From the looks of her, he figured the odds on her begging him for anything were zip and none.

Esme hesitated, but only for a second, before she walked back to the bathroom. She knew what time it was, and she knew she didn’t have any to waste.

Good God, Johnny freakin’ Ramos.

She had a handheld black light already in the bathroom, and once she closed the door, she turned it on. It would only take her a minute to check the painting. The last thing she wanted was to show up at Nachman’s with a fake. The Meinhard was her bargaining chip. She needed to know she had a solid opening hand.

Reaching into the white vinyl tote, she removed the thin metal case containing the Meinhard and popped it open. With a small screwdriver also from out of her tote, she loosened the wooden frame on the painting and lifted off the protective covering. One slow pass with the black light was all she needed, and as soon as she was finished, she reassembled the painting and the frame and put the piece back into the case.

The metal case measured precisely two by ten by fifteen inches, and when she got back to her dad’s desk, she slipped it neatly inside a black leather messenger bag she’d designed for a courier contract she’d taken last May. The job had been to transport a rare manuscript from Presque Isle, Maine, to Bern, Switzerland, and it had gone without a hitch.

She zipped the interior pouch on the bag closed, securing the case inside, then buckled the outside straps.

John Ramos, standing right there next to her. That was a bit of a hitch, maybe more than a bit. Cripes. She’d seen the way he’d looked at her red leather skirt, and she didn’t have a doubt in her mind that he’d been the “policía” at the Oxford, or that he’d followed her through the hotel room, or that he knew exactly what she’d done to Otto Von Lindberg.

Hell, for all she knew he was a policeman, undercover, off-duty, whatever. It was enough to make a girl sweat, if a girl ever sweated. Thank God, Esme didn’t, never, not on the job.

The messenger bag had been constructed with a net of very fine steel mesh sandwiched between its lining and the thick latigo leather. It also had a cipher lock connected to a steel cable running through the flap. She engaged the lock before slipping the bag’s shoulder strap over her head and adjusting it across the front of her body in a manner that insured it wouldn’t get in the way of drawing her pistol. Nobody could get the bag without taking her with it, which suited her just fine. This was a four-part deal with three parts left-Isaac Nachman, Franklin Bleak, get the hell out of Denver. That was the plan, and she was still damn close to being on schedule, despite Johnny freakin’ Ramos.

He walked ahead of her into the hall and waited while she locked up.

Hell. She probably needed her head examined for opening the door to him. She should have waited him out, toughed it out, gone out the window-something.

Jiggling the key in the lock, trying to get the dead-bolt to slide home, she hazarded another quick glance at him, and got hit by that freight train all over again, which brought her train-wreck quota for the last ten minutes up to an even dozen, easy, dammit. She felt the collision the same place she’d felt all the others, in her throat and her upper chest, a pure respiratory reaction-as in he took her breath away. It was ridiculous. She was too old for this, too jaded. She’d had real lovers since him, with real sex-and never ever had a man gotten her so hot in a backseat or anywhere else that all she could see on her horizon was complete and utter annihilation. It was the only thing that had stopped her from losing her virginity to the baddest of the bad boys that night-fear of destruction. Everything between the two of them had been so hot, and wild, and edging on frantic, the windows of the car steamed over, his body like corded sinew, all muscle and bone and warm skin, his dark hair so silky, and so tangled from her fingers, his mouth on her everywhere.

Everywhere.

Dammit. Her fingers slipped on the key, and she chipped a nail on the jamb.

Dammit.

She glanced at him again-and got hit by the memory train one more time, except the collision was closer to her solar plexus, and a little lower down.

He’d been naked that night, the first naked boy she’d seen, and she’d never seen another one like him, naked or otherwise, until ten minutes ago.

Perfect.

What an absolutely perfect image to have slide out of her memory banks-John Ramos naked. Cripes. With another couple of tries, she finally got the deadbolt locked.

Dropping the keys into an outside pocket on the messenger bag, she headed for the stairs, and he fell in beside her.

She took a breath, calm, easy. About two more minutes and he’d be firmly back in memory land, a blast from the past that was behind her. She took another breath and kept walking.

He had definitely filled out since high school. He was broader through the shoulders, broader through the chest, taller-just plain bigger all the way around. His hair was thick, and dark, and cut short, shorter than she’d ever seen him wear it. The style made him look older than she knew he was, and the thickness of it made his hair stick up a little, and altogether, combined with the lean, carved lines of his face, he looked tough, like he’d just walked out of the LoDo alley where he’d been seen, like he was still running wild on the streets.

Oddly enough, he also looked like he’d just walked out of an Abercrombie catalog. Clean, softly worn, button-fly jeans; expensive boots, tactical boots like Dax owned; a dark gray T-shirt; and over the T-shirt, a black, collared shirt, worn unbuttoned and untucked, the long sleeves neatly buttoned at the cuff. He’d slipped the naked-girl pen in his pocket between a mechanical pencil and a small spiral notebook-whatever in the world he needed those for on a Friday night in LoDo. She could also see the top end of an envelope peeking out of the pocket. In another life, if he’d grown up another way, this close to the Auraria Campus, he could have been taken for one of the university’s graduate students. As it was, she’d never seen a college boy with that hard a gaze, so much “Don’t fuck with me” stamped in the way he carried himself.

Maybe he really was a cop.

Or maybe, the gang his brother had been fighting for the night he’d been killed, the Locos, maybe Johnny had climbed to the top of it, made himself the shot caller.

Honest to God, she didn’t know which would be worse, cop or gang lord. For her sake, it would be better if he wasn’t a cop. She didn’t want to show up anywhere, officially, as having been in Denver, and she sure as shoot didn’t want to get arrested, but everything in her hoped for his sake that he hadn’t followed in Dom Ramos’s footsteps, that he’d done better by himself.

At the bottom of the stairs, she felt a moment’s regret. This was it. Her dad’s car was parked on the street, right out in front, so as soon as they walked out of the Faber Building, that would be it. Sayonara. Adios. Ciao. He’d go his way, and she’d go hers.

Too bad.

This close to getting rid of him, she could admit it. Another time, another place, under different circumstances, she might have taken him up on that drink, just to catch up with him, see what he was up to, see how he’d really turned out. But tonight, she was on a mission: return the painting, get the reward money, buy off the bookie, full speed ahead-up until they came out onto the sidewalk and her mission came to a sudden screeching halt.

She couldn’t believe it.

Parked next to the curb in all its cheap-ass, middle-of-the-road, minivan glory was her dad’s car, right where she’d left it, but somehow, for some unknown but probably easily deducible reason, sometime in the last twenty minutes, between when she’d walked in with the painting and was now walking out, the cops had booted it.