The Art Of Deception, Book Two, Stolen Hearts series, Romantic Suspense (3 page)

Sophie laughed and finally looked at him. “Hardly. He’s good at doing lots of things.”

Gage gripped his pen tighter. “Does he paint?”

“Of course, but he doesn’t take it seriously.”

“So, he doesn’t work with you?”

“No." She frowned as if she couldn’t follow his reasoning. “It takes special training to be a conservator.”

Gage wanted to ask her why she had chosen that profession rather than investing time in her own talent. If she had talent. But he didn’t want to get off the subject which had suddenly become not Sophia Pascotto, but Raphael.

“Does Raphael use your studio to paint in?”

Her eyes narrowing into slits. “Sometimes.”

“Then he has access to all your materials?”

She jumped to her feet and grabbed her satchel. “You’re way off base. Raphael would never paint a forgery!” She shot a killer glare in his direction and stalked out of the coffee shop.

A smile slowly spread over Gage’s face. The lady was quick. Quick to understand what he was getting at and quick to defend her brother. Intelligence and loyalty were two qualities he had a lot of admiration for.

His smile faded. Looks like his routine questioning had just turned into a full scale investigation. The Pascotto family had the perfect set-up to paint, transport and sell forgeries.

“Got your flowers, bud?”

A grin lit his nephew’s freckled face, revealing the gap between his two front teeth. Andy thrust his small bouquet of colored daisies up high enough for Gage to see above the hood of his rusty pick-up truck.

Gage locked the driver’s door. The guys at the bureau joked the old truck was held together with mud and his determination to get one more year out of it. Building materials were expensive. Not until he’d finished renovating his house would he consider buying a newer truck.

“Will Sarah’s baby be able to talk?” Andy asked as they walked through the visitor’s entrance to the hospital.

He let go of the small sticky hand to shift his armful of yellow roses higher. Andy had opted to buy Sarah a cheerful bunch of wild looking daisies, but Gage couldn’t imagine buying her anything less than the most elegant.

Spencer’s wife, Sarah, was the most beautiful, classy woman he’d ever met. He was half in love with her , which could have been a problem. Except Chance Spencer, once a famous international art thief, had become his best friend. Sarah and Chance belonged together like no other couple Gage knew. They were soulmates in the truest sense.

“I think babies just gurgle the first few months." He followed his nephew into the elevator and punched the button for the eighth floor.

“When did I start talking?” Andy’s clear blue eyes filled with the confidence that his uncle knew the answer to any question he might ask.

“You?” Gage tried to smile. “You came out talking." Seven years ago, he’d convinced his sister Maisie not to have an abortion. It hadn’t been his moral conviction that abortion was wrong as much as an attempt to save his sister. He’d hoped having a baby would ground her, but things hadn’t worked out as he’d envisioned. Maisie still worked in a bar, and what she did after hours on the weekends he kept Andy, Gage didn’t want to speculate about.

He took his nephew’s hand again when the elevator doors opened. “Let's go see what Michael Spencer looks like.”

“Maybe I can be his uncle, and I’ll take him to baseball games and teach him how to hammer nails. I’ll be just like you." Andy smiled up at him.

His throat locked tight as he squeezed the small hand engulfed in his. “Michael is one lucky kid."

 A lot luckier than Andy. Gage tried to spend as much time as he could with his nephew, but it wasn’t enough. The kid needed a father.

Spencer had given him the room number over the phone the night before, so they walked past the busy nursing station directly to Sarah’s room.

“Sarah!” Andy flew through the open door, over to the bed where Sarah sat upright, anxiously watching the doorway.

“I brought these for you,” he trumpeted, thrusting the daisies at her.

“They’re beautiful." She smiled and took the offered flowers. “Every time I look at them, I’ll think of you.”

She glanced at Gage, her smile spreading wider as she noticed the yellow roses. “Are those for me, or is there some other lucky lady in the hospital you’re trying to impress?”

Gage pushed away from the doorway where he’d waited until Andy had presented his flowers. “You’re top on my list of ladies to impress today."

If Sarah had suffered giving birth yesterday, it was impossible to tell now. Her long blond hair fell in soft waves to her shoulders, and her green eyes shone with excitement. She’d never looked more beautiful.

He walked over and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “Congratulations. How’s it feel to be a mom?”

“I’m out of the room for a few minutes, and the damned man is already putting the moves on my woman.”

Gage spun around and grinned at his friend. Spencer’s black hair was shorter than when they’d first met, but even cradling the small baby in his arms, he still had that devil-may-care look about him.

Gage laid the roses on the foot of the bed and moved closer to look at the baby. “So this is Michael Patrick Spencer, the 1st." Michael Spencer didn’t look like either of his parents yet. He was round and pink and still a little wrinkled.

When he brushed his finger against the baby’s smooth cheek, he turned his head toward the caress. Gage laughed. “Smart little tyke. I think he’s hungry.”

Spencer’s eyes glowed with pride and a depth of joy Gage hadn’t thought existed. He swallowed the lump in his throat, a tight, empty feeling lodging in his chest. “He’s perfect,” he said to Spencer. “You must be proud.”

Spencer gazed at his son. “Yeah, he is perfect, isn’t he?”

Sarah’s sweet, musical laugh made both men look up. “I don’t think proud is a big enough word to describe how he feels. We agreed to equal time, Chance, remember?” She laughed again and held her arms open for the baby. “Andy, climb up on the bed with me. You can see Michael better that way.”

Gage watched Spencer reverently place his son in his wife’s arms, then turn and shake his head as if he were having a hard time coming back to earth.

“So, did you meet with Sophia Pascotto last night?” He moved to stand beside Gage at the foot of the bed.

“Sophie,” Gage corrected him absently as he kept an eye on Andy. He was a good kid, but too inquisitive sometimes.

“On a first name basis with her already?” Spencer grinned. “Is she pretty?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know." Gage stuck his hands in his jeans pockets and rolled back on his heels. “She’s different.”

Spencer’s grin grew wider. “Different, huh? Think she’s capable of painting the forgery?”

Gage shrugged. “She probably has the skill to paint it. I haven’t met the mother or her brother yet, but on paper, it looks like the whole damned family could be in on the sting.”

He had Spencer’s full attention now. “Sophia has a successful career as an art conservator. Why would she blow her reputation to pass off a forgery?”

“She appeared to be very protective of her twin brother, Raphael.”

“Appeared to be? Come on, man. This is me you’re talking to. What was your gut impression? Did she strike you as the kind of person who would pull a number like that?”

Gage shuffled his feet. Methods of detection was an old debate between them. “I need more facts before I can say one way or the other.”

“Facts only tell you so much. It’s time you started listening to your gut.”

If anyone else spoke to him like that Gage wouldn’t have tolerated it, but he knew Spencer was concerned. Gage hadn’t handled a high profile case for over a year now. His career as an investigator had not only stalled; it was sliding backward.

Spencer often encouraged him to reach beyond the parameters Gage had set early in his career. The truth was he couldn’t. He didn’t know how to conduct an investigation differently, and he wasn’t going to start playing guessing games with a case that involved the boss’s wife.

“Chance, I think Michael’s hungry." Sarah smiled at her husband.

The expression in Spencer’s blue eyes darkened and grew intent. Gage looked away. He imagined Sarah was breast-feeding their baby. What man wouldn’t be turned on watching the woman he loved nurse their newborn child?

“Time to go, Andy." He walked over to Sarah’s side and dropped a kiss on the top of her head, then another on Michael’s. “Andy’s got plans for you, little one." He brushed his finger over the baby’s soft hand. “You’ll be able to catch a baseball before you’re walking.”

“You’ll make a great father some day, Vince." Sarah kissed his cheek. “Don’t leave it too long, okay?”

“I’ll think about it." He kissed her again, then shook Spencer’s hand and clapped him on the back and followed Andy from the room.

He did want a family some day. But not yet. Not until everything was in place.

Sophie wrinkled her nose. She dipped her cloth into the solvent she was using to clean the grime from the painting in front of her. She wished Ciro wouldn’t smoke dope in her studio. Potential customers occasionally dropped by unannounced to look at examples of her work, and the unmistakable smell of marijuana was hardly an assurance of her dependability.

Not that her more important customers, clients from the museums, would drop by without an appointment. Still, she made good money restoring paintings from private collections. She couldn’t afford to jeopardize her professional reputation.

Ciro stuck his head out of the storage closet and spewed out a cloud of thick, pungent smoke. “Sure you don’t want any?” He held out a half finished joint.

“After two years of trying to get me to inhale that stuff, don’t you think it’s time to give up? Now close the door or put the joint out. You’re stinking up my studio.”

He took a drag and turned his head to exhale into the small room behind him. “Like your studio doesn’t stink of turpentine and oils already." He giggled, disappeared into the storage room and shut the door behind him.

Sophie frowned at the section of the painting she’d already meticulously cleaned. The brush strokes lacked the bold certainty of a skilled artist. An amateur had painted the landscape. Once the entire surface was cleaned, she’d phone the owners and ask how important the painting was to them. She could retouch the craquelure, but not before they gave her the go-ahead.

A knock sounded at her studio door. Sophie swore under her breath, dropped her cloth and grabbed a towel and flapped it wildly in the air. Only customers and people who didn’t know her used that door. Her friends always came in through her apartment and up the back stairs.

“Just a minute,” she yelled as she dashed to the storage room. “Ciro, what are you doing in there?”

“Absorbing the ambience of this cluttered, little room." His dreamy voice drifted out through the closed door.

“There’s someone at the door, probably a customer. Don’t come out until the smell of that smoke is gone, okay?”

Ciro chuckled. “You’re such an uptight chickie. People expect artists to live on the wild side. Although, one could argue, smoking marijuana wouldn’t be called wild at this juncture in time.”

Great. Ciro was in one of his philosophical moods. “Just stay put. I could use another contract." She glared at the closet door, flapped her towel one more time and hurried over to the studio door. Just her luck she was in the middle of working on a painting and couldn’t open a window.

She finger-combed her hair, not certain if she’d brushed it that morning or not. There was nothing she could do about the green paint stain on her blue sleeveless T-shirt or her faded Indian print skirt, but her shoes.... She looked around for something to put on her bare feet. Well, hell, if a customer insisted on showing up without an appointment, they’d have to take her the way she was.

When she opened the door, cerulean blue eyes were the first thing she noticed. Her stomach sank, then did a little flip. “Where’s your suit?” She closed her eyes, her cheeks burning in embarrassment.
Stupid
.

A chuckle rumbled out of Gage. “It’s Saturday.”

She opened her eyes. Thank goodness he wore a loose flannel shirt over his T-shirt. All those muscles in black relief would be too much to take in all at once.