Page 72 of Sweet Revenge
“You stole from a museum?”
Declan pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “No one is judging you here.”
“I’m kind of impressed,” Finn replied, coaxing a wan smile out of her.
“I flew private because it’s easier security, and I stayed in a suite at the Royal Mansour in Marrakech. The file made it sound like I’d be in and out in a matter of days, but the schedule was wrong.”
“What schedule?” Brogan asked.
“The file Peter gave me had a delivery schedule of when the pieces I needed were going to be coming into the museum, but it wasn’t even close to accurate. I had to wait weeks for the shipments to start arriving, and even then, they didn’t arrive in the right order.”
“Is that normal? To get so much information about a job?” Cait wondered.
Evie shook her head. “No. But I thought the guy was really thorough or something, and with everything that happened after, I just wanted to be done with it, so I didn’t dig into it any further. I told Will I wouldn’t take any other jobs from him and left it at that.”
“So the schedule was probably a setup. What else? That’s a lot of time to kill when you only expected to be there for a few days.”
Evie’s fingers stilled on her forehead, and she jerked her head up to meet Declan’s gaze.
“What?”
“Well”—she shifted in her seat—“there was one way I found to pass the time. A waiter.”
Declan tensed, his hand tightening on hers, but he forced himself to relax. Every detail was important. Even if he’d rather gouge his eye out with a rusty spoon than listen to her talk about one of her lovers.
“Go ahead.” He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze, lips curving when she squeezed back.
“I’d been there for nearly a week, and I was getting bored. Bored and pissed off that it was taking so damn long. I called Will that day and told him if the shipments didn’t start arriving soon, I was gone, and I was keeping the deposit.”
“Where did you call him from?”
Evie frowned. “My hotel room, I think? No.” She shook her head. “From a restaurant. I was sitting at an outside table when I called him. I told him I was wasting time and bleeding money, and if a shipment didn’t arrive by the next day, I was done. Almost as soon as I hung up with William, he came over to take my order.”
Declan shared a knowing look with Brogan.
“God, I feel so stupid that I never put it together before.”
“What next? How’d you go from waiter and patron to lovers?”
“Is that really necessary?” Evie wondered.
“Yes,” Declan replied softly.
Evie sighed. “I don’t know. He was hot. I was bored. His English was better than my Arabic, and he flirted with me. We left together at the end of his shift and went back to my hotel room. The next day a shipment came in.”
“But you were there for another two weeks after that.”
“Yeah.” Evie shook her head. “They came sporadically every few days. I thought it was weird, but the file said it was a rare collection of artifacts, so I figured maybe the museum was being overly cautious by staggering the shipments.”
“It’s possible. Not likely,” Brogan added, “but possible.”
“Whenever there was a lull in shipments, I’d spend my free time with Ahmet.” She frowned, rubbing her forehead again.
“What is it?” Finn prompted when she didn’t continue.
“One night, toward the end of the trip, we were walking back from this street fair he took me to. Someone recognized him and stopped us, but they didn’t call him Ahmet. They called him Demir.”
“What did he do?”
