Colton Undercover Read online

  “Oh, that,” she murmured self-consciously, stepping out of the elevator car. “I’m very pale,” she said needlessly. “Sometimes, when someone says something that might be embarrassing under different circumstances, I—”

  “You don’t need to explain,” he told her. “And for the record, I think it’s kind of charming.”

  “Now you’re just making things up,” she told him. She turned to make a right down the hall.

  “Um—”

  She noticed that Josh wasn’t following her. Since he was still holding her suitcase, she thought his immobile stance to be a little odd.

  “What?” she asked.

  Very politely, he pointed in the opposite direction. “Your room’s that way.”

  She would have asked him how he could know that, but most likely he’d been here at least a couple of days.

  “Oh.” This time she didn’t even pretend not to be embarrassed. Errors of this sort were a way of life with her. “I have no sense of direction,” she confessed. “Given half a chance, I’d get lost in my own closet.”

  “Must be a big closet,” he commented, amused.

  “Not really.”

  He did his best not to laugh, not wanting to offend her.

  A few minutes later, after locating her room, Leonor inserted her key, then opened the door. Pausing, she looked at Josh over her shoulder. “Would you like to come in?”

  Josh kept a straight face as he asked, “Given what you said earlier, how do I know you won’t try to get me at a disadvantage? Say you tried to have your way with me just to get one of the paintings in my collection as restitution?”

  “Is that what you really think?” she asked, not sure if he was kidding.

  “No, just teasing you. I think you’re trustworthy. And I’m always on my best behavior.”

  “Are you?” she questioned, tongue in cheek.

  “I guess you’ll just have to trust me,” Josh told her seriously.

  He saw something flash in her eyes just then, a look of almost overwhelming sadness. She suddenly looked so vulnerable, he had the urge to put his arms around her and try to make her feel safe.

  First time that ever happened, he couldn’t help thinking.

  “Did I say something wrong?” he asked her. He wanted to clear up whatever had just gone wrong before this whole venture took a turn for the worse. “Because if I did, I’m sorry.”

  “No.” Leonor shook her head. “It’s nothing that you said.”

  “Are you sure?” Josh pressed. “Because for a second there, you looked, I don’t know—shell-shocked, I guess, would be the best way to describe it.”

  He looked so concerned that Leonor found herself touched. She supposed that there was no harm in making a general admission. It might even make the man feel beholden to her in some small way, she reasoned. In turn, she could leverage that to get Josh to behave favorably toward her museum.

  Oh, Lord, Leonor thought, a wave of fear suddenly washing over her. Was the unthinkable happening? Was she starting to act like her mother? Seeing and judging everything in terms of her own advantage?

  “Are you sure that you’re all right?” Josh asked, peering closely at her face.

  She had to tell him something or he was going to think that she was some kind of a nutcase, Leonor thought. And if he thought that, she was certain that he’d start putting distance between them.

  She couldn’t let Sheffield and the museum down this way.

  Taking a breath, she began to explain, framing it in general terms to stay on the safe side.

  “When you said ‘trust me,’ it reminded me of something. Of someone,” she amended. “He said the same thing to me—just before he turned around and betrayed that trust in a really major way.”

  There it was again, Josh thought, that vulnerable look. Either Leonor was quite an actress and had learned to perfect that look by practicing it in a mirror—or he had inadvertently managed to stir up something painful from her past.

  Never changing his expression, he made a mental note to look into Leonor’s background a little more thoroughly than he already had.

  “I’m sorry you had to go through that. Nothing worse than having someone lie to you,” he told her, adding just the right amount of compassion to his voice and trying not to think about the fact that he was doing exactly that for what he’d convinced himself were noble reasons. “Let me make it up to you,” he offered.

  Putting her suitcase—unopened—into the closet, Leonor looked up at him sharply. “Why? You weren’t the one who lied to me.”

  Hold on to that thought, he told her silently.

  “No, but I said something to remind you of that.” He smiled at her. “The least I can do is take you out to lunch.”

  For a moment, her better instinct rose to the surface and she was about to tell him that he didn’t have to make any sort of restitution. But the thing was, she knew that she needed him to feel obligated to her in some fashion. She needed to build some sort of a relationship with him, and having him take her out to lunch could very well be the start of that.

  Most of all, she needed to get him to trust her so that he would be more than amenable to the idea of working with her and her museum. She’d taken on this assignment willingly—after all, the museum had become her baby, too—but there was just this slightest tinge of guilt pricking at her conscience.

  Guilt because, at bottom, she was attempting to manipulate Josh. She wasn’t that kind of person, she thought.

  The man is an art collector and he’s extremely wealthy. You’re not robbing him; you’re finding a way to make him feel good about sharing that collection and his wealth. Nothing wrong in making someone feel like they’re making a worthwhile contribution to society. Stop trying to put yourself down.

  She closed the closet door and crossed over to him. “I wouldn’t want you to feel obligated,” she began, her cadence just slow enough for Josh to cut in if he wanted to.

  He did.

  Josh told her, “There are worse things than feeling obligated to a beautiful woman. Speaking of worse things...” he said, suddenly recalling. “Downstairs, just before you checked in, when I told you that there was no pleasing my father, you said that at least I had a father to try to please. What did you mean by that? Wasn’t your father around very much?” he asked her, forgetting for a moment that she had told him earlier that her father had died shortly after she was born.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Leonor replied in an offhanded manner, successfully hiding the fact that it bothered her. “My father wasn’t around long enough for me to form any sort of an opinion about him one way or another. He died shortly after I was born. Probably was the only way he could escape my mother,” she added wryly.

  Bingo!

  Utilizing the poker face that had always served him well in the field—and at a poker table—Josh asked, “Your mother was a hard woman to get along with?” He made a point of not sounding overly interested in her answer. “Look, if I’m prying—”

  “No, it’s all right,” she told him. “My mother’s a puzzle no one has learned how to solve yet. And there was no pleasing her because no one ever knew what she liked. We still really don’t,” she added in a quiet voice, saying it more to herself than to the man standing in her room.

  Leonor blinked, suddenly realizing that she had loosened the reins a little too much. This was just what she hadn’t wanted to do.

  “I’m sorry. How did I suddenly start talking about my mother?” she asked self-consciously.

  Josh knew just what to say. “I think we were comparing unhappy childhoods.”

  She laughed at that, and then shook her head in disbelief. She’d promised herself not to talk about her family and here she was, doing just that. Granted, it was in general terms without any real details, bu
t the fact was that she was talking about her mother, and she knew that the subject had to be off-limits for her if she was going to get on with her life.

  “Did I say something funny?” Josh asked. “I really need to know so that I can do it again later,” he explained. And then he smiled as he told her, “You have a really nice laugh.”

  That was a line, Leonor told herself. It had to be a line.

  And yet, it sounded so natural, so genuine, she could have sworn that he meant it.

  Found herself wanting him to mean it.

  Careful, Lennie. You can’t be wanting him to have any sort of feelings for you. This is what they call getting caught up on the “rebound.” You don’t want to get tangled up in something like that because then you’re guaranteed to make really stupid mistakes, mistakes that might even be worse than the ones you made with that monster, David. And you know how that turned out.

  Don’t you ever learn?

  Regrouping, Leonor offered the man in front of her a polite, albeit slightly frosty, smile.

  “You know,” she told him, “you should save those sorts of compliments for your girlfriend, or better yet, your wife.”

  “That would be good advice, if I had either one of those,” Josh replied. “But I don’t.”

  Okay, that just wasn’t possible, Leonor thought. Look at the man. “I don’t believe you.”

  Josh Pendergrass was drop-dead gorgeous, as well as young and apparently very wealthy. He also seemed very nice. That was above a trifecta in any woman’s book. It also made him fair game. How could he possibly not have at least a girlfriend?

  “It’s true,” he told her. “There’s an ex-wife in the picture,” he said, recalling what Bailey had put down on the Facebook page he’d created for him. “But we were married much too young, and neither of us understood what it took to make a good marriage.”

  “And no girlfriend?” Leonor pressed.

  Getting into the part, he knew the pitfalls that existed in the world he professed to belong to. “What, you think because I’m rich it would be easy for me to have a girlfriend?”

  Since Josh was the one to bring it up, she didn’t have to tiptoe around the subject. “Basically, yes, I do.”

  “Well, actually, it’s just the opposite,” he told her. “When you have the kind of resources I do, the kind that attract major attention, you never know if someone is attracted to you or to your money. You would be surprised how many people, especially women, will say anything, do anything, just to get close to me—and the zeroes in my family’s accounts.”

  “Poor little rich boy?” Leonor asked. Though she actually tried not to, she couldn’t help the sympathetic note that entered her voice.

  He inclined his head. “Something like that,” Josh agreed.

  She was trying to make light of it, but she couldn’t. Because there it was again. That sharp twinge of guilt, the same one she’d felt before, pricking at her conscience.

  And at the same time, she found that she could totally relate to this man, especially when it came to this subject. Because she’d been in the same situation. She’d had people pretend to be her friend just because she was Livia Colton’s daughter, the daughter of a woman who fairly reeked of money and connections. At one point there were all sorts of people trying to become her friend—until her mother’s sudden fall from grace. Then, just like that, she and her siblings, as well as Livia, became the town lepers. People just couldn’t get away from them fast enough.

  It took close to ten years to change that. She had no idea how many more years it would take to heal the wounds that were left behind.

  “You know,” she told Josh in a quiet voice, “the more I talk with you, the more I realize that we have a great deal in common.”

  “You’re just saying that to make me feel better about my life.”

  “No,” Leonor contradicted him. “I’m saying it because it’s true.”

  Chapter 7

  Joshua Howard knew his superior at the FBI considered him to be very good at his job. He knew how to lose himself in whatever identity he took on. But more than that, he knew how to focus attention on the subject of his investigation so that he or she felt as if he was really interested in them and what they had to offer by way of insight into the human experience.

  Leonor Colton, however, quickly turned out to be an unexpected challenge. Not because he was losing his touch or was overplaying his hand, but because she seemed to be suspicious if he displayed too much interest in her. Unlike most people or any of the people he had ever set out to investigate, Leonor didn’t really like to talk about herself.

  So, when they went out for that lunch he had promised her and he asked her what seemed like a very casual question—what had attracted her to art in the first place—Leonor very cleverly turned the question right back at him.

  “What attracts anyone to their field of interest?” she asked Josh. “For instance, what made you start collecting works of art?”

  “Because I could,” he answered, then flashed a self-deprecating smile that, even though she tried to block it out, Leonor had to admit she found exceedingly engaging. “I know that probably sounds pretty pompous and conceited to you—”

  “No, not really,” Leonor said a bit too quickly, not wanting to seem judgmental in his eyes.

  To her surprise, Josh laughed. “Then you would be in a class by yourself because most people would say that I was being exactly that.” And then he explained his earlier, flippant answer. “Fortunately, for me, money was never an obstacle.” Just in case she thought he was bragging, Josh told her, “My father was busy building his empire. My mother was busy being a socialite whose favor everyone was always trying to cultivate.

  “Occasionally, they recalled that they had come together long enough to create a child, and to appease their consciences for neglecting that child, they gave that child—me—free rein for the first twenty-five years of my life. Oh, I was sent to the right schools, was seen with the right people—all that window dressing was my camouflage while I was seeking my own path, going my own way.”

  He still hadn’t really answered her question. She was sure he had to have had a reason and she was interested in hearing it—unless, for some reason, he was lying to her and was only pretending to get close to her for some ulterior motive. She’d been through that—big-time—once, and she didn’t want anything like that to happen again.

  “But why art?” Leonor pressed. “Why not—” She cast about for something that was the opposite of the way of life he’d chosen. The way of life she mentioned was one that she highly disapproved of. “Why not a life of gambling and strippers?”

  “Not that those don’t have a great deal of appeal,” Josh told her, humor glinting in his eyes. “But art—paintings—captures beauty. Permanently captures it,” he emphasized. “I have to admit that I like the idea of owning beauty. Of being able to display it and to have people know that what they’re looking at belongs to me—as much as anyone can actually own works of art,” he added wryly.

  She wasn’t sure she quite got his meaning. “Then you don’t own it?”

  “Oh, I do,” Josh assured her. “But in a sense, works of art belong to everyone,” he said, a smile curving the corners of his mouth.

  There was a basket of hot, crusty bread on the table and she was slowly taking apart the slice she had chosen, eating it a tiny piece at time.

  “I have to say,” she told him after taking another small bite, “your perspective is rather unique.”

  “That’s what my father said, except without the charming smile,” Josh added. “Are you sure I can’t interest you in a glass of wine?” he asked, ready to signal the server to come to their table.

  “I’m sure,” she replied.

  “Then you’re a teetotaler?” he guessed, raising an eyebrow as he
posed the word.

  She had nothing against drinking once in a while—with the right person, which in this case would have been someone she knew. She really didn’t know him yet.

  “Not really, just careful,” she told him. “Alcohol tends to impair judgment.”

  “Are you saying that you don’t trust yourself?” he asked, a glint of a smile on his lips.

  Was she implying that she was capable of throwing herself at him if she was the slightest bit inebriated?

  That would be useful, he thought. He also found the thought very appealing.

  Her eyes met his. Hers were not smiling. “No, it’s not myself that I don’t trust.”

  “Ouch.” Josh pretended to wince. “Was I just put in my place?”

  “Not you specifically,” she told him. She was, after all, trying to cultivate him as a donor for the museum, Leonor reminded herself. She couldn’t lose sight of that. “Let’s just say people in general.”

  “But you’re not having lunch with ‘people in general,’” Josh deftly pointed out. “You’re having lunch with me—and I assure you that I am very trustworthy. Besides,” he pointed out as the busboy came to clear away their plates and the near-empty breadbasket, “we’re not exactly sequestered on a yacht in the middle of the ocean.” He subtly gestured around the dining room. “We’re in a very public place. I’m not about to try anything—no matter how tempted I might be,” he added in a slightly lower voice.

  She told herself that the air was too dry in the restaurant and that was the reason she was having trouble catching her breath. It had nothing to do with the exceptionally good-looking man who was quite clearly flirting with her.

  Clearing her throat, Leonor said, “I’m not worried about that.”

  He looked at her for a long moment. “Then what are you worried about?”

  She could feel her defenses heightening. “Who says I’m worried about something?”

  He was determined to take down that wall that Livia’s daughter had surrounding her—one brick at a time if necessary.

  “Please, I do have some people skills and there’s something definitely on your mind,” Josh insisted. His tone was patient as he said, “I’ve been told that I’m a good listener.”