Wicked Stage Read online

  Wicked Stage

  By Michelle Dayton

  A legendary blue diamond is the target, but Adam has bigger plans for Jess in this West End–set finale to Michelle Dayton’s Strange Tango series

  Dealing with prima donna theater people and his uncle Tony’s gang of thugs wasn’t quite how Adam pictured his first holiday season with Jess. Especially not now, when he’s made up his mind about things. Forever-type things. But it’s the job of a lifetime: Tony plans to steal the Bulgarian Blue, an enormous blue diamond allegedly owned by one of Britain’s most famously fickle directors.

  Choosing to stay in London with Adam over the holidays was a big step for Jess. Infiltrating the cast of their target’s West End production while Adam puts his role-playing experience to good use as an understudy is bigger. But she and Adam are “all or nothing,” and there’s no way she’ll let him play this one alone. In fact, Jess can’t imagine letting Adam play anything alone anymore.

  On fronts both financial and personal, this is the riskiest venture Jess and Adam have ever embarked upon. On a snowy New Year’s Eve they’ll never forget, they’ll need to be on top of their game—together—to save London’s hottest play, rob the city’s biggest jerk and find their happily-ever-after.

  This book is approximately 38,000 words

  One-click with confidence. This title is part of the Carina Press Romance Promise: all the romance you’re looking for with an HEA/HFN. It’s a promise!

  Edited by Kerri Buckley

  Wicked Stage

  Michelle Dayton

  Dedication

  For everyone who thinks that romance, whether in person and/or on the page, is an essential part of life.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Michelle_Dayton

  Chapter One

  “He’s wearing it, Jess.” Adam’s voice on the phone sounded as calm as ever, but she was starting to know all the undercurrents and inflections in that deep tone. He was worried that her role in their current operation just got a lot bigger. “Option A is off the table. We are a go with either Option B or C.”

  “Got it!” she responded cheerfully before hanging up on him. Adrenaline began to course through her veins, but she simply picked up her coffee cup with one hand and scrolled through her Twitter feed with the other. Just like any woman might do on a lazy Sunday morning at a luxury Scottsdale resort.

  Not at all like a professional thief about to steal a Piaget watch worth close to $200,000.

  Two hundred grand was a slightly lower price point than the jeweled items Adam, her partner and lover, usually preferred to steal, but they were willing to make an exception for this one because it was a quickie. They’d invested less than a week in active preparation and only the three-day resort stay as an expense. If they pulled this off, it would be well worth the time and investment.

  With a last sip of vanilla latte, Jess reached into the bag at her feet until she felt the Wi-Fi jammer. She’d spent several hours the day before testing various jammers on the hotel’s network until she found the one that met her specifications for an operating radius.

  Her target? The resort’s ultra-fancy spa, located conveniently just down the corridor.

  Holding the jammer under the table between her feet, she quickly ran through the series of steps that would block the spa’s access from the resort’s Internet. From her light reconnaissance two days earlier, she knew the spa reception counter relied on the wireless for connectivity to their scheduling and payment applications. Without Internet access, they wouldn’t be able to see their calendar of appointments for the day or accept credit cards for any treatments in progress.

  Now that the spa was offline, she needed to act quickly. Ducking into a nearby bathroom—the entrance of which was thankfully not observed by the resort’s many security cameras—she shrugged out of her silly-expensive yoga pants and hoodie and changed into a pair of baggy khaki pants and the sea-green polo shirt worn by all hotel staff. Her dark hair went up into a bun and a standard-issue hotel visor went on her head. Pretty low effort compared to some of her disguises. This was what bothered Adam. If she was caught on camera like this, she was easily identifiable.

  Good thing she wasn’t going to get caught.

  She strode confidently into the spa approximately three minutes after she’d jammed the Wi-Fi. Two gorgeous blondes working the reception ignored her entrance. If their faces hadn’t been too Botoxed to express emotion, they would have looked worried. As it was, their smooth faces were turned downward and they were jabbing frantic fingers at the iPads mounted on the counter. Jess overheard one of them saying, “What did you do? Nothing’s working!”

  Jess bowed her head, allowing the visor to completely block her face from the cameras mounted in the ceiling corners. “You guys having trouble with the network? Parts of the hotel are reporting outages. They sent me over to fix it.”

  “Thank God!” the second blonde exclaimed. “I can’t get anything to load and we’re hitting our busiest time of the morning. The 10:00 appointments will be finished soon and needing to pay, and people will be arriving for the 11:00 sessions any minute.”

  Jess felt her phone buzz and reached into her pocket to retrieve it. A text from Adam.

  He’ll be there in two.

  The “he” in question was Maxwell Touhy, a high-level executive at a tobacco company. He was currently at the resort on a kind of honeymoon with Tiphani, his second wife. Last year, he’d left his first wife after thirty years of marriage. He’d completely scalped her with the divorce, leaving her with almost nothing. From digging into his finances, Jess could see that he’d been planning the divorce for almost a year, shifting money and assets to where they couldn’t be easily traced—or claimed by his wife as joint property.

  Adam’s one thieving rule was to only steal from assholes, and Jess thought Maxwell Touhy fit the bill perfectly.

  She took her place behind the reception counter, putting her bag on the small surface and spreading out her own laptop and a bunch of unnecessary equipment and clipboards until the two blondes took the hint and got out of her way. One of them positioned herself as a greeter at the door, and the other went to “freshen up the lounge area.”

  Jess reached into her bag and turned off the jammer, restoring Internet access. Then she scrolled through the iPad apps until she came to one that displayed the security camera footage. Perfect. She connected the iPad to her own laptop, aiming to access the software on the network that was actually recording the security camera feed.

  “Good morning, Mr. Touhy.” The blonde by the door gave a practiced simper. “So nice to see you again.”

  In response, Touhy treated her to a full up and down, followed by a stifled belch. “Yep.” Under her eyelashes, Jess stole a glance at the Piaget Altiplano watch. The face was made of hundreds of diamonds set in white gold, and it looked obscenely delicate on his beefy wrist.

  “Go on back to the locker room,” the blonde instructed. “Place your things in a locker, put on a robe a
nd relax in the men’s lounge. Margot will be with you shortly.”

  Touhy grunted and shuffled to the back of the spa.

  Jess finally located the camera software on the network. Rewinding the spa’s live feed a few minutes, she verified that her own face was totally hidden from view, and then she watched Touhy enter the spa, the watch clearly on his wrist. Aha. With a quick click, she opened her new favorite software—a video editing program.

  “Good morning, sir,” the blonde greeter simpered, though this time there was nothing practiced about it. Jess refused to look up, since she knew exactly who put that seductive tone in the woman’s voice. Besides, she could see him clearly on the security camera footage right in front of her. He returned the blonde’s greeting with a nod and dimpled grin. His handsome face was lightly tanned, his dark brown hair tousled as if he’d just come inside from a run. No wigs or stage makeup obscured his pure gorgeousness today. It was atypical for Adam to do any job without wearing some sort of disguise, and Jess felt a little warm inside. He really trusted her to protect him.

  The blonde leaned in closer. “What can I arrange for you this morning? A massage? Some aromatherapy?”

  Adam laughed. “Both sound wonderful, but I’m afraid I was just hoping to use the exercise equipment and then the steam room. Can I pay the daily fee for using the facilities?”

  The blonde put her arm on his bicep. “We’re having a bit of an issue with our computer system this morning,” she said. She lowered her voice to a stage whisper. “Why don’t you just go on back? It’ll be my treat.”

  Adam beamed down at her. “Really? Well, thanks, doll.” Beneath the visor, Jess flicked her eyes to the ceiling in disgust. This wasn’t the first time she’d seen him get freebies just for showing up with those wide shoulders and bright blue eyes.

  “Morning,” he said, passing the desk. Jess rolled her eyes up at him in time to catch a wink just for her. Even after living and working with him for several months, she still felt answering butterflies in her stomach.

  Adam disappeared into the men’s locker room and Jess sent up a fleeting prayer for Option B instead of Option C. If Touhy put his watch into the spa locker, it would take Adam about thirty seconds to pop open the cheap locker lock and grab the watch. If, however, he took it into the treatment room with him, Adam would need to go Option C, the most complex path. This would involve waiting fifty minutes until the masseuse left the room for the ten minute “meditation time” granted at the end of an hour massage. Adam could move like a ghost, and she had no doubt he could enter and exit the treatment room without Touhy hearing, but it was still riskier. Too bad Touhy hadn’t just left the watch in his hotel room. Then it would have been easy pickings.

  Of course, if Option A had been on the table, Jess couldn’t have experimented with her new favorite toy. Speaking of...she began to work in earnest on the video. First, she edited the footage of Touhy, carefully removing any trace of the watch on his wrist. Next, she meticulously replaced Adam’s face with that of another handsome thirty-ish anonymous man, some model she’d found from stock videos on the Internet. It was tricky work, but she’d been practicing for months. She just knew this kind of thing would come in handy on some job and now...voila!

  When Touhy realized his watch was missing, he’d undoubtedly go ballistic and blame the spa for the theft. Changing Adam’s face on the footage was just plain common sense, but Jess didn’t want some poor underpaid resort employee to get blamed and fired for the watch disappearing. So, she wanted the tapes to reflect that Touhy hadn’t even been wearing the watch at the time of his arrival. If he blustered that he was wearing the watch when he got to the spa, there would be video that disproved it. If he’d been captured on one of the other resort cameras en route to the spa wearing the watch, so be it. It simply meant that he’d lost it on his own. Luckily, half the hotel had spotted Touhy and his new wife getting absolutely hammered until closing time in the lobby bar the night before, so his credibility would be questionable anyway.

  Jess finished her video edits, inserted the new version into the hotel’s security footage database and shut her laptop. “All finished!” she announced. “You’re back online.” Packing up her bag, she glanced down the hallway but there was no sign of Adam. She took a deep breath and walked out of the spa.

  The hardest thing about their partnership was always walking away. But she needed to trust that Adam would escape unscathed. He’d been doing this since he was a child, and he’d handled himself for over twenty years. If he could trust her, a complete newbie in the thieving profession, to edit the video footage, she could trust him to exit the spa safely.

  For the guests’ privacy, there were no cameras in the spa treatment rooms or corridors. Adam planned to leave via an emergency exit door which led to the parking lot at the back of the resort. It’d be simple for him to disengage the alarm before opening it and re-engage it before closing.

  Following the plan, Jess once again bounced into the nearby ladies’ room and changed back into the yoga pants and hoodie. The borrowed resort wear went into the bottom of her bag. She’d dispose of it somewhere off-property. Glancing down at her watch, she smiled. Her whole performance had taken less than fifteen minutes.

  She slung her bag over her shoulder and strolled slowly out of the lobby’s main entrance. She’d checked out of their room earlier in the morning and the car was already packed and waiting at the hotel’s rear, strategically near the spa’s emergency exit door.

  To her delight, Adam was already waiting at the car, engine running. She tossed her bag in the back and climbed in the passenger seat. “I guess it was Option B?”

  He reached over, grabbed her by the nape of her neck and pulled her close for an adrenaline-laced kiss. “You guessed right.” She wrapped her arms around his neck, opened her mouth to his wild lips. When he let her go, they were both breathing hard.

  She fluttered her eyelashes, and spoke in a falsetto voice. “Oh, sir, can I interest you in some free aromatherapy?”

  “Shut up, Blondie.” He kissed her one last time, a loud smack on the lips.

  She laughed. “Where to?”

  He pulled the car onto the road. “We need to get out of the Phoenix area, but let’s take a day or two to play in Arizona,” he suggested. “Ever been to Sedona? Or the Grand Canyon? Your choice.”

  Jess beamed. She’d never been to either place. She still couldn’t get used to this new lifestyle. Now late November, she’d been working with Adam for almost three months. They’d do extensive research on their targets, travel to the right locale, and live and breathe the job until it was complete. But then they could do whatever they wanted for days or weeks between jobs. For a woman who’d spent most of her adult life tied to a strict corporate daily routine, this new schedule was absolutely amazing.

  “Maybe the Grand Canyon?” she said. “I’ve always wanted to hike to the bottom. Is it too cold to do that?”

  Adam’s phone rang, and he took his eyes off the road to glance down at the display. “Hold that thought,” he said, smiling. “It’s Tony.”

  As Adam answered the call, Jess wondered when she’d finally meet the uncle—and professional thief—who’d raised him. After serving an eight-year stint for a job gone wrong, Tony had gotten out of prison in August. Adam had spent some weekends with him over the past several months, but always on his own. She suspected he was still trying to shield her somewhat from the entirety of his criminal past. Which was pretty dumb. She was so in love with him she felt it in her bones and in every breath. She wanted to know more about him, not less.

  Lost in thought, it took her a moment to notice that Adam had gone completely silent. On the steering wheel his right hand was clenched so hard his knuckles were white. “I’m coming home. Tonight. This is a fucking terrible idea, and you know it.”

  He dropped the phone on the seat. Jess didn’t say
anything, even when he turned the car in the opposite direction and started toward the highway which led to the airport. Over the past couple of months she’d learned that Adam, normally cool as a cucumber under any circumstance, only got upset like this when someone he cared about was in trouble. She’d also learned the hard way that pushing him to talk when he was upset did not work at all.

  Finally, he took a few deep breaths and reached across the seat to grab her hand. “Sorry, Jess. Rain check on the Grand Canyon?”

  “Of course. What’s going on?”

  “We need to get back to Chicago,” he said. Jess smiled at the “we.” Not long ago, Adam would have tried to deposit her somewhere safe before handling all the tough stuff out on his own.

  Going home tonight actually sounded kind of nice. She hadn’t spent more than a couple of days in her city for months. And she would have had to fly back on Wednesday anyway. There was no way she could miss Thanksgiving with her family.

  She hadn’t seen her dad or brothers at all this autumn, and she’d only returned their many calls during times when she knew they wouldn’t be able to answer. But they weren’t going to be satisfied with a relationship of voice mail messages for much longer. She’d have to figure out a way (OK, a lie) to explain how she was spending her time and making money. They knew she hadn’t taken another (legitimate) job after the drama of last spring.

  The thought of lying to them in person made her stomach hurt. Ugh. Well, she’d worry about that on Thursday. For now... “What did Tony say?”

  Adam flicked on his turn signal and changed lanes. “Apparently he wants to do ‘one last job’ before he’s officially retired. He’s concocted a ludicrous plan. I’ve got to talk him out of it before he flies to London and ends up behind bars for the rest of his life.”

  London? “What does he want to take so badly?”

  Adam groaned. “His white whale. Christ, it was his obsession. Something he wanted for a long time before he went to prison. He had a solid plan in place about ten years ago, but the whole thing made me uneasy. This thing is way out of his league. I was so relieved when it got sold unexpectedly at auction to an anonymous buyer and everything fell apart.”