An Angel In Stone
Raine left Trenton gazing glumly up at the Carnotaurus, and prowled on.
She hooked another flute of bubbly off a caterer’s tray, stopped to let a woman exclaim over her opal necklace.
“That is absolutely fabulous! Do you mind if I ask where you got it? I own a shop down in the Village, and I’m always on the lookout for—” She paused with a look of disappointment as Raine shook her head.
“It’s one of a kind, I’m afraid. I made it myself, over a period of years.” She touched the rough opals, strung together into a wide ragged sunburst, with bits of beach glass woven in for contrast. “Every time I find a new stone, I find someplace to fit it in.” Since precious and semiprecious stones were often uncovered during excavations, Ashaway All sold uncut gems as well as fossils. John Ashaway had encouraged each of his children to specialize in a particular mineral. Opals were Raine’s professional—and private—passion.
Circling toward the front of the gallery, Raine didn’t spot any opals. Still in this crowd there were plenty of other gems to admire. She saw a pair of tourmaline earrings she’d have to describe to Ash; that was his stone. Pearls galore, though Ashaway All didn’t deal in pearls. A man’s signet ring with a square-cut emerald that’d be the envy of a rajah.
“Raine, there you are!”
With an inward groan and an outer smile, she turned as Alden Eames, curator of vertebrate paleontology, caught her arm.
“Sorry to neglect you, darling, but I had to smooth some ruffled feathers. The security guard running the metal detector is an ass. Can you believe he was refusing entry to a cousin of the Kennedys? Some sort of steel plate in his leg from a skiing accident, I understand. But if these morons can’t distinguish between an honored guest and a mugger wandered in from the Park, then I say…”
He said it at length while Raine struggled not to yawn. To think that when she was seventeen Eames had bruised, if not broken, her heart! She’d met the rising young curator that summer when Ashaway All had shared a salvage dig with the Manhattan Museum of Natural History. They’d been granted three months to rescue as many bones as they could from a mass grave of hadrosaurs, discovered during construction of a dam in Venezuela. When the waters rose, the site would be submerged forever. During those months of fevered camaraderie, Raine had fallen hard for the bronzed and pith-helmeted young Ivy Leaguer. Though he was twelve years her senior, she’d taken him for her first lover.
With a teenager’s rosy optimism, she’d pictured them together forever, sharing bones, bliss and world-shaking scientific discoveries. But her dreams had shattered at expedition’s end, when she’d learned that—all the while—Eames had been engaged to a rich young socialite. His fiancée had stayed back in the States to plan their September wedding.
Still Raine had limped away from the experience with some valuable lessons. She’d learned to withhold her trust till a man had earned it. Learned also that polished charm was often the mask of selfishness, not a caring heart.
She startled now as Eames brushed a finger along her bare shoulder. “God, Raine. Have I told you yet that you’re twice as lovely as you were at seventeen? To think that we—”
“Let’s not, thank you. Let’s think about Ethiopia. I’ll be taking my usual crew, but I’ll scout for a site first, just me and a guide. Do you have any local connections you’d recommend?”
Raine hated to give up her Carnotaurus, but she was on the track of even bigger game. A richer prize.
The MMNH held a licence to dig in Ethiopia, but with the wars of the past decade, hadn’t dared exercise that right. But now there’d been another truce in the fighting, and Raine was ready to gamble this one would hold.
Apparently Eames was not.
So they’d traded, exchanging Raine’s sure thing—her neatly boxed Carnotaurus, perfect for a fund-raiser—for the museum’s wild card: the right to dig, with no guarantee that there’d be bones for the finding.
But, oh, if there were! Four years ago the shoulder blade of a gigantic new dinosaur had been unearthed in the Sudan, in the same geological stratum that was exposed in the gorge of the Blue Nile. Raine meant to be the first one in the world to bring home an entire specimen of Paralititan.
Given the right international auction, Ashaway All could sell a complete fossil skeleton for an easy five-million-dollar profit. Aside from the scientific notoriety, which was valuable in itself, the company could use a cash windfall. They’d taken some unexpected hits this past year. Lost three long-standing licenses to dig out West, that they never should have lost. Been outbid with several of their independent finders for specimens that once would have been theirs without question. Then Jaye had mounted an expensive amber-collecting expedition to Haiti that had come home empty-handed, when cholera broke out in the region. Add all those losses on to the breathtaking medical expenses of her father’s accident, and his attempts to recover…With an absent frown, Raine glanced beyond Eames’s shoulder—and blinked.
There he was yet again—Amber Eyes. Still keeping his distance. Still unsmiling. And still…attentive. So what do you want? If he was flirting, he’d get nowhere with her without showing some humor and warmth.
And if he wasn’t? Standing there like a tiger, peering through the bushes? Then—
“Miss Ashaway? Miss Raine Ashaway?”
One of the caterer’s tuxedoed staff loomed before her. He swung a silver tray of drinks under her nose.
“No, thanks. I’m all set.” She showed him her flute, still filled with icy bubbles.
“No, no, no, no. It is this! I was told to give you—”
She cocked her head as he pressed the small white envelope into her hand. An Indian accent, with its iambic inflection and hints of Britannia? “But who gave you this to—?”
He bowed, nodded emphatically and darted off through the crowd.
“What’s that about?” Eames murmured at her ear.
With a mystified shrug, Raine looked from the envelope—to her watcher across the room. From you?
His dark head dipped an inch in the barest of nods, the salute of a fencer at the first kiss of steel. He smiled at last—a white slash of teeth in a sun-darkened face—and turned away.
You, Raine concluded, ripping into the envelope.
On a square of folded paper, his message was penned in bold block letters.
I have a fossil of great rarity and interest for sale. If this beguiles you, then meet me in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge at midnight.
So. This was business instead of pleasure. Or, at least, before pleasure, Raine told herself. But why the weird rendezvous? Why not discuss it now?
On the other hand, the museum was Eames’s home court, and she certainly didn’t need the curator drooling over her shoulder, while she tried to cut a deal. A fossil of great interest was, by definition, a bone of contention. Careers as well as fortunes rose and fell with paleontology’s great discoveries.
Consider me beguiled. She looked up to send that silent reply, but Amber Eyes was speaking to the same Indian with the tray. Something passed between their hands—a tip for the man’s trouble, no doubt.
“You would be Mr. Ken…Cade?” the waiter asked with a nervous gulp.
“Kincade. Who wants to know?”
“I was told to give you…this.” He thrust a small white rectangle into Kincade’s hand, then retreated through the crush.
Odd. Kincade inspected both front and back of the envelope, but there wasn’t a mark on it. Who knew he’d be here tonight? There’d been a guest list published in the museum’s newsletter, he supposed, and possibly in the Times, but—
“Who’s that from?” Amanda wondered at his elbow.
“That’s a lovely nose, sweetheart.” Likely the best that money could buy. “But as for sticking it in my business?” Cade dropped the unread note in his pocket as he took her by the arm. “Let’s find you another drink.” And somebody else to play with. He’d blown his cover back there anyway; Raine had noticed his interest.
But then, she must be used to men staring.
Even so, maybe it was time to take it up a notch. He hadn’t meant to meet her tonight, but he had a sudden urge to learn if her voice matched the rest of her. He’d ditch Amanda, and then—
Raine chanced to be looking up at the Allosaurus, when its head exploded.
Chapter 3
T he shot ricocheted off the stone wall with a vicious whine. A woman screamed, then stunned silence spread in widening ripples.
“Ladies and gentleman, touch a cell phone and you’re dead! I mean you, sir!” The gun cracked again. A man yelled and clutched at his shoulder. His phone clattered on the marble terrazzo.
“Hands on your head. Everybody! Now!”
By the metal detector, the guard lay in a boneless heap. In a beautifully tailored suit, the shooter stood before him. A Halloween mask concealed his face—ex–President Clinton, with a rubbery aw, shucks grin that didn’t match his commands.
He’d come in as a guest with the mask in his pocket, Raine assumed, then used either a knife or a Taser to secure the guard’s gun. Clinton blocked the main—eastern—entrance, the revolving doors that gave onto Central Park West.
Balancing her champagne flute on her head with both hands, she swung casually to the south. There was an exit in the center of each wall of this rectangular gallery.
But for this event each had been closed with its own set of pocket doors. These were cast bronze fit for a cathedral, each half of which had to weigh tons. Nothing to be hastily dived through at the best of times, and with a rubber-faced “Jimmy Carter” holding a pistol at the south exit, well, forget that line of retreat.
Jimmy had taken out a second security guard. This one was conscious, wriggling futilely against the nylon ties that cuffed his hands behind his back.
“All of you, move! Thataway, move! Take your hands off your head and you die. Move it!”
Amazing how quickly a self-satisfied crowd could be reduced to a docile herd. With shaky whispers, they shuffled in the direction their captors indicated with waving guns, till a smirking “George Bush” shunted them away from the northern doors.
At last everyone converged, trapped against an inner corner of the room.
A glass of perfectly good champagne on her head, and her mouth had gone dry as a stone. Relax, Raine warned herself. Focus. Danger either numbed the senses—or it sharpened them.
So…two Democrats, one Republican. She counted three gunmen in all. Bush stood fairly close to her left; Carter far off on the right. Clinton was clearly the boss. He stepped up onto the central dais and strode across it till he stopped by the baby Barosaurus. His roving gaze cowed the last terrified whispers to silence.
Could this be her watcher? If he had golden eyes, the mask’s exaggerated brow ridge shadowed their color. Raine studied the man’s shoulders. They didn’t seem quite as deliciously wide as she remembered. But how else to account for that aura of leashed danger she’d sensed, each time she’d met Amber Eyes’s gaze? At some instinctive level she’d known the man was a predator.
“Keep your hands on your head and kneel,” Clinton rasped. “You there.” He aimed his gun to Raine’s right—at Trenton. The linebacker towered over Mrs. Lowell, who looked as if she’d erupt any second. “Help the old bag down. Yeah, like that—now hands up! Move it, folks. A little cooperation and we’ll be out of here in no time. Just sit tight till the taxman gets to you, then give him everything you’ve got—your wallet, your jewels, your phone. And meanwhile, shut up over there!”
A hysterical sobbing was instantly hushed.
Jerk. Bully. Raine studied the distance from herself to the dais. Her knife was balanced for throwing, but Clinton stood beyond her outer limit of accuracy. Besides, kneeling on the hem of her ankle-length gown, she couldn’t reach her weapon discreetly. Make a note for Shoba. Next dress needs a side zipper for instant access.
But as for now…Could she really let these creeps take her opals? The necklace wasn’t worth a tenth of Mrs. Lowell’s sapphires, but Raine’s mother had helped her dig up its first stone when she was eight. It was one of the last things her mother had ever touched on this earth. How can I give it up?
Her eyes ranged over the crowd. Who else feels the same? Trenton? But no, the big man dropped his ruby tie tack in the bag he’d been handed, while Jimmy Carter covered him with his gun. Next he helped Mrs. Lowell unhook her necklace. Trenton might be deadly on the five-yard line, but he played games; he didn’t play for keeps.
Eames? The curator’s shoulders were hunched high around his ears. His elbows trembled like a fledgling’s bony wings. No help there.
A woman somewhere behind Raine pleaded that she couldn’t get it off! She couldn’t! A squeal of pain and Bush’s coarse chuckle ended the dispute.
“If you can’t remove your rings, ladies and gentlemen, that’s no problem,” soothed the man on the dais. “Jimmy Carter has the bolt cutters, if you need assistance.”
Joke, Raine told herself desperately. Maybe.
All right, if she couldn’t reach her knife, what did she have? John Ashaway had taught all his children self defense. Then when Trey had joined the firm, he’d honed their combat skills to an ex-SEAL’s satisfaction. Think. What would Trey do? The envelope she still gripped between two fingers was too small to roll into a weapon. She wore high wedge sandals, easy to run in, but without stilletto heels.
To her right came a muffled groan. Raine turned in time to see a blood-soaked man wobble, sag—his eyes rolled back in his head. His neighbor cursed and caught him—lowered him gently to the floor, to lie in a spreading, dark puddle.
The wounded one was the man who’d tried to phone for help, and his Samaritan—“Oh!” Raine cried aloud. Amber Eyes! So he wasn’t one of these brutes—wasn’t Clinton. Sorry! she apologized mentally.
He glared past her at the man on the dais. “This guy’s bleeding to death. Better let me take him out to the—”
“Shut up!” Clinton took aim on his forehead. “Hands back on your head!”
“Look, you don’t want him dead, either. At least let me—”
Clinton swung—blew the head off the baby Barosaurus—then turned his gun back on Amber Eyes. “Want the same? Keep talking.”
O-kay, that was the last straw. Though the Barosaurus was a casting whose head could be replaced, Raine doubted that Clinton knew it. For all this thug knew, he’d just smashed an irreplaceable fossil. A creature that had survived a hundred and forty million years to whisper its tale of mystery and awe: Behold! Dragons once walked this earth!
Any eight-year-old dinosaur expert could appreciate what a fabulous thing we’ve got here! But as for you, you know-nothing, money-grubbing Visigoth? That’s it. You and your sadistic buddies are going down.
And if she had an ally in the room, it was Amber Eyes. Trading glare for glare with the gunman, he knelt, bloodstained hands clasped on his head. The muscles in his craggy jaw jumped as he gritted his teeth. Even at a distance Raine could see his eyes darkening, like the lion’s as it readies to spring.
But wait for me. Jimmy Carter would reach Amber Eyes in another minute, and Bush was just now collecting Eames’s gold Rolex with an appreciative chuckle. Wait! Raine turned to beam her message.
And somehow Amber Eyes felt her gaze. As their eyes connected, his brows twitched. His scowl eased to a rueful grimace—he shaped her a kiss.
Got it! She ran the tip of her tongue along her upper lip, saw his grin start to flash—she turned to find George Bush looming above her.
“Hey, sweetcakes! Nice necklace.” His masked eyes oozed over her. “Nice…everything. Wanna hop in my sack?”
“Best weapon you’ve got is you’re a woman. They’ll always underestimate you,” Trey whispered down the years. “Use what you’ve got.”
And “carpe diem!” added her father. “Seize the day, the instant, seize the carp.”
Gut him.
Raine’s wineglass wobbled in her trembling hands—tipped. Champagne splashed over the opals; it poured down the front of her dress.
“OH!” she cried, in a stricken baby-doll voice. She wiped frantically at the drenched silk. “Oh, would you just look at—!” Her hand froze. She’d brushed the center slit aside. Her right breast thrust impudently through the gap, its nipple taut with adrenaline, flesh moistly glistening.
“Oh, baby!” chortled George, lurching closer. He stuffed his jewel bag under the elbow of his gun hand, to free up the other.
“Wuh oh!” she said in a ditzy half whisper. Tipping her head back, Raine shook her hair out on her bare shoulders.
She rounded her lips to a carnal “oh”, then circled them with her tongue. “You wouldn’t. You couldn’t…” She heaved a shuddering breath, almost a shimmy. “D-don’t you dare—”
In a graceful half swoon, she collapsed backward to the floor. The hand holding her flute hit the marble above her head. Glass tinkled as its fragile bowl shattered. “Don’t—” she whimpered “—touch…me.” She swung her legs to one side, then down, so she lay helplessly at full length, open and inviting. “Oh, don’t!”
Tell a man what to do and he’ll do the opposite every time. With a crude guffaw, Bush dropped to one knee beside her.
“Leave her alone!” shouted someone. It sounded like Amber Eyes.
“You put your filthy lips on me and I…I swear I’ll just die!” Raine drawled, southern belle in distress. Come on, George, lift your mask.
“Oh-ho, sugarbabe!” At her subliminal dare, his reaching fingers paused—then swerved to peel the rubber up and hook it above his big nose. Leaving only his greedy eyes masked.
“Picture every move before you make it,” whispered Trey at the back of her mind.
“Bush, get your ass back to business!” yelled Clinton from the dais.
“I’ll give you the biz, cupcake!” George swore, reaching for her with a blissful grin.
He had flaring hairy nostrils, and—thank God—he’d worn a tie. Raine half sat to meet him. “Ohhhh,” she moaned, her skin crawling as he palmed her breast.
Her left fingers hooked over his tie to pull their bodies closer, while with her right—she slipped the broken stem of her wineglass up his left nostril. An inch.
Then a second inch, gently. Deftly.
“Awgggh!” George gurgled. He’d gone stiff as a board. Behind his mask, his eyes showed a frantic ring of watering white.
” Now that I’ve got your attention?” crooned Raine against his cheek. “Make another sound, and I’ll shove this halfway through your tiny brain.”
“Get off her, you asshole!” Clinton yelled. “Save it for later!” From his vantage point, he was witnessing an assault, not a counterattack. Like most of his sex, he assumed a man on top was a man in control.
“For shame!” scolded a nearby woman.
“Somebody stop him!’ cried another.
Here came the hard part. “Now ni-ice and eaaasy, George, give me the gun,” Raine purred. Crunching her stomach muscles to stay in a half sit, she let go his tie. To discourage any bright ideas—she twiddled her glass spear, a quarter turn.
He let out a piggy squeal.
“Shhhh…Hush. Don’t move.” Her left hand walked up his right wrist. “Good. We don’t want me to slip, do we? No…there…thank you, I’ve got it.”
Pity she wasn’t a better shot, left-handed. Go for the trunk, she reminded herself as she aimed under George’s arm and squeezed the trigger.
Clinton yelled, clapped a hand to his thigh—and stumbled backward over the baby Barosaurus. Bones crackled and flew. A gun barked across the room. A hundred people surged to their feet and stampeded screaming for the exits.
“G’night, George.” Raine tapped the gun across his skull, precisely where Trey had taught her. Sweet dreams, minimal damage, he’d promised, and Raine could testify at least to the first half. She barely had time to withdraw her glass dagger as George collapsed with a weary moan.
“Offa me, loser!” As she wriggled out from under, she looked for Clinton. His gun, had he dropped it? But people were crawling across the dais, falling over each other and scrambling to their feet; she couldn’t spot him. Somebody blundered into a hind leg of the mama Barosaurus and Raine cringed, arms wrapped around her skull. If five stories of fossil came tumbling down!
The dino creaked overhead. Its forty-foot neck swayed perilously—then held. Raine’s heart settled back into her chest as she turned. Clinton, Clinton, come on! Surely somebody had nabbed him?
There was old Mrs. Lowell—walking, mind you, toward the exit, her back stiff with outrage. And there, Joel was all right; he stood astride the wounded man, protecting him from a trampling, yelling for a doctor. And—
Ah! The relief she felt made her hum in surprise. Amber Eyes rose lithely from a crouch; he’d been hog-tying Jimmy. Using both their ties, apparently. And why was it that a sexy man always became instantly twice as sexy when he stripped off his tie? Plus now his dark hair was irresistibly tousled. And that fiery okay, who’s next? glint in his eyes as he scanned the room. And the way he held Jimmy’s gun with a casual readiness along his thigh as he turned…Add up the whole package and you got just, “Rrrrowrrr,” Raine growled happily to herself—as their eyes connected.
With a slow sinful smile, he gave her a thumb’s-up. Then his gaze dropped—his grin widened. He stroked a forefinger down his chest.
What did he—? She glanced down. Oh! The blood boiling to her face, Raine rearranged her bodice. She looked up again with a laughing shrug. Hey, it worked, didn’t it?
“Rainy!” called a voice with aching urgency.
Chapter 4
R aine whirled—to see that someone had opened the western doors. Framed in the gap, a couple staggered. That was Trenton in the lead, and behind him, jabbing him in the kidney with a gun—
“Oh, rats!” If only she’d aimed higher! Clinton’s pantleg clung wetly to his skin. His right shoe had tracked a trail of bloody prints across the hall. “Stop or I’ll—!”
He glanced back with a rubbery grin. “Sure, bitch, go ahead! You get two for one!” Shoving Trenton around the corner, he limped into the darkness.
“Bastard!” she swore, stalking after him. From this angle her bullets would punch right through him and into his hostage.
Weaving around couples too stunned to run, stepping over a downed body, Raine reached the doorway—then yelped as an arm hooked around her waist. It yanked her back against muscled resilience, a delectable fragrance of bay rum and overheated male. She jabbed an elbow into a stomach soft as a chunk of granite. “Le’go, dammit, that’s a friend of mine!”
“Not so fast, Ashaway. You spoiled Clinton’s party. The man may hold a grudge.” Amber Eyes released her and sank to a crouch. He reached for an elegant red Prada pump that some woman had lost, held it around the corner—a shot sang out of the dark. He stood and showed her the sole, neatly drilled. “And he can shoot. Any idea where they’re headed?”
“The terrace!” she guessed. “Twenty yards to the right down this corridor, then he’ll turn left.”
“Give him a minute to limp to the corner. And then?”
“About eighty yards down another hallway, they’ll come to the northwest entrance.” Then out across a raised terrace, down some steps to the level of the park that surrounded the museum—and then whoever knew? Could a getaway car be waiting at the rear of the building?
“You winged him good. If we don’t push him, he might just bleed himself stupid and sleepy. Lie down for a nap.”
“Or he might keep moving, then shoot Trenton out of spite! Or keep him for a consolation prize.” The linebacker earned millions every year. If Clinton held him for ransom…“No way I’m risking that.” Raine gathered her gown up to midthigh and knotted the silk to keep it there.
“Umm…no?” Amber Eyes looked up from her legs. “Then give them thirty seconds more.” He switched his gun to his left hand and held out his right. “Meanwhile, it’s Kincade. Or Cade if you like things simple.”