Page 3 of Under Arthur’s Protection

“I think you’re looking for—” The words died in my throat when I saw him.

He stopped.

I stared.

Oh shit.

Lance Collins. He was tall, too, with light brown hair and friendly eyes. The same warm grin he always wore spread across his face as recognition landed. He looked good. He always looked good. That had not been the problem.

“Lance.”

“Gwen Lyons.” He strode over to me, took my hand that I hadn’t offered, and kissed my cheek. His lips lingered just long enough for his cologne to rewind my brain two years. “It’s been too long.”

“It has.” It hadn’t.

We’d dated for a few months while he was on a security contract in New York City. When his contract wrapped up, neither of us brought up long-distance. There’d been no hard feelings. No real feelings at all, and that had been the actual problem.

“Hey, Lance,” said Arthur, as he reentered the room. “Thought you’d never get here. You met the arms expert?”

“Oh yeah,” Lance said with that stupid, irrepressible grin. “Gwen and I go back.”

Arthur Penn was with Round Table Security. And Lance worked with him?

Arthur and Lancelot?

Shit.

Before I died of embarrassment in front of my ex—and his co-worker I’d been ogling—Sam joined us.

“Now that we’re all here,” she said, “let me explain the project.”

Chapter 2

Arthur

Samantha was explaining the FBI contract when my attention slid away from her for the third time.

Dr. Gwen Lyons was slender, with shoulder-length wavy brown hair and the most stunning hazel eyes. She stood by the sword’s table, glancing up at Sam between notes. She’d pulled her hair back sometime after we’d left her alone, and the change exposed the curve of her long neck.

Fuck, Penn, what are you doing?

Sam continued, and I forced myself to listen. “The Detroit raid netted over two hundred assets. The FBI kept most of them in-house, but farmed out the pieces that needed specialized authentication. We received thirteen paintings and the sword.”

“It made the national news,” I said, “but it was buried under a busy week. General knowledge won’t be the risk—it will be the people who’d consigned the items to the auction.”

“And any criminal who thinks they can weasel their way into a bigger network by recovering one of the items for the original owners.” Sam turned and walked along the wall of paintings in their tidy storage slots.

“I expect your security is fairly solid?”

She nodded absently and pulled out a two-foot-tall painting of a man in a blue suit. “If this one’s authentic, I’d estimate its worth around five hundred thousand.”

There were easily two hundred paintings in slots along the wall. If someone were searching for something from the auction, nothing on the slots said which ones were which. “Is that a normal value for this office?”

“Normal enough,” she said as she slid it back into its spot. “We carry a thirty-million-dollar blanket insurance policy for damage to the paintings, but since our usual fare is contracted by owners⁠—”

“—the theft angle isn’t usually as big an issue?” I finished for her.

“Precisely. We have a temporary increase the FBI is underwriting a portion of. They’ve okayed the security systems, but I’d rather have a second opinion.”