Bracken.
Making love to Emma, yes.
She and Matt Yankowski both were holding back on him. Did Yank know about this Tatiana Pavlova?
The wind rattled the windows, reminding Colin that he needed to get the house ready for the winter. He could do that over the next couple weeks, too. Caulk windows, stack wood, clean the chimney.
Dwelling on his frustrations and questions in the middle of the night wasn’t helping anything. He looked at the woman lying next to him and put emotion and desire aside. The Sharpes were a family with sixty years of investigations, contacts and secrets behind them. Emma had worked art crimes with her grandfather from childhood—long before she’d become an FBI agent.
Colin didn’t expect to know everything about her in the short time they’d been together, but he doubted even Yank knew what all lurked in the Sharpe family vault of secrets.
She shifted slightly, throwing back a slender arm. Colin held her close, and she rolled over, touched her fingertips to a deep purple-and-yellow bruise on his side. “They did this to you?”
“It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“You could have said something before we—”
“Trust me, sweetheart, I wasn’t thinking about my aches and pains while we were making love.”
“There are more bruises?”
“A few. I heal fast. Being back here helps.”
“They were trying to kill you—”
“Not when they hit me. They were just trying to get me into their car, show me they were in charge. They disagreed on killing me.”
“They knew you were a federal agent,” Emma said.
“By then, yes. They thought I was playing both sides and was willing to sell them weapons at a cut rate.” Colin thought a moment, then said, “Yank is getting the go-ahead to involve the team, but there were three men. Pete Horner, a private pilot out of Florida. He flew planes for Bulgov but wasn’t one of his regular pilots. He wanted to wait to kill me.”
“The other two?”
“Russians. Yuri and Boris. They wanted to kill me right away. Yuri is in his late forties, with short, thinning gray hair and blue eyes. Boris is younger—maybe thirty. Medium brown hair, brown eyes. Good-looking. Yuri’s kind of flat faced.”
Emma sat up slightly. “You’re describing them to me because you think I might recognize them.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“They could be anywhere. They could have split up, or they could still be together. They could have new IDs. Another boat. They could have had a car or a plane waiting for them. I had to bail too soon—”
“It sounds as if you bailed in the nick of time.”
“You mean before they fed me to the alligators?”
She gave him a faint smile. “Your sense of humor is a coping mechanism.”
He leaned in close to her. “What’s funny about alligators?”
“Do they believe they could force you to get them weapons?”
“Hard to say. They want to be arms merchants. They have contacts, resources, funds—seed money, Horner calls it.”
“Will their buyer be mad at them for not coming through with weapons?”
“Oh, yes. Very mad.” Colin realized suddenly how much he appreciated her approach to a problem. “I made it easy for Horner by turning up with orphaned weapons that I wanted to unload.”
“They knew you didn’t want a career as an arms merchant,” she said. “Just a profit. Everyone has good reason to be mad at you. Horner, the Russians, their buyer. Are they the type to exact revenge?”
Her skin was warm, as soft as anything Colin had touched in a month. “They’d have to find me first,” he said.
“And they don’t know who you are.”
“That’s right, they don’t—unless your source tipped them off.”
“My source isn’t one of them. I can tell you that much.”
“Did you break rules to find me, Emma?”
She let her fingertips drift over his chest. “I would have.” She looked up at him, her eyes as green as he’d ever seen them. “But I didn’t need to.”
“Why not?”
“You’re good at undercover work.”
It wasn’t an answer. Colin saw that she knew it, too, but he didn’t care. Not right now. He kissed her, then let the curve of his hand drift over her smooth, cool skin. “I’m good at this, too.”
6
LUCAS SHARPE SLOWED from a run to a light jog as he entered St. Stephen’s Green, a welcome oasis in the heart of Dublin. The lush greenery, flowers, statues and fountains were dripping as much as he was, if only from the early-morning rain and not a mixture of rain and sweat. He had pushed himself hard on his five-mile run. Nothing like an enigmatic, irritating email from his one-and-only sister to propel him into the Irish rain in sweats and running shoes:
I need everything you and Granddad have on London jewelry designer Tatiana Pavlova and her interest in the Rusakov collection. I’ll call tomorrow.
Btw, Colin is back.
Hope you’re enjoying Dublin,
Emma
She had sent the email at 8:00 p.m. Maine time, 1:00 a.m. in Ireland. Lucas had picked it up when he had awakened at seven in the spare bedroom of his grandfather’s Dublin apartment. Checking messages first thing, before he even crawled out of bed, was a habit he was trying, with limited success, to break. Given the five-hour time difference, there was even less point to diving onto his iPhone at first light in Ireland than in Maine, where at least he could rationalize that he wanted to stay abreast of what was going on in Europe.
As it was, by the time he read Emma’s email, it was the middle of the night on the U.S. East Coast. He would have to wait several hours before he could call his sister for more information.
Was Emma referring to Russian tycoon Dmitri Rusakov?
“Bloody likely,” Lucas muttered, jogging past a curving ornamental pond, ducks grooming themselves in the rain-soaked grass.
He slowed to a walk on a meandering path that led to a gate on the east end of the iconic green. The rain had let up but he was already soaked to the bone. Dublin was quiet so early on a drizzly Sunday morning. He crossed the normally busy street and continued into the heart of residential Georgian Dublin where his grandfather had lived for the past fifteen years.
Three days ago, Lucas had seized on the disruption of the renovations at the Sharpe house in Heron’s Cove as an excuse to fly to Dublin. He had barely had time to adjust to Irish time and get over jet lag before he had received Emma’s urgent message.
Having a sister who was an FBI agent had its drawbacks, but Lucas didn’t doubt that she was as concerned about their grandfather as he was. Ostensibly Lucas was in Dublin to check out the status of the Sharpe Fine Art Recovery office there, but he was also checking out the status of his grandfather. His health, his well-being, his plans for the future.
Easier said than done with an independent-minded old codger like Wendell Sharpe, Lucas thought with a sigh of exasperation.
He came to the narrow brick town house where his grandfather had an apartment. Born in Dublin, Wendell Sharpe had been just two when he had left Ireland with his parents for Boston. They soon moved to southern Maine, where his father had worked