“Hey. You used to like the old Marc.”
He was right. She had. Right up until he’d tossed her out on her butt without so much as her apartment key. Unbidden, the memory of that long-ago night crept in—along with an uneasiness she refused to feel.
Not now, when Marc was looking at her with such warmth.
Not now, when she could feel herself melting into a puddle of warm goo at the look in his eyes.
And so she settled for a half-truth, as she wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her mouth against the dark stubble on his jaw. “I still do like him.”
This time she was sure it was his breath that caught in his throat, his heart that was beating way too fast. “Go,” he said, after taking her mouth in a swift, hard kiss that set her nerves jangling and her sex pulsing. “Before I decide to take you right here in the parking lot with my security guards looking on.”
She wasn’t sure what it said about her that right then, at that moment, that didn’t sound like such a bad proposition.
Still, she climbed in her car, let him close the door after her. And, as she drove home, she refused to think about the future. For the first time in her adult life, she refused to think about the consequences of what she was doing. Instead, she decided that, just this once, she would look before she leaped.
And pray that she landed on her feet.
Sixteen
Two days later, she was still leaping. And still falling, with no hint of the ground in sight.
It was wonderful and awful, exhilarating and terrifying, all at the same time. Especially since Marc seemed to feel exactly the same way.
Last night he’d invited Nic to come to dinner with them and she’d spent the two-hour meal laughing until her sides hurt. Even with the threat of the newspaper article hanging over their heads, Nic was just that kind of guy. He always had been, but she’d forgotten that in the years since she’d seen him last. Just as she had blocked out so much of her time with Marc because it was too painful to remember.
She was remembering it now, remembering all the fun they’d had together. The million ways Marc had to make her smile. The million and one ways she’d had to make him relax, no matter how stressful his day had been.
And now, as she walked up to his office, she couldn’t keep the triumphant smile from her face. She’d completed the last of her tests, had spent the entire day looking at hydrogen isotopes until her eyes crossed and her brain felt as if it would bleed out of her ears.
She’d crashed what was normally a ten-day certification process into five days and she was exhausted, completely wiped out. But none of that mattered because she had good news for Marc. It was news he already knew, of course, but it would still be a relief to him and Nic to know that she concurred. And that none of their employees had snuck something shady in under the radar.
Marc’s assistant, a really nice guy named Thomas, waved her toward Marc’s door as soon as he spotted her. “Go right in. He’s been waiting for you for the last two hours.”
Of course he had. He was that kind of guy. She’d told him she thought she’d be finished around four and her phone had buzzed with a text at exactly 4:01, checking to see if she was finished for the day.
She’d put him off for two hours as she ran more isotope tests than she ever had before—many more than the industry considered necessary. But she wanted this certification to be beyond reproach, wanted Marc to have the peace of mind of knowing there was no truth to the LA Times article at all.
After the debacle of their past, she owed it to him. More, she wanted it for him. He deserved it.
He and Nic and Harrison, one of the attorneys working on their end of the situation, were all gathered around Marc’s desk when she walked in. And though they were chatting amiably enough, the tension in the air was thick enough to scoop with an ice cream spoon.
All eyes turned to her and she smiled, holding out to Marc the folder of documents she’d put together—and signed—certifying Bijoux as carrying only conflict-free diamonds. She would send him electronic copies of the same papers, but for now, handing him a folder felt more official. More real. She supposed she was old-school like that.
It must have felt official to him, too, because the moment he opened the folder and saw the first page, her lover grinned like a crazy man.
“We got it?” he asked, his voice slightly hushed despite the excitement on his face.
“You absolutely got it,” she said.
Nic jumped out of his chair, pumped a fist in the air. “I knew it, baby! I knew that reporter had a bad source.” He gave Marc a second to look over the documentation she’d provided, then ripped the folder out of his hands and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” Marc demanded.
“To make a copy of this file. And then I’m going down to the LA Times myself and force-feed every single page of this to that jackal of a reporter. I hope she chokes on it.”
“I feel obliged to warn you of the illegality of such actions,” Hollister said. But he was grinning, and Nic just rolled his eyes and flipped him off, so she figured it was a long-standing joke between them. Which didn’t surprise her at all—Nic was totally the kind of guy to skirt the rules just enough to make a lawyer like Hollister absolutely insane.
She started to sit down in the chair vacated by Nic, but Marc grabbed her and pulled her into his arms. Then he picked her up and actually spun her around his office, laughing the entire time.
“Yes, well, I guess I’ll leave you to your celebrating,” Hollister said. “Send me a copy of the report when you get it back from Nic. I’ll make sure to have it messengered over to the editor of the LA Times before I go home tonight.”
“I thought Nic was already doing that?” she asked as Marc finally set her back on her feet. “He looked like a publicity director on a mission to me.”
“Oh, he is,” Hollister assured her. “But I just want to cover all the bases. Make sure no one has a chance to say the verification—and our comment on it—slipped through the cracks.”
He left the office after that, leaving her and Marc alone to grin stupidly at each other.
“I want to celebrate,” he said, grabbing her hand and bringing it to his mouth. “I want to take you out somewhere fancy and ply you with champagne and chocolate and moonlight.” He pressed several kisses to her fingers, before turning her hand over and doing the same to her palm and wrist.
Shivers of excitement went through her at the whisper soft contact, and she leaned into Marc. Let him hear the hitch in her breathing and let him see the way her hands were suddenly a little unsteady.
His eyes darkened and then he was kissing her, his lips and tongue and mouth devouring her own as need—hot and dark and overwhelming—flowed between them.
“Hold that thought,” he growled when he finally ripped his mouth from hers. Then, grabbing a small remote from his desk drawer, he darkened the privacy shades on the windows until no one could see in. Then he strode over to the door, starting to close and lock it. But before he’d done much more than swing it shut, Lisa appeared, pale and disheveled.
“I need to talk to you,” she said. She looked absolutely panicked, her face drained of color and her hands shaking as she made her way into his office without an invitation.
“What’s wrong?” Marc asked, leading her to a chair. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she told him, placing the tablet she held on the desk. “But the vault isn’t.”
Isa felt her stomach plummet to the floor, felt her heart stick in her throat. “What does that mean?”
Lisa pulled up a spreadsheet on the computer, gestured to it wildly. “It means we’re missing several of the large, two-carat and above VVS1 diamonds. It means,” she said, choking on tears, “that Bijoux has been robbed.”
* *
*
“That’s not possible,” Marc said, keeping his voice—and himself—as calm as possible.
“That’s what I said when I went in to pack up several of the jewels for shipment this morning. But they’re missing. I’ve checked and double-checked the logs. I’ve searched every drawer within five rows in both directions, just in case they were put back in the wrong place for the first time ever. I’ve even pulled up the security tapes and nothing suspicious popped at all. No one has been in that vault in the last three days who doesn’t belong there.”
“Three days? Is that the last time you saw those diamonds?”
“I saw them Saturday. I had just secured them in the vault when you called me into your office. I haven’t checked them since—have had no reason to until today. No one except Isa has.”
He could barely think around the suspicion—around the rage—that was seeping into him from all directions. This couldn’t be happening again. It simply couldn’t. It wasn’t possible. Isa wouldn’t do this to him a second time, not when they were finally starting to get somewhere. Not when he was finally beginning to move past her betrayal of six years ago.
Yes, he’d been suspicious enough to stay in the vault with her. But they’d moved past that. No way would she do this. And no way would he be so stupid that he didn’t see it. Not when he’d been so careful. Not when he’d worked so hard to make sure she wouldn’t fall victim to temptation while she was here.
While she was in his vaults.
He told himself not to jump to conclusions, not to let his suspicions run away with him. But still he couldn’t look at Isa as he called up security and ordered the video for the past five days to be emailed to him.
“What can I do to help?” Isa asked from where she was standing, frozen, next to his desk.
He didn’t answer. Didn’t trust his voice, or the words that would spew out of his mouth.
Picking up his phone, he called his head of security. Demanded that the man meet Marc at the vault in the next five minutes. Then he grabbed his cell phone and the tablet Lisa had brought with her and made a beeline for the door and the elevator.
As if the machine understood the rage coursing through him—and the fact that Marc was one breath away from jumping out of his goddamn skin—the elevator came right away. He got on, waited for Lisa to do the same. But when Isa went to join them, he told her, “Don’t.”
She froze, eyes wide and cheeks pale. It was the last visual he had before the elevator doors slid shut.
He pulled up the video, had it running on the tablet before he even hit the vault floor. He kept it running as he did the usual security routine to open the vault, his eyes never leaving the footage as it ran through Saturday afternoon.
He paused it when Bob, his head of security, showed up. “Seven of the nearly flawless one-point-five-carat diamonds are missing,” he told Bob, as he thrust the tablet at him. “Find out what the hell happened.”
Before entering the vault, he called up the IDs of everyone who had entered in the past ninety-six hours. Lisa was right—there was no one suspicious on the list. Nobody suspicious but the woman who had spent the past three nights in his bed.
He blocked out the thought, along with the fresh wave of rage that threatened to swamp him, to pull him under. He concentrated on the job at hand.
“I want three pairs of eyes on the footage from every camera in this vault,” he barked at Bob. “I want to know what happened in this room every second of the last ninety-six hours and then I want to know what happened in every other room on this floor. In the bathroom down the hall. In the only two damn elevators that actually reach this floor. And I want to know these things in the next four hours.
“I also,” he continued, gritting his teeth and doing his damnedest not to bellow like a wounded bear, “want to know where the bloody damn hell my diamonds are. I want to know how they got out of the vault, I want to know how they got out of the building and I want to know where the hell they are right now!”
“Yes, Marc.” Bob looked as pale as Isa had right before the elevator doors closed on her. Good. It was his damn job to make sure this didn’t happen and now that it had...he damn well better figure out how to fix it.
Except it wasn’t fair to blame Bob, the little voice in the back of Marc’s head whispered. Not when Marc had knowingly, wittingly, brought an ex-thief into his building. Into his vault. Not when he’d trusted her despite her track record—and despite his misgivings. No, this wasn’t Bob’s fault so much as it was his. He was the one who had trusted Isa. He was the one who—after that first day in the vault—had given her more and more freedom at Bijoux. He had given her the run of the place because he’d begun to trust her again.
Because he’d wanted to believe in her, no matter who her father was. No matter what she’d done in her past.
Jesus Christ. Six years and he hadn’t learned a damn thing. He was still a sucker for red hair, a sweet smile and a pair of chocolate-brown eyes. Still a sucker for Isa.
No, not a sucker, he told himself viciously as more of his security team swarmed into the vault. He wasn’t a sucker. He was a goddamn fool. An idiot. A moron who deserved every bit of this. He hadn’t learned the first time, hadn’t been smart enough to keep from repeating his mistakes, so fate had stepped in to teach him a lesson once and for all.
Well, he’d learned it this time. Christ, had he ever. No way would Isa ever pull one over on him again.
Jesus, he thought even as he barked orders to start inventorying the drawers. They would have to eat the loss of those diamonds. He wasn’t going to some insurance investigator with this story. They’d laugh him out of the building. After they crucified him, that is.
Provided nothing else was missing but those seven stones, it wasn’t a big deal. They were nice stones, but they weren’t anything spectacular. They sure as hell weren’t worth enough that they would disrupt anything important, not even his profit and loss margins.
Three hundred grand retail, maybe. A hundred grand sold to a fence on the streets. That was it. A hundred thousand dollars. Is that what his love was worth to Isa? A hundred grand? Silly girl. If she’d stuck with him she could have had a lot more than that. She could have had everything that was his. He’d been so close to loving her again, so close to giving her anything and everything she could ever want.
And instead of loving him back, instead of caring about him at all, she’d done this. Stabbed him in the back even while she continued to make love to him.
His stomach clenched at the thought and for a minute he thought he was going to embarrass himself all to hell by getting sick. But he swallowed down the nausea, forced his body to take it just as he forced himself to take the pain of Isa’s betrayal. Better to deal with it now than to sublimate it and give it the power to bring him to his knees later.
He did everything he could in the vault, issued all the orders that needed to be given at this first stage of the investigation. He supposed he could thank Isa for that, too. Isa and her father. If it hadn’t been for the robbery six years ago, Marc wouldn’t be as well versed in what needed to be done.
It took him nearly three hours to make his way back down to his office. Three hours in which he watched time-lapse video of every single person who had been in the vault since Saturday afternoon. Three hours in which he had to tell his brother that they’d been robbed, again. Three hours in which he stewed and brooded and grew angrier and angrier as the truth became clear. No one had been in this vault in the past four days who hadn’t been in it hundreds of times before. No one had been in this vault who hadn’t worked for his company for at least five years. Nobody, that is, except the woman who insisted on making a fool of him over and over again.
He didn’t know what he’d find in his office, didn’t have a clue if Isa had fled the premises or if she would be stupid enough to be waiting for h
im. Nor was he sure what it said about him that he didn’t know which option he would prefer.
The choice was taken out of his hands, however, when he pushed the door to his office open and found Isa curled up on his sofa, eyes wide and feet tucked under her.
She jumped up as soon as she saw him, crossed the room at close to a dead run. “Did you find out what happened? Does Security know where the diamonds went? Or how they were smuggled out? Or—”
She broke off when he held up a hand. “I’m going to ask you once, Isa, and then I’m never going to ask you again. Did you take those diamonds?”
“No, Marc. No! Of course I didn’t. I would never do that to you. I would never do that to us.”
He stared at her for long seconds, searched her face for sincerity. Then nodded. “You need to leave.”
“Leave? But—”
“You need to leave now. I’ll have accounting cut you a check for the work you did for me and then you need to get whatever things you have here and you need to leave the premises. Forever.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Oh, I mean it, Isa. I mean it more than you could possible imagine.”
“Seriously?” she demanded. “It’s been six years and we’re right back here again?”
“Don’t act offended. After all, you’re the one who put us here.”
“No, Marc. You’re the one at fault this time. Because I didn’t steal those diamonds.”
“Stop talking!” he ordered her as fury threatened to swallow him whole. “Stop lying to me. I can take anything but that. I can take knowing you stole from me, but I can’t take you looking me in the eye and lying to me.”
“I’m not—”
“Get out!” he yelled. “Before I have you escorted from the premises. Get out now and I’ll have your check mailed to you tonight. Just get out.”
“Marc, please—”
He whirled on her then, the rage breaking wide-open inside him. “Get the hell out, Isa, or this time, I really will call the police.”