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“I have to admit I was a little surprised when you showed up at my apartment,” she said, feeling suddenly a bit shy. “It wasn’t as if we knew each other well.”
He didn’t smile when he looked at her, and something in his eyes made her pulse trip. “That was always a situation I had hoped to remedy.”
Tara suddenly found herself having difficulty breathing normally. Blake had been interested in her before she’d left the law firm? All those times during the past couple of years when he’d stopped by her desk with a smile and a teasing remark, she’d told herself that he did so only to be polite. That she’d been no more special to him than the other associates in the firm, all of whom he never failed to greet with equal charm.
Had he really looked at her differently?
Blake exhaled and looked away, breaking the sudden taut silence between them. “This really isn’t the time to get into that,” he said. “First, we have to get out of this mess I’ve gotten us into.”
Tara tried to speak normally. “What do we do next?”
“I still think the missing art is the key,” he muttered, rubbing the back of his neck. “If we could get a lead on what happened to it, we might be a little closer to finding out why we’re being set up for a murder charge.”
“‘They knew,”’ Tara murmured, remembering the dying man’s last words again. “‘The paintings were...”’ She shook her head. “The paintings were what? Stolen? Everyone knew that.”
Blake pulled absently at his lower lip, lost in thought.
Needing something to do—anything to distract her from Blake’s admission that he’d found her attractive—Tara busied herself neatly repacking the duffel bag. The suit Blake had worn last evening. Her own dinner suit, now sadly crumpled.
She shook out the skirt, folded it, and laid it in the bag. And then she picked up the jacket. Remembering that she’d put her pearl necklace into one of the pockets, she felt a sudden need to make sure it was still safe. Maybe because she had so few of her own possessions with her, she needed to keep track of those she had. She plunged her hand into the left pocket, unable to recall which pocket she’d put the necklace in.
But rather than the strand of pearls, she pulled out a crumpled white envelope.
She stared at it blankly, knowing that it hadn’t been there when she’d left for the art gallery. And suddenly she held it more gingerly, as if it might explode in her hand.
“Tara? What’s wrong? What’s that in your hand?” she heard Blake ask from behind her.
She turned to find him watching her closely.
“I found this in my jacket pocket,” she said. “It wasn’t there when I put the suit on.”
Blake frowned and looked hard at the envelope. “You’re sure?”
“I’m positive. I don’t know where it came from.”
“Do you mind if I see it?”
She handed it to him. He turned it over a couple of times, studying it. As far as Tara could see, it was a sealed, legal-size envelope with no markings on the outside.
Blake took a penknife from his pocket and carefully slit the seal. As Tara watched, he pulled out two sheets of paper and scanned them intently.
A moment later, he muttered a curse. “Where did this come from?”
“I told you, I don’t know. I found it in my jacket pocket just now. I have no idea who put it there, or when.”
Blake looked up from the papers, his gaze intent on her face. “You said you knelt beside the man on the floor. Could he have put it in your pocket then?”
Tara remembered the man groping weakly at her jacket as he lay beside her. Could he?
She covered her mouth with her hand, suddenly remembering something else—Botkin’s lingering pat on her hip that she’d found so puzzling and offensive. But then she’d forgotten all about it when she’d found the same man lying in his own blood on the floor of the back office.
Blake eyed her expression closely. “You remembered something?”
She nodded. “I think Botkin put it in my pocket when we were looking at that ugly brown-and-yellow painting. I, er, I thought he was patting my butt Apparently, he was slipping this into my pocket.”
“You thought he was...” Blake grinned fleetingly, then his face became sober. “So he put this in your pocket before the time he was supposed to meet me in that hallway. Which could mean that he suspected he was being watched.”
Tara bit her lip, remembering the man’s dying words. They knew.
