“And thought she was turning you on?” It made Erica’s confidence in ensnaring him more understandable, Tyler reflected.
“Could be. She acted like it. But then, she acted like that all evening.”
Tyler stared at his neck, even though no trace of the lipstick remained. She forced herself not to think about that. Except that her voice didn’t obey her mind. “Did she miss your mouth, or was she trying to get lipstick all over you?” Damn! She sounded like a shrew.
“Shrew.” But Kane was smiling. Then the smile faded and he said seriously, “You know, I think that’s just what she was doing. It’s hard to believe, but even as . . . as frantic as she seemed to be, it was sort of . . . bravado. Something she almost had to do.”
“She was branding you. For me to see.”
Kane frowned a little. “I don’t get it.”
“Neither did I, until I talked to her. What she more or less said was that as long as you were here, you wouldn’t be safe from her, um, seductive wiles. I think she fully expected me to panic, grab you by the collar and hustle you out of here.”
He gazed up at her, still frowning, one hand toying gently with her tumbled hair. “Are you saying that whole vamp bit was designed to make us leave the villa? Baby, that doesn’t make sense.”
“No, because we don’t know why. But I think I’m right, Kane, I really do. Nothing about her was natural tonight; it was like she was playing a part—being forced to play it—and scared to death of not doing it right.”
“Surely she could have found an easier way of getting rid of us,” he objected.
Tyler chewed on her bottom lip as she thought about it, until Kane lifted a hand to cup her cheek and used his thumb to gently ease her lip free.
“Don’t do that,” he murmured. “It makes me crazy.”
She had to laugh, but said, “I’m trying to think; stop distracting me.”
“I can’t think of anything but you right now,” he retorted, and pulled her head down firmly.
The conversation ended for the time being, and both of them were too pleasantly exhausted to resume it. The lamp was turned off, and they fell asleep still entwined.
It was hours later when Tyler woke up, and she couldn’t figure out why; dawn was no more than a faint gray light in their silent bedroom, the house quiet and peaceful. Then she heard a sound from outside, faint and muffled. She eased away from Kane and slipped from the bed, crossing to the window and shivering unconsciously at the cold floor beneath her feet.
The window was open just an inch or so, which explained how she’d managed to hear anything at all from outside. She pulled the drapes aside and gazed out. Nothing moved, and in the gray light she could see nothing unusual, nothing out of place.
But she felt tense, jumpy.
“Ty?” Kane’s voice was sleepy, puzzled. “Baby, come back to bed.”
With a shrug, Tyler abandoned the window and returned to him, sliding under the covers and cuddling up to his warm body as he pulled her close.
“Why’d you get up?” he murmured.
“I thought I heard something.”
“What?”
“Just a noise; it woke me up, I guess. But I didn’t see anything.”
He murmured something wordless and pressed a kiss to her forehead, recapturing sleep with no effort. But Tyler lay awake for a long time, bothered. She felt uneasy, the way she had from time to time in the past when there had been puzzling undercurrents in a situation.
After experiencing stark, primitive fear herself, it was almost as if some barrier of civilization, some protective veil, had been ripped away from her. People who had known the physical and emotional trauma of violence, her father had said, were changed forever by it, left wary on the deepest levels of themselves. Instincts that most people never needed in their lives were born—or released—in violence.
Now, in the gray light of a silent dawn, Tyler felt those instincts stirring. Like an animal bristling at the stench of fear, she felt tense and anxious, her unconsciously straining ears listening for . . . something.
But the house was silent. Gradually Tyler forced herself to relax. The steady rise and fall of Kane’s broad chest and the thud of his heart beneath her cheek lulled her senses, until finally she drifted back to sleep. She had strange dreams, remembering in the morning only that they had disturbed her, that she had been searching for someone whimpering in pain.
ALL THE NEXT morning Tyler and Kane worked in the big library. Despite their active adventures in the past, both were competent researchers, and it took them very little time to become familiar with the haphazard system Stefano Montegro had tried to impose on nearly four hundred years of chaos. They briskly decided that Kane would wade through the stack of household ledgers and inventories they had unearthed, while Tyler studied the available journals and diaries.
They had already agreed to explore the villa later in the afternoon; the contessa told them at breakfast that she always rested after lunch, and it seemed to be Erica’s habit to do the same. The dark woman’s pursuit of Kane was apparently reserved for evening hours, since she put in no appearance at breakfast and they saw no sign of her during the day.
They were working companionably in a silence broken from time to time as one or the other of them made a comment. Since he was dealing with the big, heavy ledgers, Kane sat at the mahogany desk while Tyler was curled up nearby in one of the reading chairs.
“Here’s something,” he said when they had been at work no more than an hour or so.
Tyler looked up from frowning over the faded ink and spidery writing in the journal on her lap. “What?”
“It’s dated 1894. Household inventory.” Steadily he read, “Item: one heavy cup, no handles, on a pedestal base; figures of Greek design, warriors and chariots, et cetera. Gift.” He looked up at her with a wry frown. “It doesn’t even say who the gift was from. Or when it was given. This entry could have been carried over from an earlier inventory that doesn’t even exist anymore.”
She stared at him. “No mention of its being made of gold?”
“No. But none of these entries bother to mention if any item is made of precious metals. Two lines above the cup, there’s a terse entry concerning a dagger. From the description, you’d think it was just another knife, but I happen to know it was made of gold, the handle at least, and studded with rubies. It’s in a museum now, and has been for the past fifty years. It’s called the Rose Dagger.”
Tyler accepted his certainty about that. “Then the cup could well be our chalice.”
“Could be. And it doesn’t help that there’s no mention of a mark on the base of the pedestal. It could have been missed or ignored, or there might not have been one.”
She sighed. “So we still don’t know which chalice belonged to the church in Florence, and which one the Montegros owned.”
Kane straightened in his chair and flexed his shoulders slightly. “Any luck at your end?”
“No. This is one of the oldest journals—a diary, really—dated from 1860. Unfortunately it belonged to a very silly girl named Melina.”
Kane grinned at her. “Why’s she silly?”
“I just read three pages describing her newest ball gown. It’d be bad enough in English, but in Italian it’s hell. Stop laughing, or I’ll make you read it!”
They paid no attention to the passing hours as they worked, and were disturbed only once as Fraser crept in with a tray of coffee and sandwiches sometime after noon. Tyler, immersed in the second of Melina’s three diaries, thanked him absently in Italian. She hardly noticed when he left again.
“Come up for air,” Kane requested, leaving the desk to pour coffee for both of them. “Are you still on Melina? I thought she was silly.”
“She is. But it’s a fascinating kind of silliness. She writes about everything. Fashion, what people talk about over dinner, the servants, her parents . . . a sexy stable-boy.”
“She didn’t write that he was sexy, I imagine?” Ka
ne set a cup of coffee on the table beside Tyler’s chair, then leaned over her shoulder to gaze at the diary.
Tyler tilted her head back and looked up at him. “No, but she described their tryst in an empty stable for five pages. I think it’s safe to assume he was sexy.”
“Maybe I should read it, after all.” He kissed her lightly before she could respond, then added, “Take a break. We’ll have lunch and then go exploring. I don’t know about you, but my eyes are beginning to cross.”
Tyler had no fault to find with the suggestion, and after finishing the sandwiches and coffee they set out to explore the villa. They had both dressed casually for the day, choosing to wear jeans, and neither was disturbed by the dust they stirred up as they wandered among the closed rooms on the third floor. The contessa had told them that this floor was unused and had been for some time, but she had also invited them to look around and they took her at her word.
It was a lonely place in its disuse, a part of the house cut off from life. Heavy furniture under Holland covers, rugs rolled up along walls, some windows bare and some shuttered. An occasional dark painting hung on a stained wall, so covered with layers of varnish that there was no hope of guessing what subjects the unknown artists had depicted.
“It’s so sad!” Tyler burst out as they headed back down the hall to the stairs. “A slow death. This place should go out in style, with laughter instead of this awful silence.”
Kane took her hand and squeezed it slightly. “I know. But this house was built for a way of life that’s gone, Ty. It can never be the kind of private home it was once.”
Tyler sighed an agreement and tried to make her voice brisk. “Well, we can’t do much poking around on the second floor; it’s mostly taken up with suites for the family and servants and a few guest bedrooms like ours. Elizabeth has a suite in our wing; Erica and Simon have one in the other along with Fraser and his wife. She’s a good cook, isn’t she?”
“Mrs. Fraser? Very good.”
They were moving down the stairs by then, and a glance at the cracked frescoes on the curving wall depressed Tyler all over again. Before she could say anything, however, they reached the second floor and found themselves facing a stranger.
“Good afternoon,” he said cheerfully. “I’m Simon Grayson.”
HE WAS A medium man. Medium height and weight, medium coloring, a voice in midrange. His smile was easy, his handshake firm and cool. He seemed polite and mild. And smooth.
“Are you finding everything you need in the library?” he asked as they continued down to the ground floor. “Mother told me about your research. It sounds fascinating.”
Tyler responded almost at random. “The Montegro family is fascinating. Between the journals and the ledgers, there’s a lot of information about them.”
Simon smiled at her. “I’m afraid that I’d be defeated at the outset by all that spiky writing. You read Italian, then?”
She glanced at Kane, who was unaccountably silent, then nodded at Simon. “Yes, we do. I can claim only French and Italian; Kane probably has half a dozen languages.” She knew, in fact, that he had at least that many.
Kane neither confirmed nor denied it; he had stopped at the closed library door and stood with one hand on the handle, and was looking at Simon with a kind of detached, vaguely polite attention. Despite his powerful size and rugged handsomeness, the abstracted air gave him the look of a scholar with his mind fixed on some weighty problem.
Tyler was baffled, since she’d never seen him look like that before, but some instinct alerted her to say nothing about it in the presence of Simon Grayson. Instead she said casually, “We’ll probably work the rest of the afternoon. Will we see you and Erica at dinner?”
Simon took the polite dismissal with good grace. “Of course. Until this evening, then.” He smiled and strolled off toward the stairs.
Kane opened the door for her, then followed her into the library. She leaned back against the door and watched as he began pacing restlessly.
“He didn’t waste any time, did he?” Kane muttered.
She frowned a little. “You think he came back early from his trip because we’re here?” She didn’t bother to keep her voice low, since the thick stone walls and massive wooden door made the room virtually soundproof.
“I’ll bet Erica called him as soon as the contessa told her about us. Elizabeth said he was in Brazil, didn’t she? Last night at dinner?”
“Yes.”
Kane grunted. “The hell he was. He came tearing back here to cover his ass, and it wasn’t from Brazil; he couldn’t have made it back so quickly.”
Tyler pushed away from the door and moved across the room to sit on the arm of a chair. “Kane, what’re you talking about?”
He stopped pacing and faced her. “Damn it, you were right. Erica was trying to get rid of us. I don’t know if the method was her idea or his, but you can bet he told her to do it.”
“He wouldn’t have told his own wife to—” She broke off suddenly. “Simon wants us out of here? But, why? He doesn’t even know us.”
“He knows we’re researching in here, reading the family journals and ledgers. Which means we could well stumble across information he’d much rather keep for himself. He must have nearly had a heart attack when Erica told him we were coming here and why. You said he’d always talked Elizabeth out of having this stuff cataloged; the last thing he wants is someone picking around in here, especially a couple of adventuring archaeologists. Who both speak and read Italian.” Scowling, he added, “Damn it, we always start out with a simple goal, and end up tangling with crooks!”
Tyler had to laugh, but she was still bewildered. “Kane, will you start at the beginning, please? What do you know about Simon Grayson that I don’t?”
Kane eyed her for a moment, then said, “Why don’t we just leave, now? I know you, Ty, you’ll get fierce about the contessa and we’ll both end up in trouble.”
She didn’t take the bait. “Tell me.”
He swore softly but with exquisite creativity. “All right. Simon Grayson deals in the black market for art objects. He supplies them.”
Her mouth fell open. “What?”
“Cute, isn’t it? Interpol’s had their eye on him for three or four years now, but they’ve never been able to nail him.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. I never connected the name, but I recognized him. A friend with Interpol showed me a photo about a year ago. They wanted to know if I’d ever encountered Grayson. He’s been driving them nuts by selling untraceable art objects into the black market. They believe he has a stash somewhere; they even got an agent in the villa once, but he couldn’t find a thing.”
Tyler felt limp. “Why haven’t they arrested him?”
“You know how it is. They know, but they can’t prove it in court. The middlemen he deals with are pros and not likely to even admit knowing him. It was just an unlucky chance that they got onto him at all; he made the mistake of using a ruby necklace to pay off a gambling debt—Erica’s, I imagine. The necklace, appraised and cataloged around the turn of the century, was listed as having disappeared sometime during World War II; at that time, it belonged to another old Venetian family in this area. I forget the name. Anyway, the guy Simon bought off with the necklace tried to sell it, and Interpol was alerted.”
“Couldn’t he testify against Simon?”
“He could. Except for one thing. A few hours after he’d made an informal statement to the police, he ended up in the morgue. Hit and run.”
“They think Simon did it.”
“Thinking isn’t proving. Simon was supposedly a hundred miles away at the time. With Erica.”
Tyler chewed her bottom lip. “Damn.”
“I told you not to do that,” Kane growled.
It took her a moment to realize what he meant, and she was a little surprised by her ability to distract him. She stopped chewing her lip. “Sorry. Kane, we have to do something.”
“I knew you were going to say that.” He half closed his eyes.
She was surprised again. “When have you ever run from a fight?”
Kane started pacing again, reluctant to tell her that he wanted to run from this one because of her. The thought of Tyler in danger made him sick with fear—and she courted danger, she’d taught herself to face it. She’d rush in with that fiery spirit of hers, just the way she had in North Africa and Mexico and Budapest and the Sudan and Hamburg and Hong Kong, and all the other places their jobs had taken them. Matching her strength and her wits against crooks with nothing to lose and a taste for violence. Damn, damn, damn.
“Kane?”
He loved her courage, even the maddening independence revealed in every defiant lift of her chin, but he wanted her safe and that instinct was too primitive to be denied. He’d wrap her in cotton wool if she’d let him, but she wouldn’t let him, he knew that only too well.
“He’s dangerous, Ty,” he said finally, evenly.
“All the more reason.” She sounded puzzled. “Those art objects have to be the Montegros’; he has no right to them, no right at all. He’s robbing Elizabeth.”
“The ruby necklace wasn’t the Montegros’.” He was reaching for objections, and he knew it.
“I can’t explain that,” she admitted. “But the answer’s here in the library, it must be. In the journals and diaries or the ledgers. Whatever it is, he probably didn’t dare take the chance of destroying anything in here for fear of Elizabeth finding out.”
Kane knew he had lost. He should have kept his big mouth shut about Simon Grayson’s little scam, but it was so natural to discuss it with Tyler that he hadn’t stopped to think. All he could do now was work with her, be alert to those reckless actions of hers, and guard her back. He didn’t intend to let her out of his sight as long as they remained at the villa.
“Kane?”
“All right,” he said briskly, heading for the desk. “So now we’re looking for two things. The chalice, and some indication of what was hidden, when it was hidden, and where.”
Tyler gave a gasp suddenly and began searching through the pile of diaries and journals beside her chair. “Stefano’s father,” she muttered. “I know I saw a couple of his journals, and Elizabeth said he hid the valuables during the war.”