Professor Donald Harp had always said Cleve had the talent to become the kind of man who didn’t roll out of bed in the morning for less than a few multi-million, but Cleve had never quite believed it.
He was a kid from nowhere with nothing but a gift for persuasion, who’d bluffed his way into Harvard by impersonating a member of a distant branch of the famous Kennedy family. He’d surprised himself by getting as far as Professor Harp’s Ancient History class and was happily soaking up the privileged Ivy League atmosphere and the flirty smiles of the gold class babes while he waited for his fake tuition payment to start stinking, and the moment where he’d go from living in his car to hoping it would start so he could make a clean getaway.
The professor had sniffed him out quicker than he could say Alexander the Great loved his horse Bucephalus, and instead of turning him over to the authorities—and a no doubt shamefully long stint in an incarceration facility not of his choosing—had offered Cleve a deal.
The professor was in need of an apprentice, and since Cleve was in need of a regular diet that didn’t come from dumpster diving, a roof over his head, and a way to channel his talent for deception that ensured he stayed on the right side of a jail cell, they shook on it.
He’d always thought the trade-off of security for nefarious deeds would eventually lead to a Greek tragedy. He was no student of history, but he listened to police scanners and read court transcripts and true crime novels, and happy endings were a myth.
He’d been right, but not in the way he’d imagined.
And now, ten years after the death of his mentor, that made him a man who genuinely didn’t bother getting out of bed for less than a few million, except for the odd occasion when the temptation to stay between the sheets was worth its own weight in another kind of gold, the kind shaped like a desirable woman.
It’d been an annoyingly long time since he’d forgotten about work and spent the day in bed.
“Oi, she’s a bit of all right.”
It was a shame Brandon Bartley hadn’t decided on a lie in. It was a shame Brandon Bartley was a thing in Cleve’s life at all.
“Sweet Celestia is the largest vivid pink diamond in the world—she is more than a bit of all right.”
It was a shame Brandon Bartley was still breathing. The man has shown such promise as a thief, but turned out he was just a common garden-variety bagman, useful for collecting the rent as it were. Not at all what Cleve was looking for, because Cleve was looking for a partner to share the load, to go for even bigger paydays, in exactly the same way the professor chose him.
The problem was he was simply awful at picking the right accomplices. Brandon was his fourth not-rotten-enough-in-the-right-way apple.
“Hah, not the rock, mate.” Brandon tipped his chin at the screen. “The dolly bird.”
Cleve had been aware of the movement in the room on screen. The photographer’s assistants bustling about while the gum-chewing photographer herself barked orders, the furniture being moved in, the PR flak furiously typing on his cell, and the girl.
“‘Ard up like you bin, gov, fought you’d be all ova vat.”
Cleve took a deep breath, thought happy thoughts, like not dropping his aitches, and the deep tissue massage he’d have after he knew Sweet Celestia was his. Like hoping Brandon got another job offer.
Of course he was aware of the girl. He hadn’t had the delicious feel of a girl’s skin under his hands for months, and that girl was more than a dolly bird; she was genuinely beautiful, slender and steely strong like a ballerina, with clouds of almost-white hair and Elizabeth Taylor eyes.
But she also wasn’t much more than a walking manicure. Her job was to hold Sweet Celestia in her buffed and polished hands, adding warmth to cold perfection while the stone was captured in digital glory.
The girl, whose name was Melody Solo, wasn’t famous. She’d had all the usual physical attributes: height, slim form, barely enough curves to count, and a symmetrical face, as well as the relevant career milestones—beauty pageant, catalogue, catwalk, magazine fashion layout—to her name. But she’d been chosen for this job because she was no doubt cheap and available and looked a lot like the famous model she was replacing at the last moment.
It was Cleve’s job to know these things, just like he knew the photographer’s assistant with the ginger hair was having an affair with the PR flack, and the dresser, Katerina, was soon to launch her own label, and the guard with the cauliflower ears liked to bake, so yes, he’d noticed the girl, and she was indeed a bit of all right.
Given the chance, he’d stay in bed for her.
But she was eleven thousand miles away and within the next hour would be irrelevant.
She was also silly as a box full of kittens. She tittered, she fluttered her lashes, she had trouble walking in the jewel-encrusted shoes she wore. He might wrinkle a sheet for her because he was, after all, hard up, but he would most definitely kick her out of bed in the morning. He had no tolerance for silly—tried it, not to his taste. He’d apparently been ruined for silly for all time by the professor’s daughter.
On the screen, Annie swallowed her gum and the redhead positioned Melody on the chaise lounge as if she was a bendable Barbie.
The professor’s daughter was two years younger than him, sixteen going on juvenile delinquent when they met. Half her hair was dyed burnt orange and the other half of her head was shaved and later adorned with a tattoo of two crossed bones. It was a joke, skull and crossbones, and Cleve had loved her for that alone. She had a pierced tongue, a savage wit, a healthy disrespect for authority, and her favorite shoes were steel-capped boots. She’d been expelled from more schools than Cleve had bothered to bluff his way into, and she was the hottest, wildest, smartest woman he’d ever kissed.
The professor forbade him to talk to her. “It’s very simple. If you speak to her, I will turn you in. If you touch her, you die,” he’d said, with the same student-friendly tone he used to say, “Of course you can have an extension on that paper.”
A decade later Cleve had never quite recovered from his first love. Neither the high of risking his life to fall in love with her, nor the devastating low of losing her, raising the earth to find her, and coming up with nothing but empty whispers. She was a ghost, but the memory of her magnificence had stayed with him.
When a score went bad, you cleaned up, covered your tracks and moved on. He’d never quite been able to move on from Aria Harp and doubted he ever would.
“I’d do ‘er,” said Brandon, his awful tobacco breath wafting across Cleve’s face as he leaned in to the screen to take a closer look at what was happening inside Greville’s Auction House. “There’s our boy,” he added, as the camera rotated to capture a change out in the security detail.