The jade pieces were unique, priceless, but it wasn’t so much the quality of the objects, but their age and the mystery shrouding them that had caught and held the attention of experts and collectors alike.
Jade, like many minerals, could generally be traced to its country of origin. It was simply a matter of profiling the mineral content and then matching it up with the characteristics exhibited by jade from different countries or locations. Sometimes the jade could even be traced to the particular mine it had come from. The set of three objects had been analyzed and identified as extraordinarily high-quality nephrite, originating from the Sinkiang region in China. The objects: belt and scabbard accoutrements, and a round vessel carved in the shape of a bird, had also been dated. They were neolithic in origin and had been carved approximately three and a half thousand years ago, during the Shang dynasty. All three pieces were old enough, and rare enough, to be the jewel in any collection without the added mystery of how they had come to be included with Maori grave goods on the small island nation of Aotearoa, New Zealand, thousands of miles away from China.
It wasn’t unusual for artifacts to be stolen from museums, or looted from archeological sites. The theft of artifacts from war-torn countries was rife. But it was unusual for anyone to want to steal artifacts that were so world-renowned they could never hope to display them.
Anger flickered, warming her, but even that emotion had become faded, distant, as exhaustion closed in on her, sucking the last remnants of her vitality so that she simply sat, motionless, her eyes fixed on the screen until the minute irritation of the electronic flicker made her blink.
A fine tremor ran through her, jerking her back to an awareness of just how punchy she’d become. Her mind was functioning, barely, but her body was closing down; her pulse slow, viscid—her breathing shallow and long-drawn-out.
She hadn’t slept more than four hours in the last seventy-two, and she couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten anything that could remotely pass for a square meal. She could remember taking a few bites of a sandwich in the half-hour respite she’d had between police interviews that afternoon, but she couldn’t for the life of her recall what had been in the sandwich. She’d been having trouble concentrating all day, her mind blanking out for short periods of time. If she closed her eyes now, she would fall asleep in her chair.
Her hand found the mouse, her fingers stiff and clumsy as she moved it on the pad until she located the electronic cursor on the screen, then centered it on the cartoon character.
Help.
She took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “If you’ve got an FBI unit on hold…maybe.”
She clicked the mouse, bringing up the menu, then closed the file, sending the little intruder back into its hidey-hole.
Right now she could use the FBI, Interpol, the CIA, a SWAT team…whatever.
Letting out a breath, she hooked off her spectacles, sat back from the bright glow of light pooling her desk and ran a hand over her sleek knot of hair to loosen the tension.
The list of private collectors she’d been compiling from Laine’s sales records dating back for the past ten years was starkly illuminated by the bluish glow of the screen. The names could have been written in Chinese characters for all the good it did her.
Her eyelids drooped again, and a picture of West strolling toward his car as she’d left for work this morning floated into her mind and she blinked, banishing the image.
She desperately needed to work, to focus, but the fact that the husband who had walked out on her five years ago was now practically her next-door neighbor kept distracting her, so that she found herself staring into space, precious minutes out of her long working day lost.
Her stomach rumbled. Frowning, she checked her watch. Almost eight. Past time she was out of here.
“Cancel the FBI unit.” She smothered a yawn as she saved the file to a disk. “What I need is an analyst.”
The tawny gleam of light off an egg-shaped tiger’s-eye worry stone caught her eye as she waited for her computer to shut down. Absently, Tyler picked it up, her fingers smoothing the silky curves, her mind abruptly shifting back to a time, eight years ago, when she’d been mesmerized by eyes that had burned with the same intense shades of gold.
Gabriel.
Dispassionately, she examined the tension that held her motionless when all she wanted to do was leave the office, drive home, ransack the fridge for a snack, then crawl into bed and forget that the world she’d so carefully constructed around herself since she was eight years old was coming apart.
She was crazy even to examine the past. Five years ago she’d asked West to leave, and the husband she’d never been able to tame had packed his bags and walked, leaving for another secret assignment in some foreign country—preferring the edgy danger of the SAS, the hardship and the uncertainties—maybe even a bullet in the dark—to spending time with her.
For months she’d clung to the fantasy that he’d come back.
Well, he had come back. She just hadn’t ever imagined it would be five years later, and that they’d be neighbors.
Jerkily, Tyler set the tiger’s-eye stone down. The gleam of the worry stone continued to draw her eye as she slipped the disk into a side pocket in her handbag, unplugged her laptop and placed it into her briefcase along with the notes she’d made. She snapped the case closed and picked it up by the grip, hooked her handbag over her shoulder and rose to her feet.
She should have gotten rid of the tiger’s eye years ago. She must have thrown it away a dozen times, only to pull it out of the bin and dust it off. The problem was that it was irritatingly beautiful. The hot flashes of gold and copper always caught at her and she just couldn’t bring herself to chuck something so elegant and enduring away.
Her problem was she never could let go, never could throw away something she’d cherished, even if the cherishing was well in the past. Once she loved someone or something, she hung on for grim death. When it came to relationships, her loyalty wasn’t in question, just her sanity.
Which was probably why she’d never quite been able to cut West out of her life.
The thought hit her square in the chest, literally stopping her in her tracks. The possibility—however remote—that West could still have some call on her emotions.
Uh-oh. No way. She didn’t still care for West.
There were lots of reasons why she shouldn’t even like him…if she ever thought of him at all, although the last few months, crazy as it seemed, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him. It was as if her mind had been caught up in some kind of loop. She’d even dreamed about him, which was beyond strange, because she hadn’t glimpsed him more than a handful of times in as many years.
She’d attributed the phenomena to stress and a ticking biological clock. She was twenty-eight, alone, and still tied to a marriage with West for the simple reason that neither of them had bothered to dissolve it.
Maybe it was cowardly, but she’d become used to living in relationship limbo, and had even welcomed it at times because it was a convenient shield when all she’d wanted to do after West had left was crawl into a dark hole and hide. It had taken her months to feel even remotely normal, and then she’d made sure she was too busy with study and work and establishing her career to think about him or the shipwrecked marriage—or to want the turmoil of falling in love again.
The thought that she’d clung to the legalities of her marriage because some remote part of her still wanted West made her go still inside, but she refused to yield to the possibility. She wasn’t that needy.
West still affected her, she was big enough to admit that, but any woman with red blood pumping through her veins would find it hard to ignore him.
She stepped out of her office