‘My boss…’
His smile chilled her blood. ‘He won’t help.’ He waited with speculative dispassion while she struggled with the implications of that confident statement.
Sara’s hand clenched on the stem of her glass and a huge emptiness hollowed out her insides. Stonily she asked, ‘Are you implying that you arranged my job for me?’
‘Of course. I wanted you where I could keep an eye on you.’ He spoke casually, as though it was the most natural thing in the world for him to have done.
And, of course, it was.
Sara’s mouth dropped open. Stunned, she gazed at him in stupefied disbelief.
The unexpected offer of a job from a respected interior designer had literally given her something to live for. To learn that Gabe had organised it, and that her work meant nothing, hurt her so deeply she couldn’t speak.
She should have known, Sara thought as humiliation ate into her, leaving her cold and shaky. Gabe didn’t take betrayal lightly; he was famous for his long memory and his insistence on fair play. He’d want revenge. And he had the power and the money to seek it cold, to organise it with ruthless efficiency, so that she had no way of protecting herself.
Struggling to keep a clear mind, she fought back a sense of debilitating helplessness. He’d played with her life as though she were a puppet. It hurt, and it frightened her.
Nevertheless, she wasn’t going to surrender. He’d enjoy that; it would satisfy his desire to humiliate her. ‘I suppose I’m no longer working for him?’
‘That depends entirely on you,’ he said, watching her with coldly speculative eyes. ‘I want the Queen’s Blood, Sara. Tell me where it is and your life will be your own again.’
Her own? She could almost have laughed if his dispassionate tone hadn’t bruised so painfully. Gabe might have been able to cut her out of his life with merciless precision, but her heart was not so easily placated; it still trembled when she looked at him, longing for a commitment that had only ever existed in her wishful thinking.
If he’d loved her, he’d have at least given her a hearing when she’d tried to see him. But, no—he’d accepted the word of his grandmother’s maid rather than listen to the woman he’d been planning to marry!
Knowing it was hopeless, she said in a brittle voice, ‘If I knew where the rubies are, believe me, I’d have told you.’
‘Listen to me,’ he said forcefully, his eyes hooded and dangerous. ‘It occurred to me that you might be afraid. That’s why I brought you here—where you’ll be completely safe.’
‘Not from you!’ she retorted.
His wide shoulders moved in a slight negligent shrug. ‘Of course you’re safe from me—I’m not a barbarian.’
‘You threatened me about half a minute ago!’ He wasn’t going to get away with deliberately trying to intimidate her. She matched his hostile stare with one of her own, eyes glinting green as grass beneath her slim winged brows.
Another shrug underlined his Mediterranean heritage, from those warlike warriors whose blood had mingled with that of princesses from all over Europe to give him arrogantly handsome features and stunning colouring—hair like ebony, eyes as cold and blue as the sheen on a scimitar, and skin of warm bronze.
‘I knew you wouldn’t be intimidated,’ he said coolly. ‘But planning and executing a heist as successful as the Queen’s Blood is one thing—selling the thing is another. That involves criminals, and where this amount of money is involved the criminals are not loveable rogues. Stop hedging, Sara—it’s not getting you anywhere. Tell me where the Queen’s Blood is and I’ll let you go without fear of prosecution.’
The last tiny flicker of hope died. How could he be so intelligent in every other respect, yet so bone-headedly convinced that she’d stolen the necklace? Sara snatched another look at his face and saw beneath his amused contempt an unsparing determination.
Mindless panic roiled starkly beneath her ribs. She hid it by snapping, ‘You meant it when you said you could do whatever you liked with me.’
His black brows drew together in a forbidding frown that revved her heart-rate up into the stratosphere. ‘Oh, yes, I meant it. I could.’ His voice turned sarcastic. ‘But do try to restrain your vivid imagination. I don’t intend to hurt you.’
‘Why should I believe you?’ she demanded, realising too late that attacking his credibility was hardly the best way to get him to reconsider this crazy scheme and let her go.
Anyway, it wouldn’t work. Oh, Gabe definitely had a temper, but it was all the more intimidating for being so tightly controlled. More steadily she finished, ‘You didn’t believe me.’
‘Did I ever hurt you?’
‘I—no,’ she admitted reluctantly. Not physically, anyway. Indeed, he’d always been exquisitely tender with her.
Her heart-rate picked up as she remembered just how tender—and how she’d gloried in his strength and his potent male sexuality.
‘So stop pretending to be scared of me,’ he said crisply. ‘And don’t try to evade the subject. If you’re worried about your safety, be assured that no one can reach you here—no army has ever taken the castle by force.’
Sara remained stubbornly mute. Anything she had to say would only make things worse.
He waited, and when she didn’t fill the silence, went on relentlessly. ‘Give me the details of the theft and who else was involved. I promise you’ll be safe.’
As he’d once promised to love her?
‘I don’t know what happened to the wretched necklace,’ she told him, each word emerging with mechanical precision. ‘I gave it to the maid—to Marya—to put in the safe, and to the best of my knowledge she did just that.’
His response was unexpected. Instead of the chilling disbelief she’d had to endure when she’d tried to convince him of this a year before, he nodded. ‘And she swears that she did that, too. But about an hour afterwards she realised that she hadn’t put your engagement ring there, so she slipped down from her bedroom to do that. When she got there, the safe was empty. It had been opened by someone who knew the combination, which, as you set the combination when you arrived to stay with Hawke, means that you took it.’
A raw edge in his voice alerted her. She glanced up sharply, shock freezing her brain when she saw the dangerous glitter in his eyes. Stubbornly she retorted, ‘Or Marya.’
Holding her gaze, he said on a lethal note, ‘Marya is completely trustworthy.’
‘You’re so sure of that?’ she asked impetuously, knowing even as the words tumbled from her lips that she was on a hiding to nothing.
She hadn’t stolen the necklace, so the thief had to be Marya. Why, she didn’t understand, but there was no one else.
‘I’m sure,’ he said, his handsome, autocratic face hardening. ‘And, as the Queen’s Blood hasn’t yet appeared on the market—’
‘How do you know?’
Wide shoulders lifting in the slightest of shrugs, he kept his steel-blue gaze fixed on her face. She felt as though she had diamond lasers boring through the outer layer of skin and bone, right into her brain.
But if he could do that, he’d see her innocence.
He said, ‘The jewellery world is small, and it’s been under surveillance ever since the Queen’s Blood was taken. Apart from the value of the gold and the stones, the necklace is priceless as an artefact; an ancient, solid gold chain studded with perfectly matched cabochon rubies could only be sold