Or both.
In spades.
He paused with the beer bottle halfway to his mouth, his gaze riveted to the navy-blue-and-white-striped, peep-toe spectator pump descending from out of the passenger side door of the Land Cruiser. The shoe was elegant, expensive, leather, and handmade, and it encased a sweetly feminine foot whose arched lines extended up a delicate ankle, a silken calf, a slender, cream-colored thigh that hit him where it hurt, all the way up to the leading edge of a tight navy blue dress that wrapped and swirled its way up the most dangerous set of curves Dax had seen since…since he didn’t remember when.
On second thought, he did remember when.
His gaze narrowed, zeroing in on the woman and cataloguing every square centimeter of her lush female form, every brass button marching down the front of her short cropped jacket, every perfectly tailored fold and sweep of the navy blue dress so lovingly molded to her body, every inch of blindingly white piping accenting the suit, right up to the tortoiseshell sunglasses on her face and the elegantly broad-brimmed white Panama hat set at a rakish angle on her head. Her richly colored hair was swept up under the hat, but there were enough silken auburn strands drifting down the nape of her neck to tell him he was in way more trouble than he had bargained for-more than a boatload, more than made sense.
He carefully set his beer back on the table, untouched. There weren’t many women built like the one getting out of the Land Cruiser, but he knew one. He knew one with that exact set of cyclone curves and auburn hair.
Geezus.
He didn’t believe in the impossible, any more than he believed in the immortal powers of the Sphinx. But there she was, straight out of his dreams, the headliner of his fantasies, the girl who’d stood him up at Duffy’s Bar in Denver six months ago, the one whose presence here told him more about her than he’d unearthed in all his months of investigation-and everything it told him set every nerve ending he had on full redline alert.
He didn’t take her picture. He didn’t need to take her picture. He knew exactly who she was, and he knew it because the first time he’d laid eyes on her, she’d lit him up like a flare. It had been pure, unadulterated lust, and in six long months, he hadn’t recovered from the smackdown, not even close-Suzanna Royale Toussi, born and raised in San Francisco, educated at the University of Southern California in Santa Barbara, lately of Denver, Colorado. Hell, he had copies of her résumé, her biography, her birth certificate, and her college transcripts. He even had a copy of the application for her first Small Business Administration loan for her first art gallery. He knew her GPA, her favorite color, the name of her first husband-some guy in Australia-and her second, the dates of her divorces, and her shoe size. What he didn’t know was what she was doing in Ciudad del Este, in front of the Old Gallery, with damn Jimmy Ruiz.
But he had a pretty good idea, and it set his teeth on edge.
Sonuvabitch.
He was unbelievable. Out of all the girls in all the world, he’d had to get himself just a little bit fixated on one who was on the wrong side of the game. It didn’t matter that in the case of the Memphis Sphinx, he was working out in left field, too. He had his reasons, and sweating it out at a hundred and one in the shade in Ciudad del Este, he didn’t care one way or the other about the twelve-to-one odds piling up in the Galeria Viejo, or what really happened to the friggin’ Memphis Sphinx, or whether or not it really had any occult powers-but he cared very much about the information Erich Warner had used to rope him into this deal.
He also-dammit-cared about the drop-dead-gorgeous redhead shrink-wrapped in that damn sailor suit.
He shouldn’t.
She’d gotten herself here. He was sure she could get herself back out. Without a doubt, she knew a helluva lot more about what she was doing in this scrap heap than he did, and it pissed him off to think he had read her so wrong. He wasn’t here to save a wayward art dealer who was putting her ass on the line to dabble in illegal antiquities.
But, geezus, what an ass.
Her second foot hit the pavement, and with just the slightest wiggle, she readjusted the skirt of her dress.
Slight.
Right.
He felt that little wiggle from his heart to his groin.
He knew better.
So help him, God, he knew better.
So why in the hell was he dropping a wad of bills on the table and getting ready to cross the street?
CHAPTER TWO
Well, things were going just great, Suzi thought, standing at the entrance of the notorious Galeria Viejo, possibly the dumpiest, dirtiest, most squalid place she’d ever stood in her life. Or at least things had been going great-spectacularly great. She hadn’t had any delays on the flights getting from Dulles to the Guarani International Airport in Ciudad del Este. Her hotel, the heavily guarded Gran Chaco, was first-class, her suite gorgeous and overlooking the luxury establishment’s tropical garden and courtyard pool area. The light lunch she’d had delivered via room service had been impeccably prepared. Jimmy Ruiz had shown up on time, nervous and unkempt, but also well armed and accommodating. She hadn’t had a single problem since she’d left General Grant in his office at the Marsh Annex in Washington -until now.
This was a problem.
“No,” she said, very clearly, lowering her sunglasses partway down her nose and giving the ape blocking the door of Galeria Viejo her steeliest gaze. He wasn’t frisking her, not this side of the grave. Oh, hell no.
Next to her, Jimmy Ruiz was talking a mile a minute to ape number two, but without getting much affect, despite the addition of dramatic hand gestures.
He needed to get some affect.
She understood that he’d brought her here under duress. She hadn’t been shy about threatening him with certain agents of the U.S. government, who had been investigating his dealings with a U.S. Treasury agent recently transferred out of Paraguay and currently under indictment for charges ranging from tax evasion to treason.
But Ruiz needed to make her position clear, crystal clear, or he wouldn’t see the light of day for another twenty years, if then.
“Who do they work for?” she asked in English, interrupting his tirade. Ruiz had short dark hair, a medium build, a cheap brown suit that fit him like an old paper bag, and a rap sheet a mile long.
“The two out here, for Esteban Ponce,” Jimmy said, meeting her gaze with a brief glance. “The one just inside the door, staring at us, for Señor Levi Asher.”
Yes, she thought she’d recognized the hulking man standing in the shadowy interior of the gallery. His name was Gervais.
“Señor Asher is from New York,” Jimmy was saying.
New York, London, Athens, Cairo, she thought. She and Levi the Pervert went way back in the art trade, and the minute she’d seen that photograph in General Grant’s office, she’d have laid a thousand dollars down on Levi being in Paraguay. That boy had been after the Memphis Sphinx for as long as she’d known him.
“Esteban Ponce is a very important man from Brazil,” Jimmy finished up.
Actually, Esteban Ponce was an idiot, but a dangerous idiot, one of the people she’d meant when she’d told Grant that some people would kill for the Sphinx. The Maned Sphinx of Sesostris III had been a lightning rod for true believers, lost souls, and avaricious charlatans of all stripes for over a century, with immortality as the prize. People got a little crazy when life everlasting was put on the auction block, especially people who were a little crazy to begin with-like Esteban Ponce.
Both Ponce and Asher had been noted and highlighted in the DIA files she’d read on the plane, along with half a dozen other collectors and dealers, some of whom she knew, some she didn’t. The DIA Moonrise team had compiled quite a number of lists concerning the Memphis Sphinx, not least of which were the things she shouldn’t do if by chance she actually got her hands on it: Do not hold the statue up into the moonlight on the night of the third full moon in the year of Horus, as immortality may be imparted to the holder. Do not drench the statue in blood on the night of the third full moon in the year of Horus and set it on a corpse, as resurrection may result. Do not take the statue apart.