Page 36 of Tracking Luxe

She told herself she liked the rush, the adrenalin her drug. But that wasn’t entirely true.

She was good, extremely good at taking things that didn’t belong to her and making them hers, it didn’t mean she didn’t have a brain, that she couldn’t do a normal every day job if she wanted to, join the ranks of every other American and the 9-5 society.

But the rush she once experienced in her earlier days, those random highs she chased from one reckless job to the next, was long gone.

Monotonous repetitive, it was all the same noise now.

This one last big job, it could set her up for a good while.

Whereas once she would take foolish risks and somehow walk away unscathed, these days her planning took much longer, she weighed pros against cons and drew up a strategy long before she even attempted to put her hands on something that didn’t belong to her.

Maybe she could be called a business woman now.

She did rather fancy having people working for her instead of doing all the dirty work herself.

Maybe the kidnapper would help her in more ways than one.

Especially now as she’d recalled just how she’d stolen from him and the reason she hadn’t returned to the bar that night and finished what they’d started between them. It all made sense now, and she could understand a slither of his anger.

Luxe met Grinder on the corner of Westmeadow drive. An uninteresting suburbia street where kids played in the street and where absolutely no Russian Mafia would be hanging around to see her meet with him.

It was all very cloak and dagger and gave her a tiny thrill of old.

His bike pulled up beside her Lincoln. The way he slung his leg over the seat and stood to his full height caused a riot inside her underwear, she shamelessly watched him pull off his helmet, hooking it on the handlebars, it was the first time she’d fully seen him without the black beanie hat in daylight andwow... How much more handsome he became, his hair going in all directions, he simply used his long-tapered fingers to tame it before he slid into her passenger seat, closing them in together.

The car instantly became too small.

“Did we really have to meet out here in the sticks? I feel like you want to give me a code name next...”

“I don’t take risks.”

He mocked. “You did last night sneaking into their building for all and sundry to see, you might as well have announced you were there to steal their gold bars.”

She brushed off the accusation, knowing he was right. It had been sloppy.

For the next thirty minutes, they were all business. Discussing back and forth what she needed from him, what he could do and when. It surprisingly went well, they agreed on most everything. It was a shock they thought alike.

“How do you propose to get huge as fuck paintings out from under their noses?”

“They’re not traditional paintings you’d see in a museum. They’re sketches in a small protective tube about so big.” Luxe held her hands out ten inches apart.

“And you have someone who wants to have these sketches?” his brow curled up mockingly. “People are fucking weird.”

“They’re worth a lot. Therefore, I want them. And the Russian guy stole them first.”

“And you know they have them… because?”

“It pays to know everything in my line of work, Nathan. Who has what. The whys never matter, only how you can extract it from them is what’s important. I heard who had them and followed their trail here from New York.”

“You realize who they are, right? You don’t fuck with thebratvaand live to tell the tale at supper time.”

She knew this was the riskiest job she’d ever pull off. But if she did it, her and Mimi would be set, no more risky jobs.

“We all have to die sometime,sí?”

Grinder growled and she felt the noise of his disapproval in her belly. Resisting the urge to squirm or to recall every detail she’d tipsily done last night on his lap, on his mouth, she started up the engine.

Giving him a not so subtle clue it was time for him to go.

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