The Soul Jar Read online

  Gino liked to sneak up on people. You’d think after the tactic got his throat cut one night a dozen years ago he’d have changed his MO. Not Gino. He was the old dog who couldn’t learn a new trick.

  “It’s in good hands at the moment,” Chance replied. He turned slowly, letting the air out of his lungs bit by bit to calm his jangled nerves.

  Bree. Her scent, her voice still lingered in his mind. How could seeing her again hurt even more than losing her had? The regrets he’d suppressed for two years returned with a vengeance, shredding his usual inner calm.

  “Whose hands? What do you mean? You didn’t get it?” Gino Carloni set down the scotch he’d been drinking and hauled his compact form out of the armchair that constituted his office away from the office. He ran one hand over his bald head as if ruffling his non-existent hair and glared at Chance with eyes as piercing as searchlights. Gino hated lies. He had little use for the truth most of the time, but he hated lies with a passion that manifested in a mean streak wide enough for a man twice his size.

  Chance decided not to lie. “It’s with an old friend of mine for safekeeping. We’ll meet her tomorrow at the airport.”

  “I don’t like this, Ozzie. It wasn’t part of the plan.” Gino strutted across the room, his skinny chest puffed up in an attempt to look menacing. He poked Chance in the sternum with a blunt finger. “Mr. Garadeshi doesn’t like it when plans change unexpectedly.”

  Chance endured the smaller man’s warning because he had to. Garadeshi had him by the short hairs, but as soon as Dr. Mallory was safe, Gino would get what was coming to him.

  “Don’t worry. Garadeshi will get his merchandise. I’m expecting a call from my friend any minute now, and we’ll work out all the details. In the meantime, I need to go online and finalize our travel arrangements.”

  Gino glared, but wisely stepped back out of Chance’s personal space. “No funny stuff, Ozzie. One phone call from me and Mr. Garadeshi will pop your doctor friend without a second thought.”

  “I said don’t worry, Gino. I’m not going to let anything happen to the doctor. Now go and have another drink and let me finish my preparations.”

  The invitation to continue drinking overpriced spirits from the courtesy bar seemed to distract Chance’s dubious bodyguard. Gino sauntered across the suite to the small refrigerator set into the wall near the door and began rummaging through the tiny liquor bottles and gourmet snacks.

  With Garadeshi’s muscle momentarily placated, Chance took another calming breath. He had to clear his head and consider how to get the jar back from Bree without having to fight her for it. He refused to compound his earlier mistakes by engaging in battle with the woman who’d haunted his dreams for the past two years.

  He pulled a bulky rectangular envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket and rifled through the folded pages inside as he crossed the room.

  His laptop sat on the polished secretary desk in front of the suite’s spacious window. He dropped the folder containing Bree’s plane tickets on the desk and lowered himself into the straight-backed chair.

  He indulged in a bittersweet memory as he booted up the machine and ran a virus scan. The images on the screen blurred a little, replaced by a vision of her peering up at him from under the wide, flowered brim of a straw hat. Sun filtered through the loose weave of the hat, dotting her face with glowing freckles of light. She smiled at him, and he almost drowned in the blue of her eyes, soft and full of mischief. He remembered the look of those eyes, dilated in pleasure as he rose above her and merged his body with hers. He remembered the dark, passionate glances they’d shared over dinner, and breakfast and every other moment their eyes met after the first time they’d made love.

  Chance had never considered himself a romantic before he met Bree, but he’d meant it when he told her he saw heaven when he looked at her. He hated himself a little more each day for putting her through hell.

  Why did she have to be there tonight? Why hadn’t she given up this life and settled down with a man who deserved her? The thought of her with another man stung like salt in his wounds, but that’s what had gotten him through the last two years. Believing she was better off without him, safer, happier. That alone eased the ache a little on the loneliest nights.

  Knowing she hadn’t retired from the dangerous line of work that had brought them together made him both proud of her and afraid for her. Professional thieves tended to live glamorous, if unnaturally short, lives.

  He had to get her out of this deal for good. Bargaining with Garadeshi for one life was hard enough. He refused to put Bree in the same kind of danger as he had Sam Mallory.

  In Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell, traitors lay buried up to their necks in a frozen lake. That image from the classic poem played through Bree’s mind as she slid into the back seat of a cab a few blocks from Chen’s. She stabbed at the numbers on her cell phone and berated herself for not remembering there were cold days in hell. She also should have remembered that Mason MacKenzie always got what he wanted.

  He answered on the second ring. Her simmering rage boiled over the moment he said, “Hello, luv.”

  “You bastard! You stole my plane ticket.”

  “I only borrowed it, with every intention of giving it back in exchange for the jar.”

  “Blackmail.” The word formed a lump in her throat. When she and Chance were together, they’d called it creative bargaining.

  “Technically, luv, it’s not blackmail. I don’t want money, and I don’t have any deep dark secrets to hold over you. It’s just a simple trade, really. What you have, for what I have.”

  She wanted to throw the phone out of the cab window. In all honesty, she could get another plane ticket, but it might not be on the same flight. If she missed the deadline with her client…she didn’t want to think about what might happen. Besides, Bree’s dwindling bank account couldn’t handle a withdrawal in excess of $2500 for a round trip flight to Cairo. Purchasing each leg of the connecting flights separately would cost her twice as much. She had to be on the 2:30 flight to D.C. tomorrow, and she’d be damned if she let Chance MacKenzie stand in her way.

  “There’s no way in hell I’m giving you the jar.”

  He laughed. “You probably thought there was no way in hell you’d ever call me. Am I right?”

  “I’ll get another ticket.” Could he still tell when she was lying?

  “That flight’s booked. I’m looking over the airline website as we speak.”

  Her heartbeat quickened. “I’ll find another way. There’s more than one airport in this town.” All the bravado in the world wouldn’t change the fact that she couldn’t book another flight. She couldn’t use her credit cards without certain unforgiving authorities becoming suspicious. “You’re not going to stop me, Chance.” She covered her mouth with trembling fingers when his name slipped out. She hadn’t meant to use it, hadn’t meant to let that thin strand of desperation creep into her voice.

  When he spoke, his voice had lost that arrogant edge. Had she gotten to him by using the name she’d called him back when they belonged to each other? “I don’t want to stop you, darlin’. I want to join you. Meet me at the airport in time for your flight. I’ll have your ticket. You’ll have the jar. We’ll make the journey together.”

  “What good would that do? We certainly can’t both be working for the same…client.”

  “I’m sure we aren’t, but maybe if we put our heads together, like the old days, we could work something out that might put us both in the black at the end of this deal.”

  Bree closed her eyes against the mounting frustration of her situation. She held the phone away from her ear as the cab eased out of traffic and skimmed to a halt in front of her building. “Hold on,” she said into the tiny receiver as she dug some cash out of her pocket and slapped it into the driver’s hand. “Keep the change.”

  She slid out of the back seat and hauled the knapsack onto her shoulder before taking up the conversation again. The cab s
ped away, leaving her alone under a flickering street lamp in a quiet section of Chelsea.

  “I’ll meet you at the airport. But you’re not getting your hands on the jar.”

  “Fair enough. You can carry it all the way to Cairo.”

  “Then what? You bop me over the head and run off?”

  “By then, luv, I’ll have convinced you to give it to me willingly.”

  Chapter Three

  In his fevered dreams, Chance held Bree’s supple body beneath him. Her soft curves fit against his hard lines perfectly, a buffer against the harsh world around them. The circle of their arms formed a barrier that kept the world at bay while they loved each other, thoroughly and without regret.

  She sighed in his ear, and he relished her sharp intake of breath as he thrust inside her. The feel of her soft inner flesh cleaving to him, tightening around him, gave him a wondrous kind of peace. This was where he belonged. In her—with her, always. He brushed her dark hair away from those luminous blue eyes and kissed her willing lips, softly first and then with more ardor, until his muscles tensed with the desire to pour himself into her. He needed her so much it hurt. His body ached with it. As much as he wanted to pull back, to gentle her and assure her, he couldn’t. He pounded into her relentlessly until her cries of passion became screams of pain. He felt her fist beat against his back and still he couldn’t make himself stop. She pounded so hard on his back that he finally hauled himself up, gasping and sick from the horrible images of her frightened face as she pushed him away.

  The pounding on his back continued.

  “What the…? Gino, get the fuck off me!” Chance vaulted out of bed, alarmed and disoriented to find his bodyguard standing over him.

  “You were havin’ some weird dream. Sounded like you were choking. I tried to do the Heimlich.”

  “The Heimlich is not performed by whacking someone in the spine with your fist.” Chance shook the cobwebs from his vision and rubbed his temples. A headache threatened behind his eyes, a clue that the rest of the day would be even less pleasant than waking up to Gino Carloni’s face twisted in a caricature of concern for his welfare.

  Gino shrugged. “You’re still breathin’, so it must have worked.” Garadeshi’s thug turned on his heel and strolled out of Chance’s bedroom. “Better get your ass in gear, Ozzie. I want to be waitin’ for your friend at the airport.”

  Chance sighed, relieved to have Gino out of his face and his room. Why hadn’t he locked the bedroom door? Oh, right. Gino had disabled the lock. This had to be over soon. In a little over thirty-six hours he’d be in Cairo, handing over the jar to Garadeshi and freeing Sam Mallory from captivity.

  He’d been in worse situations and breezed along, fearless, energetic and utterly confident in his training and his abilities. Why the hell did he feel so shaky now? The dream had knocked a chink in his emotional armor and that had never ever happened before. Until he met Bree, that is. She had turned him inside out with her mischievous spirit, her nurturing heart. He’d never pretended leaving her the way he did was easy, but he’d really never realized how hard it was until he saw her again. Running into her, finding out she was after the same artifact, was like a punch in the gut.

  He ran his hand through his hair and stared at his reflection in the mirror. The bad night he’d had showed on his face. Would she be able to tell what he was really feeling? Would she see through him with those heavenly eyes and know that two years ago, when he cast her aside like yesterday’s newspaper, he’d done it only to protect her? He couldn’t afford that, yet.

  With Gino hovering around until the jar reached Garadeshi, and the mobster’s proclivity for exploiting any weakness in his enemies, Chance didn’t dare begin to try and set things right with Bree now. His friendship with Sam was what got the Egyptologist captured and held for ransom. Imagine what Garadeshi might want if he knew Bree was so much more than just a friend. She was Chance’s soul.

  He made sure to lock the bathroom door before taking a quick, bracing shower to calm the lingering effects of his dream. He shaved and slapped on some icy cologne to wake himself up. Even now, though, he didn’t like the man in the mirror, found he couldn’t meet his own gaze. Why had the dream rattled him and made him feel so guilty? He’d done a lot worse things in his life while wide awake.

  As he pulled on a clean shirt and dark jeans he thought back reluctantly to the times he’d been with Bree. They’d done it every which way—soft, hard, five alarm fire, noisemakers and party hats. Well, maybe not the party hats. He’d loved her with every ounce of his strength, wore them both out on numerous occasions and always left her begging for more. Why would he feel so evil about the dream in which he took what he wanted from her when she’d always given herself to him freely?

  Maybe because she wasn’t his anymore. The disdain in her eyes had cut him deeply last night, and yet part of him felt a surge of male pride that she still cared enough to hurt.

  Could he do it again? Could he hurt her like he had before to keep her safe? A harder question to answer—could he let her go again knowing that if he did, he would never get another chance to make up for his past mistakes?

  Gino pounded on the bedroom door, rattling Chance out of his miserable thoughts. “I’m ready, princess. Are you finished washing your hair?”

  Chance rolled his eyes and actually felt a flicker of amusement. He crossed the room and flung the bedroom door open. “At least I have hair, Gino.”

  His nemesis was not amused. “I have plenty of hair. It just migrated south.”

  The disturbing image cured any desire Chance might have had for breakfast before their odyssey began. He collected his few possessions and stuffed them in his softsider carryall along with his laptop and Bree’s tickets.

  “I have one stop to make. I can probably get what I need in the shop in the lobby,” he told Gino as they left the suite.

  “Make it quick. And pick me up a pack of gum while you’re at it. I don’t want my ears to pop on the plane.”

  “Right. Wouldn’t want your brain leaking out onto the other passengers.”

  “Stuff it, wiseass. I like spearmint—none of that sissy flavored fruity crap.”

  “All right, all right. Wait for me by the revolving doors.”

  “Don’t even think about bailing on me, Ozzie.” Gino patted his shirt pocket where a tiny cell phone rested against his sunken chest. “One phone call. Bang.”

  “I’m not planning on bailing.” Yet, Chance added before he and Gino parted company by the checkout desk. “I’m stuck with you until Garadeshi gets the jar.”

  Bree had attracted quite a few curious looks during the time she waited curbside at the Central Terminal Building of New York’s bustling LaGuardia International Airport. Cabs and limos lined up two abreast, disgorging happy vacationers with mountains of luggage and harried business passengers dragging computers, portfolios and compact travel suitcases. The skycaps were cordial at first when she found herself a discreet spot to wait for Chance to show up, but after half an hour, she’d begun to draw suspicious glances from security. With her only luggage a miniscule toiletries case and her black knapsack containing the jar beneath her carefully packed clothes, a willowy, black-haired woman in a tight dress and dark sunglasses was either looking for trouble, or looking to escape it.

  She sighed as another New York Transit bus whizzed by, kicking up an invisible cloud of stale exhaust that made her cough. The nearest skycap glanced over, then down at his watch as though he was timing her.

  “My boyfriend has my ticket,” she felt obliged to explain finally. “He’s always late.”

  Boyfriend. The word stuck to the roof of her mouth. Chance had never been her boyfriend. Her lover—her heart and soul—but never her boyfriend. And he never would be.

  The skycap nodded. Did she see a hint of sympathy in the tall man’s dark eyes? He probably thought she was the mistress of some high-powered executive who was about to be dumped at the airport because sugar-daddy’s wife d
iscovered the affair. Life would be so much simpler if that were the truth.

  She crossed her arms over her chest and tapped her foot, scanning the incoming traffic as though she might recognize his car. A small part of her brain still rebelled at the idea that Chance was alive and kicking. Maybe she’d imagined last night. Maybe she’d dropped her plane tickets in the alley and dreamed everything else. Lord knows she’d dreamed about him often enough over the past two years.

  The first few months had been the hardest. After she fired the fateful shots, she’d dragged herself to the hotel lobby to report the incident and turn herself in to the police. The prospect of spending her life in a Jamaican jail for murder had actually calmed her hysteria. Dead inside, she no longer cared about physical comfort, justice or her future. With Chance gone from her life, she had nothing. She wanted nothing.

  They found no body, no blood. The local authorities in Kingston thought she was crazy, and the legal counsel assigned to her, a pretty young woman with a lilting accent, fresh out of an American law school, had suggested psychiatric counseling and a good antidepressant when she’d put Bree on a plane home to New York.

  The nightmares started immediately. Every couple of days, she’d wake crying, sobbing for him, hating him so much it made her physically ill, and hating herself so much she couldn’t bear to face her own reflection in the mirror.

  Last night, she’d slept like a baby. Not because she relished being a pawn in some political game, not because she wasn’t a wreck about carrying the fabled Soul Jar halfway around the world to its original resting place and not because she’d overcome her rage at Chance’s interference in her plans. She’d slept, guiltless and content, because he was alive.

  The fact that he’d let her believe she’d killed him was a whole other can of worms she just couldn’t process right now. He was alive, and that restored a little bit of her soul. She’d faced herself in the mirror this morning, looked deep into her own eyes, and promised if he pulled any more bullshit with her she’d strangle the life out of him once and for all with her bare hands and never feel a moment’s regret.