Island Getaway, An Art Crime Team Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page B

flashy or obvious, like
the women he usually found himself going out with. The dress was
beautiful but demure. The light blue silk didn’t dwarf her fine
features and pale complexion the way the dead black had done.
Instead, it played up the blue of her eyes, still hidden behind the
glasses, and set off the flaxen sheen of her hair. The neckline
framed her face and throat, draped over her breasts, and skimmed
her waist and hips to swirl around her calves. She wasn’t wearing
stockings, and her legs were smooth and pale, ending in a pair of
strappy silver sandals. They had low heels, and that was fine with
Nick; he’d seen her legs when she’d been kicking around on the
baggage carousel earlier, and he knew she didn’t need any extra
help. If she’d shown up for dinner in four inch heels, he might
just have passed out from the excitement.
    “You’re beautiful.”
    He could hear the surprise in his voice, and
wanted to kick himself, but she didn’t seem to mind. A blush
started at the neckline of the dress and traveled up to her cheeks
and all the way out to the roots of her hair. Clearly it was a long
time since anyone had treated this woman the way a woman should be
treated.
    Before he could say something else he’d
likely regret, he added, “Are you ready to go?”
    She nodded. Looked like he’d made her
speechless.
    “I made a reservation at Den Gyldene
Freden .” He put his hand against the small of her back, feeling
the silk slide under his palm, and guided her toward the outside.
“It’s just a few blocks from here. Would you like to walk, or
should I have the doorman get us a cab?”
    “Walk,” Annika managed, and he couldn’t tell
whether she was afraid of spending the extra money or whether she
simply wanted to look around more. She’d spent most of the day
wandering, but it was a nice night, and they were in a beautiful
place—Stockholm’s medieval Old Town—so it could just be the
latter.
    While they strolled along the cobblestoned
streets, he told her about the landmark he was taking her to. “It’s
located in one of the medieval buildings. And it belongs to the
Swedish Academy, the group that selects the winner of the Nobel
Prize in literature every year. The name of the place translates to the golden peace .”
    She glanced up at him, a bit shyly. “You
speak Swedish?”
    “My mother was Swedish,” Nick said. And
added, “And your father, I think you said?”
    She nodded. “I don’t speak the language,
though. He never taught us. I understand a little Danish, but it
isn’t the same.”
    No, it wasn’t. A native Scandinavian, like
Fredrik, could converse easily with people from the neighboring
countries, but Nick had always had a hard enough time just keeping
up with the Swedish. Once the Norwegians and Danes started talking,
he was lost. He knew there were similarities between the languages,
that they were close enough that the native speakers could
understand one another without problem, and he could recognize a
few words here and there himself too, but it wasn’t the same
language at all. Not to him.
    “Why Danish?” he asked now, as if he were
just any old businessman who’d happened to meet a nice woman at the
airport, and not an FBI agent who’d already dug up as much of her
past as he’d been able to find.
    She answered readily enough. “My mother was
Danish. She made sure we spoke the language for when we went to
visit family in Copenhagen when I was small.”
    “But your father didn’t?”
    Annika shook her head. “I don’t think I even
knew he was Swedish until I was a teenager. He never talked about
it.” She hesitated for a moment and added, “Now that I’m here, I
guess I could look into the family history. I’m sure there are
places I can go.”
    Nick was sure there were too, especially for
a librarian. But he found he didn’t want her to realize that her
father had been a thief and a murderer. If she didn’t already know,
she had enough on her plate