Playing Dirty (23 page)

Frankly, she had to wonder how deep his love could be, if he found it that easy to blow her off. If he couldn’t even spare her five stinking minutes to try to explain the panic that had led to her idiocy.

And she would give him that—he had gone out of his way to shore up her up-and-down body image far too many times for her to pretend she hadn’t been a complete ass with that whole but-what-if-I-get-fat question.

Jeez Marie. Trust issues with Cade aside, she was embarrassed for
herself
. She was smart, skilled and capable. And although she might not be in Poppy’s league, she was attractive, as well. So what the hell was she doing? Her days as an eighteen-year-old were far behind her, so why was she flip-flopping all over the place, thinking she was pretty darn hot one minute, only to turn around the next and allow her old shopworn insecurities to regress her right back to the maturity level of her high school self? It said reams more about her than it did about Cade that she had to keep relearning the same lessons over and over again.

That she had the same damn issues with trust.

For the second time in less than twelve hours, missing Miss Agnes was a wrenching pang in her heart. The older woman had always known how to make her
think,
had had ways of helping her cut through the bullshit to the heart of whatever was dragging her down.

Well, she couldn’t have Miss A, but maybe she could at least grab herself a few minutes of peace and quiet. The party was finally starting to wind down, but she was so tired of pretending to share the euphoria everyone else felt that she doubted her ability to last until then. So, slipping away, she went upstairs to Agnes’s
sitting room, where she tried to recall the specifics of how the older woman had talked her through her problems. Flopping down in a slipper chair, she stared moodily at the ornate paneling on the wall.

And heard her mentor’s foghorn voice whisper through her mind as clearly as if they’d sat side by side.
So how do you feel about your young man’s anger with you?

Her automatic shrug was every bit as sulky as her habitual go-to response had been back in her tween-and-teenaged years.

But Miss A had never let her get away with that, and, sitting straighter in her chair, Ava knew that neither could she let herself wiggle off the hook. For as much as she’d rather stick bamboo shoots under her fingernails than conduct a soul search, it was a valid question. What
did
she feel, knowing the tables were turned and Cade was mad at her?

Well, resentful, for starters.

As if she were on shaky ground.

Suspicious that she may have finally taken things a step too far, have played the guilt card one time too many.

Scared.

God, she hated that last one, hated recognizing that she was petrified she had driven Cade away once and for all because she’d been too damn chickenshit to admit—to him, to herself—that she would give her left boob to have him, and the love he offered, in her life.

She hated it even more that, after acknowledging the truth of that, she still had jittery, jumpy, afraid-to-depend-on-him feelings. That, even knowing what she
risked losing, she honestly didn’t know if she would do anything differently.

Crap.
She was seriously screwed up. There came a time when you had to have some faith or get off the pot, so to speak.

She couldn’t say why she wasn’t quite there yet.

“There you are.”

Startled, Ava swiveled in her seat to look toward the door as Beks breezed into the room carrying the boom box in one hand and a magnum of champagne in the other, two fingers anchoring plastic cups to its side.

It sank in then that the mansion had grown quiet.

More than willing to be diverted from thoughts that kept circling and circling without resolving a damn thing, she smiled at the younger woman, whose hair was purple and black today and looked as though it had been styled at the Finger In The Light Socket Salon. “Are you and I the only ones left?”
Has Cade gone?

“I assume the night guy is around somewhere, but other than him, it’s just you and me. Cade was the last to leave and he took off about ten minutes ago. I had a little paperwork to finish up, then decided to see if you were still around.” She shrugged. “When I saw your car out back, I came looking.”

Crossing to where Ava sat, Beks extended the boom box. “Here, you look like you could use some dance therapy. Hook this up and I’ll pour us some bubbly.”

Ava rose to her feet and went behind the grouping of the little table and two slipper chairs, but couldn’t find a nearby outlet. Locating one all but hidden in the beautifully carved wainscoting, she squatted to plug in the CD player.

Then she glanced over at Beks, who had taken the companion chair to the one she’d just abandoned. “Will
you be around for a while or are you heading back to L.A. right away?”
Is Cade?
“If you get a little time between projects I hope you stick around. Because I’m going to miss you when you’re gone.”

Directing her attention back to the boom box, she turned it on and selected a song off Beks’s preloaded disk. She rose to her feet to the beat of Rihanna’s “Only Girl.”

But for once in her life she didn’t feel them automatically move in rhythm to a dance beat. Nor did her hips. And her shoulders and arms remained stubbornly stationary, as well.

“I’m gonna miss you too,” Beks said. “But as for when we’re leaving, I don’t have a clue. The boss hasn’t told me a damn thing—he’s been in one helluva mood today.”

“Tell me about it,” Ava muttered.

Beks popped the cork and grabbed a cup to catch the wine foaming up and over the neck of the bottle. Once she’d poured one for both of them, she looked over at Ava. “Yeah, I had a feeling you’d know more about that than I do.”

“Hey, don’t look at me,” she said. “He’s barely said two words to me. Everything he’s wanted me to know or do has come through you.”

“Exactly, so don’t play stupid. He hasn’t had eyes for anyone
but
you since we came to town—and suddenly he’s refusing to even look at you?” The younger woman scowled. “What the hell did you do?”

Had a little panic attack when he said he loved me.
Guilt drove her back to the small table to snatch up her cup. She drained the drink in one long swallow. “Nothing I want to talk about.” Seeing the stubborn look in Beks’s eyes, however, she whirled back to the boom
box. Maybe she could find Al Green. Al always made her want to dance.

But she turned too fast and without a shred of her usual grace, found her upper body lurching forward when the thick nap of the throw rug caught at her foot. Staggering on tiptoes, she flung out her arms to prevent a collision with the ornate wooden wall.

Her right hand made contact first, skittering over the panel’s whorls and grooves before it caught in the dip of an elaborate pattern. Gripping the rich, carved paneling, she came to a panting halt, her heart pounding and her lungs heaving for the breath that had been startled right out of her.

And could have sworn she felt the solid wood shift beneath her fingertip.

B
EKS RUSHED
over. “Are you okay?” She reached out to help Ava from her uncomfortable, bent position.

“Wait, wait!” Ava waved the younger woman away with her free hand, afraid of the time it would take to relocate the piece she was almost certain had moved beneath her fingers if she took them off of it. “This might be a secret compartment.”

Beks froze. “Are you serious?”

“I’m not positive what I’ve got here, but I swear I felt something move. Give me a second.”

Okay, it was going to take a little longer than that, she conceded after a couple of minutes. Bending was awkward—not to mention hard on the back—but when she tried squatting she found herself too low to see what she was doing. She looked at Beks, who was hovering a scant foot away. “Drag that slipper chair over here, will you?”

Beks thunked the chair down next to her a moment later and she slid her rear onto its seat. “Oh, that’s better,” she said in relief. Stretching out her back, she smiled up into the production assistant’s gray-blue eyes,
rounded now with excitement. “Okay, let me see if this is anything like the other one in here.”

Beks’s eyes grew wider yet. “There’s
another
secret hidey-hole in here?”

“There’s an entire secret closet. Jane kept Miss A’s couture collection in it while she prepared the show she put on at the Metropolitan Museum last year.”

“You and your friends are so interesting,” Beks murmured.

Ava grinned at her, then turned back to the woodwork puzzle. Her fingers had developed a fine tremor from all the possibilities—including the one where she had just
imagined
she’d felt the wood shift beneath them. Still, she kept at it for what seemed like forever.

The thing was obstinately, sturdily immobile, and she was about to concede defeat when she suddenly felt something trip. The next thing she knew, a piece of the wall recessed, sliding out of sight to the left.

She gawked at the hole it left. The opening was roughly twelve by eight inches but had been so skillfully cut around the elaborate pattern of the wood that it was virtually undetectable if one didn’t know it was there.

Hell, she’d been pretty certain this was what had lain beneath her fingertips when she thought she’d felt it move, but even then she hadn’t been able to discern its outlines in the wall. She glanced up at Beks in wonder. “We’re in.”

Beks made a squeaky sound behind lips pressed together as if to keep from screaming out loud. Her hands performed a frenzied little wave.

Ava blew out a breath, turned back to the opening and reached inside. Feeling several leather boxes,
stacked one upon the other, she made a squeaky noise of her own.

Pulling them out, she sat them in her lap and turned slightly in her chair so Beks could also see as she extracted the largest—a flat, almost square, affair of faded black leather—from the bottom of the pile. She opened it, then for a moment simply stared in stunned silence at its contents. Diamonds glistened against black velvet beneath the overhead lights.

“Omigawd,” she finally breathed as she reached in to remove an intricate twenties-era necklace from its velvet bed. “Oh. My. God. I’ve seen it in a couple of pictures, but this—
this
is magnificent.”

It was all platinum and diamonds, diamonds, diamonds in an art deco design whose short chain alternated lacy links with round diamond-set triangles, before changing to square cut diamonds. Those anchored interconnected diamond-studded triangular links, which in turn widened into a sparkling V-shaped centerpiece, crowned by a large round center diamond and a matching pear-shaped diamond suspended below.

Tearing her eyes away, she stared up at Beks. “I didn’t actually believe I’d find the Wolcott Suite. Even when the wall opened and I felt the boxes, I suspected what it might be but I didn’t truly believe it.”

The excitement of the discovery belatedly kicking in, she laughed. And fastened the necklace around her neck. “How do I look?” Without awaiting an answer, she thrust a medium-sized box at Beks. “Here. You open this one. I bet it’s the bracelet. Or maybe the hair clips.” She hefted the smallest box. “I bet these are the earrings.”

She’d called the bracelet correctly, and, urging the younger woman to try it on, she clipped the earrings
on her own earlobes, then had Beks fasten a section of her purple-and-black hair back with the diamond hair clips.

Laughing, she grabbed her purse and pulled out her iPhone. “I have
got
to tell Jane and Poppy about this.”

“I’ll call Cade,” Beks said, her eyes alight with excitement. “This is gonna put the documentary right over the top!”

Ava’s first instinct was to protest, but she knew Beks was right. The discovery of the Wolcott Suite during the actual shooting of the documentary would add a whole new dimension to the film, not to mention hand deliver a promotional campaign better than anything even the greatest ad company in the world could invent.

She simply nodded and made her calls.

She tried Jane first, but nobody was home. She dialed Poppy next, and almost whooped when her friend answered right away. But Ava only got as far as, “You are
not
—” when her friend interrupted.

“Oh, good timing!” she said. “Jane’s here. Why don’t you come by, too?”

“Have her grab the other phone,” she said excitedly. “Because you guys are
not
gonna believe what I found!”

The second she told them about the Wolcott diamonds they insisted on coming over. And since the Fremont neighborhood where Poppy and Jason lived was just over the hill from Queen Anne, the women burst through the sitting room door less than ten minutes later.

Poppy skidded to a halt, staring at the dazzling bling adorning both women. “Holy shitskis,” she breathed. “You really did find it.” She shook her head. “I mean, I know you said you did. I’m just having a hard time wrapping my mind around it.”

Ava nodded in fervent agreement. “I
so
know the feeling.”

“I wonder why Miss A didn’t know about this compartment,” Jane said. “She did the closet.”

Ava just shrugged, for she didn’t have the first idea.

“Would
you
suspect there’d be two of them in the same room?” Poppy said, then turned to Ava. “How did you find it?”

“By pure happenstance. I got up to dance and tripped instead.”

“
You
tripped? Miss Honest-to-gawd-we’re-not-being-ironic-she-really-
is
-poetry-in-motion?”

Yeah, well, for the first time in my life I didn’t feel like dancing and got tripped up by this fat rug.
But she couldn’t say that, because her BFFs would want to know why. And she didn’t want to—couldn’t—talk about it. Not right now.

God. She had to figure out what to do about her and Cade. But not, thank God, at this precise moment. Because, much to her relief, Jane interrupted.

“Give me summa that!” she demanded, thrusting out a hand.

Beks started to remove the bracelet from around her wrist, but Ava wagged a staying hand. “No, keep it on—you were in on the find. Except for her wedding ring, Poppy isn’t all that into jewelry, but give her the hair clips—she has to try something on and they aren’t really your style anyhow.

“And, here, Janie.” She unclipped the drop earrings, which were miniatures of the necklace’s centerpiece. “You wear these. My lobes are too fat for clip-ons.” She rubbed some relief into her ears. “I don’t know how anyone can wear these things.”

“You do realize,” Jane said to Beks as she clipped on
the earrings, “that Av’s just saving face because she’s always been jealous of my skinny lobes.” Hooking her shiny brown hair behind her ears, she looked around. “Where’s a mirror when a girl needs one? What are we doing in the sitting room, anyhow, when all the reflective surfaces are in the bedroom?”

“Good point.” Ava surged up out of the chair, stooped long enough to unplug and snatch the boom box, then headed for the other room. “Let’s go. Beks, grab that bottle.”

“We only have the two glasses. Want me to run downstairs for more?”

“Nah. We don’t need no stinkin’ glasses. We’ll pass the bottle around.” She gave them all a brilliant smile. “Look at us! We’re decked out in famous diamonds. Only thing we need besides that is a celebratory swig or two and a dance.”

C
ADE HAD BEEN
restless before Beks called. After they hung up, he felt as if he were jumping out of his skin.

It didn’t help that sometime before his assistant had called, he’d decided that maybe he hadn’t handled Ava’s response to his declaration of love as well as he could have.

That maybe, in fact, he’d handled it with all the suaveness of a sulky high school Romeo shot down by the recipient of his lust and affection.

Except, what he felt for Ava was a helluva lot more than a simple case of lust and so far beyond your basic vanilla affection it wasn’t even funny. Having her toss his love back in his face had hurt—he wouldn’t deny it. But when he’d gotten back to his condo and couldn’t find a damn thing needing his immediate attention—which would have at least helped divert his
single-minded focus—he had been forced to admit that if Ava lacked faith…well, he was one of the main reasons why.

And, yeah, yeah, it had been a long time ago.

That didn’t negate the fact that he’d turned her into the public butt of a joke.

It was hypocritical to complain that she oughtta get the hell over it. Not when he himself had ignored his mother’s pleas for forgiveness up until—what?—three years ago?

No one knew better than he how impossible it had been to live with Allan Gallari’s cold perfectionism. Yet still he’d blamed his mother for the sense of worthlessness that had come from dealing with his old man. It had been tough enough when the reasons behind it were incomprehensible. But a good part of his rage had stemmed from knowing that she’d known perfectly well why his father had treated him the way he had, yet instead of telling
him
why the old man had hated his guts, she’d kept it a secret and made him work his way through it blind.

He had taken his own sweet time getting over that mad-on. So maybe he ought to man up and tell Ava he’d give her all the time she needed to get past her issues with him, as well.

Which he knew she eventually would. She interacted with him, made love with him, as if she loved him. He just had to give her a little space—and shoot for supportive instead of impatient when her insecurities hit.

That wasn’t what bothered him most right now, anyway. Ever since Beks had called to say Ava had found the Wolcott diamonds, something had been niggling at the back of his brain. He paced from the condo’s bed to the minuscule kitchenette to the front door, then
reversed the unsatisfactorily short route. He couldn’t put his finger on exactly why, but unease itched like a bad rash.

Which didn’t make sense. Hell, this was
good
news. Not only was it beyond cool for Ava and her friends, it was the crowning touch for what he already felt in his gut was going to be a kick-ass documentary. And you couldn’t
buy
the kind of publicity this discovery would generate. There was no downside.

He stilled midstep. Yes. There was. Ava and Beks were alone in a big old mansion with a fortune in recovered diamonds. It admittedly had low problem potential, but his gut still didn’t like it.

“Shit. You’re overreacting.” His gut was wrong. The night guard was there; it was the man’s job to see that no one got in.

On the other hand, the gods hadn’t exactly been on Cade’s side today. So who could swear this wouldn’t be the night Tony got clubbed over the head as he made his rounds outside the house?

Extreme reach, dude.

Still. He’d learned a long time ago to listen to his gut. And his gut was screaming that Ava and Beks were alone with a night guard who maybe did, maybe didn’t, know about their find. And if he didn’t, how the hell was the guy supposed to take extra measures?

Coming to a decision, Cade pulled out his cell phone and dialed 411 for information.

A moment later, he placed a call.

M
USIC DRIFTED
down the staircase, and it took everything Tony had not to howl his impatience as he raced up it. All that time he’d counted on having to finally discover the wall’s secret was ticking away while a
couple of idiot women whooped it up in the very room he needed to be in. And he couldn’t even run them off—not when he’d recently learned that one half of the duo, the redhead he’d blown off as kitchen help, was not only the production company’s concierge—she
owned
the goddamn mansion.

Hell, if he’d had that knowledge from the beginning, he might have forgotten the damn jewels and just romanced a smart chunk of change out of Spencer. He liked big girls, and they were usually sooo grateful for the attention. Plus, face it, conning lonely women was what he did best. It might not add up to retirement in a tropical paradise, but it probably would’ve gotten him eight months to a year of damn fine living.

And he really did like a woman with a rack and an ass that a man could get a solid grip on.

Well, it was too late for that, and he was bristling with irritation as he approached the sitting room doorway. That, however, was an attitude that would not do, so he breathed his exasperation away and plastered a pleasant smile on his face before poking his head into the room. Hell, charming women was his stock-in-trade. He oughtta be able to come up with a reasonable ploy to move them along. He’d take their measure and do what he always did: just open up his mind and let it connect to the right thing to say.

It was a method that worked for him nine times out of ten.

It likely would have worked now as well, except the room was empty. Brows furrowing, he hesitated for an instant before it sunk in that the music he’d heard from halfway down the stairs was coming from the bedroom. Even as he made the connection, he heard an eruption of female laughter, and, squaring his shoulders, he walked
into the sitting room, casting a covetous glance at the carved wood wall as he crossed the plush rug.