full. I’ll bring ’em by tomorrow.”
“You’re too good to me.”
“Nah. It’s Hank I love, not your ugly mug.”
Marvin’s lawnmower roared back to life, and Clementine replayed that brief interaction, unsure what to make of it. Another local appeared to be friends with Jack, the exchange between them beyond basic pleasantries. First, coffee-pouring-dog-walking Imelda, now cricket-collecting-mower-riding Marvin. It was as though Jack David was not only nice, but…well liked. This wasn’t the man she’d prepared to con. And the cricket comment had fresh sweat blotching her brow.
The only use she could think of for crickets could mean she and Jack had more in common than she’d bargained on.
“What’s with the crickets? Are you breeding reptiles?” She laughed at her not-quite- joke, a maniacal edge to the sound. He wasn’t allowed to own reptiles. Not when Clementine loved diapsids more than people. If he was feeding crickets to reptiles, it better be because he planned to slaughter and sauté them. Jack wasn’t allowed to be any more attractive.
“I don’t breed them,” Jack said, his cheeks burning redder. “I offer them sanctuary.”
Her heart stalled. The fumes of freshly cut grass stung her nose. She sneezed, taking the moment to bend forward and cover her face. This shy, apparently nice-when-not-firing-employees man, who looked hot as Elvis and fantastic in a damp dress shirt, owned reptiles. Plural. Not just one or two.
That twingy pinch in her chest worsened.
In her wildest dreams, she’d never have imagined him a fellow herpetoculturist. Not a man as dashing and handsome as him. Most reptile lovers were video-game fanatics who still lived with their parents and didn’t look fantastic in a damp shirt. Muggles twitched their noses and cringed when faced with ectothermic cuties.
Not reptile-saving Jack. The man she needed to deceive, for good reason.
Since her surge of guilt on recent jobs, Clementine had thought about her and Lucien’s trip to India, taken after a particularly lucrative heist. Spreading that much money around the United States had become risky. Lucien had wanted to show her how they could help abroad, how crucial it could be to orphanages. What she’d seen there had changed her life: sickness that could be healed with basic medicines, hunger that could be solved with a garden, fear easily cured with a sip of love. And, God, the overcrowding. Kids upon kids literally dying for a bed. Without Clementine and Lucien’s funding, the children turned away would be used, sold, abused.
Sharing more personal details with Jack was nothing in the face of that suffering, and giving up meant breaking into his family’s estate, a possibility that made her itch.
She knew the David estate’s address, but the structure was massive, and she didn’t have a blueprint or a clue to the painting’s location. Fumbling in a mansion that size led to screw-ups. She only needed the Van Gogh’s coordinates. Once she’d secured that, she’d drop off the radar, claim an emergency and leave Whichway for one of the surrounding towns. Three or four weeks later, she’d lift his painting under the cover of night—the biggest paying heist they’d ever performed. It was a longer con, but a safe one. That made her choice easy. As was her next move.
Pulling up to her full height, shoulders back and breasts out, she touched Jack’s forearm, not his hand. “Well then, our meeting must have been fate.”
Jack didn’t know where to look. If he focused on Clementine’s eyes, his mouth dried. If he caught sight of her ample cleavage, emphasized in her sports bra, his running shorts felt too snug. The sweat on her skin had his synapses misfiring, all signs pointing to trouble.
Like he was a gawky fifteen-year-old again.
“How exactly is our meeting fate?” he asked.
“Your reptiles.”
“My reptiles?”
“We’re both herps.”
His heart pressed against his ribs. The term wasn’t the sexiest of labels, but he’d never met a fellow herp, let alone a female herpetoculturist with strawberry-stained lips and a freckled nose, who could fix cars. He should step back, move so her fingers slipped from his forearm. He stepped forward. “How many reptiles do you have?”
“Just one.”
“What type?”
“A bearded dragon. A girl.”
“Did you travel with her?” The words thumped out of him, everything feeling thick and leaden. She stood enticingly close, this woman who loved reptiles.
Her soft breaths brushed his neck as she tilted up her chin. “No. I hate leaving her, but Lucy’s in good hands while I’m gone.”
A sharp pulse of blood flooded his veins. “Lucy…as in I Love Lucy?”
She smirked. “Indeed.”
Lucy. Bearded dragon. It didn’t seem