Stephen Carmen laughed. “Should I fax you over a copy of the court’s Memorandum of Decision? Maybe you didn’t get yours.”
She hated him with an intensity that made her stomach feel awash in oil. “It’s a piece of paper. I’m talking principle. Ethics. Honor.”
“And I’m talking money.”
“I know.” The very idea of Stephen selling the Rose hurt Tara all the way down to her bones. But, of course, she’d considered the possibility—the probability. There was little Stephen craved more than the image and the lifestyle that money could buy. That was why she had planned a worst-case solution to this nightmare.
“Give it up, Tara,” Stephen said. “The Blood of the Rose is mine. Every last carat. Your mother gave it to me.”
She wouldn’t. That truth had never left Tara’s soul once in the nearly four years she and Stephen had been battling over the heirloom. He had possession of a will that said Letitia Cole Carmen had bequeathed the ruby to him, her stepson. Hours ago, the courts had ruled that the will Stephen had produced took precedence over Tara’s own.
But her mother would never have given Stephen the Blood of the Rose. Letitia would only have handed it on to Tara because that was part of its legend—and its curse. Her great-grandmother, Tzigane, a notorious Gypsy, had decried that her gem would never leave the hands of her descendants.
“I don’t know how you managed such a clever forgery on that will,” Tara muttered aloud.
Stephen laughed again. “It’s your mother’s signature. You had enough experts trying to prove otherwise. And my witnesses are squeaky clean.”
It was true—they were both topnotch, successful businessmen. The investigators she’d hired hadn’t been able to dig up any dirt on them at all. Tara took a breath. “I’ll buy it back from you.”
That kept Stephen quiet for a moment. “You’d spend money to get it back?”
“It’s mine,” she said simply. “I know you’re going to sell it to someone. Why not me?”
Stephen’s pause was ripe with calculation. “How much?”
“Four and a half million.” Let the games begin, she thought bitterly.
“Six,” Stephen countered.
“It won’t appraise for that.”
“I don’t give a damn what it’s worth on the market. What’s it worth to you?”
He had her there. “Meet with me tonight. I’ll see if I can scrape up some more money between now and then.”
This time the weight of his hesitation was different. “Where are you scraping it from?”
“An investor.”
“What kind of investor?”
“One who respects the stone’s legacy.”
“Your Uncle Charlie.” Stephen said the name like an epithet.
Tara didn’t answer, which was an answer in itself. The admittedly eccentric Charlie Branigan wasn’t her uncle by blood. He’d courted Tara’s mother for six wild and exciting months before Letitia had tossed him over for the staid and steady Scott Carmen. Tara was sure that her mother had broken Charlie’s heart because he’d never married anyone else. But he’d been there for both of them anyway through all the years that had passed since then, at least when he could be found. Charlie had a propensity for popping off suddenly and without warning. The last time they’d lost track of him, he’d turned up snorkeling with sharks off the Great Barrier Reef—at the age of seventy-two.
He was also the money and the power behind Philadelphia’s Hoyt Museum. When Charlie snapped his fingers, the entire board of directors jumped. He felt—and Tara agreed—that there was no harm in putting the gem on display once they got it back. They’d decided that Tzigane would have no objection to sharing its beauty, its fame, with the world, just as long as Tara owned at least a part of it.
Charlie’s identity would come out sooner or later anyway, Tara reasoned, and letting it out sooner might even be to her advantage. She and Charlie weren’t trying to strike a business deal. They were motivated by their hearts. Stephen would understand that he was unlikely to get as much for the ruby from the average investor. And he knew she didn’t have enough money to pull the deal off by herself. She’d inherited her mother’s share of Stephen’s father’s estate, but she had spent a hefty chunk of it on lawyers and experts, fighting with Stephen over Letitia’s will.
“All right,” he said finally, thoughtfully. “Come by at seven. We’ll talk.”
“I’ll be there.” Tara lowered the phone from her ear without saying goodbye.
She dropped it into her coat pocket as though something of Stephen’s greed and cruelty had rubbed off on it. This was not her mother’s doing, she thought again. Letitia had not knowingly signed that will. Tara would go to her own grave believing that and Uncle Charlie agreed with her. Somehow, Stephen Carmen had tricked Letitia. Or perhaps he had blackmailed her somehow. Letitia had seemed so edgy those last weeks of her life. Had she possessed a secret so awful that she’d even kept it from her own daughter? Tara had been over and over it in her mind and the path always led back to nowhere. She simply didn’t know.
The bottom line was that the Blood of the Rose was now Stephen’s. Her Rose, the stone she had sat with at her mother’s bedroom hearth as a child, her heart pounding at its fire, at the red tears in its depths. We have to put it away now, baby. But someday it will be yours.
Tara curled her fist against her mouth and coughed over something hard that lodged in her throat. She turned the corner onto Race Street.
She’d get the gem back. She would.
C. Fox Whittington arrived in the door of Remmick’s—his favorite pub—just shy of seven o’clock. He waded through the crowd to the bar, feeling the tension of the day peel off layer by layer. Fox had been looking forward to this for hours since the last nail had been pounded home into a complex matter involving a six-month-old murder, a well-faded beauty queen and a slice of lemon pie.
The case had consumed him for weeks now and if the law of averages held, he could count on an easy month or two before another humdinger passed his particular desk. But first, he thought, he would enjoy a night of soft music, fine bourbon whiskey and maybe a good steak, medium rare.
A gaggle of pretty women clustered near the bar to his right. Ordinarily, the type of women who came to bars on their own didn’t appeal to him, but the blonde on the stool closest to him left her friends’ conversation long enough to catch his eye and smile shyly. Fox felt his heart shift a little.
She wasn’t Adelia. There would never be another Adelia. But she had a similar way of cocking her head to the side, a way of sweeping her gaze demurely downward after that brief touch of their eyes. Fox smiled back at her.
Maybe, he thought. Maybe this was the one.
Tara’s cab drew up in front of Stephen’s home at six minutes past seven.
The house was three ostentatious floors of diamond light trickling out the windows, making the afternoon’s snow sparkle on the lawn. She had grown up here after her mother had married Stephen’s father but Letitia had legitimately bequeathed the house to Stephen—even Tara’s will said that. It had been his father’s, and his grandfather’s before him. It was rightfully his, just as the Rose was rightfully hers.
Tara stared at it long enough that the driver cleared his throat. “Oh, thanks. Sorry.” She checked the meter and shoved a generous handful of bills at him.
“You want me to wait?” He frowned at all the money.
“No. Keep the change.” She had a feeling that it was going to take a while