock. Her sexual radar homed in on him. Cop or no, he was a man. And a striking one at that.

She watched as he skirted around a departing Sydney, then approached the bar, his gaze on one woman and one woman only: Venus.

Nicole let out a long, mental sigh. It was just as well. After her last encounter with the opposite sex, she’d do well to fly solo for a while. Still, it could have been…interesting if the fine male specimen was the one shadowing her.

She eyed Venus, who looked a breath away from either blindsiding the latest arrival or pulling him across the bar and laying a wet one on him.

“Hi, Venus.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m thirsty,” he said as he slid onto a bar stool and tapped his fingers on the pitted wood surface of the bar. “What do you recommend? A Screaming Orgasm? Sex on the Beach?”

Venus smirked. “Screaming Orgasm Up Against the Wall is always a good choice.”

“How about Screaming Orgasm Up Against the Bathroom Counter? Or in the Pool?” The man’s grin was even dirtier than his words implied.

Nicole let out a low whistle, not having to question whether or not this was the man Venus had referred to earlier. “Yep. Definitely oughta be illegal.” Just being within five feet of the couple reminded her why she could never swear off men, no matter how much trouble they caused. She smiled at Venus, then made her way out of the bar.

The door slowly closed behind her as she tucked her chin into her chest and scanned the street from beneath her lashes. Nothing. Not a single suspicious person in sight. Just an ordinary, perfect early summer day and the foot traffic it encouraged.

She shifted her backpack to her other shoulder as she started one way, then changed her mind and walked in the opposite direction, the sensation of being followed mysteriously gone.

Could she have been wrong? She took a deep breath, then released it, wondering if paranoia was something that went along with age. Of course, it didn’t help that out of the three members of her family, she was the only active thief left. Her brother Jeremy had hung up the title a year ago when he’d met and married Joanna. Her father…

Nicole swallowed hard. Maybe that was why she was so hypersensitive about everything lately. What had happened to her father…well, she was going to make damn sure it didn’t happen to her.

She slid a glance over her shoulder. A shadow retreated into a doorway.

She twisted her lips. Maybe she hadn’t been imagining things, after all….

ALEX CASSAVETES melded into the doorway of the pub the wily and alluring Nicole Bennett had exited moments earlier. He absently rubbed his chin. She’d spotted him. He knew she had. What did that say about him as a one-time detective in the N.Y.P.D. robbery division and current insurance investigator?

Apparently not a whole hell of a lot.

Alex pushed up his jacket sleeve and glanced at his watch. He’d be a moron to try to tail her now. He suspected she’d caught onto him before she’d even entered the pub. It’s the reason he hadn’t followed her in. He still couldn’t believe that the instant he’d stepped out from the coffee shop where he’d been waiting across the street she’d looked back and made eye contact even though a good hundred feet separated them.

Damn.

Stepping from the doorway, he made his way in the opposite direction, not even looking at where Nicole had been moments before. To have come so far and to have blown it so close to meeting his objective was incompetent at best, stupid at worst.

The heels of his shoes thudded against the sidewalk, echoing against the building-crowded Baltimore street. Nicole Bennett, thief of thieves, had flown from New York to Baltimore a little more than three days ago. And he’d been right there with her every step. Following her into lingerie shops. Eating lunch a few tables away from hers. Even securing the room across from hers in the glorified flophouse that advertised hourly rates on the faded brick exterior.

But nothing in his thirty-two-year existence had prepared him for meeting her gaze head-on.

“The eyes of a witch,” Panayiota, his Greek grandmother would have said. Black, fathomless eyes that could either repel you or pull you in. He could only imagine what impact those almond-shaped eyes would have on him at close range. Photographs, no matter how vividly real, didn’t come close to depicting the genuine article. He’d just learned that the hard way.

“You’re losing it, Cassavetes,” he muttered to himself, turning a corner and suppressing the urge to duck to the side and see if she was watching him.

No. His best bet now would be to return to the boardinghouse and hope she would come back so he could pick up her trail again.

Even as he thought it, Alex knew she wouldn’t return. She was the type that, once she sensed danger, would disappear back into the woodwork from which she’d emerged. A search of her room yesterday and this morning had revealed absolutely nothing of the woman who inhabited it. Nothing that would require her to return to the room. His guess was that she either kept her personal items in her generously sized leather tote, or that her occasional visits to various bus and airport lockers explained the lack of anything left behind.

Which is exactly why she’d been so difficult to catch.

And precisely the reason he intended to catch her.

Alex Cassavetes always nabbed his man. Or in this case, his woman. A very clever, seductive and endlessly fascinating woman who slipped through his fingers like quicksilver and for the first time made him question his abilities as an insurance investigator.

He caught himself fingering an item in his pants pocket, then slid it out and stared at it. No, you wouldn’t find Nicole Bennett’s likeness on any Wanted posters. Or even any alerts circulating to local and federal law enforcement agencies. Nicole Bennett—if that was even her name—was smarter than that. For the most part, she targeted other thieves. Marks that would have to be the ultimate in obtuse to report the thefts. She was more of a ghost that sensed when a large score was about to go down and then would swoop in and make off with the booty with nary a soul the wiser.

Except for Alex.

He stepped into the lobby of the rundown hotel where he’d hung his hat for the past two days, eyed where an aging hooker and a john were haggling with the desk manager, then took the steps to the second floor two at a time.

He couldn’t exactly pinpoint the moment when he’d put two-and-two together and come away with Nicole Bennett. He’d been in the middle of the third month of tracking down the diamonds that Christine Bowman and her dangerous band of thieves had made away with. Christine had been arrested and charged, and later convicted, of the theft and the death of two security guards, but the diamonds had never been recovered. The insurance company he worked for had been out a great deal of money. But something had been bothering him about the whole case, something hovering just beyond his reach. So he’d pulled an all-nighter going over everything related to the case when something in his brain finally clicked. He’d methodically thumbed through the security shots taken from a St. Louis bus station and found the image of the woman standing half in shadow in the far corner while Christine Bowman was arrested on the other side of the station. The mystery woman had gone unnoticed, despite her black leather trench coat and striking features. Then he’d rifled through photos taken from similar thefts, incidents where the thieves were caught but the spoils were curiously missing. And he’d come across two more partial photographs of the shadowy woman in black standing on the fringes of the goings-on. An interview with St. Louis P.I. Ripley Logan had yielded him a name: Nicole Bennett.

The same name on the hotel register for the room across from his.

He turned the corner of the second-floor hall. His room was halfway down the vomit-green corridor with its narrow wood doors and tarnished knob and lock plates. Room 107. He slid his key into the lock, then paused, the fine hairs on the back of his neck standing on end. He slid a glance over his shoulder at the peephole to Room 108. Nicole?

He pushed his door open and paused. Before he could question the wisdom of his actions, he walked across the hall and knocked on the door to Room 108, his gaze steadily on the peephole.

Silence.

Alex cocked a half grin. He knew she was there. Sensed it with every molecule.

He raised his hand to knock again, then heard the lock mechanism turn. And instantly found out exactly what it was like to encounter those coal-black eyes up close and personal.