Steal Me

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A huge thank-you to all the usual suspects:

Nicole Resciniti, my fabulous agent, for always being there to talk me off the ledge.

For Lauren Plude, for gently nudging me back on track when my story ideas go in all the wrong directions.

For the entire Grand Central team, for the fabulous cover, the marketing support, and, of course, the production process that turns this from messy manuscript into beautiful book.

For my husband, for being understanding when I speak only “grunt and tantrums” when knee-deep in a story, and for my family and friends for understanding when I drop off the edge of the earth.

Lastly, for my super-secret NYPD source (and brother of one of my most darling readers), who helped me keep the “cop stuff” grounded.

F
or Captain Anthony Moretti, three things in life were sacred:

(1) Family.

(2) The NYPD.

(3) The New York Yankees.

And on this breezy, September Sunday morning, two out of these three things were making him crazy. Not in the good way.

“What do you mean, you don’t want to talk about it?” his father barked, leaning across the table to help himself to one of Anthony’s pieces of bacon.

Maria Moretti’s hand was deft and practiced—the mark of a mother of five—as she swiftly swatted the bacon out of her husband’s fingers. “The doctor said you were supposed to take it easy on the bacon!”

“I
am
taking it easy. This is Anthony’s bacon,” Tony clarified, rubbing the back of his hand.

“Is it?” Anthony muttered, glancing at the now empty plate. “I don’t seem to remember actually getting to eat any of it.”

His youngest brother and fellow cop stabbed a piece of fruit with his fork and waved it in Anthony’s face. “Cantaloupe?”

Anthony gave Luc a withering look. He could appreciate that his baby brother felt man enough to get a side of fruit with his Sunday brunch, but Anth would stick to potatoes and fatty pig products, thanks very much.

“I think I’m going to hurl,” his other brother, Vincent, said to no one. “Shouldn’t have gotten the side of pancakes. Too old for this shit.”

Anthony felt the beginnings of a headache.

Item number one on his priority list (family) was also the number one cause of his frequent
Please, God, take me away to a deserted tropical island
prayers.

But there was no tropical island. Just the same old shit.

For every one of Anthony’s thirty-six years, Sundays had looked exactly the same. All Morettis filed obediently into their pew at St. Ignatius Loyola Church on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for ten o’clock Mass.

Breakfast always followed, always at the same diner, although the name had changed a handful of times over the years.

The sign out front currently read
The Darby Diner
, named after…nobody knew.

But the Morettis had never cared what it was called. Or why it was called that. As long as the coffee was hot, the hash browns crispy, and the breakfast meats plentiful, they were happy.

Granted, the greasy-spoon food of the Darby Diner was a far cry from the Morettis’ usual fare of home-cooked Italian meals, but Anthony was pretty sure they all secretly loved the weekly foray into pure Americana cuisine. Even his mother didn’t seem to mind (much) so long as her family was all together.

“So what did you mean, you don’t want to talk about it?” Tony Moretti repeated, glancing down at Anthony’s plate and scowling to see the bacon supply completely depleted.

Anthony scooped a mouthful of Swiss cheese omelet into his mouth before sitting back and reaching for his coffee. “It means that Ma doesn’t like cop talk at the table.”

“
Riiiiight
,” Elena Moretti said from Anthony’s left side. “Because you guys
always
respect Mom’s no-cop-talk rule.”

Anth took another sip of coffee and exchanged a look and a shrug with Luc across the table.

Their sister made a good point.

In a family where four out of five siblings were living in New York, and three out of
those
four were with the NYPD, cop talk was likely.

And when the family patriarch was the recently retired police commissioner?

Cop talk wasn’t just probable, it was
inevitable
.

Still, it was worth a shot to throw up his mother’s token rule of “no cop talk.” Especially when he didn’t want to talk.

About any of it.

It had been a long time since he’d been the one in the hot seat, and he wasn’t at all sure that he cared for it.

Scratch that. He was sure.

He
hated
it.

But his father could be like a dog with a bone when it came to his sons’ careers. And today, like it or not, it was Anthony under the microscope.

He surrendered to the inevitable.

“Dad, I told you. It’ll get handled.” He went for another cup of coffee, only to find it was empty. Diner
fail
.

He scanned the dining room for the waitress, partially because he wanted more coffee, partially because he wanted a distraction. Partially because—

“You’ve been saying it’ll get
handled
for weeks,” Tony said, refusing to let the matter drop.

“Yeah,
Captain
. You’ve been saying that for weeks.” This from Anthony’s other brother Vincent. Two years younger than Anth, Vin was a homicide detective and the most irritable and irreverent member of the family. And the one least likely to kiss Anth’s ass.

If Anthony was totally honest, he was pretty sure that most of his younger siblings respected him, not only because he was the highest-ranking family member, but simply because he was the oldest. He was the one they’d come to when they needed to hide that broken vase from Mom, or when they were scared to death to tell Dad about that D in chemistry, or in the case of his brothers, when it was time to learn their way around the female anatomy.

But Vincent had authority issues and was always the first to jump at the chance to gently mock Anthony’s status as captain.

A title that had been hard earned and still felt new. As though it could be ripped away at any time.

Which was
exactly
the reason his father was on his ass right now. Anthony had passed his captain’s test three months ago, and his father had every intention of him climbing the ladder all the way to the top. The
very
top.

It was a path Anth had never questioned. A path that, up until recently, had been remarkably smooth.

And then…

And then
Smiley
had happened.

“Well surely you’ve got a couple leads to go on,” Tony said, leaning forward and fixing Anthony with a steady look.

Anthony looked right back, hoping the bold gaze would counteract the hard truth.
That Anth didn’t have a damn clue who or where Smiley was.

For the past two months—the majority of Anthony’s tenure as captain of the Twentieth Precinct—the Upper West Side had been plagued by a smug and relentless burglar.

Nickname?
Smiley
. Courtesy of the idiotic, yellow smiley-face sticker he left at each of his hits.

The plus side, if there was one, was that Smiley hadn’t proven dangerous. If it had been a
violent
criminal on the loose, Anth’s ass would have been on the line weeks ago.

But still. It had been eight weeks since Smiley’s first hit, and the man was getting bolder with each passing week, hitting three brownstones last week alone.

And Anth wasn’t even close to catching him. Neither was anyone else in the department. Hence why number two on his life priorities (the NYPD) was making him crazy.

“We’ll get him,” Anthony said curtly, referring to Smiley.

“You’d better,” Tony said. “The press has gotten ahold of it. It’ll only get bigger from here.”

“Yeah, thanks for the reminder,” Anthony muttered.

His phone buzzed, and a quick glance showed it was a text message from his grandmother, letting him know that she’d self-diagnosed herself with tuberculosis, but that whiskey might help and could he bring some by when he was done with breakfast.

Anth put the phone away without responding, picking up his coffee cup again. Still empty. “Damn it. Where the
hell
is what’s-her-name? Is it too much to ask to get some damn coffee around here?”

“Now there’s a good plan,” his sister mused. “Blame poor Maggie because you can’t catch a pip-squeak cat burglar.”

As if on cue,
poor Maggie
appeared at their table, coffeepot in hand.

“I’m so sorry,” the waitress said, a little breathless. “You all must have been waiting ages for more coffee.”

Anthony rolled his eyes, even as he snuck a glance at her. Her friendly smile was meant to hide the fact that she was frazzled, and for most of her customers, that apologetic, dimpled smile probably worked.

It
was
a damn good look on any woman, but especially her.

Maggie Walker had become their default waitress at the diner back when their old waitress, Helen, had retired a couple months ago. And while Anthony missed Helen and her too-strong floral perfume, he had to admit that Maggie was better to look at.

She had a wholesome, girl-next-door look that appealed to him mightily. Brown hair that was always on the verge of slipping out of its ponytail. Wide, compelling green eyes that made you want to unload all your darkest secrets.

Curvy. Hips that were exactly right; breasts that were even better.

And then there was that smile. It managed to be both shy and friendly, which was handy because he was betting it was very hard for even the most impatient customers to get annoyed at her.

But Anth didn’t buy the doing-my-best routine, and seeing as she was dealing with an entire table of observant cops, he was betting the rest of his family wouldn’t buy it either.

Then Luc leaned forward and gave Maggie an easy grin. “Don’t even worry about it, Mags. Didn’t even notice I was running low!”

Luc’s girlfriend, Ava, smoothly reached up one hand and swatted him on the back of the head, the gesture so graceful, so practiced, that she never once sloshed her coffee. Anthony nearly smiled.

To say that Ava Sims was good for his little brother would be an understatement. The big brother in Anthony would be forever grateful that the gorgeous reporter had helped Luc vanquish his demons. But the big brother in Anth was also grateful that Ava helped keep his younger brother in line. Or at least tried to.

He rolled his eyes as Luc shot a guilty smile at his girlfriend, even as he slid his mug toward the edge of the table so Maggie wouldn’t have to reach as far.

Then Anth watched in utter dismay as Vincent did the same.

Vincent
. The guy who’d practically devoted his life to being perverse was trying to make life easier for their inept waitress.

Un-fucking-believable.

Anthony was so busy trying to figure out what about the frazzled waitress turned his brothers into a bunch of softies that he didn’t think to move his own mug to be more convenient, and Maggie had to lean all the way in to top off his cup.

It was a feat that their
old
waitress could have handled readily, but for reasons that Anth didn’t understand, the rest of the Moretti family had embraced Maggie as Helen’s replacement.

Anthony didn’t realize that his mug had overflowed until scalding coffee dripped onto his thigh.

“Son of a—”

He caught himself before he could finish the expletive, grabbing a large handful of napkins from the silver dispenser and trying to soak up the puddle of coffee on his jeans before it burned his skin.

“Nice, Anth,” Elena said, tossing another bunch of napkins at him. Like this was
his
fault.

“Oh my God,” Maggie said, her voice horrified. “I’m
so
sorry, Officer…”

“It’s Captain,” he snapped, his eyes flicking up and meeting hers.

Silence descended over the table until Vincent muttered
douchebag
around a coughing fit.

But Anthony refused to feel chagrined. The woman had waited on the family every Sunday for weeks; one would think she could get his title right. To say nothing of mastering the art of pouring coffee.

Her green eyes flicked downward before turning away with promises to bring back a rag.

He watched her trim figure for only a second before glancing down at his lap. A rag wouldn’t do shit. He now had a huge brown stain on his jeans.

And this wasn’t the first time.

Last week, it had been ketchup on his shirt. Maggie had been clearing plates, and a chunk of ketchup-covered hash browns from Vin’s plate had found its way onto Anth.

The week before
that
, it was a grease stain from a rogue piece of bacon that his father had somehow missed.

And it was always the same oh-my-gosh-I’m-so-sorry routine, and his family would lament the unfortunate “accident” and tell Maggie not to worry about it, even though none of
them
had basically tripled their laundry efforts since Maggie had taken over their Sunday brunch routine.

“I don’t know why you always have to do that,” Elena snapped at him.

He gave his little sister a dark look. Elena was basically a female version of Luc. Dark brown hair, perfectly proportioned features, and bright blue eyes. His siblings’ good looks had worked very well for them with the opposite sex, but with their brother? Not so much.

“I didn’t do anything,” he snapped.

His mother—his own
mother
—gave him a scolding look. “You make Maggie nervous, dear. All that glowering.”

“Wait, sorry, hold up,” Anth said, abandoning the futile effort of blotting coffee from his crotch. “It’s
my
fault that the incompetent woman can’t do even the most basic requirements of her job?”

A startled gasp came from the head of the table, and too late—
way
too late—Anth realized that Maggie had reappeared with a clean white rag and what seemed to be a full cup of ice.

“I thought…I wanted to make sure it didn’t burn your skin,” she told him brightly.

To her credit, her voice didn’t wobble, and her eyes didn’t water, but damned if she didn’t look like she wanted to cry just a little.

Shit.

“I’m fine,” he muttered.

“Thank you, sweetie,” Tony said kindly, taking the rag and ice from Maggie. “Maybe just the check when you get a chance.”

“Of course. And really, I’m so sorry,” she said, not quite glancing at Anthony. “You’ll send me the dry-cleaning bill, right?”

“He’ll do no such thing,” his mother said firmly, reaching across her husband to grab Maggie’s hand. “I can get any stain out of any fabric. I’ll take care of it.”

“You hear that, Anth?” Luc said. “Mommy’s going to wash your pants for you!”

Anth shot his brother the bird.

“I just can’t believe Mags called you
Officer
,” Vincent said in a sham reverent tone. “I don’t know how she missed the nine hundred and forty-two reminders that you’re a captain now.”