She hated to give him up.
She noticed the sun-whitened hairs on his tanned arms. He was so handsome, so arrogantly French. Leanly built, he was a dark, sleek, wiry man, his eyes a deep brown, soft and oddly vulnerable—and keen. They had to be. He was one of France’s premiere Grand Prix drivers, a risk-taking, desirable man who radiated a generous and unquenchable sexuality. He could have had virtually any woman he wanted. He had chosen Annette. She had never had any illusions that their affair would last, but she supposed she ought to derive some satisfaction at being the one to end it. He curled a loose tendril of hair behind her ear and brushed two fingers along the line of her jaw. “I missed you last night.”
“Jean-Paul…” For nothing at all she’d strip herself naked and make love to him right there in the grass under the olive tree. The children and her caretaker and Thomas Blackburn and her entire future be damned. She licked her lips, parched to the point of cracking, and squinted at her lover, sitting in the shade with the bright morning sun at his back. “Have you seen the papers?”
Nodding, he sighed and sat back in the grass.
“That’s why I called you.” Her voice quavered; she didn’t like that. She cleared her throat and forced herself not to look away. “Last night I became Le Chat’s latest victim. I was at the roulette wheel, wearing a Tiffany diamond-and-pearl bracelet—”
He looked pained. “Ma belle…”
“No, don’t. Let me finish. The bracelet was a gift to me from my husband on our fifth anniversary. There’s an inscription. The police…” Her throat was so dry and tight she felt she would choke. “I gave the police an exact description.”
Jean-Paul accepted her words without apparent surprise or concern. “What else did you tell the police?”
Annette hesitated, then said, “Enough.”
He looked away from her, his soft eyes lost in the shade.
“They’ve gone to your house, Jean-Paul. I would expect they’re there now and have already found my bracelet—”
“You used the key I gave you?”
“Yes. Last night, while you were asleep.”
He turned back to her, assessing her with the same alertness and intensity that had made him one of the finest race-car drivers in the world. This time, his craving for excitement and danger had led him astray.
“I don’t blame you,” Annette said, feeling stronger. “Please don’t blame me. We are what we are, Jean-Paul, and I’m only doing what I have to do. I have no desire to see you in prison, and I’m aware of the acute embarrassment testifying against you in court could cause me. I have a husband and a son I need to respect me—a life that I won’t allow Le Chat to destroy.”
“I should kill you,” he said calmly.
“Perhaps. But then you’d be a murderer as well as a jewel thief.” She dug beneath the flowers and pulled back the calico cloth, removing the gun and a leather pouch. The automatic she held in her right hand, awkwardly; the pouch she handed to Jean-Paul. “I decided to warn you because I don’t want you to be arrested and sent to jail. Here’s twenty thousand dollars. A generous amount under the circumstances and enough, I should think, to get you out of the country and settled elsewhere.”
He bit down on his lower lip, the only outward sign of the effect her words were having on him. “And if I choose not to go?”
“You can’t win, Jean-Paul. Remember who I am. I’m giving you a way out. Consider yourself lucky and take it.”
“What about the Jupiter Stones?”
She took no pleasure in how his voice cracked. In the last five minutes, she’d shattered his life. Better yours than mine, my love.
She said, “I don’t care about the Jupiter Stones. I only care now that you get out of the country before you’re arrested. Jean-Paul, I can’t have what we’ve been together come out. Don’t fight me. You’ll only do yourself worse damage.”
His eyes fastened on the gun, briefly, and Annette blanched at the thought he might actually force her to use it. But all at once he shot to his feet, and before she realized what was coming, he cuffed her hard on the side of the head. She sprawled backward against the tree, biting the inside of her mouth and crying out with pain as she tasted the warm saltiness of her own blood. Only by a miracle did she keep hold of the gun. If Jean-Paul reached for it, she’d kill him.
“Au revoir, ma belle.”
Annette shuddered at the hatred in his voice. But he walked away, quickly disappearing in the thickets, and she brushed herself off and staggered to her feet, fighting back tears. She began to run. Through the field, her flower and herb gardens, across the terrace, and into the quaint stone farmhouse where so long ago her nanny had taught her how to dry herbs and debone a fish. Thank God Thomas wasn’t around. She basked in the house’s familiarity, its welcome.
She made herself and the children tall glasses of iced, fresh-squeezed lemonade and put sugar cookies onto a plate—and, in a few minutes, she began to laugh.
Baroness Gisela Majlath was buried in a simple nonreligious ceremony attended by her closest friends and the tall Bostonian, Thomas Blackburn. As if his vaunted presence could change anything, Jean-Paul thought bitterly, as he hid among a stand of oaks. He stared at the plain white coffin and choked back his sobs lest anybody should hear him. He didn’t want to disturb the funeral. Had the police known their missing Le Chat would be there, they would have sent more than a single uninterested gendarme. And the Bostonian in his frayed, pinstriped suit? What would he have done?
The stiff breeze off the Mediterranean whipped tears from Jean-Paul’s eyes. Thomas Blackburn, he thought, would have done nothing.
Gisela had been a favorite on the Riviera. Her suicide forty-eight hours earlier had caught everyone by surprise and abruptly ended Le Chat’s welcome on her beloved Côte d’ Azur. For weeks, his presence had lent a spirit of romance and adventure to an otherwise ordinary season. With visions of Cary Grant in their heads, eager young heiresses, jet-setters and bored wives of American tycoons had ignored warnings not to wear their valuable, albeit heavily insured, jewels to crowded cafés, parties and casinos. In truth, they had vied to tempt Le Chat to commit one of his daring robberies, each longing for the excitement and attention of being his next victim. After all, he never hurt anyone.
Even Gisela had emerged from her brush with the Riviera jewel thief physically unscathed.
If it had ever occurred. Fact and fancy were often inseparable in Gisela’s quirky mind, an eccentricity that prompted more amusement than outrage among those who knew her. To be sure, her encounter with Le Chat—real or imagined—would never have happened if he hadn’t been stalking the Côte d’ Azur for victims.
Jean-Paul knew that the graveside mourners and the gossips and the snobs would blame Le Chat entirely for her suicide, without looking to themselves for culpability. He believed, however, that they, as much as their now-despised jewel thief, were responsible for her death.
No one had believed Gisela’s blithe assertion that she was a member of the displaced Hungarian aristocracy, never mind that she had possessed the fabled Jupiter Stones until they’d been stolen by Le Chat.
Engaging and vivacious, she had arrived on the Riviera in 1955—from whence no one could exactly say—and immediately made a name for herself with her irrepressible charm and her unique talent for decorating country cottages and farmhouses. She never called the people she helped clients, simply “friends.” Nor did she call herself an interior decorator or formalize what she did into anything as depressingly ordinary as a business. She did favors, that