Page 17 of The One-Night Heist

What is he thinking?

No.

What am I thinking?!

There was no good reason for me to be planning a goddamn art heist—an inside job—especially not with an aggravatingly hot billionaire who didn’t know what the hell he was doing. Yet, here I was, doing exactly that.

It wasn’t just stupidity on my part, although it was partly that. The main reason I’d agreed to this scheme was because of the obscene amount of money Giancarlo was offering as my cut, and the freedom that money could buy me. As humiliating as my little panic attack in his home office had been, it was genuine. The idea of being trapped behind bars for 10 to 20 years made me want to throw myself into the Hudson River, and it was because of the threat of jail time that I’d once taken a plea deal I’d regretted ever since.

And now I’m trapped in a different kind of prison.

Part of my deal with the FBI had been to give up the names of some fairly Bad Men, but even the possibility of a future hit didn’t scare me half as much as the thought of consulting for the Art Crime Team until the day I died.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t fit for employment anywhere else—not when my only marketable skills were stealing and transporting cultural property. Plea deal or not, the felony theft conviction was a black mark on my record, so unless I wanted to go flip burgers for minimum wage, which I didn’t, I was beholden to the very people who could just as easily lock me up for a long time.

Somewhere along the way, my resentment over the situation had turned into resignation, because I was self-aware enough to acknowledge it was my own damn fault I’d ended up here. It felt inevitable, in a way, and the only thing that kept me going most days was the knowledge I’d done what I needed to survive.

Just like always.

Then Giancarlo fucking Luxford had to come along and offer me an offshore bank account full of ill-gotten gains in exchange for staging a fake heist to increase the value of his mother’s art collection at auction.

The man may as well have proposed.

This was the excitement I’d been missing over the past few years, and that it came from an unexpected source made it all the more thrilling.

An unexpected, slightly helpless source…

It wasn’t that I was surprised a billionaire wanted to game the system—that was kind of their thing—but Giano seemed so out of his comfort zone, not just with this scheme but with life in general.

Poor little rich boy.

Poor little rich boy who might end up in jail without my help.

I stopped walking and dropped my head back with a sigh.

This is not good.

As big of a draw as the money was, it was also Giancarlo’s infuriatingly endearing cluelessness—the pure terror on his face when I mentioned his home possibly being tapped—that had sealed the deal. My suspicions about him setting me up had vanished at that moment, because what I saw wasn’t a man getting caught in the act. It was a boy realizing too late there were actual consequences to his illegal actions.

Highly relatable.

What wasn’t familiar was the weird urge I had to protect this trust-funded dum-dum from getting himself into trouble—especially when it wasn’t even my problem.

Maybe the high altitude of his villain lair messed with my brain…

More than anything, I was dying to know why Giano needed the money—what dark secret he was trying to bury. Not because I cared but because I knew better than anyone that having dirt on your business partners was useful in case things went south.

The squeak-hiss of an M4 braking directly next to my ear made me realize I was standing at a bus stop. My “fancy shoes” were making my feet hurt anyway, so I climbed aboard and plopped onto a seat near the front.

This gave me the opportunity to pull out my phone and conduct some light Google stalking of my new partner—more than I’d already done, that is. To my continued annoyance, Giano didn’t have a social media presence at all, and what press there was on him was extremely limited, without a hint of scandal.

Such a good little billionaire.

Because I still had a ways to go before the bus reached Herald Square, I decided to get specific by googling “Giancarlo Luxford boyfriend.”

Purely because I’m nosey.

No photos of Giano with another man came up—not even gossipy speculation—which meant he kept his “not heterosexual in the least” status close to the chest.