All-American Baby. Peg Sutherland
felt fedora. The collar of her raincoat was turned up, but neither it nor the hat had managed to hide her delicate beauty.
Someone in the barbershop whistled low as one of the men surrounding the young woman moved in to block her from the camera. She disappeared into the limousine and the camera panned to a female reporter who did not look nearly as elegant in her raincoat.
“Dang! Imagine that,” Fudgie said. “Melina Somerset. How old’s she now? ’Bout twenty?”
“Musta been more than a dozen years since they wiped out her mother,” Eb said. “She was just a little one then.”
“Her mother and her sister,” Whiskey said. “She’s twenty-six now. Said so on the noon news.”
“Low-life scum.” Fudgie sat in the empty barber chair and linked his fingers behind his head. “Never did catch ’em, did they?”
The debate raged about whether justice had been done for the people who had killed Melina Somerset’s mother and sister, but Tood didn’t much care. Oh, he knew how the country felt about the mysterious young woman who had apparently arrived in San Francisco the evening before. Melina Somerset, daughter of computer magnate Tom Somerset, was like America’s royalty. And all the more intriguing because she’d lived in seclusion, her whereabouts shrouded in mystery, ever since the tragedy had struck her family. Tom Somerset had paid a big price for his enormous wealth.
At least, Tood thought, Somerset had his daughter. Whereas Tood had nobody.
Seventy-one and a bad ticker marking his days and not a soul in the world to care. The only one on God’s green earth who even shared his blood was a runaway fourteen-year-old. He supposed he could send the detective off on her trail now. But he had about as much chance of ever seeing her again as he had of seeing Melina Somerset walking through the door at Fudgie’s, that’s what Tood reckoned.
Yep, he was going to die alone. That was about the size of it.
CHAPTER ONE
San Francisco, California
ASH THORNDYKE FELT the first stirring of lust as his gaze lingered on the diamond-and-emerald pendant pointing the way to the perfect breasts of the Hollywood agent’s young bride.
The breasts were clearly faux and interested Ash not in the least.
But the diamonds and emeralds were the real thing. Magnificent specimens. Ash could almost feel them in the palm of his hand, their cool ice, their weighty heft. His breath grew a little quicker and he forced himself to look away.
“A lifetime of training doesn’t vanish overnight,” he muttered to himself.
“Beg pardon, sir?”
The black-tied waiter balancing the silver tray of champagne flutes paused, a questioning expression on his young face.
“Oh. I... Nothing.”
The young man gave Ash a quizzical smile, then seemed to remember that it wasn’t his job to analyze this mob of well-dressed, well-heeled, well-known revelers. “Champagne, sir?”
Training. “Not for the moment, thank you.” Not while working. Ash had learned that at his father’s knee. Never drink on the job.
Ash scanned the crowd. He no longer even had to school himself to look as if his perusal of the gala gathering was casual. It wasn’t, no matter how blasé he managed to look. As always at this kind of bash, Ash Thorndyke was working.
Tonight, however, he wasn’t on a mission for the kind of expensive baubles worn by the agent’s trophy wife. Tonight, Ash Thorndyke had been hired to kidnap Melina Somerset.
Ash’s stomach cramped. Maybe he should have that champagne after all. Maybe he should get the heck out of Dodge. Kidnapping beautiful young heiresses wasn’t his cup of tea, as Grandfather Thorndyke would say. Cat-burglary—safecracking, pulling off heists that always made the papers but never made the court dockets—was Ash’s specialty. It was all a part of the family business. Each member had a specialty. Counterfeiting was what his dad, Bram Thorndyke, did—a skill he’d passed on to Ash’s brother, Forbes. Confidence games targeting the sinfully rich, that was Grandfather Thorndyke’s forte. For four generations, the Thorndykes had been running their circumspect little family business.
Kidnapping, however, didn’t sit right with Ash. The very idea violated his moral code. In this instance, however, family was more important than anybody’s moral code.
“Anything for family,” he said quietly to the canapé he snagged from a passing silver tray. His payoff for tonight’s distasteful little caper was his father’s freedom. And Ash was prepared to do anything to ensure that his dying father didn’t spend his final days in prison.
The men who had hired Ash promised him that much. They worked for the government, at least that’s what their identification said. And Ash had surely been around enough phony papers in his day to recognize a fake when he saw it. Of course, there was always the chance that he was being fooled, but it was a chance he was willing to take. Anything for family.
His quarry had not yet made her appearance. When she did, Ash was certain, she would be hard to miss, even though he couldn’t recall having seen a picture of her since a family funeral more than a decade earlier. The family was reclusive, everybody knew that, which made their sudden appearance in California all the more intriguing. Somerset was apparently developing some new technology for the film industry and was here to network and to research the project. Of course, the national media vultures had managed to catch the Somersets’ arrival in San Francisco, but Ash made it a policy never to watch television. Now, he just needed to be patient. The rich, headstrong heiress was waiting until a fashionably late hour to make her grand appearance at the gala in her father’s honor. Ash would know her from the stir she would create in the crowd.
“Rich women,” he said. “A pain in the backside.”
Another young waiter was at his elbow. “Champagne, sir?”
Ash’s mouth felt a little dry. His nerves were beginning to get the better of him. Bubbles rose lazily to the top of the elegant crystal flute. He could taste them, a sweet, tart explosion against his tongue.
He could also imagine those delightful little bubbles fuzzing his brain and slowing him down just as the time came to execute his plan.
He shook his head.
At midnight, when he turned over Melina Somerset to the government agents who had hired him to confiscate her, he would find a bottle of the finest bubbly in the city by the bay and relax in style. Then, tomorrow, he would be on his way East, to retrieve his father. At last. It had been a long four years since his father’s incarceration, far too long.
Ash sidled through the crowd, engaging in only the briefest of conversations with the people he passed, making sure he didn’t stand out from the crowd. In fact, his appearance was one of Ash Thorndyke’s greatest assets in his line of work. He was nondescript. Average-looking. Tall but not too tall. Average build, with a slight tendency to be too lean. Light-colored hair a shade past blond but not quite brown, worn too long to be called short and too short to be called long. Eyes that might be described as gray. Or green. Or hazel. Depended on who you talked to. Ash looked like the young attorney who drew up your will or a representative of the investment company that managed your finances. He looked like your daughter’s best friend’s husband, whose name you never can remember.
There was no doubt that Ash Thorndyke’s ability to blend in with the crowd was one of the things that had made him so successful.
That, and a sharp wit, unflappable nerves and fingertips that could feel the tumblers working in a safe lock. Ash Thorndyke could romance a safe the way some men could romance a woman. He was the best.
Had been the best, he reminded himself. After tonight, it was all over. That was the deal. His deal with himself.
He kept moving. Kept listening.