She unbuckled her seat belt and retreated to the galley at the back of the plane. She tugged open the built-in wine cooler and extracted a bottle without giving the label a second glance. When her hunt for a corkscrew escalated from frustrated to frantic, he joined her.
“I should have kept the champagne,” she said with a slightly maniacal laugh. “It was already open.”
“Let me.” He reached out to touch her shoulder, but pulled back. She didn’t want him to touch her—she’d made that clear. And right now, he didn’t think she needed one more reason to hate him.
She didn’t turn around, but clutched the countertop in front of her.
“I loved Marshall.”
“I know.”
From their first contact, their first kiss, their first hot, frantic sexual encounter in a darkened corner of the museum after hours, Danny had known that Abby had only gravitated to him because of excitement and exploration and lust. He was a man unlike any she’d ever encountered—one who had been tailored to her needs, her wants, her desires. In giving her what she so secretly craved, he’d taken what he’d come for and then counted on her loyalty to the man she really loved in order to cover up his own crime.
What Danny hadn’t factored into the equation was that once he delivered the painting to his buyer, he hadn’t been able to follow his usual routine, which was to disappear until the heat from the crime wore off. Instead, he’d walked right back into the fire, determined to steal Abby, too.
But not to fence her for someone else to enjoy—she was a treasure he’d wanted for himself.
One he could never have.
He wished he could define what it was about her that was so enthralling. Despite her sexier packaging, he still sensed her reined-in wildness, her continued struggle between doing what was expected of her and acting on her raging need to be free.
In a lot of ways, she lived a double life the same as he did.
Once upon a time, Abby had been as simple to figure out as a game of Three Card Monty. Now, she was more like Omaha Hi/Lo Hold’Em Poker—complex and challenging, with variations the average player wouldn’t understand.
Luckily, Danny was well above average.
“I’m sorry for what I did to you, Abby. I’m sorry that I took something you valued so much. I have no good excuse, I just have the truth. I’m a thief. Stealing is what I do. It’s what you’re counting on me to do when we get to Chicago.”
At this, she spun around. Her eyes were dry, but streaked with red. “And you agreed with hardly a second thought.”
He clasped his hands behind his back to keep from grabbing her by the shoulders and kissing her. The action was all levels of wrong, but the need to backtrack out of this conversation was powerful.
“Of course I agreed. Stealing is what I do. Besides, I only steal from people who can afford it,” he explained with a wink. “And my expertise is in stealing things. The value we put on tangible items in our society is the real crime.”
She snorted, then pushed past him, abandoning the wine. “Philosophy? Not your forte.”
“Clearly,” he said wryly.
She marched down the aisle and threw herself back into her seat. Danny took a quick look through a drawer, found a corkscrew, grabbed the wine bottle and joined her. As he had not thought to pack a parachute, he had nowhere to run and a lot of air space to endure before they reached Chicago. The whole experience would be a hell of a lot better after a few glasses of Pinot Noir.
He settled in across from her and popped the cork.
She didn’t speak until he offered her a glass, which she accepted, though she didn’t take a sip. “You stole more than a thing from me, Daniel.”
Her voice was barely audible, yet sharp as a knife.
“I know.”
“I want it back,” she said.
“I told you. I’ll do whatever it takes to get the painting for you.”
She stared at him with such intense focus, he nearly looked away. “That’s not what I meant. I want what you took from my heart. Think you can find that, too?”
5
THE MINUTE THEY LANDED, Abby wrapped herself up in the minutiae of getting them from the airport to her apartment without more than minimal conversation. Though she’d tried to dig a little deeper into what had transpired five years ago between her and Daniel, he’d skillfully spun the topics away from anything personal. For the duration of their two-hour flight, they’d exchanged little more than small talk.
But that, in itself, was revealing.
Time had not made him cavalier about what had happened between them. He had regrets, which was only fair, since she had them, too.
Outside the casino, Daniel’s touch had blown apart the emotional containment built by Marshall’s unconditional forgiveness. Questions she’d set aside in order to concentrate on her marriage now exploded in her brain. What vulnerabilities had Daniel noticed about her first? How had he breached her understanding of right and wrong so easily? Why had he learned about her secret fantasies when she’d never confessed them to anyone else?
Had he ever really loved her?
For so long, she hadn’t cared about what Daniel felt. She’d concentrated only on Marshall’s love, which she’d cherished. But now she needed answers. Moving on would require them, and more than anything, she wanted to put her past to rest so she could live again—and hopefully, someday, love again. And since the collector who had her painting would show the work to the public in a little over a week, she only had until then to close this chapter of her life for good.
But instead of deconstructing the foundation of their affair, she and Daniel had spent the rest of the flight sipping wine and talking about his newly discovered brothers.
Or rather, his newly acknowledged brothers. He’d actually known about them both long before either Alejandro, the Spanish auction-house owner, and Michael, the FBI agent, learned about him—a fact that pretty much summed up the man she was counting on to save her family from humiliation. To keep the upper hand, Daniel made it his business to know everything he could about any nemesis, even when his “nemesis” was a blood relative…or a woman he’d once claimed to love.
Luckily, she had honed her own information-gathering skills since they’d last met. From her private investigators, she’d learned about his arrest and subsequent release from jail. But from Daniel, she’d found out that he no longer thought Alejandro was a stuck-up prick, and that he’d gone to New Orleans to steal the ring he was now wearing, but instead had helped Michael rescue two women from a psychotic rapist.
“So are you going to tell your brothers where you are?” she asked, hunting in her clutch bag for the keys as her driver pulled up to the covered awning in front of her apartment. Though she’d downsized from the brownstone Marshall’s parents had leased to them during her marriage, she was eternally grateful that she’d picked a place with more than one bedroom. Inviting Daniel into Marshall’s house would not have been right. Putting Daniel up in a hotel would make planning his theft too difficult. She needed to keep him close—but not too close.
“No,” he replied, folding his arms against the blast of Chicago cold.
She hurried to the front entrance so they could get out of the frigid wind. “Don’t you think you should?”
“Why?”
Abby keyed in the code to her building, then waited while Daniel swung open the door.