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didn’t smile—couldn’t quite pull it off. “I guess I fell into the moment.”
    And leaving her there with her knees trembling, he retrieved his camera.
    He strapped it back on, picked up the shopping bag, then with his eyes on hers, held out a hand. “Let’s go.”
    She’d almost forgotten the purpose, almost forgotten the plan. With a nod, she fell into step with him.
    When they reached the gates of the old palace, he tugged the guidebook out of his back pocket, like a good tourist.
    “It was built in 1255,” he told her. “From the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century it was a prison. Executions were carried out in the courtyard.”
    “Apt under the circumstances,” she muttered. “And I know the history.”
    “Dr. Jones knows the history.” He gave her butt an affectionate pat. “Abby, honey.”
    The minute they were inside the principal ground-floor room, he dug out his video camera. “Great place, isn’t it, Abby? Look at this guy—he’s knocked back a few, huh?”
    He aimed the camera at the glorious bronze of the drunken Bacchus, then began to slowly pan the room. “Wait until Jack and Sally see these. They’ll be green.”
    He swung the camera toward a doorway where a guard sat keeping an eye on the visitors. “Wander around,” he told her under his breath. “Look awed and middle-class.”
    Her palms were sweating. It was ridiculous, of course. They had a perfect right to be here. No one could possibly know what was going on inside her head. But her heart pounded painfully in her throat as she circled the room.
    “Wonderfully awful, isn’t it?”

    She jolted a little when he came up beside her as she pretended to study Bandinelli’s Adam and Eve . “It’s an important piece of the era.”
    “Only because it’s old. It looks like a couple of suburbanites who hang out at a nudist colony every other weekend. Let’s go see Giambologna’s birds in the loggia.”
    After an hour, Miranda began to suspect that a great deal of criminal activity involved the tedious. They went into every public room, capturing every inch and angle on camera. Still, she’d forgotten that the Sala dei Bronzetti held Italy’s finest collection of small Renaissance bronzes. Because it made her think of the David, her nerves began to twitch again.
    “Haven’t you got enough yet?”
    “Nearly. Go flirt with the guard over there.”
    “I beg your pardon.”
    “Get his attention.” Ryan lowered the camera and briskly undid the top two buttons on Miranda’s crisp cotton blouse.
    “What do you think you’re doing?”
    “Making sure his attention’s focused on you, cara . Ask him some questions, use bad guidebook Italian, bat your eyes and make him feel important.”
    “What are you going to do?”
    “Nothing if you can’t hold his eye for five minutes. Give me that long, ask him where the bathroom is, then head there. Meet me back in the courtyard in ten.”
    “But—”
    “Do it.” He snapped it out, with a flick of steel. “There’s just enough people in here that I should be able to pull this off.”
    “Oh God. All right.” Her stomach tilted down toward her shaky knees as she turned away to approach the guard.
    “Ah. . . scusi, ” she began, giving the word a hard American accent. “Per favore . . . ” She watched the guard’s eyes dip to the opening of her blouse, then skim back up to her face with a smile. She swallowed hard, then spread her hands helplessly. “English?”
    “ Sì, signora, a little.”

    “Oh, wonderful.” She experimented with fluttering her lashes and saw by the warming of the guard’s smile that such pitiful ploys actually worked. “I studied up on Italian before I left, but it just gets all jumbled up in my mind. Such a scatterbrain. It’s terrible, isn’t it, that Americans don’t speak a second language the way most Europeans do?”
    The way his eyes were glazing, she deduced she was speaking much too quickly for him to follow. All the better. “Everything’s so beautiful here. I wonder if you could tell me anything about . . .” She chose a sculpture at random.
    Ryan waited until he saw the guard’s focus fix on Miranda’s cleavage, then slipping back, he took a thin pick out of his pocket and went to work on a side door.
    It was easy enough, even dealing with it behind his back. The museum hardly expected its visitors to come armed with lockpicks or to want entrance to locked rooms in broad daylight.
    The floor plan of the