NICK
We were on the floor of her living room. On the coffee table was the full spread—enough takeout to last us for days. She sat with her feet tucked underneath her. Each time she undid the flaps on one of the containers and looked inside, she let out an excited little, “Ooh!”
But I wasn’t going to let her distract me. She’d said they were planning one last job, and she was thinking of doing it alone.
Which I didn’t like the sound of. At all.
I knew a thing or two about big jobs. I’d known a guy when I was just starting out, a Bible-thumper with a passion for cheap weed, who had had a theory that every crew did three jobs in their time together. There was the Genesis Job, which a crew did when they were first starting out; the Revelation Job, which made a crew realize what they were really good at; and the Exodus Job, the last one before a crew got the fuck out of the business for good. Or . . . got thrown in jail.
The Shimmy Shimmy Bangs’ Exodus job wasn’t going to be some princess-cut, two-carat platinum engagement ring taken from a jeweler on Central. It’d be big. It’d be gutsy. And thanks to that brochure that the Texan had tried to use on me as bait, I suspected I might know exactly what it was already.
I waited until she was deep into her orange chicken before I asked—it would give her no time to prepare, and if her mouth dropped open . . . that’d be my sign.
As she put a piece of chicken in her mouth, I sprang it on her. “It’s the North Star. Isn’t it?”
Her mouth did drop open, and a piece of broccoli fell from her fork onto the carpet. She gave me five quick blinks. She plucked the broccoli off the rug and busied herself with her napkin. There was the blush. I had my answer. “Could I . . . have . . . some soy sauce?” she said.
I shook my head and moved the packets away from her, like I was moving chips on a poker table. “Tell me. What are you planning?”
She tried to snag one of the little packets, but I was quicker on the draw.
She bit her lip and flared her nostrils. “Pass. Next question.”
That was fire on the flames. “The North Star, alone? You don’t get to pass on that one.”
Now she tried to grab the mu shu pancakes, but I grabbed those too and stashed them between me and the sofa.
She was looking pretty indignant. A little fire in those eyes. I liked it. A whole lot. “Here’s how I see it. You had a plan, and probably a good one. But now you’re two partners down and still planning to do the job?”
“That would be bananas.”
I slid the soy sauce back toward her and put the pancakes on top. “So that’s it, isn’t it?”
She lowered her eyes. She ripped open the little packet of sauce and drizzled it on her carton of rice. “The more I tell you, the riskier it is.”
I knew it. But I didn’t play it cocky—I played it calm and careful. “I get that.” And after a few beats, I added, “I don’t want in on your job. I just want to give you a shoulder to lean on.”
When she looked back at me, her eyes were softer. She chewed her new piece of broccoli carefully and thoughtfully as she studied me. I patted my own shoulder, and she gave me a little smile. I left it with her and didn’t say any more. I dished out some orange chicken on my plate and put some fried rice on hers. I topped up her glass of wine, even though she didn’t need it, and I dug into my beef and snow peas.
“Do you know anything about hotel jobs?” she asked. Almost shy, almost tentative.
“How can you be so sweet even when you’re talking about a felony?” I asked.
She snickered and smiled just enough to show off her dimple. “You didn’t answer the question.”
Deserts, strip mall parking lots, shady-ass places like Pony Up—that was what I knew about. Hotels, not so much. But theft was theft. “I know a thing or two about not getting caught.” I raised my eyes to her and waited.
But I could tell from the way her shoulders had begun to lift that she was definitely tightening up on me. So I decided to cut that fucking tension with the oldest trick in the book. “Knock knock,” I said.
She froze with her fork inside her lo mein carton. “We’re doing knock knocks now?”
I nodded, deadpanning her. “Knock knock.”
She rubbed her lips together and shook her head at me, smiling. Like she couldn’t believe this shit.
Believe it, beautiful. “Knock knock,” I said again.
“Who is it?” she asked.
Awww yeah. “Dishes.”
“Dishes who?”
“Dish is the police! Open up!”
Her laugh was enormous, it was joyful, and it filled me with such happiness. Fuck. I clicked my tongue and said, “Ba-dun-tssss. I’ll be here all week.”
She glanced up at me. “All week, huh?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said, more serious now. “And that’s not a joke. So you can lean on me, or not. I just fucking like you a lot, Stella. That’s all there is to it.”
She lowered her head so she was looking into her lap. Smiling, embarrassed almost. That’s when she set down her takeout carton and wiped her hands on a paper napkin. “All right, you. I’ll show you part of the plan. Close your eyes.”
She was taking a leap of faith, and I wasn’t about to take my eyes off her. So I pretended to close them and watched her through the gap. She got up on her knees and took the puzzle box from the coffee table. She made a series of taps in specific places, and a secret compartment on the bottom popped open. Whatever she was holding, she kept it palmed nice and tight.
“Hold out your hand,” she said. “And close those eyes tight, please.”
I bit back a smile and closed my eyes all the way.
She placed something in my palm that was hard, solid, and about the size of a golf ball. And said, “Open sesame.”
It was an exact replica of the North Star, so precise in every last detail that it even had the identical internal flaw in the center, a hairline fracture no bigger than a few specks of dust.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, turning it over in my hand. It was the right weight, the right clarity, the right everything. “This can’t be plastic.”
“It is,” she said, wide-eyed and smiling. “High density, that’s why it’s so heavy. It’s within one one-thousandth of an ounce of the real thing.”
I had about a million questions. But only one really mattered. “Why? Why this? Why now?”
She took the jewel from me, rotating it in her fingers. “We’ve had our eye on it for years. When we saw it was changing hands, we started talking about it more seriously.” She palmed it and looked at me. “We all have dreams. And we all want a shot at something better. Something safer. Something saner.” Stella scooted across the floor and lay down, with her head in my lap.
I understood that in my bones. “The only dream I really care about is yours,” I said.
She sighed hard. “Me?”
“Yeah. You.”
I felt her shoulders rise and fall under my hands. “It’ll sound silly.”
“Try me.”
Stella let her head fall slightly to the side. “There’s a ranch in Arizona that always belonged to my family until my grandparents had to sell. It’s called the Big Wide Open.” She turned the jewel another quarter turn, and its facets sparkled. “I’d be able to buy it back. Have some horses, a family even.” She sighed. “Silly, right?”
Silly? Fuck no. A dream like that was what kept guys going when they had nothing else. A dream like that was everything. “You know what that is, though . . .”
Stella shook her head. “Crazy?”
It was crazy—it was my kind of crazy. I could almost see her out there, wherever it was. Driving a pickup, wearing boots. Making her way. “That’s the American Dream.”
She laughed a little and looked with shining eyes at the icicle lights. “It is, isn’t it?”
I moved her bangs away from her forehead. “Want to show me what else you’ve got?”
“Yeah,” she said softly. “I do.”
She sat on her knees in front of a small table by the sofa. Pulling back the cloth that was over it, she revealed that it wasn’t a table underneath, but a safe about as big as a minifridge. And not just any safe either, but a Safeco 9000, one of my very favorites. She moved the dial to zero and got eye level with the combination wheel.
A rush ran through me. Until I’d met her, there was no rush like breaking into a safe. But now, to do it, in front of her? Christ. “How about I do that for you.”
She turned to me, her adorable feet pressing into the carpet. On both feet, two of her toes crossed over each other. “Really?”
“Really,” I said, and scooted closer.
She rocked back on her knees and sat on her calves. “Sure. Of course. Ruth tells me this one is really hard.”
Really hard was an understatement. Pain in the ass was closer. “You wanna learn?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “I’m crap with combination locks.”
In my head, I called bullshit on that instantly. I was pretty sure she had the touch to do fucking everything, from lasagna to larceny. And the idea of teaching her something new, something she had no idea how to do, was intensely hot to me for some reason. I positioned myself behind her on the carpet, in front of the safe, with my arms around her. It was like that scene in Ghost, but way better. “Maybe you just didn’t have the right teacher.”
She turned and gave me that little smile. “Maybe so.”
“Maybe definitely.” I situated myself right behind her, so she was basically sitting in my lap. “Just a heads-up I’m probably going to get hard here in like two seconds, but just ignore it.”
“I’ll try,” she said, with a snicker.
“So. Put your hand like that.” I showed her what to do, middle finger at noon, thumb at six. She did as I’d shown her, and I took the opposite position, guiding the dial from above, at nine and three. “First thing you need to know is the safe you’re dealing with. Every safe is different; they don’t always go clockwise.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“You feel it out. So see when we go this way”—I turned it clockwise—“feel how there’s less resistance?”
She nodded, making her long curls slide against my chest. “So we go the other way?”
“Exactly. Then you just feel it out. It takes a lot of practice.” I guided the dial and closed my eyes. I placed my chin on her shoulder and focused on what I was feeling with my fingers. It wasn’t easy. What I was feeling with my body, and my heart, was even more powerful than my focus on the safe right then. But I’d done jobs with plenty of distraction, and I managed to tune in to the lock in spite of how badly I wanted her. The resistance got higher and higher, and I knew we’d hit the sweet spot. “Did you feel that?”
She paused. “I think so.”
“It’s like feeling for a pulse,” I told her, and pinched her left wrist between my left thumb and forefinger. She leaned back into me when I did it, and her breathing quickened. I moved the pad of my thumb over her pulse points, until I found the strongest one. “Everybody is different. I can feel yours there. If you do mine . . .” I let go of her hand, offering her my wrist. Her fingers pressed into my skin gently. “Mine’s not like yours.”
She nodded slowly, feeling for it. She started in the same place I had with her but then shifted her grip. Again and again, until she inhaled hard and her eyes popped open. “There it is!”
What killed me was that she was somehow surprised. Like there was a little girl in there somewhere, astonished at everything in the world. I wanted to live in that amazement with her so badly, and I wondered if maybe it would start to rub off. Or maybe it already had.
Returning my attention to the safe, I said, “Safes are like people,” and turned the dial counterclockwise. “Some of them are assholes; some of them are nice. Some want to keep their secrets, and some . . . are willing to share them. If they find the right person to tell them to.” I nestled my cheek against hers and savored the feeling of the two of us there, alone, in the universe. I felt so damned happy, I thought I might break down into an old-school man-cry.
Before the emotion really took over, she threw me a lifeline without knowing she had. “Show me,” she said, and loosened her grip on the dial.
So I did. I did my thing, and I held her close, and I told her what I was doing every step of the way. It was hard to know how long it took, because every minute with her was like being in a time warp. But when the safe opened, I didn’t feel the old rush that I usually felt. Instead, I felt disappointment. Because when it opened, she leaned forward and made a gap between us.
The rush of being close to her was more than busting into a Safeco 9000. I was falling for her, and falling hard. No fucking doubt about it.
She nested the empty takeout containers into stacks and sucked a droplet of sweet-and-sour sauce off her thumb. From the safe, she took a neat pile of notebooks and folders. On the top of the stack was a tattered old composition notebook, black and white, that had blue ballpoint pen filling in most of the white splotches. Between us on the carpet she placed a magazine page, the paper shiny and crinkled. On the top was the header for Rock&Gem, and in the middle was a photograph of the North Star. A promo photo like the one I’d seen on the brochure in the Texan’s office. Minus the cheese smudges, thank Jesus.
Carefully she lined up the edge of the image so it was parallel with her knees, placing the resin North Star like a paperweight on the corner. To the right of that she put a photograph of what I recognized immediately as the Gemological Institute of America Museum in Carlsbad, California. It looked about as exciting as a strip mall Staples from the outside. She tapped the photo of the Gemological Institute and said, “He bought it in July, with the agreement that it would stay on display until November 1.”
She nodded. “Definitely. Which I know because this guy . . .”
From the folder, she produced a photograph of a bearded dude in gold-rimmed aviators and a checkered head scarf with a black cord doubled around it. He was walking on a tarmac, talking on the phone. “. . . is who has purchased it. I made a fake email, pretending to be from Rock&Gem.” She pulled out two stapled pages. “He was more than happy to tell me way too much. Including the date he’s going to pick it up.”
On the top of the page was the email time stamp and address info, [email protected] A fake domain, no doubt. Good odds on the Rock&Gem domain being straight-up rockandgem.com. But vanity was blinding, and this guy had fallen for it.
The from line read: Sheikh Saud ibn Nejd al-Aziz. This she traced with her finger and said aloud.
I found it weirdly hot, hearing her say his name. It was just Arabic for God’s sake, but on her lips, it sounded like some sort of spell. It was proof of what I’d known since the first time I laid eyes on her; she knew what the fuck she was doing, and there was literally nothing hotter than that.
She placed the photograph of the sheikh in the head scarf on top of the email, adding, “He’s in ceremonial dress here. Usually, he just looks like a dude. Also, he prefers to go by Chad.”
I pressed my fist to my mouth and laughed. The guy had a name out of The Arabian Nights and that was his chosen nickname? “You’re shitting me.”
Shaking her head, she rolled her eyes. “Oh, just you wait . . .”
Next to the sheikh, she arranged a cluster of images. They were screenshots from a Google search. According to the printout, it was the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel. At the bottom of the printout was a footer containing a URL from the Albuquerque Public Library. Smart. No cyber trace. As if she could get any hotter.
Stella explained, “The Ritz in Laguna Niguel is owned by Chad’s cousin from Riyadh. They are super close, and he always stays at the Ritz when he goes to Southern California. Doesn’t pay a penny.”
I was impressed; it was solid intel on her mark. But intel was only as good as where it came from. “What’s your source?”
She inhaled hard and smiled. She held a finger in the air. From the door pocket of the safe she produced a phone and powered it up. I knew without even having to ask that it was a dedicated burner. “You’re damned good at this.”
“Ooh, thanks!” She seemed as genuinely flattered as if I’d just complimented her cooking. “I try to think of everything. But the sheikh himself has been very helpful . . .” With a few flicks of her finger she’d unlocked the burner and opened up Instagram. She thumbed through image after image in which the sheikh looked a lot less traditional. Him drinking something out of a coconut. Him in bright-orange Umbros. Him driving a Lamborghini. Him kissing a koala. As she scrolled through, I checked the header on the Instagram page. The handle was @The_Sheikh_Dude, and his profile pic was him in a T-shirt that said @THE_SHEIKH_DUDE. “I hate him already,” I said.
She nodded at her phone as she kept scrolling. “He takes videos of himself on leg day at the gym and posts them on YouTube. I can’t even with this guy.”
Finally, she landed on the photo she was after and held out the phone for me to see. It was the sheikh, living it up poolside at what was obviously the Ritz. It had the same kidney-shaped pool as in the printout. He was with two guys who might have been poached from a remake of Animal House. Underneath was the caption Chilling in the kingdom with my Kappa Phi bros. #RitzLagunaNiguel #SheikhLife #DudeI’mSoSheikh
“For fuck’s sake,” I muttered under my breath.
Stella nibbled on her lip. “The hashtags are what get me. Dude I’m so chic, pullllllease.” She scrolled to another photo and held it out to me. It was a selfie the sheikh had taken of himself standing in an enormous hotel room, with the caption My suite rulz as usual. #SheikhLife #CallingRoomService
“Half the world lives on like a cup of rice a day, and he’s dropping letters on rules.”
Stella snickered, but she was laser focused on her mark and didn’t let me distract her. She cruised past the image of the sheikh with his suite selfie and landed on one that was, of course, another selfie, but on this one Stella tapped her thumb on a guy in the background, slightly fuzzy but still visible. Cheap suit, wicked bad dark-brown hair plugs, heavy unibrow. I couldn’t place the face immediately. “How do I know that guy?”
“My guess would be from the Neanderthal display at the natural history museum.”
Holy shit. “Nailed it.”
“I’ve spent a lot of time looking at him.” She moved to another image and pointed out the same fuzzy form. Another, and another. The guy was clearly the sheikh’s bodyguard. His polyester pants bunched up in his crotch so bad it made even my balls hurt. He had a gun bulge on his ankle and a gun bulge under his shirt. I was getting pretty fucking tired of gun bulges. Most interesting of all was that in every image he carried a silver briefcase. I’d have known what it was anywhere. A Zero Halliburton, attached to his wrist with a steel cable. The nuclear codes were kept in one. James Bond used one. And apparently so did the douchebag sheikh. “That where he’ll put it?”
Stella nodded. “Whenever he acquires a jewel, it goes in there.” She then pulled the identical briefcase from the top shelf of the safe. She slid it across the carpet. “That’s for you, safecracker. Show me what you got.”
Whoa shit, I liked that tension in her voice. Pushing me a little, getting serious—not so sweet anymore. “Can you?” I shot back.
“Yeah, I can,” she said. “Locks are trickier for me, but rotating dials are easy peasy lemon squeezy.”
“I’ll show you easy peasy,” I said, and I got to work, making my way through the first digit. She snuggled up next to me to watch, leaning in with anticipation—or maybe to pressure me. The first Safeco I’d ever busted into was bolted to the back of a Suburban with spinning rims as sirens got closer with every turn of the dial. That was pressure.
She gently placed her hand to my thigh. I paused, midturn. That was its own kind of pressure. The kind I always wanted. Breaking into the safe was the work of literally sixty seconds, yet having her so close made me wish it had taken me an hour. But dial combinations were my jam, and soon enough I’d lined up the numbers and the hinge locks popped open.
“That. Was. Awesome!” she said, clapping softly and beaming. “Ruth’s record is two-twenty. I clocked you at sixty-one!”
The joy in her eyes hit me hard. It was the first time someone I knew, and someone I actually cared about, seemed proud of me. It was a weird feeling, but a good one. If all my shitty decisions added up, finally, to getting to see that happiness in those eyes, I might not have any regrets at all. If she was the pot of gold at the end of my shitshow, it might’ve all been worth it. “All in a day’s work, ma’am,” I said, and slid it back to her.
Coming up off her knees, she walked over to the bookshelf. She got up on her tiptoes, straining with the effort so that her panties rode up an inch, revealing more of her ass, making the elastic pucker along her curves. She grabbed a big jar of something next to a houseplant. Kneeling again, she placed the jar on the carpet in front of me. It was a huge bottle of glitter, as big as a jar of mayonnaise. Its silver particles stuck to the inside of the plastic jar, and all I could think was, Yeah, this is gonna be a huge mess.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Open that.”
Glitter made no sense right then, but I trusted that she was up to something. And I was damned sure going to find out what it was. If she wants me covered in glitter, she’s gonna get me covered in glitter. But when I unscrewed the bottle, I found it wasn’t full of glitter at all. It only looked like it was. Same trick as the dog shit outside. I tipped the bottle into my hand, and out slid out what looked like three credit cards, held together by a rubber band. They were fake IDs. One for Roxie, one for Ruth, and one for Stella. I held hers up, and the hologram shimmered. The name under her beautiful face was Elizabeth Rutherford, with an address in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Organ donor, Gemini.
I’d seen a shitload of fake IDs in my day. Some so bad that you could peel the laminate right off with your fingers. Some so good they fooled the DMV. It was one of the best I’d ever seen. Heat sealed, precise, professional. “You do this?”
She pressed her lips together, and I saw that sweet dimple. “I loved doing the little buffalo on the crest.” She took it from me, between her thumb and forefinger, and set it on her bare thigh. “But what I really loved doing were these.” She tapped the glitter bottle in her palm, and a second stack of IDs fell out. These were vertical, with what I recognized immediately as the Ritz-Carlton logo. That gold lion was unmistakable. Underneath each made-up name it said HOUSEKEEPING. Stella ran her finger over her own badge and over the lion in the logo. She inhaled and exhaled hard, making her cheeks puff out a bit. “We did some recon on it in early August. Ruth, Roxie, and I drove out there and stayed at a little RV park with cabins up the road. We snuck through the conference center entrance to case the place.”
“On-the-job training. Nothing better.”
“We went to the pool and ate the world’s most expensive hamburgers while the sheikh trounced a little boy in floaties at pool basketball.” She rolled her eyes at the ceiling, but she was still smiling. I liked her style; her approach to getting the intel was straightforward and easily explained—just three girlfriends hanging out poolside. They would have been able to get the lay of the land and the basics about their mark. No hocus-pocus, just old-school observations. If they’d been caught, I could just imagine her explaining themselves to the guard—It’s just so beautiful here! We’d always wanted to say we’d been to the Ritz!
“And you were going to go in as maids for the real score?”
Stella nodded and let her shoulders fall slightly. I could tell she was bummed, and I understood that. All that fucking anticipation, all those plans—gone. But when she looked back up at me, there was still a little sparkle in her eyes. “Want to see?”
Her, in a maid’s uniform, showing me her skills? Why was that even a goddamned question? “Fuck yes, I do.”
“OK. I’ll get changed,” she said, her eyes twinkling. “You go get in bed.”
Christ almighty. I was a stubborn motherfucker. But that was one thing she’d never have to tell me twice.
She knocked on the door and said, “Linen service!”
Here we go, I thought, smiling to myself and propping my head against the headboard with a pillow. “Come in.”
She opened the door, and there she stood. The outfit was straight from a uniform supply shop—a navy polyester dress with white buttons down the front. On the right breast, it had the Ritz logo and ELIZABETH embroidered on the pocket. She wore nude nylons and black orthopedic sneakers. Even though it wasn’t sexy on the surface, I found it a hundred times sexier than some skimpy French maid’s costume. The legit con was the best con.
The wig was what really sealed it, though. It was a dishwater blonde, slightly wavy, messy and cute. She’d done her makeup differently—less bad-girl, more blush maybe. Cute as a goddamned button.
In her arms she carried a stack of towels. These she placed at the foot of the bed. “How are you this evening, sir?” she asked. “It’s getting chilly out!” She straightened the sheets and made a hospital corner on each side, expertly folding the edges and seams. I bit my lip and watched her, trying to distract her, trying to break that perfect veneer. It didn’t work. She stayed in character like the pro that she was and doubled-over the edge of the quilt, making me tidily into the bed. She fluffed the pillows around me, then arranged the stuff I’d left on the bedside table, aligning my wallet and my keys. In her palm, she held chocolates with the Ritz logo. She placed them on the table and glanced at me. “I’ll give you a few extra toiletries as well, just in case. A big strapping guy like you might need them.”
I gave her a flick of my chin. “Strapping, eh?”
She smiled—flirtatious, sweet, but not over-the-top. Just right. Next to the chocolates, she arranged a few complimentary toiletry bottles, each of which was labeled RITZ-CARLTON, LAGUNA NIGUEL. She lined them up in a distinctive triangle, and from her pocket she produced a small bar of soap, wrapped in paper and sealed with a gold embossed sticker. The edges of the lion’s mane caught the light. While she was straightening the lamp, she managed to knock the soap off the table.
“Oh, sorry!” She knelt down to get it, revealing enough thigh to make me fucking crazy. Then she arranged the bottles and the soap on the bedside table. She leaned over me and straightened the already-straight covers once more. She placed the chocolates right on my chest and smiled again. “Have a nice evening, sir!” she said, and headed for the door. She turned over her shoulder and looked back at me. “Would you like me to put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the knob?”
“Yeah. For sure. I’ve got plans for tonight, and nobody’s going to get in the way of what I want.”
For one second, “Elizabeth” wavered and Stella broke through. I saw that ferocious desire in her eyes, but it vanished as soon as it had come, and she got back into character. “All right, sir. Enjoy your night. Please press two on your phone if you need anything!” And she was gone.
With the door closed, I gave her a nice, solid slow clap. From the precisely folded corners to the chocolates, from the uniform to the sensible shoes, it had been believable. Planned to the T. “Well done, gorgeous. Well done.”
That was when I looked at the bedside table again. And saw she’d taken my goddamned wallet. Holy fuck. Classic misdirection—she’d shown me two inches of thigh and robbed me blind.
The door squeaked open, and she peeked inside. I didn’t mention the wallet; I might not be able to turn into Elizabeth the maid, but I had moves of my own. And I was going to make sure she knew it.
I looked her up and down as she came back into the bedroom. I wanted to pull those sensible nylons off with my goddamned teeth. “All right, hot stuff. So play the tape forward. You think the mark is going to leave the gem in his room, unattended?”
She put her hands on her hips and raised her chin, all sass. “Nope. We’re counting on him staying close to it. We know the room that he always stays in. I broke into the reservation system online, and every single time the sheikh is there, the guard stays in the same room, number 321. The room on the right, 319, has an adjoining door. Using the master key, we’d make that room unusable.”
All this and she also knew how to hack into secure systems? Fuck. “How?”
“A wastebasket fire. A shattered bottle of perfume. Whatever seemed most logical.”
Solid answers, and good ideas. “Twenty Questions isn’t over yet,” I said, and beckoned her closer.
Stella bit her lip and hiked up her skirt. She hooked her knee over my body and straddled me. I ran my fingers over her nylons and pulled them away from her thigh. I let the slippery fabric go with a snap. “From 319 you’d go in through the connecting door . . .”
She dropped her weight onto my hips. “When the guard was in the shower. He’s got these hair plugs that are just”—the thought of it made her shiver—“awful. We happen to know he doesn’t care for getting stuff in his hair. So we ensure he’s got to take a shower, then go in. Swap the fake for the real one, and be drinking margaritas within the hour.”
It wasn’t exactly ripped from the opening of Cartel Land. It wasn’t really my style. But as nonviolent heist plans went, it was decent. What happened after, though, that was a different issue. “It’s almost six hundred carats. It can’t be fenced. I know that for sure.”
She walked her fingertips up my chest. “You’re pretty nosy.”
“It’s not about the job. It’s about you.” I gave her perfect ass a squeeze. “So I’m not being nosy. I’m being protective.”
She paused with her fingertips pressing into my right pec. I slid my hand underneath the high waist of her nylons so I was touching her bare skin. And gave her a little pinch.
She let her knees slide farther apart and said, “I’ll cleave it myself, and poof.” She snapped her fingers. “No North Star, no evidence. Just a handful of rough-cut stones for us to use as we see fit.”
Cleaving the stone herself knocked out another variable—a jeweler. It was good thinking. But from where I was, at thirty thousand feet, all I could see was all the shit that could go wrong, all the permutations that ended with cops and cuffs. “Worst-case scenario: you’re too nervous to pick the locks on the adjoining doors. What then?”
Wetting her lips, she almost glared at me. Almost mad. On the edge. “I’ll be able to focus. I can always focus.”
“But if you can’t? Or if the adjoining room is a no-go? What’s the plan to get through the hallway door?”
“We’ll take a master key.”
“What about the chain lock?”
The way she responded was defensive—flaring her nostrils, tilting her head away, and putting one hand to her chest. It told me I’d hit a weak spot in her plan. She didn’t know how to answer, and she was pissed she hadn’t thought of it. And two, she didn’t like being challenged. Of course she didn’t; neither did I. But right now, the third degree was necessary. I was going to press her until she saw she needed to think this through. God knew I wanted to press her.
I held on to her ass and pulled her closer. I slipped off her shoes and tossed them across the room. Then I reached up and brought her down to me for a kiss. When I had her deep into it, I made my move and slipped my wallet out of her pocket. When I let her go, I dangled it out in front of her. “Nice try.”
She tried to snatch it back from me, but I was quicker and bigger and kept it just out of her grasp. Her eyes were full of challenge, mischief, and heat. I tossed my wallet aside and cupped her jaw to make her look at me. And then I looked her right in the eye and leveled with her. “I know you don’t want help, but I think you could use it.”
She planted her hand on my chest and shook her head. “Nice try yourself. You’re not getting in on my job, Nick.”
Fucking A, the last thing I needed was to get involved in stealing an infamous diamond from the Ritz Goddamned Carlton. But there was something bigger at play here—her safety, her security. “I don’t want in on your job,” I said as I reached up and began undoing her uniform buttons. “But you need to think this through. And I can help you do that.”
She didn’t answer me at first, but instead silently watched me undress her, each undone button revealing a little more of that soft, silky skin. I slipped the top part of her dress over her shoulders and arms. Straight-up, I didn’t want to get tangled up in this heist. But even more straight-up, I wanted to protect her . . . even if it was from herself. That wasn’t a new-me thing, and it wasn’t an old-me thing. It was the fucking honorable thing. “Let me get you to where you need to be on the locks, at least. OK?”
Still she didn’t answer. She took off the wig and let her long dark hair fall over her shoulders.
I knew I was right. But I couldn’t tell what was going on behind those beautiful blue eyes until finally, after a few minutes, she said, very softly, “Maybe.”
It wasn’t a yes. But it wasn’t a no either. And that was good enough for me.