Always a Thief - Kay Hooper [1]
Quinn froze.
He had excellent night vision, but through the swirling fog it was difficult to be certain the man moving yards ahead of him on the same roof hadn't heard the faint sound. Quinn squinted, concentrated all his senses, and decided finally that the man was still moving slowly, cautiously, away from him.
Hardly breathing, testing every foothold, Quinn continued to follow his prey.
As he followed, from one rooftop to another across an expanse of several huge office buildings, something nagged at him. What? What was bothering him?
This was the third night he had managed to locate and stalk his prey, and so far nothing was different. Just a trip across rooftops, silent and cautious, in the darkness. Tonight there was a fog, but otherwise it was the same.
The same.
Exactly the same.
Quinn froze again, this time with realizations gathering in his mind. The same. The same goddamned route. The same time of night, to the hour. The same rooftops, none of them sheltering anything of interest to a thief of gems or artworks. The same difficult, physically demanding path testing both his nerve and his skills.
He was playing follow the fucking leader.
And he wasn't the leader.
He was being tested.
A rare anger swept over Quinn, but even stronger was the instinctive urge to break off immediately. Someone else was playing a dangerous game, and until Quinn knew the rules he had no intention of playing along.
He eased back and began his retreat, automatically planning the best path to take.
And he almost made it.
Avoiding an iron fire escape, as he did whenever possible because he'd found them to be unacceptably noisy, Quinn fastened a grappling hook securely and used the gear he usually carried to rappel down the side of the building and into the dense darkness of an alleyway.
He was no more than ten feet from the pavement when all his senses screamed a sudden warning that someone was nearby, too close—and he was dangling helplessly like a worm on a hook.
He barely had time to turn his head, had only an instant to see the shadowy outline of a man on the fire escape not far away, see the gleam of faint light on dark steel, and then a sound like a soft sneeze reached his ears in the same moment that Quinn made an instinctive effort to push himself away from the building and drop to the alley below.
He felt the bullet hit him, and the shock caused his legs to buckle as he reached the pavement. Hot pain washed over him, pain he fought to ignore as he looked up, searching the fire escape for the man who had shot him.
The fire escape was empty.
Quinn pressed a gloved hand to his chest, and when he brought it away he could see even in the darkness of the alley a wet gleam.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered.
CHAPTER
ONE
Morgan West was beginning to get tense about the entire situation. The Bannister collection of priceless artworks and gems would be moved to the museum within days, which meant the bait would be in the trap. Neither Max Bannister nor anyone else had deigned to inform her that there was a trap, information she knew only because of an overheard conversation. And she hadn't seen—or felt—a sign of Quinn in weeks.
It was maddening.
She didn't fool herself into believing that Quinn wasn't uppermost in her mind. Once she'd gotten over her fury at having been presented with a concubine ring (though she fully intended to give him a piece of her mind about that little item when next they met), she had gone back to spending an hour or two of her evenings parked outside some likely museum or jewelry store, hoping to be able to sense him, feel him, whatever the hell she'd been able to do before. But he hadn't been kidding when he'd said if he didn't want to be found, not even she would be able to find him.
The most elusive thief in the world seemed to have no difficulty in eluding her.
Dammit.
She had read the newspapers front to back and had kept her ears open during her days at the museum, but if Quinn had robbed anybody they apparently didn't know it. There had been no splashy headlines