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she settled into the exciting rhythm of bids and nodding and the outbursts of applause and commentary. Funny, the last time she’d done this, her heart had been going a million miles an hour while she waited for somebody to make the winning bid on a particularly valuable Degas so the staff would return it to its secure location in the basement. And then she’d gone to work.
    With a slight smile at the memory, she returned to gazing at New York’s uppermost upper crust. Some of them were definitely old money, but even if they weren’t regular newsmakers, she knew who they were. She’d relieved at least a dozen of them of some valuable or other in the course of her career. Halfway back on the far side of the room her eyes found a figure standing in the shadow of one of the modern sculptures up for bid. Medium height, thin, wiry build, light brown hair running to gray, and an expensive-looking, tasteful suit, he fit the room as well as anyone else did—except for his hands.
    Long fingers twiddled, tapping his thighs in a rhythmthat had more to do with nerves than with Ian Smythe’s melodious, cajoling voice or the bang of the auctioneer’s gavel. As though sensing her gaze, he turned and looked straight at her, brown eyes into her green ones, then faced forward again.
    She’d known those eyes for all but the last six years of her life. Martin Reese Jellicoe.
    Samantha lurched forward, gasping forcefully enough that she could hear the ragged shake of her own breath. Her heart just stopped. Her fingers abruptly went ice-cold, and her purse clattered to the floor at her feet. Even in the drone of noise from the large room, it seemed loud.
    “Samantha?” Richard murmured, glancing sideways at her before he bent down to collect her handbag and return it to her lap. “Sam? What is it?”
    Get it together, get it together . Just because a ghost stood thirty feet from her and she’d lost her mind and she needed to scream and throw up and run away to somewhere quiet where she could think , didn’t mean she had to let anyone else know. “Sorry,” she drawled back. “All these dollar figures are making me giddy.”
    He chuckled softly. “Wait till you hear me get going.”
    Samantha barely noted what he said. She took a slower breath. Waiting long enough so no one would notice that her attention was focused on a particular someone in the audience rather than on the auction, she looked back into the shadow again. She’d more than half thought she’d be gazing at empty space, but he was still standing there.
    Holy fucking shit. Her father—her father —was at Sotheby’s. Her dead father. The one who’d died in a Florida prison three years ago, and whose cheap prison-grounds burial she’d watched through binoculars from a half mile away. Martin Jellicoe might have been a hell of a cat burglar at onetime, but even at his peak he couldn’t have faked his own death. Escape, sure—that was how he’d ended up at the Okeechobee Correctional Institution, the third and highest-security prison that had attempted to hold him.
    Trying to keep her breathing steady and her heart from pounding right through her rib cage, Samantha reached into her purse and fingered her cell phone. Who was she supposed to call, though? The Florida State Board of Corrections? The Ghostbusters? Stoney? If Stoney had known about this…She couldn’t imagine that he could know and not tell her. Not after all that they’d been through together. But then her father knew, obviously, and he’d been somewhere other than six feet under for the past three years. And for the past five months she’d had a very public address. If he’d bothered to contact her, she probably would have remembered.
    “Here we go,” Rick said beside her.
    She jumped. “What?”
    “The Rodin.” He sent her a half-annoyed look. “Do try to stay awake. I, at the least, find this to be rather exciting.”
    “So do I,” she countered, shaking herself again. It would be so