Suspects(65)
“No, I didn’t. I was so excited to meet you, I’d have bought anything.”
“It’s a good thing you didn’t buy the red mink jacket, she would have hated that more.”
“It was too expensive.”
“Yes, it was,” Theo agreed. “It’s overpriced.”
“I still have the purse if you want it.”
“Never mind. I know exactly the right one for her. What did you give her instead?”
“Nothing. It wasn’t her birthday.”
“You lied to me about your sister’s birthday? Oh my God, you are a liar. She’s right!” Theo was laughing and he grinned.
“Maybe introducing the two of you was a mistake. I’m starting to think so, if you’re going to gang up on me.” He kissed her then, and was dying to get her into bed in a serious way.
“Remember what the doctor said,” she warned him. “Two more weeks!”
“I hate you,” but the way he kissed her said otherwise. It had been a fun evening for all three of them. Fiona texted him as she rode back to the Village on the subway.
“She’s terrific. Marry her,” was all it said.
Theo sent a quick email to her office before they went to bed. Two days later the package arrived of what she ordered that night after meeting Fiona. It was the Balenciaga City bag with multicolored graffiti all over it, and it was perfect for her. She showed it to Mike and he grinned when he saw it. It looked like it had been made for her or that she’d made it herself. Theo sent it to her address by messenger, with a note hoping to see her soon, and Fiona was bowled over. She sent Mike another text after that. “If you don’t marry her, I will. Best purse I ever had.”
“It’s complicated,” he responded to his sister.
“She’s already married?”
“Widowed. A year ago. Bad story.”
“I’m sorry. I love her,” Fiona wrote back.
“Me too,” Mike wrote to his sister.
The meeting between the woman he loved and his sister had been a resounding success.
Chapter 16
Theo spent another week with Mike at the hotel in New York, and then she had to get back to work. She had been gone for four weeks to see him through his recovery, and he was going to take another month off, but couldn’t travel. She had to catch up on all the things she hadn’t done while she was in New York, but they were closer than ever when she left. Her standing by him while he hovered between life and death had created a bond between them that deepened their relationship immeasurably, the way nothing else could have. They had been through the worst together.
He had been in touch with both Guy Thomas and Robert Richmond, and the remaining kidnapper was still floating around somewhere just out of reach. Robert’s sources told him that he was still in England, but no one seemed to know where. He had gone underground and was staying out of sight.
Both men were immensely relieved that Mike had survived his ordeal.
Daniel had changed places with Patrick halfway through the New York trip.
Theo was sad to leave Mike, but he knew she had to get back to work, and he was grateful she had stayed for so long.
“I’ll come over as soon as they let me travel,” he promised her before she left. And they had decided to take the trip to Venice and Rome when he felt up to it, maybe in the summer.
She was swamped when she got back, and they spoke several times a day. The four agents from the DGSE were assigned to her again, and they were in evidence. She couldn’t enjoy the same freedom she’d had in New York, and she missed it.
She’d been back for a week when Robert got word of a sighting of the Russian they’d been looking for since December. They followed the leads he had to the Cotswolds, where they saw the kidnapper coming out of a supermarket and closed in on him before he could flee. He tried to run and fired a shot at one of the MI6 agents pursuing him, missed, and the agents caught him and pinned him to the ground, and delivered him personally three days later to Guy Thomas, who arrested him and added him to the others to stand trial for the kidnap and murder of Matthieu and Axel Pasquier, and the attempted kidnapping of Theodora Morgan Pasquier. Guy went to Theo’s office to tell her in person. Mike already knew, but Guy wanted the pleasure of telling her himself. It had taken more than a year to find them, but justice would be done in the end.
Theo looked incredulous when he told her. “Does that mean I’m a free woman?” she asked him.
“Not totally, I’m afraid. You will need to be careful in the future. You will always be a target. Your success and your fortune are both a blessing and a curse. I’d like to keep our detail with you for another month, just to be comfortable, and after that your own private security should accompany you publicly. There will always be someone envious and ill-intentioned. There are unseen evils in this world, and you need to protect yourself against them.”
“I have ever since my husband’s death,” she said sadly. “I suppose I’ll never have the freedom I had before.” Her life had changed radically. But the daily tension and terror would no longer be there, knowing that they were after her to settle an old score that should never have been held against her, or her husband, and surely not their son. She had paid a terrible price for what had happened, a price that could never be reversed.