Hale looked at Gabrielle and gestured at Kat. “She’s adorable when she’s jealous.” Kat kicked his shin. “Hey! It had to be done, remember? And contrary to popular belief, I don’t know that many girls.” They both stared at him. “Okay, I don’t know that many girls who have your special skills.”
Gabrielle batted her eyelashes. “Oh, you do know how to make a girl feel special.”
But Kat . . . Kat felt like a fool.
She looked at Hale. “I’ll see you at the hotel.” She turned to her cousin. “And I’ll see you at Christmas or at one of your mother’s weddings or . . . something. Thanks for coming, Gabrielle. But I’m sure there’s a beach somewhere that wishes you were on it, so I’ll let you get back to your business and I’ll get back to mine.”
She had almost made it to the corner when her cousin called, “You think you’re the only person in the world who loves your dad?”
Kat stopped and studied Gabrielle. For the first time in her life, she could have sworn her cousin wasn’t trying to con her. By the time Gabrielle was seven, she had been trained to call five different men daddy. There was an oil tycoon from Texas, a billionaire from Brazil, a man with a very unfortunate overbite who did something for the Paraguayan government, which oversaw the import/export of a highly overpriced fake Monet or two, but none of them had been her father.
“You need me,” Gabrielle said. There was no doubt in her voice. No flirt. No ditz. She was in every way Uncle Eddie’s great-niece. A pro. A con. A thief. “Like it or not, Kitty Kat, the reunion starts now.”
Kat sat quietly as Gabrielle parked a tiny European car on the side of a winding country road. There were no headlights, no sounds. As Kat opened the door and stepped outside, she felt a cool damp breeze, and looked up at a dark starless sky. A thief couldn’t ask for anything more.
“Tell me again why I had to ride in the backseat.” Hale stretched and stared down at her.
“The billionaire always rides in the back, big guy.” She reached to pat him on the chest, but before she could pull away, he caught her wrist and held her gloved hand against his pounding heart.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” he asked.
There were a million lies Kat could have told, but none more powerful than the truth. “This is our only idea.”
While Gabrielle popped the hood and disabled the engine so that no roaming guards or passing busybodies would stop to ask questions, Kat kept her gaze locked with Hale’s. In that moment, he looked a lot like the boy in the Superman pajamas. Scared but determined, and maybe just a little bit heroic.
“Kat, I—”
“Coming?” Gabrielle’s whisper sliced through the night, cutting off whatever Hale was about to say. Kat was left with no choice but to turn and start up the steep embankment, shrouded in inky darkness, fallen branches sounding like firecrackers as they snapped underfoot.
* * *
“Oops,” Kat said ten minutes later, stumbling for what felt like the millionth time. She didn’t know what was worse, that Hale had had to steady her, or that Gabrielle was witnessing her clumsiness.
She kept waiting for her cousin to say Kat’s out of practice. She was sure Hale was about to joke that the Colgan School’s physical education curriculum was sorely lacking in practical application. But no one said a word as they made their way to the top of a tall hill, climbing steadily until Gabrielle came to a sudden stop. Kat almost collided with her cousin as she pointed and said, “That’s it.”
Even at night, even from this distance, anyone could see that Arturo Taccone’s home was really a palace made of stone and wood, surrounded by vineyards and olive trees. A postcard paradise. But what Kat noticed were the guards and the towers, the walls and the gates. It was no paradise—it was more like a prison.
The grass was damp against their stomachs as the three of them lay at the top of the hill, looking down on the villa below. Kat hated to admit it, but Gabrielle was absolutely right: you did have to see it to believe it. The day before, when they had spread out the blueprints for Simon to study, Kat had thought Arturo Taccone’s home was one of the hardest targets she’d ever seen. But when the dark clouds parted for a moment, and the moon shone like a spotlight on the moat, Kat realized that only a fool would approach those walls.
“Groundhog?” Hale asked.
“No time,” Kat replied. “The tunneling alone would take days, and Taccone wouldn’t leave these woods unpatrolled for that long.”
“Fallen Angel?”
“Maybe,” Kat answered, looking to the sky. “But even on a night with no moon, that inner courtyard is awfully small to risk someone seeing you or your parachute. And no one builds guard towers if they aren’t going to fill them with guards.”
“With guns,” Gabrielle added.
Kat watched her cousin turn onto her back, rest her head on her arms, and stare up at the black clouds that filled the sky. She might as well have been lying on a beach or in her own bed for all the ease she exhibited. But Kat’s feet ached from the run through the woods. Her black ski cap was too tight and itchy. Kat was wondering what exactly it was that Hale smelled like, and whether or not she liked it.
Kat didn’t know how to rob Arturo Taccone.
So Kat didn’t know how anyone could have robbed Arturo Taccone.
And that was what she hated most of all.
“So someone either Trojan Horsed or Avon Ladied or . . .” Hale was going on, still listing options, but Kat was through speculating; she didn’t dare to guess. Instead, she was recalling the words Hale had said to Simon: It’s not an ordinary job. Kat was realizing that maybe it couldn’t be done by an ordinary thief.