Reckless Night Read Free Page B

my darling. I went off to arrange… your Christmas present.” Grace’s eyes rolled as she stifled a sigh. The eternal question. What could he give her? He asked her that a thousand times a day, and at each birthday, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, he visibly suffered.

    What could he give her?

    Nothing.

    She had everything she could possibly desire. A husband who loved her and whose love was made visible and tangible every second of every day. A beautiful home on a tropical island. Time and space to paint.

    What else could she possibly want or need?

    Certainly not the expensive baubles he kept trying to give her.

    “Not another diamond?” she asked suspiciously. The last one was so big it weighed down her hand and nearly blinded her whenever they were in sunshine, which was every day in Sivuatu. After a week, it went back into its box and into a wall safe that held about a hundred of its kin.

    He laughed. “You are perhaps the only woman in the world who doesn’t want diamonds, my beloved. Actively dislikes them.”

    “I don’t dislike them,” Grace murmured.

    Diamonds were rocks. Big, shiny rocks whose only purpose was to attract a huge amount of attention. A woman draped in expensive jewelry was the object of envy, sometimes hatred. The opposite of what they needed. To save their lives, they needed to fly under everyone’s radar.

    Drake realized in theory but not in practice that ordinariness was a protective cloak around them, one she tried to pull over them at every opportunity.

    Being ordinary protected them. In New York, Drake had lived large, albeit away from prying eyes, but with an outrageous degree of luxury. And all the tight security in the world, the armed guards and bulletproof windows hadn’t been enough to save him because his enemies knew he was there.

    They’d gone to a great deal of trouble and effort to convince his enemies that he was dead. So why attract attention with an outrageously fancy home, high living, jewels, and super expensive designer clothes?

    It was insane, suicidal.

    “Diamonds attract attention, and we don’t want that, my love.” She twined her arms around his neck and kissed him just below the ear, a spot she knew from experience would make him shudder.

    A h, yes.

    “I don’t need diamonds,” she whispered in his ear. “I need you.” He had his arm around her waist, holding her tightly to him and she felt him rise urgently against her stomach.

    To her surprise, instead of taking her down to the ground, or over to the sofa, he stepped away with a secretive smile.

    “So. All right.” His voice had that slight guttural tone of arousal and she could seehow sexually excited he was.

    Nonetheless, he kept himself out of arm’s reach and handed her three sheets of paper. “Here’s your Christmas present, two days early.”

    Puzzled, she took the sheets, reading carefully, not understanding until—all of a sudden—she understood.

    Her eyes widened as she lifted them to her husband in shock. He was smiling. “A re these—” she held up the sheets of perfectly ordinary photocopy paper. “Are these for real? For—for us?”

    “Oh yes,” he answered softly. “In another name, of course.”

    “Of course.”

    They’d had several identities since their “death,” and continued to have them. For example, she ordered hard copy books from Amazon to be delivered to Australia, then flown in to their island by her husband’s airline under one fictitious name and credit card, and ebooks set up on her Kindle account under another fictitious name and fictitious credit card.

    “These are—” A ll of a sudden her hands shook, the paper rattling. “These are tickets to Aida at the Sydney Opera House, to a showing of Phantom of the Opera and to a showing of Cirque du Soleil,” she whispered. “All in Sydney.”

    “They are all right?” Drake asked suddenly with a frown. “On the website it said that there were live elephants onstage at the Aida.