Too Wicked to Keep by Julie Leto Page A

head, then accepted the hand he offered to help her sit up.
    â€œNow?” she asked.
    â€œNo time like the present. Besides, if we don’t start talking business, I’m going to get down to business, if you know what I mean.”
    â€œAnd that’s a bad thing?”
    His eyes flared with consternation. “We’re taking it slow this time.”
    She nodded as if in agreement and then went to her desk to retrieve the file she’d collected on her painting. But when she sat beside him again, she skewered him with an indignant look.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œWhy what?”
    â€œWhy are we taking it slow? I mean, you’re only going to be here for a week, tops. If we can’t get mypainting back before the guy makes it public, then our plan is dead in the water and you have no reason to stay.”
    He slid the file in front of him and started pawing through the documents. “I might have a reason to stay.”
    â€œLike?”
    â€œYou.”
    â€œMe?”
    He groaned, probably because she was being purposefully dense. She knew what he meant—or at least, she thought she knew—but she couldn’t really wrap her mind around believing it.
    â€œDo you know what happened to me when you threw me out of your bedroom the night before your wedding?” he asked.
    He sounded angry, but somehow, his frustration did not seem focused on her.
    â€œI have no idea.”
    â€œI went to Mexico,” he said, his tone making it clear that he hated Mexico.
    â€œI’m…sorry?” she tried, not exactly certain what she was supposed to say.
    â€œYeah, so was I. A sorry mess. For a whole month, I survived on tequila and tortillas. I felt like crap for what I’d done to you, Abby, but even worse than that, I felt like I’d let myself down.”
    â€œI don’t understand.”
    From what she’d found out in the week between his stealing her painting and his reappearance on the eve of her wedding to Marshall, David Brandon, aka Danny Burnett, had established himself as one of the foremost art thieves in the country. His name was listed on several government-agency watch lists, as well as Interpol. Complaints against him came from many of the same people she dealt with in the art world—gallery owners,private collectors, museum curators. Seducing her so he could get his hands on an undiscovered painting by an increasingly popular artist, Bastien Pierre-Louis, had been a strategy he must have used before. So while she could understand how he’d let her down, for him, it had been business as usual.
    He shoved the file away and turned aside, cursing quietly, though it was loud enough for her to make out the word.
    â€œI shouldn’t have gotten personally involved with you, Abby. I never had before and I never have since.”
    Â 
    â€œB UT I WASN’T THE FIRST woman you seduced in order to steal something,” she guessed.
    Danny shook his head, wincing at the depths of her low opinion of him. Yes, he’d enjoyed a few brief affairs during some of his jobs. A spark of attraction had led to the gathering of important information like security procedures, secret hiding places or, as in Abby’s case, safe combination numbers. But he’d never gone out of his way to seduce the information out of a woman. He’d never immersed himself in learning everything about a woman’s past, habits, interests and vulnerabilities in order to exploit her.
    But the minute he’d first seen Abby, he’d known that’s what he had to do. Not because it was the only way to get the painting, which rarely—if ever—left the family vault. He had a million different ways to infiltrate security systems that didn’t include seducing the woman with the combination. But with Abby, he hadn’t been able to resist.
    Though moneyed and privileged, she possessed a kind of innocent naïveté that arrested his attention, but he