Innocent in Death (In Death #24)(79)

That stopped him, had him straightening again. “Can you really believe this? Believe that I’d regret what we are, what we have? That I’d regret it was you and not her? Haven’t I told you enough, shown you enough, that you’re everything to me?”

She struggled for calm, fought for the words. “She’s not like the others. The connection, it matters. You know it, and I know it. And maybe worse, she knows it. The connection, this history, they show. Show enough that people looked at me with pity today. That I was humiliated walking through my own bull pen to my own office.”

“And what of our connection, Eve, our history?”

Her eyes were swimming. She would never use tears as some did, he knew, and was battling them back even now. Her struggle not to give in to them made it all the worse.

He walked over to her window, stared out at nothing. So they wouldn’t rage at each other until it was burned away, he realized. They would pick their way through it, uncover it. Then they’d see.

“You need to know, is it, what it was, how it was, and how and what it is now?”

“I know—”

“You think you do,” he corrected. “And maybe you’re not altogether wrong, or altogether right. Do you want it?”

“No.” God, no, she thought. “But I need it.”

“Well, then, I’ll tell you. I was, what, three and twenty or thereabouts, doing business as it were in Barcelona. I’d had considerable success in the game, and in business by that time. Always, I’d enjoyed keeping a foot on either side of the line. Light and shadow, you could say. Such an interesting mix.”

He said nothing for a moment, then went on. “And it was there, in Barcelona, she and I crossed paths, with the same job in mind.”

He could see it now, as he looked through the dark window. The noisy club, the colored lights. It had been sultry in September, and the music had been a pulse in the blood.

“She came in where I was watching the mark for a time. Walked in, a red dress, an attitude. She flipped me a look, then moved straight in on my mark. Within minutes he was buying her a drink. She was good. I barely saw her pinch his passkey.”

He turned from the window. “It was rubies—bloody red rubies, you see. The star display of a gallery. Three passkeys required, and I had two of them already. What she did, she pinched his, then slid off to the loo, made a copy, and slipped it right back to him with him none the wiser. Neither of us could get to the damn jewels now, and it pissed me off.”

“Sure.”

“I waited for her to come to me, which she did the next day. We did the job together in the end, and stayed together for a time. She was young and fearless, passionate. We liked living fast, traveling, riding the wave, you could say.”

“Did you love her?”

He crossed over to get them both a glass of wine. “I fancied I did. She was capricious, unpredictable. She kept me on my toes. The legitimate bits I was involved in bored her.” He set a glass of wine on Eve’s desk. “She could never understand why I bothered, why I wanted what I wanted. What she understood was the game, and the thirst for money, for the shine. She didn’t understand what it was to come from nothing, as she’d come from a decent family, a decent home. What she wanted was more, then to move on and pick up more somewhere else.”

“What did you want?”

“Her, of course. I don’t mean that to hurt you.”

“It doesn’t.”

“I wanted the more, for different reasons, I suppose, but I wanted the more.” He studied the wine before he drank. “I wanted respect and power and the shields and walls and weapons that ensured I’d never be nothing again. You know.”

“Yeah.”

“She didn’t. Couldn’t. That was the crack in the jewel, I imagine.” The flaw, he thought, he’d seen even then. “And still, it was shiny enough that we worked together, played together, stayed together. Until Nice. The mark had an exceptional art collection, with two Renoirs, among others. It was the Renoirs we wanted, had a buyer set for them. We spent weeks on it, with Maggie moving to the inside by seducing the mark.”

To stop him, Eve held up a hand. “She slept with him? That didn’t bother you? Knowing she was with another guy?”

“It was work, and he was more than twice her age. And the Renoirs? They were worth a great deal.”

“She wasn’t yours,” Eve murmured, and something inside her un-knotted. “You never thought of her as yours.”

“Did you think otherwise?”

“Yes.”

“Not altogether right,” he repeated and eased down to sit on the edge of her desk. “I had complicated feelings for her, and I believed she had them for me. I thought because of those feelings, and that wave we rode, I could trust her. And there I was altogether wrong.”

As he drank, Eve could see he was looking back. “The night before we were to make the score, she didn’t come back to the villa where we were staying. Nor did she come in the morning. I was afraid something had gone wrong, she’d done something foolish and been caught. Then I got word she’d run off with the mark. Left me for him. Not only that, but if I’d gone through with the job that night, as planned, there would have been a number of gendarmes waiting to scoop me up.”