Marilyn Pappano - Nights With A Thief

“What’re you doing?”

Lisette jerked, spinning around like a turtle hunkered on the ground to face the man who’d spoken, her feet sliding between two squat columns, dangling in air. One shoe slipped, then slid off her foot in slow motion, landing somewhere below without a sound.

For an instant, she wanted to strangle Jack Sinclair, but that would mean prying her hands loose from the stone, and that wasn’t happening until it was do-or-die time.

She’d had two choices for this role in her drama: Jack or his friend Simon Toussaint. It had been no choice, even without her mother’s lifelong insistence that the Toussaint family was evil. If Simon had appeared on the balcony, she would have lost her grip and fallen backward to her death. He scared her that much.

Jack, on the other hand, was Prince Charming. She’d never met him, but she’d seen him, mostly on the internet, a few times in person. He was tall, blond, tanned and, even in this light, outrageously handsome.

Her gaze was traveling the fine leather of his shoes up to the incredible weave of his trousers when abruptly he crouched in front of her. His brows were quirked, and so was his mouth as their gazes connected. His expression was tinged with curiosity, but underneath that was tautly controlled intensity. Interest. Even amusement.

She didn’t take comfort in that assessment.

“Well?” he prompted.

She swallowed hard. “I’m taking a shortcut downstairs for the fireworks.”

He looked at the grappling hook and the line, then freed her right hand from its grip on the rope. “Not with these gloves. They’re great for not leaving prints, but you’d better have a heavier pair somewhere, or your bloody hands will give you away.”

Those same reactions from seeing the painting—goose bumps, muscles tightening, breath catching—returned, provoking a curious emotion, not as awestruck as the painting but not as, say, nauseating as the height of the balcony.

She was in the process of reclaiming her hand when he stiffened, turning his head slightly toward the room. She would like to think it was just a gesture, listening out of habit, but she’d heard the sounds, too, the opening and closing of heavy doors. The rumble of male voices, barely audible outside.

“You got gloves?” he asked again as he withdrew a pair of his own from inside his jacket. The man carried climbing gloves in his tuxedo? Before she could finish being surprised by that, she accepted it. Tools of the trade. Getting caught without them could cost his life.

She ripped off the thin gloves and replaced them with her climbing ones as more voices sounded in the room. Was it staff sneaking in to watch the fireworks from the best seats in the house? Guards making rounds? Or maybe Candalaria himself had come in to show off a wonder, talk business or get busy with the latest woman on his arm. It didn’t matter, though. Getting caught on the balcony didn’t bode well for Lisette.

She wasn’t sure how it boded for Sinclair.

“Come on, Cinderella, get moving, or I’m hijacking your coach for myself.”

Giving herself a mental shake, Lisette tucked the thin gloves into the bodice of her dress, hiked up her dress and slid her bare foot over the knee wall, curling her toes into the stone as if they might find a lifesaving grip there. Her palms were sweaty, her heart was pounding, and she wasn’t sure she could do it. Swing the other leg over. Step into thin air. Have a good fall while avoiding one hell of a bad landing. But she had no choice. She very much wanted to avoid prison, even more to avoid death.

Jack’s hand brushed her arm. “Let me go first. If anything goes wrong, I’ll break your fall.”

Gentlemanly? Or seeing to his own safety first? Either way, she couldn’t protest over the knot in her throat. All she could do was watch as he slipped over the wall, then gracefully disappeared from sight without making a sound...and listen as the lock on the French doors clicked. The reflections on the glass panes shifted as the door slowly pushed outward. A gold-and-silver ball exploded in the sky high above the grounds, and a raspy voice said, “We’re right on time.”

Grasping the rope, driven purely by adrenaline, she swung her entire body over the wall to dangle in the air, nothing more than a thin line and her own ten fingers stopping her from splatting to the ground. Instantly she closed her eyes, unable to look at the sky, the tops of trees, the people made so small by distance they didn’t look real.

As she clung to the rope, the swaying caused by the inelegant start of her descent stopped. Time to start moving, to press her knees to the line, to balance her weight on her arms, to slide hand over hand down to the ground... Nothing happened.

Time, she told herself more forcefully. She couldn’t freeze now. She was strong, lifting weights just for this purpose, but she couldn’t hold herself forever. Even the thought sent fine tremors through her hands, up her arms and across her shoulders to meet in the middle.

Another starburst appeared in the sky with a muffled boom, so bright it would take only one guest glancing about to spot her dangling there. Sadly, there was no contingency for that in plans A, B, C or D.

Panic danced up her back, but before it got close enough to make the short leap into her brain, warm fingers closed around her ankle. Jack tugged on it, not enough to startle her into letting go, too much to ignore. Had he already reached the ground and come back up for her, or had he been waiting all this time?

Either way, the touch of his hand made her feel safer, braver. Focusing on that bravery, she pried up her left fingers one at a time, let her body slide, then grasped the rope again and repeated the action with her right hand. Let go, slide, grab tight, over and over, and the entire time Jack Sinclair’s fingers remained around her ankle.

At last, even with her eyes closed, she knew she was only feet above the ground. She could tell it from the overwhelming mix of perfumes that assaulted the air, from the voices, the clinking of glasses, the aura created by too many people jammed into too small a space.

“You can open your eyes.”

She didn’t want to, not until her feet were on the ground—hell, not until her butt was on the ground. But she forced them open and saw that they’d wound up exactly where she’d planned: in the corner where the east wing jutted out from the main building, in the shadows created by a feathery tree growing in a giant pot. Before she could undo her grip on the rope, Jack laid his hands at her waist and lifted her away.

He set her on her feet in the corner, stone at her back, earth under her feet, and stood close, his gaze crinkled as he studied her. His eyes were the rich, startling blue that she kept in her stock of tinted contact lenses, except his were natural. She studied them, looking for something—suspicion, awareness, too many questions or too many answers. She wondered why he had helped her, if he would now turn her over to Candalaria or figure she owed him a favor for not jamming her up. She wondered if she could escape him.

A very small part of her wondered if she had to escape him right this very moment.

Considering that last thought, she paid little attention to his movements—stripping off his gloves, stuffing them into his pockets, straightening his jacket, smoothing a wrinkle from her dress.

“Stay here.” He ducked behind the tree before disappearing around the corner of the building.

This would be the perfect time for her to run, and she even took a few stumbling steps before leaning against the wall again. She’d known better than to wear four-inch heels on a job, especially ones that could fall off so easily, but she’d been swayed by the fact that they made her legs look damn good. But slipping out of the party like this would raise the question of how she’d managed to lose a shoe, and the last thing she wanted was questions.