Chapter Eight
Sebastian Shaw
She looked the part, I had to admit. The hat Elizabeth had dredged up suited Amanda.
Now all I had to do was get her to my car, drive into town, and keep her out of sight. The hat would be a start, but the rest would be up to me.
I didn’t bother to open the door for Amanda, and I found it highly amusing when she paused, waiting for me to do it. I could tell she was a well-heeled girl, and I’d also done some checking on her last night, which helped. She had a trust fund and was related to Imelda Stanton, one of the richest women in England. Amanda had gone to uni and walked away with the most useless degree: an arts degree specializing in history and fine art. She had gone on from there to do various stints in volunteer organizations, especially ones that had anything to do with animals or the environment, and had pretty much vacillated for the rest of her life, as children born into rich families often do when they do not have to work for their crust. She didn’t have a police record, she’d only ever had a handful of parking fines, and she wasn’t on any lists. Well, she would be now, but before the auction, Amanda had led an outstandingly boring life.
Amanda Stanton looked like the most ordinary of girls. I was gobsmacked it was her of all people who’d found my globes. Though technically, it wasn’t her at all, it was her Great-Uncle Arthur Stanton, adventurer extraordinaire. He’d done all the hard work and found the globes, she’d just put them up for auction in the most stupid manner possible.
She got in the car, the giant brim of her hat tilting and covering most of her face save for a thin line of her bottom lip and chin. Move over Serena, in that moment Amanda looked more than attractive. But that moment passed when she opened her mouth.
“Where are you going to take me?” she asked in that highly irritating pitch of hers. “Should I call my great-aunt? I mean, what if people start to realize I’m missing? What if people go to my house and… well, notice all the guns on the ground?”
I shook my head as I walked around the front of the car to sit with a thump behind the wheel. I ignored her as I started up the engine, scratched my neck, waved at Elizabeth, and moved into reverse.
“Won’t the police be looking for me? What about this Maratova man? Last night while you were in my drawing room, you mentioned something about a man named Romeo, won’t he be after me too?” Her voice was picking up speed, the words blurring together.
If this woman didn’t irritate me so much, I could sympathize with her situation; she’d had one hell of a night. Yet for some reason this chick irritated me, so I pulled my lips back, my teeth stuck together in the worst smile I could muster.
It wasn’t until I gunned the accelerator down the immaculately graded stones, tires slipping as they tried to get traction on the uneven surface, that I answered her. “You do not want the list of people that are after you, honey,” I took great pleasure in using that pet name because of the distinctly irritated look she shot me. “First things first: you need to tell me where the rest of the globes are.” I turned to her as I made it to the end of the driveway and onto a large country road.
She didn’t answer right away, she hesitated. I sure as hell hoped it wasn’t because she was caught with a desire to open the door and roll out of the car, in her never-ending attempts to flee me.
“Amanda, I need as much information as you can give me. Please don’t tell me that those globes are back at that house.” I doubted they were. If Maratova had found the globes lined up neatly under her pillow, I would have heard about it by now.
She bit her lip, and I only noticed because I took the time to take my eyes off the road to glance her way. “Amanda?”
“Well,” she began in a small voice, “Technically I… don’t have them yet.”
My lips curled into a frown. “Sorry?” my voice bottomed out low. This wasn’t all some game, was it? Had Amanda Stanton been lying when she’d told that auction room she had the full set of the Stargazer Globes?
My throat became dry at the prospect of how fucked up this could be.
“I know where they are, I just don’t have them yet,” Amanda started to play with her fingernails, rubbing her hands nervously.
Before I could blow a gasket at the prospect Amanda had been lying all along, and that the only Stargazer Globe had already been sold off at auction, I took a calming breath. “Where are they, Amanda?”
“Oh,” she clamped her hands tightly on her lap, “They are in his book. Well,” she moved her hands about as if she was trying to extinguish a fire, “I don’t mean to say that they’re in his book, like they are somehow squeezed between the pages, because that would be silly.”
I didn’t even bother to point out that yes, obviously that would be silly, as silly as the current conversation. All I cared about were those globes, not how ridiculously cute Amanda’s lips were as she caught them between her teeth.
“What book?” I asked after it became clear Amanda was going to leave out the most important detail.
“My great-uncle’s book. The one on his desk where I found the original globe, the one that had been in the attic full of treasure.”
“Sorry? The roomful of treasure? What are you talking about?” my tone was terse; this was like getting information out of a two-year-old.
“I found the original globe, the one sold at auction, in my great-uncle’s attic. While the rest of his house was full of junk, well, the attic was full of treasure,” she said matter-of-factly, “There were even gold statues. My great-aunt, owing to the fact she is the executrix of the estate, dealt with those. She left me that inane-looking globe and all of Great-Uncle Stanton’s papers. I suppose she thought they weren’t worth anything.”
I snorted. It didn’t surprise me that Imelda Stanton wouldn’t have thought much of the dusty old Stargazer Globe. She wasn’t the kind of old dame to look beyond appearances.
That Amanda had obviously thought there was something to the Stargazers, or at least enough to put them up for auction and find herself in the biggest trouble of her life, was interesting.
That the globe sold at auction had been in a room full of treasure, well that very was interesting indeed. Could it be that old crazy Arthur Stanton had already brought all the Stargazers together and found some of the treasure from them (it wouldn’t be all, not unless he’d hollowed out a whole city underneath his manor and had stacked it to the brim with the world’s greatest antiquities)? I had no idea, but it was something to think about. I realized as I let a genuine smile spread my lips that any clues I was looking for might be in the book Amanda was talking about.
I took a corner too hard, Amanda grabbing hold of the armrest, her legs stiffening as she tried to keep balance, her skirt riding up. I flicked my gaze down to her knee, then up to her face. “Where is the book, Amanda?”
She caught me looking at her legs, and sucked in her lips and narrowed her eyes. As if I was interested anyway.
“It’s at the local library,” Amanda said with a shrug.
Before I could worry that yet again the next piece of the puzzle was back at old Stanton’s house, it was as if she had come at me with a right hook, right out of the blue. “What?”
She offered an awkward smile around gritted teeth. “Well, you see, I accidentally took it to the library when I was returning a whole bunch of other books. They called the other day to let me know, but I haven’t had a chance to go pick it up yet.”
I burst into laughter. Seriously? She had taken what could be one of the most valuable books in human history to the library by accident? I got the distinct impression that if you were to loan the Mona Lisa to Amanda, with explicit instructions to keep it safe, you would walk into the room five minutes later and find it ripped on the floor, Amanda playing with her fingers awkwardly by its side.
I grinned. Stupidity aside, this was pretty good news. It was at the library; it wasn’t back at the house. Maratova wouldn’t have had a chance to get his hands on it yet. He probably didn’t even
know it existed. And unless Amanda had written up on a message board with a giant marker that she had to go back to the library to pick up the book that had the locations of the four Stargazer Globes in it, Maratova wasn’t going to find out anytime soon.
At that point, I did something brash, because fuck it if I wasn’t in a brash mood. I did a bootlegger turn on a tiny narrow country road. The library was in the other direction.
Amanda shrieked, sounding like some stereotypical soapy heroine who’d stepped on a mouse. “What are you doing?” She tried to keep herself steady as the car screeched around in an arc, smoke curling up from the tires. Her legs splayed out all over the place, her skirt rising up until it was several inches above her knees, her hat tumbling right off her head as her hair bunched up over her face.
“I’m going to the library,” I said in the coolest voice I could manage as I let go of the park brake and gunned the accelerator to speed out of the dangerous turn. My car scraped past a hedge, several leaves and twigs falling on Amanda through the partially opened window.
The look on her face was worth it. I could bet my own expression wasn’t anything but cool and calm as I straightened up the vehicle and continued down the road at a cracking pace.
She sat there with her mouth open, trying to rearrange her skirt as she picked the twigs and leaves from her hair and threw them out the window. “You mad bastard.” She grabbed the hat and shoved it on her head.
I offered a sweet smile in return. One hand on the steering wheel, one hand still resting on the gearstick, and with no other vehicles in sight, I turned to her. With a serious expression, I tilted my head to the side. “Amanda Stanton, I need you to tell me what is in that book.”
She looked at me, mouth wide open, brow pressed with amazement at my antics. “Are you out of your mind?”
I shrugged. If doing a bootlegger turn on a narrow country lane in an effort to get to the library as quickly as I could in order to get a book that told me the location to some of the greatest treasure maps on earth was mad, then yes, I was mad.
She continued to stare at me, her mouth still wide, wide open. “I don’t have my library card on me,” she pointed out primly.
I snapped my head to the side and gave a short, sharp laugh. “I hate to point this out, sweetie, but you own the book.”
“They don’t know me, they’re going to need some ID to ensure that I am who I say I am.”
I didn’t bother answering, because I couldn’t think of a statement that could show her how damn stupid she was. So I shook my head, ran a hand over the sharp stubble collecting on my chin, and hoped like hell I wouldn’t have much more to do with this woman.
After a while, a thick silence descended over us. Amanda sat tensely, her hands pressed over the hem of her skirt, her ankles locked neatly, her head turned toward the window, the massive brim of her hat hiding her face. For my part, I drove and thought about how much shit I was in.