20

THE HOLIDAY

(Fifteen and a Half Months Ago)

West Virginia wasn’t the remote wilderness I’d imagined, but it was a far cry from New York. I’d left the state before—gone to New Jersey and Connecticut, picked up the occasional odd job in Washington, D.C.—but this was the farthest I’d ever strayed from home.

It was pretty, I’d give it that much. I could stand in the middle of Central Park and squint my eyes enough to believe I was surrounded by nature, but it took the rolling foothills of the Appalachians and snow deep enough to reach my knees for me to realize how far off the mark I was.

Grant’s mom lived in a semiremote location. From where we stood on the freshly plowed driveway, all we could see was the cozy split-level house where he’d grown up, complete with smoke chugging out the chimney, as well as the six or so acres of land that surrounded it. We weren’t isolated, exactly—we’d passed several houses on the way in—but I was pretty sure no one would be able to hear me scream.

A girl could disappear out here. Be murdered. Or—

Thunk.

Have snowballs thrown at her back?

“Hey!” I ducked before Grant had a chance to land a second missile—this one aimed neatly for my head. “That’s not fair. You have to warn me first. I like to know when I’m being attacked.”

He stopped in the middle of scooping up another handful of snow. He wasn’t wearing gloves, which didn’t seem to affect him in the slightest. “If you insist. Penelope Blue, light of my life, girlfriend extraordinaire, general pain in my ass—”

“The compliments aren’t necessary.”

He paused long enough to smile at me, the sight of it more blinding than all those acres of snow. “I’m going to throw snowballs at you until you beg me for mercy.”

“Never.”

Fast—so fast I thought it must be a supernatural trick—he flicked the handful of snow and caught me right in the face with it. The flakes melted on my skin almost immediately, but a few clung to my eyelashes, rendering my vision a blurred white.

Relying on instinct rather than sight, I ducked to the right, narrowly missing another well-aimed projectile. I paused to form one of my own. “You play dirty, don’t you, Emerson?”

“Absolutely.” With a flying leap, he dove out of the way, rendering my poor snowball null and void. I’d had really good aim, too. “If there’s one thing you should know about me, it’s that I play to win. Every time.”

“I’ve always thought that was such a stupid statement,” I said. Now it was my turn to dive, and I gave him a glimpse of my criminal derring-do with a tuck and roll that had me safely ensconced behind the wheel of the oversized Jeep we’d rented to drive down. Snow nipped down the collar of my jacket, and I could feel the damp seepage of my jeans pressing against the packed ground below, but I didn’t care. Especially when the sound of two snowballs on the other side of the vehicle meant they missed me by a huge margin. “Everyone plays to win. Otherwise, why would they bother starting the game at all?”

He didn’t respond right away, so I dared to look over the top of the car’s hood. He wasn’t in sight, which immediately put me in a panic. Already, I was coming to learn about his catlike grace, the way he could sneak up on people out of nowhere. Arming myself with a well-packed snowball, I crept along the side of the car, my eyes scanning for any sight of him.

I didn’t get far. A hand grabbed my ankle and yanked, sending me—and my trusty snowball—sprawling. Before I had time to react to the sight of Grant wriggling out from underneath the SUV, he had me pinned to the snow.

Being overpowered like that, so easily and thoroughly and without a moment’s hesitation, was exhilarating. The ground was hard and cold beneath me, but that hardly seemed to matter with such a hard and hot body on top. Grant wasted no time pushing the knit cap off my forehead and claiming his victory kiss.

What a kiss it was. If I’d had any questions about whether we’d indulge in public displays of affection at his mom’s house, he laid them to rest with the force of two lips and one persistent tongue. Both of them pushed deeper and demanded more. Not that my lips and tongue were passive participants in this display, mind you. I might have lost this particular battle, but there was a long and fruitful war yet to be waged.

There were layers of winter clothes between us, but we might as well have been naked for how my body reacted to his touch. This marked the first time Grant and I had kissed horizontally—and if you think that isn’t a distinction worth noting, then you’ve never been kissed horizontally by someone like Grant before. See, he didn’t just kiss with his mouth. With him, it was a full-body effort, every muscle working hard to achieve its aim.

Vertically, this meant he constantly pushed me into things. Walls, tables, the side of his car—anything that would allow the press of my breasts against his chest, the hard lines of his muscles seared against me in ways that tormented me long after we said good-bye. Technically, we never did more than lock lips, even if the frantic way our bodies molded against each other signaled a need for more.

Now that we were on the ground, it was impossible to keep things at that level. I wanted to crawl inside the warm culvert of his body and burrow there. I wanted to open my legs and let him settle firmly between them. I wanted him inside me so badly, it had become more than a physical ache—it was a physical void, a phantom limb, the searing pain of knowing that I was missing a vital part of myself.

I probably would have done it, too. Had sex with him right there on a snow-covered driveway, my ass a block of ice, his mom a few yards away baking Christmas cookies in anticipation of our arrival.

Fortunately, Grant released a soul-deep groan and pulled himself away. Well, the top half pulled away. The bottom half only ground into me harder, reminding me how easy it would be for him to maneuver a few zippers and answer all my prayers.

“You’re terrible at snowball fights,” he said. “Did you know that?”

“I do now.” Unable to help myself, I wriggled against him, eliciting another one of those rugged groans and making me feel like the most powerful woman in the world. “Do you want to know what I am good at?”

Contrary to my expectations—and my hopes—he didn’t ask me to provide an answer. He didn’t even smile. He just remained on top of me, his desire still very much a presence between us.

“I wasn’t kidding before, you know,” he said.

I blinked up at him, confused. What wasn’t he kidding about? That he wanted to decimate me with handfuls of snow?

“I play to win, and I don’t always fight a fair game to do it.” His voice was rough, and it grated against my heart. He wasn’t talking about the snow at all.

“Well, I wasn’t kidding either,” I replied.

Now it was his turn to look confused, though it was more of an adorable wrinkle of his brow than actual perplexity.

“I hate when people say that,” I explained. “It’s a humble brag, minus the humble. Name me one person who plays to lose. One.”

That got him to smile a little. “A boxer who’s being paid to throw the game.”

“Okay, with the exception of that.” Since I wasn’t quite sure what he wanted from me, I allowed the moment to settle back into solemnity. “I’m not afraid of things getting rough, Grant, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Oh, I know you’re not afraid. That’s the problem.” He sighed and wrapped his hand around the back of my neck. His fingers were freezing against my flushed skin, but I didn’t draw away. “You said you wanted to be warned before I attack. Well, I’m warning you now.”

My heart picked up. “You’re declaring war?”

“Not exactly. I’m declaring my intentions.” Feeling me shiver, he rolled over on his back, his arms wrapped in a bear hug to bring me with him. The position we landed in was even more sexual than the previous one—I sat astride, my legs parted over the top of his. Both of us panted from something that wasn’t exertion, but I knew this moment was about a whole lot more than sex. “I’m crazy about you, Penelope Blue, but I don’t know how much longer I can be a gentleman about this.”

My lips spread in a smile. I liked where this was going. “Then don’t be one.”

“I mean it.” His hands spanned my waist to hold me still as I made a tiny—infinitesimal, really—movement against the hard length of him. Even that tiny jolt flooded my body with pooling warmth. I thought it might do the trick for him, too, but all he did was tip his head back with a ragged groan, drawing deep breaths like they were his only lifeline. When he finally spoke, his voice was strained with the efforts of immobility. “There are two guest rooms inside my mother’s house, and I have every intention of using them during our stay.”

“Why? Is she old-fashioned, like you?”

His eyes crinkled despite his best intentions to remain in control. “Brat. You enjoy tormenting me, don’t you?” He continued without waiting for my response. Which, to be fair, was a firm yes. And why not? He was tormenting me right back. “I didn’t bring you down here to seduce you on my childhood bed, and nothing you say or do is going to goad me into it.”

“Then why did you bring me here, Grant?” I’d promised myself I wouldn’t ask that question, but there was no stopping it. I had to know. I had to leave here with an understanding about what was going on inside…if not his heart, then at least his head. “What am I doing spending the holidays with you and your family?”

The fact that he didn’t hesitate was more unsettling than all the rest. “Easy. I wanted to show you where I grew up.”

* * *

“Pen, would you be a dear and move the tree a little to the right? The glare keeps flashing off the window. I think it’s giving me a migraine.”

I paused at the top of the stepladder where I was putting the final touch on the Christmas tree—an angel topper, no less—and stared at the tiny scrap of a woman who had somehow managed to give Grant life.

“You want me to move the entire tree?”

“Would you?” She tipped her head back against the couch and sighed. “I don’t know why I bother decorating anymore. It just comes right back down again.”

It was a good thing her eyes were shut, because it took me a solid twenty seconds to recover my bearings. I cast Grant a supplicating look—he was trying to get flames to emerge from smoldering logs in a black-sooted fireplace—but all he did was twinkle up at me, laughter in his eyes.

“I’d offer to help, but it takes a lot longer to burn the water out of wood than you’d think,” he said. “I could be here all night.”

Mrs. Emerson didn’t open her eyes or even look up as she said, “Laugh it up all you want, but I’m not feeding either one of you until it feels merry in here. This family Christmas was your idea. I’m supposed to be in Hawaii right now.”

Grant’s eyes only twinkled more. “Sorry, Mom. Pen promises to move the tree right away.” He went back to throwing so many crumpled pieces of newspaper onto the grate, it was a wonder we weren’t all asphyxiated.

There was nothing for me to do after that but get off the stool and move the tree. I wouldn’t get any help from either one of the Emersons, that was for sure. I don’t know what I’d expected Grant’s mom to be like—I’d had one or two visions of a Psycho-like scenario in which Mrs. Emerson was revealed as Grant in a dress—but I should have known better. Mrs. Emerson was small—smaller than me, even—but other than a diminutive stature and a few strands of gray hair, she was exactly like Grant. Stubborn and charming and not the least put out by me at all.

The angel was slightly askew at the top of the tree, but I decided that even Christmas angels deserved to go a little crooked now and then, so I left her like that. I was still on the fence about whether or not Mrs. Emerson really expected me to move a fully decorated, eight-foot blue spruce on my own, but I knew Grant was watching me out of the corner of his eyes to see how I would handle things.

In other words, it was a test.

Yet another twist in a game I didn’t know the rules to and, frankly, no longer cared to play. Had I been anyone else, my mocking suitor’s vows of chastity and constant scrutiny might have upset me, but protocol was for other women. Softer women. Women who cared about whether they impressed their annoyingly perfect boyfriends in front of their mothers.

I marched over to where Mrs. Emerson sat reclining and dropped to her level with the crouch of my knees. She hadn’t lied. From that angle, there was a reflective glow from the large bay window at the front of the house, and it flashed in an intermittent light that could quickly grow annoying. Which was exactly why I grabbed an engraved wooden screen posing ineffectively in a corner and dragged it over. A few minor adjustments, and it formed a barrier to the light without impeding her view.

I was examining my handiwork with triumph when I heard Mrs. Emerson break out in laughter. The sound of it was one hundred percent Grant, that signature deep-throated chuckle that practically forced its way out.

“You were right about this one, Grant.” She didn’t stop laughing as she spoke, merely forming her words in the spaces in between. “She doesn’t take any crap, does she?”

“Nope.” Grant glanced at the fire poker in his hand and back at me. “Since the day we met, I haven’t been able to get anything past her. And believe me—I’ve tried.”

Since it would have been impolite to glare at my hostess, I settled one on Grant instead.

“That’s rude,” I said. “Instead of constantly trying to provoke me, maybe you should just be nice for a change.”

Mrs. Emerson answered for him. “What would be the fun in that?”

* * *

“Okay, it’s the moment of truth. Do you want to sleep in my boyhood room or the guest room?”

Grant stood at the bottom of the stairs, blocking the hallway and making it impossible to move past him without brushing my entire body against his. Mrs. Emerson had already gone to bed, leaving us alone in this part of the house, which would make it a perfect moment for stolen kisses and body brushes of that sort.

So of course, neither one of us moved. I had the feeling even the slightest touch right now would send us both reeling. Me, because I couldn’t have more. Him, because he wouldn’t.

“Boyhood room,” I said.

“I should point out that the guest room has an adjoining bathroom.”

“Still boyhood room.”

“It also has a queen-sized bed and real goose-down pillows.”

“That’s gross. I only sleep on chemically manufactured fillers that have never touched a live animal’s skin.”

“But you eat animals all the time,” Grant said. He heaved a mock sigh. “Forget I asked. You’re planning on snooping through all my childhood treasures, aren’t you?”

“Without question,” I said and marched past him to what I assumed was his room, if the faded G.I. Joe stickers on the door were anything to go by.

I hadn’t been wrong about how much space he took up in that hallway. In order to get around him, I had to shrink myself down, force that hard body to move just enough to make room for me, and squeeze past his massive thighs and chest. It was a pretty good analogy for everything this man did to me, actually. He never budged. He never gave. He never strayed from his position.

God, he was annoying. It was a good thing I was just using him. The poor woman who ended up with this man would have a hell of a lot to put up with.

Those same massive thighs and chest pressed against me a little too hard as I popped out the other side, and I felt a momentary twinge of regret. It made a nice companion to the other twinges my body suffered in Grant’s constant looming presence. The poor woman who ended up with this man would also have a hell of a lot to enjoy. There were times when going head-to-head with a powerful and arrogant man had its perks.

Or so I assumed.

“I’m hoping there are old copies of Playboy between the mattresses and trophies of all your childhood triumphs on the walls,” I said with a glance over my shoulder. “Maybe even a framed jersey from your winning touchdown.”

He grinned. “Which winning touchdown? There were so many, I can hardly be expected to remember them all.”

Oh geez. He probably meant it, too. “You know, one of these days, someone is finally going to take some of the wind out of your enormous, billowing sails. All I can say is that I really hope I’m there when it happens.”

His hand caught mine and held it. “Believe me, Penelope—you already were.”

I stopped, and my heart stopped with me. This is it, I thought. This is the moment it all comes tumbling down. I’d never seen a man look so earnest, so intent, so real—and yet things between us were exactly the same as they’d been the day we first met.

He was still a federal agent, and I was still the jewel thief he was tracking. That truth would never change. And the longer I stood there staring at him, the pressure of his fingers like claws around my heart, the harder it was becoming to remember that.

With a bright, false smile that fooled no one, I turned to his room for a much-needed distraction. Fortunately, it provided all the wonder I needed to transform my brittle smile into a genuine one.

“You lie,” I said, my eyes wide. “This isn’t your room.”

He coughed. “You don’t like it?”

Like it? I loved it. It was a history museum crammed into three hundred square feet, from the glass-framed corkboard on the wall holding various pinned bugs to the cracked vase in one corner that looked as if it had been glued together by ancient Greeks. There were no girly magazines, no trophies, not even a dumbbell set gathering cobwebs in the corner. It was books and old maps as far as the eye could see. It was too good.

“Oh my God. This isn’t the nesting place of a virile youth with a football scholarship.” I whirled on him, not bothering to hide my glee. “This is where a kid with no friends lives. This is the childhood room of Indiana Jones.”

“Are you finished yet?”

Almost. “I can forgive you for a lot of things, but I’m not sure I’ll ever get over the fact that you didn’t tell me you were a nerd.”

He grabbed me around the waist and pulled our bodies flush, threatening me with his strength and proximity, with the massive biceps taut as they held me against him. “I was not a nerd,” he said.

He could flex all the muscles he wanted. I wasn’t giving up this easily. “What was your grade point average?” I asked.

“Irrelevant.”

“Were you, at any point, a member of a group that played chess and/or debated for fun?”

“I had a lot of interests.”

I squealed—half in delight, half because he’d moved one of his hands to pinch my chin. It was his favorite move when he wanted to show his dominance. Or, you know, kiss me. Those two things often intertwined.

“You can abuse me all you want, but it’s not going to change the fact that I know all your secrets now,” I said. I smiled up at him, practically daring him to drop his lips to mine. “You had the audacity to mock my sad and empty apartment for being juvenile, when all along, you were hiding a museum of nerd relics in your mom’s house.”

“They aren’t nerd relics. They’re an explanation—which I’m not sure you deserve anymore.”

He kissed me. It was fast and hard, as if he was afraid lingering too long would lead to something more, but it was effective all the same. For the moment, I forgot what we were talking about or why I needed an explanation, so caught up was I in the sensation of his delicious mouth moving over mine.

“That”—he pulled away and pointed at the vase in the corner—“was the first treasure I ever found. It was at an antique shop in town. The owner was tossing it out, because he’d dropped it on the sidewalk, and it cracked into a hundred pieces. He told me I could have them if I hauled them out on my own.”

“It’s…lovely?”

He ignored me. “And that”—this time, he pointed at a desk in the corner, which I’d overlooked in my earlier glee; it was rickety and unstable, chipped in ways that made it look about a thousand years old—“is an authentic seventeenth-century gueridon I found at an abandoned farmhouse about a mile up the hill.”

I didn’t tell him it would have been kinder to leave it there. “Um. Also lovely?” I said instead.

His eyes crinkled even as he sighed his exasperation. “And this”—he reached for a box on top of the fancy French table, opening it to reveal dozens of rocks and gems in various states of decrepitude. He pulled out a cameo brooch straight out of a Victorian movie—“I found under the floorboards at a school I helped renovate one summer in high school.”

“Oh, that one really is lovely.” I reached out to trace the woman’s profile, but he yanked the brooch back quickly—almost like a reflex—before I made contact. A ringing silence filled my ears as we both realized what he’d done.

“Here, you can hold it,” he said, but the mask had already slipped. For a few seconds, he’d unwittingly admitted the relationship between us—FBI agent and jewel thief, good guy and bad. A flush of color diffused his face, and he pressed the pin into my palm. “I found it in a box of old bills and jewelry, but I ended up giving those back to the woman they belonged to.”

I still had a hard time registering the shift, so he had to force my fingers closed around the brooch as he elaborated. “The box of stuff was stolen about eighty years ago. It was a kind of local mystery, a string of robberies in one of the affluent neighborhoods not as badly affected by the Depression. According to the police records I found, they arrested a traveling salesman in the area after they found most of the stuff in his suitcase. But they never found these.”

I swallowed heavily, unsure what to say. Something flippant about him holding on to women’s jewelry seemed pertinent, but I didn’t feel flippant. I felt angry, to be honest.

I might not have been the smartest woman he’d ever dated, but I could read subtext when it was being applied with a trowel. Criminals bad. Police good. Was he hoping I’d transform my way of life because he’d once found a box of buried treasure and returned it to its rightful owner? Did he think I took my position lightly, that I’d just woken up one morning and decided to embark on a life of crime for shits and giggles?

I made a motion to give the cameo back, but he wouldn’t take it. “I want you to have it,” he said.

As my response was to goggle furiously at him, he dove in to the rest of his story. “When I found this box, the town hailed me as a sort of local hero. I’d solved the closed case after eighty years, found the missing loot and all that, but I had a hard time accepting it. It didn’t make sense to me that this one box would turn up under the floorboards after all this time, so I dug around in the county records department. It turns out there were some carpenters doing repairs on the school that year. I think one of them must have been a copycat—someone who took advantage of the other thefts to try and line his own nest.”

“Maybe he needed it to feed his starving family.”

Grant had the nerve to smile at me. “I’m sure he had a heart of gold and planned to give it all to charity. Unfortunately, he never got around to performing his good deeds. He died first.”

“Oh? Did you find his ancient skeleton fingerprints all over the ill-begotten goods?”

“Not quite. But one of the carpenters died of natural causes a few weeks later. My guess is that he took the money and jewels, buried them, and then passed away before he had a chance to recover the box. Since he didn’t tell anyone, it stayed there for all those years.” His eyes had taken on an almost glazed, euphoric look as he spoke. “The woman’s granddaughter was delighted to get the jewelry back. A lot of it had been in her family for centuries. She gave me the cameo as a gesture of thanks.”

Once again, I wasn’t sure what to do with that information, other than swallow it bitterly. “Let me guess—that was your first solved case, and you won’t be able to rest until all of the world’s wrongs are righted again. Is that it?”

“Something like that.” His finger came up and stroked me on the cheek, his expression soft enough to lift some of my bitterness away. I suppose it wasn’t his fault I was more like the dead thief than the sweet old lady he stole from. “I like antiques. I like mysteries that have gone unsolved for decades. I like holding something in my hand and knowing it has an entire history I know nothing about.”

He grew quiet and pensive. So did I.

“I like even more that if I work hard enough, I can uncover that history. In all my years at the Bureau, one thing I’ve learned for sure is that nothing disappears without leaving a trace. Nothing and no one. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Oh, I understood all right. He wasn’t censuring criminal activity, and he wasn’t telling me my entire life was wrong. He was admitting that his goal was—and always would be—my father’s treasure.

I almost laughed out loud, giddy and desperate. My senses whirled. Good luck with that, my friend. If he thought I could give him even a little clue, he was headed for the disappointment of his life.

“So what are you going to do, Penelope Blue?” he asked, watching me.

I opened my mouth and closed it again. I had no idea. As far as I was concerned, he could spend the rest of his life in a never-ending search for a fortune that wasn’t there. Not even he could find something that didn’t exist. But if that was the only reason he kept me around…

He smiled and shook off the cloak of solemnity that had taken over, returning us to a place where I could at least feel the ground beneath my feet. “Do you still want to sleep in here tonight, among all my junk and boyhood dreams, or are you going to take the guest room after all?”

I could have kissed him for giving me such an easy out. He wasn’t asking me to make a decision about us. I just had to understand two things: he played to win, and he wanted my father’s treasure. Full stop.

“Oh, I’m staying right here.” I flopped onto his bed, laughing at his expression of dismay. “I refuse to believe there isn’t at least one picture of a naked woman hidden somewhere, and I’m going to find it if I have to search all night.”