“Speaking of erotic daydreams,” she snapped, “stop looking at me as if I were a piece of strawberry cheesecake.”
“Cannoli.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I see you more as a cannoli. Rich and Italian and full of sweetened ricotta cheese,” he mused.
“You may as well go all the way and call me a blintz. I’m half Polish as well as Italian,” she said sharply. “So I look like something stuffed, do I?”
“You look,” he said quietly, “absolutely delicious.”
“Get that rapturous expression off your face, Blackheart. We’re going to break into Carleton House, I suppose we’ll eat something, and then you’ll take me back home. And that’s it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said with mock humility.
She turned those magnificent green eyes on him. “Why do you always try to goad me, Blackheart?” she questioned in a deliberately calmer voice. He could guess how much that effort cost her, and he applauded it silently.
“Because I like to make you mad.”
“Why, for heaven’s sake?”
“It shakes you up and keeps you from looking down that very pretty nose at me. It also makes you forget that you’re trying to be Regina Merriam or Olivia Summers.”
“Not Olivia,” she said sharply. “And I don’t look down my nose at you.”
“Sure you do. I’m still not quite sure why. Just a law-and-order complex, or is it something deeper? Were you molested by a cat burglar when you were a child?”
She turned to look at him then. “You’re the one who’s so knowledgeable about my past. Didn’t they tell you about that?”
“A molesting cat burglar? No, that somehow slipped past my informants.”
“What did they tell you?”
“That you come from a very large, very poor family from a small farming community outside of Chicago. Your father was Polish, your mother Italian, and you’re one of eight children. There was never much money, but it sounds as if there was plenty of love.”
“Maybe too much love,” Ferris said slowly. “And I’m one of nine children. I had a younger sister who died when she was twelve. Of kidney failure.”
Black heart was silent for a moment, digesting this. “Do you think if you’d had money she wouldn’t have died?”
He was astute, she had to grant him that. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think if we’d had money I wouldn’t have to wonder about it.”
“Do you blame your parents?”
“Of course not. I loved them. They worked themselves to death before they were seventy, Mama from having too many children too fast and Pop from a form of emphysema called farmer’s lung. Maybe money would have helped them, too, maybe not. It wouldn’t have hurt.” She looked at him then, with a sudden, savage pain in her green eyes, turning them from a distant sea color to a deep forest hue. “Do you know how many nieces and nephews I have? Twenty-two. Twenty-two from seven brothers and sisters. And one of them’s a priest. And every single one of them either had a baby on the way when they got married or had one within a year after the wedding. My older brother Paul made it through one year of community college before he had to quit and get a job in a factory to support his three children. And he was only twenty-one years old.”
“And you decided that wasn’t going to happen to you?”
“You’re damned right. I wasn’t going to be trapped in that cycle of babies and poverty like everyone else. I finished high school a year early, got a scholarship to Stanford, and haven’t looked back.”
“Do you ever see your family?” he asked lazily.
“Of course I do. You think I’m ashamed of them? I’m not, not at all. But when I see how they’re weighed down by poverty and too many children and no ambition, it makes me even more determined not to let myself get weighed down the same way.”
“So there won’t be any children for you?”
“Of course there will be. But they’ll be wanted, they’ll come from choice and not by accident,” she said with great certainty.
“That makes sense.” His voice was cool, nonjudgmental. “That still doesn’t quite explain why you disapprove of me so heartily.”
She looked at him for a long moment, considering something, he wasn’t sure what, and then she leaned back in the seat, eyes straight ahead of her. “When I was eleven years old,” she said slowly, “I wanted to be a Spanish dancer. I couldn’t take lessons—even if we’d had the money, there was no one in our small town who could teach it. So I’d watch every movie I could, and practice out in the barn, humming to myself. I even made myself a costume out of one of my older sister’s party dresses. All I needed was the shoes. I didn’t even know what kind of shoes I should wear, but I knew they were important.” There was a dreamy note in her voice, bringing back a nostalgic, painful past, and Blackheart listened intently.
“One spring afternoon I’d walked into town, and there in the local five-and-dime was a pair of red shoes. They were made from a sparkly, shiny kind of stuff, they were two sizes too big, and it was the only pair they had. And I wanted those shoes. I wanted them so badly that it made me ache inside, I wanted them so badly that I stood there in the store and cried. Every day after school I’d go in and look at them, every day I’d try to figure out how I could find the money to buy them. And then one day I went in and no one was there. The grain store had caught on fire, and everyone was out watching it burn. I was alone in the store with my book bag and no one to watch me, and the shoes were sitting right there, waiting for me,” She closed her eyes, the lashes fanning out over her lightly tanned cheeks.
“I didn’t take them. I stood there, rooted to the floor, staring at them, and all the while the fire engine was racing down the street outside and people were rushing toward the grain store, and I didn’t even touch them, much as I wanted to. I just stared at them, and then I turned around and ran out of the store, ran all the way home.”
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t know what to say. The sound of pain in her voice was fresh and new, from a wound that had never healed.
She opened her eyes again, turning her head against the seat to look at him. “No one, in the history of the world, has ever wanted anything as much as I wanted those red shoes. No one. And if I didn’t take them, if I turned around and left without touching them when I wanted them that much, then there’s no excuse for what you did. None at all.”
“Did you ever regret not taking them?” he questioned curiously.
She sighed. “Every day of my life for the next five years. Until my baby sister died, and I had something more important to think about. Getting out.”
“And you got out. Very effectively.” She hadn’t even noticed that he’d pulled over in front of the deli and was watching her, had been watching her for the last few minutes. “What does Merriam think about this?”
“I haven’t told him. I’ve never told anyone about it.”
“Apart from your family.”
“Not anyone,” she said distantly. “It didn’t concern them. It concerned you.” She closed her eyes again. “I’m going to take a nap. Go in and get the food. If I have a choice I like Beck’s dark.”
He wanted to lean over and kiss her on those soft lips, like Sleeping Beauty and the Prince. God, he must be going crazy! “Beck’s dark,” he agreed. “At least we have something in common.” Sliding out of the car, he closed the door quietly behind him, careful not to jar her. If he had any sense, he’d turn around and take her straight back to her apartment. Francesca Berdahofski was going to interfere with his carefully made plans, and if he wasn’t a complete idiot he’d stop the involvement that was entangling him before it was too late.
But he wasn’t going to take her back to her apartment. He was going to get a six-pack of Beck’s dark beer and a feast, he was going to wine and dine
her on the floor of the empty ballroom at Carleton House, and then he was going to do his absolute level best to strip all those layers of clothes and defenses and armor away from her and make love to her on that hard, shiny floor, make love to her until she wept, till she cried away all the years of hurt that kept her heart locked away behind Ralph Lauren suits. And then he’d make love to her again, slowly, achingly, until. . . .
Damn, he must have that look on his face again. What did she call it? Rapturous? Maybe they’d have cannoli in the deli.
THEY WERE AN unlikely partnership, the three of them. Not what one would have expected, to pull off a caper of this magnitude. But their very unexpectedness would work to their advantage.
It was hard being a mastermind. Being responsible for your assistants’ weaknesses, having to foresee every possible disaster when there were so many that could befall them. But it was a high, an ego boost unlike anything else. It was only unfortunate that no one would ever know the depth of the brilliance behind this particular little jewel robbery. It would be chalked up to Patrick Blackheart, others would be implicated as accessories, and the three of them would get off scot-free. And very, very much richer.
Quiet, self-satisfied laughter echoed through the room. Yes, I am very clever, the mastermind thought. Very clever, indeed.
Chapter Seven
THIS WAS A ridiculous thing to be doing on a chilly, rainswept Sunday afternoon, Ferris thought, leaning against the newel post on the long, curving staircase in the front hall of Carleton House. She should be home, watching old movies on TV, eating Double Rainbow ice cream and waiting for Phillip’s phone call. Every Sunday afternoon he would call her, precisely at three o’clock, and every Sunday afternoon she would be there, waiting for him. But not today. She hadn’t even thought of it until Blackheart had left her alone, and then it had been too late. She had contemplated the notion of having him take her back home and then she’d dismissed it, without trying to figure out why.
She hadn’t even had a chance to look at a clock before he’d dragged her out of the apartment, but she figured it had to be sometime in the early afternoon. Not three yet, but there was no way she could get back in time to answer the phone, and no way she could get in touch with him—he could be anywhere from San Diego to Santa Cruz. So why wasn’t she more worried?
Maybe it was the usual restful effect Carleton House had on her. She always preferred it when it was empty, no chattering magpies born to the purple cluttering up its clean architectural lines. And it might as well have been empty; after stationing her midway up the winding staircase, Blackheart had disappeared out the front door. He’d been unnaturally silent the rest of the trip out here, and Ferris had kept her eyes firmly shut, pretending to sleep. There was no way she could sleep with that lithe, slender, jean-clad leg inches from hers in the rattling old Volvo, no way she could relax so close to him. Why had she told him that embarrassingly story about her childhood? She’d never told a soul before, and a retired cat burglar was hardly the choice audience for such a confession. God, she was a fool.
Well, now she could relax. Blackheart was supposed to make his way through the windows with their elaborate alarm system, pilfer a scarf he’d placed in a second-floor bedroom, and end up back in the ballroom without her seeing him. There was no way he could do it—she’d watched the upstairs hallway like a hawk, determined to catch him, and there’d been no sign, no sound, no hint of his presence. Plus he had to get down to the ballroom without leaving the house—he couldn’t just exit through the window.
Ridiculous, she thought dismissively. He was a little boy, playing at a game he couldn’t possibly win, but she was content enough to humor him. Nothing would please her more than to catch him—
A quiet sound caught her attention, and she whirled around, ready to flash him a triumphant smile. He was standing in the doorway of the ballroom, the silk scarf in his hand, that damned smug grin on his face.
“How did you do it?” she demanded flatly.
“Never ask a magician to reveal his tricks.”
“You must have cheated. You went back out the window and came in through the French doors. Though I can’t even guess how you managed that.”
“I didn’t leave the house once I entered it,” he said calmly.
She moved slowly down the steps. “This is supposed to reassure me as to your trustworthiness? You’ve now demonstrated just how easily you can burglarize a burglarproof house, you won’t even tell me how, and yet you expect me to trust you.”
“No, I don’t expect you to trust me. That, it appears, would be asking too much.” He held out his hand. “Come and have some lunch.”
Ignoring his hand, she moved past him into the cavernous ballroom. He’d started a small fire in the huge fireplace at the far end, spread a blanket on the shiny wood floor, and set the goodies from the deli in place. “Where’d you get the blanket?” she questioned suspiciously.
“Same place I got the scarf—the upstairs bedroom.”
“And you carried it back down here without me noticing?” She didn’t know whether to be infuriated or awed. Perhaps she was a little bit of both.
“I’m very light on my feet.”
“You and Dracula.” She sank cross-legged onto the blanket, reaching with resignation for a beer. “If I didn’t trust you I wouldn’t be here, Blackheart.”
Sitting down a decent foot or so away from her, he took the chilled bottle from her hand, opened it and handed it back, his tawny eyes sober. “Up to a point.”
“Up to a point,” she agreed, tilting back her head and swallowing a quarter of the beer. “Since you know all about my less than patrician history, I suppose I have to.” Stretching her legs out, she leaned back on the blanket, a suddenly carefree smile playing about her lips. Phillip was out of touch, the echoing silence of the deserted ballroom seemed a magic place and the man opposite her a magician, a creature from some elfin world where people appeared and disappeared at will. And for a brief moment she was willing to be enchanted. The dark, rainswept afternoon let little light through the row of French doors, and the small, crackling fire sent a small pool of warmth into the shadow-filled room. “What are you going to feed me?” she questioned, that slightly husky note in her voice more pronounced.
“Knockwurst and blintzes. And Beck’s dark.”
Ferris laughed then, and once she started, she couldn’t stop. Rolling onto her back, she let her delighted laugh ring out in the room, wrapping her arms around her waist to hold in the pain. Tears were in her eyes as the mirth bubbled forth. “That’s . . . the most . . . ridiculous thing I’ve ever . . . heard,” she gasped. “I thought you were on the make. Everyone’s warned me about Blackheart, Inc., and its reputation for keeping bored ladies busy. With all that experience you should know that you can’t seduce a woman with knockwurst and blintzes.”
“You can if you pick the right woman,” he said, levering his body forward. And then his mouth stopped her laughter as he covered her with his lean, lithe frame.
He couldn’t have picked a better time. She was soft and vulnerable and relaxed from her laughter, with the warmth of the room around her, and his mouth on hers was right and natural, delicious with the taste of the dark beer. She started to put her arms around his neck, her mouth softened and began to open beneath the gentle pressure of his, and then sanity returned.
“No!” With a convulsive start she shoved him off her, rolling away to end up crouching warily, staring at him as if he were the devil himself.
He’d landed on his back, and he made no move to right himself, just lay there looking at her out of enigmatic eyes. “You needn’t act like a Sabine about it, lady,” he murmured gently. “It was only a kiss.”
“I don’t want you kissing me,” she shot back, and he politely said nothing, the small, eloquent quirk of his mobile mouth signaling his disbelief.
“All right,” he said finally, pulling himself upright and catching her abandoned beer before it toppled onto the blanket. “Come here and eat knockwurst and I won’t even be tempted.”
Ferris felt the tension drain from her body, felt the absurd disappointment flood it in return, like the ebb and flow of the Pacific. She hesitated for a moment, then, with a wary look in her eyes, rejoined him on the blanket, a good two feet away from him. “Is that why you bought it?” she questioned, accepting the beer from him again. “As a medieval form of birth control?”
“You don’t get pregnant from a kiss, Francesca.”
“Is that all it would have been?”
His eyes had darkened in the shadowy room—as they looked at her they were warm and gentle and subtly promising. “If that’s all you wanted.”
Ferris swallowed. He was so damned attractive, sitting there, and that infuriating smile of his was half the attraction. It was no wonder the female half of San Francisco society was at his feet. “And if I wanted more?” Why the hell was she asking such a question? Was she out of her mind?
Blackheart’s smile broadened. “Why then, I’d be happy to oblige. Ever the little gentleman, you know.”
Ferris gave a snort of disgust. “Hand me a knockwurst, Blackheart. I think I need all the protection I can get.”
“We’re going to need something to roast them with. I forgot to bring any sticks.”
“I thought you were on top of everything.” The moment the words were out of her mouth she could have cursed herself.
Bless his heart, he didn’t even smirk, though the light in his eyes showed his appreciation. “I try to be. Things don’t always work out that way.”
“I know where the kitchen is. I imagine they have skewers of some sort.” She rose swiftly. She could feel her cheeks were flushed, she could still feel the warmth of his mouth on hers, his bones pressing into her softer flesh. She needed to get away, and fast. “You build up the fire.”