Hot Whispers of an Irishman (34 page)

“The gorget, I’m thinking,” she said to herself, for surely Rog, happily bolting his food, did not care.

Wrongly taken from a Rafferty or honestly given by one, it no longer mattered. Together, she and Liam would decide the gold’s fate, and she knew that her trust could rest with him.

Vi picked up the hammered gold gorget and slipped the collar around her neck. The metal was cool against her bare skin, and a shiver rippled all the way down to her equally bare toes. Though not as fine as the wax cast she’d seen in Dublin, this piece, which had been beneath Nan’s painted rock, was no small treasure. For added effect, Vi slipped on two thin armbands she’d also unearthed. All the pieces from the strongbox were in remarkable shape, the rich patina of their gold making them look like old silk.

“And some wine?” Liam called. “Have you some wine?”

“Wine, then,” Vi absently replied, pulling a piece of notepaper from the box…something Nan had left, explaining how, at her own elderly mother’s urging, she’d moved the gold from Castle Duneen.

Vi tucked the note into an empty wine glass, then gathered that, the wine, and a glass for herself before returning to Liam.

The bedroom light was dim, too much so for Vi’s current needs.

“Could you switch on the lamp?” she asked Liam as she set the wine and glasses on the nightstand at her side of the bed.

“I can find you well enough in the dark, my fire,” he said.

Aye, she’d definitely stopped short of replete. “Humor me.”

“Stubborn woman,” Liam said, laughter in his voice.

The light came on. Vi held herself as tall, still, and proud as any woman wearing only three pieces of gold ever had. Her gaze locked with Liam’s, who seemed to have frozen.

He cleared his throat. “I, ah…I don’t suppose those are costume pieces.”

She smiled as she moved across the bed to kneel above him, her knees to either side of his. “I don’t suppose they are.”

He reached one hand up to touch the gorget about her neck. “It’s a good look on you, love.”

“That’s all you have to say? I bring you a treasure and—”

He smiled. “You’d brought me a treasure when you came back into my life. Now this is very grand,” he said, “but not nearly as fine as the woman wearing it. Still, I’m thinking you’d best take it off.”

“You’re afraid I’ll damage the pieces, then?”

“No, I’m afraid I will, as it’s time to make love to you again.”

“So you don’t want to know how I found the gold on Nan’s cupboard and under the painted rock on her property?”

He paused for a moment, and a broad grin lit his face. “Which would go far in explaining the watercolor of the rock that she left me.”

“She left you a watercolor? How could I not know? But that makes the note I found a bit clearer. She said that she’d left the gold’s fate in two sets of hands and I have only one.”

“Later, love. All of that later,” he said, putting his own hands to very good use. “Now slip free of that gold, if you please. The people at the National Museum won’t take well to our playing in it.”

“So you agree to sell it to the State?” she asked slipping the armbands off, then dipping down to kiss him.

“All but the necklace, which we’ll hide again,” he said. “We can’t have a legend die, now can we?”

Vi slipped off the gorget and handed it to Liam, who turned it over once in his hands, then set it gently on the nightstand.

“Now come down where I can kiss you, Violet, my love.”

Lord, but he was all smooth sex and persuasion.

“With pleasure,” she replied.

And as he kissed her, Vi Kilbride not only fancied herself a fine collector of men, she was thrilled to have kept her very first and best one of all.