“I see the very best version of myself when you look at me.”
Anna Collins
Darius’s gaze left a trail of pink everywhere it landed on my skin. Blushing was one of those feminine things princesses and pretty girls did, which is why I had never been prone to it. But now it seemed like the blood under my skin rose up to meet his eyes – not like a challenge, unfortunately for my sense of self-preservation, but like an invitation.
It was disconcerting and slightly mortifying because now that I’d actually admitted I’d stolen the painting, lusting after the guy who was going to bust me felt a little too Stockholm syndrome-y for comfort. Granted, he wasn’t my captor, but I’d tried telling that to my traitorous skin with zero success.
We met my dad on the cliffs, already headed down to the beach with his camera and a towel for Mom. I introduced Darius to him as someone I was working with on a case, and they shook hands with a strange formality that I only ever saw in my dad when he was sizing up a business rival.
He was halfway down the path away from us when I called out to him impulsively. “Dad, can I borrow your bike?”
He stopped, looked up at me, and after a quick glance at Darius, said “Sure kiddo. Helmets are on the wall.”
Until he said yes, I hadn’t thought about taking Darius with me, but then it was all I could think about, and the blush on my face must have been epic, because he almost looked concerned. Almost.
“Want to go for a ride?” I asked quickly, in a futile attempt to divert his attention from my face.
“Your father has a tandem bicycle?” Darius asked, and suddenly my blush melted into a grin, and I felt my confidence slide back into place.
“Not at all. Come on, let’s go chase the wind.”
I took us north around the rocks and points, inland on the small, twisty roads where I’d first learned to ride my dad’s Triumph, and then finally south to Land’s End, where I parked the 1972 Bonneville motorcycle that my dad had rebuilt from the wheels up. Darius practically flung himself off the back of the bike, and I tried to ignore the voice in my head that said he was disgusted by me. He stood with his back to me and pulled off his helmet to look out at the view of Thacher Island, where the twin lighthouses still protected the ships from the rocky shore.
I removed my own helmet and wished we were still riding and his arms were still around me. I almost suggested we keep going, but when he finally turned to look at me, the expression on his face made me glad that I hadn’t.
It was raw and hungry, and it sent a shiver of something that definitely wasn’t fear up my spine. I suddenly realized it might not have been disgust, but desire that sent him off the back of my bike. Like being pressed against my back, with his arms around me, had been too much. It had been for me. I looked away to compose my face into something that didn’t scream I want you, and when I looked back a moment later, prepared to say the words out loud, his expression had slipped back into something cool and detached.
“You ride like the motorcycle is a part of you,” he said, with about as much investment as if he were discussing the sunny day. Okay. Two could play at this game.
“My dad started teaching me on a dirt bike when I was little and on this one when I was fifteen,” I said, my tone carefully neutral as I kicked the stand down and stepped off the bike.
His eyes jerked toward the lighthouses. “Why are there two?” he asked roughly.
“They’re twins,” I said, with a small smile at the memory of picnics on Thacher Island when we were kids. “And when they line up together, they point you to true north.”
Darius’s eyes reflected wry amusement as he contemplated the view. “Do they still operate?”
I nodded. We’d learned the history of the lighthouses from Dad, who grew up in Rockport and was part of the association involved in their preservation. “They were built in 1771 by the British, and rebuilt in the 1860s. For a while after the Coast Guard took over, they only lit the south tower, but when they relit the north tower, they became the last twin lighthouses in the U.S.”
“Did you grow up here?” Darius asked when he turned back to face me.
I nodded. “My dad used to take me out there in his kayak because Colette was never brave enough to go on the ocean in such a small boat. He said that back in the late 1700s, the lights were called “Ann’s Eyes” when they lit up stormy nights. That’s how I got my name. Mom chose Colette for the firstborn twin, so Dad chose Anna for me. I’ve pretty much been his ever since.”
“That explains the handshake,” Darius muttered.
“What handshake?” I asked.
“The one with which your father nearly crushed my hand.” I must have looked concerned, because Darius chuckled. “I guess I should be flattered that he felt the need to warn me.”
“To warn you about what?” I’d noticed the odd competitiveness of their handshake, and if Darius could explain it, I was all ears.
Darius’s gaze slid away from mine and back out toward the lighthouses. “That I’m not to hurt you.”
“Oh.”
Too late.
Actually, to be fair, he wasn’t the one who hurt me. Working with Darius over the past few days, I had let myself dare to hope for something more than just sex.
“I’m sorry, Anna.”
He still didn’t look at me. I liked how my name sounded in his voice, but not the carefully blank expression on his face.
I pasted a cheerful smile on with thoughts of corgi butts and tumbling kittens. “So,” I said, “how does this go now? You go back to Chicago, give my name to the police, and my mom’s painting back to the Grays? Will you give me enough warning to get out of the country, or do I need to change my identity and run?
“Anna—”
I looked away, toward Thacher Island. “I always thought the name Anna was too boring for who I wanted to be. Anna isn’t a skydiver, or a mountain climber. That’s Parker, or Scarlett, or Shane.” I smiled a little at that. What if I changed my name to Shane and became a P.I.? Except for that whole stealing-someone’s-identity thing, not to mention the fact that we looked about as related as an Afghan hound and a shih tzu.
“Do you know what a shih tzu is?” I asked him. “It’s a zoo with no elephants or zebras.”
I reached for my helmet, but Darius grabbed my hand before I could take it from the seat. He pulled me around to face him, and all I wanted to do was lose myself in his gaze. I had lost myself in it – that was part of the problem.
He searched my eyes, and then his eyes went to my lips and lingered there. It seemed like it took effort for him to meet my eyes again.
“Anna,” he said again in a hushed voice, “I don’t know how this goes now. Cipher doesn’t work for Gray anymore, he fired us, so my responsibility to him is done. But I still work for Cipher. I need to tell them what I know – what we found out – and see where they want to go from there.”
His hand was wrapped around my wrist, and I knew he could feel my pulse tripping along like a busy little jackhammer. I let ten beats go by without moving or saying anything, and then I nodded.
“When?” I asked. “I’ll meet you there.”
“You’ll—” he frowned, and then something that looked like respect crossed his face. “Monday morning. Ten o’clock.”
“Okay,” I said as I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and entered it into my calendar. “Cipher Security. 10 am on Monday. I’ll meet you in the lobby?” I looked up to see him gazing at me with an expression that looked something like confused wonder.
“Yeah. That’s fine.” He shook his head a little like he was trying to clear his vision.
I stuck my phone in my back pocket again and tried not to look forward to having his arms around me again on the bike. Tried, and failed, and then laughed at myself for thinking it would ever be easy. “Okay,” I said to redirect my focus, “now, are you hungry? Because I’m starving, and the world’s most perfect fish and chips is a six-minute ride from here.”
His expression gradually softened into something less surprised and more … relaxed. “The world’s most perfect? Are you sure you want to make that claim to a man who lived in England?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Perfectly deep fried fish is all about the batter, and everyone knows the best batter can only be found at Marisma in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico and at the Fish Shack in Rockport.”
“Everyone knows,” he countered as he reached for his own helmet, “that the best ingredient in fish and chips is the ink from the English newspapers the fishmongers wrap it in.”
I opened my mouth to respond, but then quirked my head at him. “Gray actually fired you?”
Darius looked a tiny bit chagrined, and then he shrugged. “Yes. My boss didn’t seem particularly worried though.”
“Worried about what?” I asked.
He exhaled quietly. “Gray threatened to kill us in the court of public opinion unless we were successful in retrieving the painting of your mother and aunt. Apparently he has the connections to do so, but that didn’t seem to worry my boss. He has let me stay to sort out what I can on the heist, and on the Manet.”
“Well, the Manet is a closed case. Mom said she painted it,” I reminded him.
“She also said it was unfinished,” he said seriously.
I flung my leg over the seat of the bike and faced backward, then gestured to him to the seat. “Sit.” After a moment of hesitation, he did, and despite scooting as far back on the seat as he could, there was less than a foot between us. “What haven’t you told me?”
His expression did a rapid-fire shift, from something guarded to something resigned, and I didn’t like either, so I was glad when he settled on something neutral. “I did a cursory examination of the frame that was left behind in the panic room.”
I noticed that he was careful not to say “that you left behind,” which I appreciated.
“There were, as you obviously know, the remnants of two canvases left between the stretcher and the frame,” he continued.
“Right. The Sisters and Mom’s copy of the Manet.” I tried not to sound impatient, but I really was hungry, and he sat so close to me that it was fifty-fifty which hunger I’d try to satisfy first.
“Your mother said her Manet was unfinished. She never painted the edges.”
I waited for him to continue speaking, but he didn’t until he’d looked into my eyes for a long moment, like he really wanted me to get what he was about to say. “The edges were black, Anna. They’d been painted.”
The Roadrunner in the Looney Tunes loop in my brain screeched to a halt, and I stared at Darius, unable to process what he was implying.
“The edges of both canvasses in the panic room were painted black.”