Twice the Temptation (27 page)

 
She watched his expression. For a guy with so long and rich a heritage, he rarely talked about it. In fact, he winced whenever anyone referred to him as the Marquis of Rawley, preferring, especially in the States, to go by plain old Mr. Richard Addison. “Do you know these people?” she finally asked.

 
“Yes. Connoll and Evangeline are my great-great-and-then-some-grandparents. There are portraits of them in the gallery hall.”

 
“So this Nightshade Diamond has actually been sitting in a hole in the stable for nearly two hundred years.”

 
“It would seem so.”

 
She looked at it, draped across the box where he’d set it to read the letter. “We should put it back.”

 
“Are you mad? If this is genuine, and it looks like it is, this thing’s at least a hundred and fifty carats, not counting the smaller ones around it or the chain. And it’s blue. Do you know how rare that is?”

 
“It’s bad luck. Your great-great says so.”

 
“You’re too superstitious. Show me where you found it.”

 
He picked it up and started to hand it to her, but she backed away, putting her hands behind her back. “No way.”

 
“The note said carrying it on your person has the same effect as wearing it. You saw it, and you carried it to the house. Did lightning strike you? Did you fall in a hole?”

 
“Rick, that—”

 
“Two hundred years ago my great-great, as you call him, was superstitious enough to put a diamond worth several million pounds in a hole. I think we’re a bit more enlightened than that, don’t you?”

 
When he put it that way, it did sound a little silly. Still reluctant, she put her hand out and he draped it across her fingers. It was lovely. Stunning. For a second she couldn’t help waiting, breath held, for the sky to crack open or something, but nothing happened. No lightbulb even dimmed. “I can’t help being superstitious, you know,” she said, seeing Rick grinning at her. “Black cats, ladders, all that shit, it’s—”

 
“Yes, I’ve heard that criminal types look for warnings everywhere.” He kissed her again. “But you’re not a criminal type any longer. Show me the hole.”

 
She clenched the diamond in her fist, sighing and pretending that she wasn’t still jumpy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. “Okay, but if the ground caves in, I’m pulling you down with me.”

 
“I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

 
Chapter 2

 
Wednesday, 9:44 a.m.

 
Richard Addison went up the stepladder andpeered into the small, irregularly shaped hole in the wall of his old stable. After several renovations in over two hundred years, and especially with the massive one he’d commissioned seven years earlier, the fact that this hiding place had remained intact was something of a miracle.

 
Deep in the far left corner his fingers touched something, and he pulled it free. An old lead soldier, its paint flaked and faded away to nothing, emerged into Sam’s expertly lit exhibit room.

 
“What is it?” she asked, standing on her tiptoes to look.

 
“A fusilier,” he returned, handing it to her and stepping down. “George the Third, I would think.”

 
She gave him a quicksilver grin. “I knew you were an expert in Georgian painters, but I had no idea about the toy soldiers.”

 
“I was an English lad, you know.” He glanced around the cluttered room. “Where’s Armand?”

 
“Mr. Montgomery took your diamond outside to examine it in the sunlight.” Samantha handed him back the soldier. “I’ve never seen an English guy look so excited.”

 
Richard lifted an eyebrow. “I beg your pardon?”

 
She snorted. “Well, not outside a bedroom, anyway.”

 
“I just hope he doesn’t try to run off with it.”

 
“I could totally run him down if he tried,” she commented, heading with him to the door. “Besides, jewels are his life. And that one’s a stunner. Even if it is bad luck.”

 
“There’s no such thing as an object causing luck,” he said, taking her hand as they left the stable and walked over to where Armand Montgomery stood with the diamond in one hand and his cell phone in the other. “Peoples’ reaction to an object, yes,” he continued. “The object itself, no.”

 
“How logical of you, Mr. Spock.” She pulled free of his hand as Armand ended his call. “So, what do you think?” she asked him.

 
“It’s a blue diamond,” he returned, a muscle beneath his left eye jumping. “Expertly cut.”

 
In his career as a buyer and seller of properties and businesses, Richard had become very proficient at reading people. Their Mr. Montgomery was upset about something. “Armand? What’s troubling you?” he asked.

 
“I, um, was just called back to London. A question about the authenticity of a very prominent item in the museum collection.”

 
“But the exhibit opens here in three days.”

 
“Yes, I know. I’ll send my assistant up here with the
delivery tomorrow.” He cleared his throat. “Abysmal timing, I’m afraid. And it’s been a pleasure working with you, Miss Jellicoe. And you again, Mr. Addison.” He opened the door of his Mercedes and slid onto the seat.

 
“Eventually, I will convince you to call me Rick. And Armand?”

 
The assistant curator looked up. “Yes?”

 
“The diamond?”

 
Montgomery blanched. “Oh, good God.” He handed the necklace over. “My apologies. I’m just, well, a bit distracted.”

 
Richard took a step back from the car. “No worries. Have a safe trip.”

 
As soon as the Mercedes left the gravel parking lot, Samantha clapped her hands together. “Great. I get the assistant’s assistant to help me put together a showing of a shitload of jewels.”

 
“You don’t need anyone else, my dear,” he commented, beginning to regret leaving the house barefoot if they were going to keep treading about on the gravel. “You know Montgomery was just window dressing.”

 
“Except that the exhibit belongs to his museum and goes where he says. And this is my first big gig like this, and I only got it because you own half the countryside, and the—”

 
Richard grabbed her around the waist, pulling her in for a long, soft kiss. Green eyes, auburn hair, slim and athletic—she’d attracted him the moment he set eyes on her, and that had been while she’d been in his Palm Beach house trying to rob him. But it was the rest of her—the way she could disarm an alarm system in five seconds flat but refused to rob museums, the way she would full-on tackle an armed bad guy but hated killing spiders—that mesmerized him.

 
Obsession, heart, whatever term he chose to describe her, he loved her. So much that it frightened him sometimes. And she’d thought he had planted the diamond for her to find. And she hadn’t screamed and run away into the night. She’d thanked him, and kissed him—which made a certain item he’d picked up a few weeks ago even more interesting.

 
“What say we go out somewhere for dinner tonight?” he suggested, gingerly leading the way off the gravel and back to the grassy garden path.

 
“As long as we don’t go anywhere that has the wordpudding on the menu. You people do not know what pudding is.”

 
“I was actually thinking of dining at Petrus.”

 
“I am not driving to London; the gems and the assistant’s assistant will be here first thing in the morning.”

 
“That’s not a problem,” he returned. “I’ll call for the helicopter.”

 
She laughed, tucking herself into his shoulder. “You are so cool.”

 
“Yes, I know.”

 
She glanced up from his hand to his face. “So that’s pretty weird, huh, finding that necklace like that? A two-hundred-year-old family heirloom. The last person to set eyes on it was probably your great-great himself.”

 
“I have a multitude of family heirlooms. Connoll Addison, though, was the one who began the collection of European Masters. Family legend has it that he rescued a handful of paintings from Paris so Bonaparte couldn’t seize and sell them for ammunition.”

 
“He sounds like your kind of guy. You…don’t talk about your family very much.”

 
“Neither do you,” he pointed out.

 
“That’s because I don’t know who my mom is, and until three months ago I thought my dad had died in prison.”

 
“And now he’s wandering about Europe and points east scamming Interpol. I remember. He nearly got you killed.”

 
“Mm-hm. You’re changing the subject, Rick.”

 
He took a breath. “I’ll have the copter pick us up at half five.” Richard checked his watch. “I’ve got a proposal to finish reading before then.”

 
“And what about the Nightshade Diamond?”

 
He looked down at the necklace in his hand. It was “weird,” as Sam had said. It felt strange, to be holding something so directly connected to his own ancestor, reportedly the one he most resembled in both appearance and temperament. Yes, he owned other items passed down from that generation and even earlier, but hundreds of hands had touched them, hundreds of eyes had gazed at them between then and now. The Nightshade Diamond felt like a direct link between him and his great-great-grandfather, and it had come with a bloody warning.

 
“Hey,” Samantha said, nudging his rib cage with her elbow, “you don’t have to have everything about the diamond sorted out in ten minutes. I get the being-thrown-for-a-loop thing. And I can be cool and understanding.”

 
He chuckled. “And here I thought you were the peppery, temperamental one.”

 
“Peppery. I like that.” She released him as they reached the house. “I’m going to do another video and sensor check. Can’t be too careful. There might be a me out there somewhere looking to make a score.”

 
“There is no other you. I can guarantee that.”

 
She leaned up and kissed him again. “Thanks. See ya.”

 
“See you later,” he returned, nodding.

 
Inside the house he headed upstairs for the library and some of the old property and inventory ledgers. Surely somebody would have noted the ownership of a 150-plus-carat diamond, whether they knew of its location or not. And before he let anyone else know that he now owned a very rare blue diamond, he wanted to authenticate a few things—including the value and quality of the gem itself.

 
No, he didn’t believe in bad luck, but Samantha did. And she’d discovered a diamond lost for nearly two hundred years, three days before Rawley Park was to host a traveling precious gem exhibit. Fate. Now, that was an odd bird, and apparently one with a sense of humor. Or so he hoped.

 
When Samantha blew out her breath in the early morning air, it fogged. Chilly and damp, even in the middle of June—she’d never really called any one place home, but it was mornings like this when she missed the warmth of Palm Beach, Florida, the city where she’d lived for most of the last three years.