“Are we having dessert?” Gwen said. “I love dessert.”

“You eat dessert?” Clea said, clearly appalled, and Gwen turned to her gratefully.

“Every chance I get,” she said. “If possible, I eat it twice.”

“Good for you,” Mason said. “I was hoping to come by and look at your records. I’d like to contact the others who bought Scarlets.”

“The records are confidential,” Gwen said. “Couldn’t possibly. Unprofessional. So, dessert?”

Clea had been tapping on her water glass, evidently trying to summon the caterer who showed up now, looking like Bertie Wooster in his white jacket and slicked-back dark hair.

“Dessert, Thomas,” Clea said.

Thomas exchanged a look with Gwen, not the first of the evening.

“Confidential, of course,” Mason was saying. “But perhaps you could contact them for me. Let them know someone is interested in buying. For a commission.”

“Really, Mason,” Clea said. “The woman came for dinner, not to be harassed.”

Mason looked across the table, his face suddenly hard, and Clea shut up. “But what would really help,” he went on, turning back to Gwen, “would be to meet Scarlet. I’d like to do an article on her, nothing professional, of course.” He laughed self-deprecatingly, and Gwen thought, Article? Oh, no. “Do you know where she is?” Mason asked.

Upstairs burgling your mistress. “I think she’s dead,” Gwen said.

“But she was so young,” Mason protested. “In her teens. How did she die?”

Gwen thought about Tilda, throwing the last canvas at Tony and walking out the door seventeen years before. “She was murdered. By an insensitive son of a bitch.” She smiled cheerfully at Mason. “And I have no idea what happened after that.”

“That’s fascinating,” Mason said, leaning forward.

“Not if you’re Homer or Scarlet,” Gwen said, as Thomas brought in the cheesecake. “Then it just stinks. Oh, good, chocolate. My favorite.”

Beside her, Clea contained her scorn, and Gwen cut into her dessert and prayed that she’d heard the last of Homer and Scarlet Hodge.

“So when can I come by the gallery and talk more with you about Scarlet?” Mason said.

“Excellent cheesecake,” Gwen said, and kept eating.

DAVY HAD been braced for Clea, so he was pleasantly surprised when he fell on somebody soft and padded. Definitely not Clea, he thought as he pinned her to the carpet in the darkness and tried to reason with her, one adult to another. It was a fine manly show of control for the ten seconds before she bit him. Then he jerked his hand away, swallowed his scream, and resisted the urge to deck her. A fistfight was not in his best interest at the moment, especially with somebody who fought dirty.

“Have you had your shots?” he whispered to her as he rubbed his hand.

She stayed under him, braced on one hand, gasping for breath as she fumbled for something in her pocket, the bill of her baseball cap shielding her face in the dark. He heard a whoosh and another gasp and leaned over her to see if she was all right, and she whispered savagely, “Touch me and I’ll scream.”

“No you won’t,” he whispered. “If you were going to scream, you’d have done it already.”

She exhaled hard and pushed herself up from the floor, a blur in the darkness as she knocked him back, and he caught her sleeve as he rolled to his feet.

“Easy,” he whispered. “I can’t let you go yet I haven’t-”

“I don’t care.” She was whispering, too, as she tried to tug her sleeve away from him. “Let go, I have to get out of here.”

“No.” He pulled her arm closer and caught a hint of her scent, something sweet “The thought of you on the loose discussing this with the cops does not-”

“Look, you idiot.” Her whisper was savage as she tried to pry his hand from her arm. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t even know what you look like. How can I possibly tell anybody about you?”

“Good point.” Davy dragged her over to the window and pulled back the drape to let the street light in, keeping to the shadow so she couldn’t see him.

“Hey.” She was wearing a sloppy Oriental jacket buttoned to her throat, and she glared up at him, her strange light eyes glowing behind huge hexagonal glasses that made her look like a bug. “Are you insane?” she hissed at him. “What if somebody’s out there?”

She jerked away from him again, and he let go of her arm before she dislocated it. “What are you dressed for?” he whispered. “Chinese baseball?”

She shoved past him, and he pulled off her baseball cap and held it above her head, feeling disappointed when her hair was too short to come tumbling down. She took another deep breath and turned back to him.

“Has it occurred to you that this isn‘t a game?”

“No.” Davy stared at her dark, loopy curls, standing up like little horns. “It’s always a game. Why else would you do it?”

“Give me that hat,” she whispered, and when he held it higher, she pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and glared at him.

“No,” he said. “And that was a question. Why are you here?”

She frowned at him, glaring harder.

“What?” he said. “Speak.”

She shook her head, clearly frustrated. “Oh, forget it. Keep it.”

She headed for the door and he caught her around the waist and pulled her back against him. “Tell me what you’re up to, Mulan,” he said in her ear as she tried to squirm away. “I’d like to be a gentleman, but the stakes are high.”

She stopped struggling so suddenly that he drew in his breath. Cinnamon. Her hair smelled like cinnamon and vanilla, like the rolls his sister used to make on Sunday mornings. Then she turned in the curve of his arm to face him, which was nice all on its own.

“An old-fashioned gentleman,” she said, her voice low, and Davy felt a stirring of alarm. “I could use one of those.”

“I’m not.” Davy loosened his hold and backed away toward the closet. “Twenty-first-century cad, that’s me.”

She stepped closer, and he tripped over Clea’s shoes and stumbled backward.

“I need a favor,” she whispered up at him as she backed him through Clea’s clothes and up against the wall, and her low, husky voice would have set up a nice hum in his blood if she hadn’t been so stiff as she pressed against him.

You want to seduce me, you have to melt a little, he thought, but she smelled like the best mornings of his life, so he didn’t push her away.

“I’m not good at this kind of thing,” she whispered, putting her palms on his chest, her hands trembling a little.

No kidding, Davy thought. He’d held two-by-fours that were more yielding.

“While you clearly are-” she clutched his shirt “-good at this.”

“Okay, you really are no good at this,” he told her, keeping his voice low. “So cut to the chase. What do you want?” He heard her sigh in the darkness, and there was a tremor in it, and he realized she was afraid and put his arm around her. “It’s okay,” he told her, without thinking.

“There’s a painting,” she said. “Eighteen inches square. A city scene with a checkerboard sky with lots of stars. It’s somewhere in this house.”

“A painting,” Davy said, knowing what was coming next.

“Steal it for me,” she whispered, and his hands tightened on her automatically, feeling all that warm softness under her slippery jacket.

Okay, the chances of her delivering what she was promising were nil, and she was a thief which couldn’t be good, and she was asking him to steal which was worse than anything she’d done to him up until then including the bite and the shin kick. A smart man would say no and escape, dragging her with him so she couldn’t rat him out.

But life had been so boring lately.

And she was afraid.

“Please?” she said, pressing closer, her lips parted.