The Grift of the Magi

  “Georgie, get over here. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  Georgie was young and lovely and decidedly more female than her name might indicate. She was dressed for riding and had a faint horsey smell that spoke of someone who was coming in from the stables.

  When she approached she looked at Hale and Kat both, smiled at them equally. And for the first time in the earl’s presence Kat felt like more than just the girl the Hale heir brought to the party.

  “Hello,” she said and her father reached for her hand.

  “W. W. Hale the Fifth, I’d like you to meet my daughter, Lady Georgette.”

  Georgette dropped into a curtsy as if she’d been doing it all of her life and, Kat supposed, she had.

  “Lady Georgette.” Hale gave a bow. “It’s an honor to meet you. May I present my assistant, Kat?”

  Georgette smiled in Kat’s direction. “How do you do? My father has told me of your grandmother and her charity, Mr. Hale. Tell me, how go the plans for the auction?”

  Hale looked at Kat who turned to Lady Georgette and answer-ed. “Very well, my lady. The press release went out yesterday and all the prominent collectors were notified by phone the night before last. So far, the response has been tremendous.”

  “Has it?” the viscount said.

  “Are they still planning on doing it so close to Christmas?” Lady Georgette asked. “I know I’m no expert on these things, but surely you could get more interest with a little time?”

  “True.” Kat smiled. “But interests can also wane. Especially with collectors who never thought an Egg of the Magi would become available during their lifetimes. Best to act before that fact fully sinks in. We’d hate for them to get immune to the thought. We’re hoping that it will give people a sort of rush. Plus, we think the Christmas spirit will help people to be even more generous than usual. It’s for a good cause, after all. Many of the children and families who benefit from the charity are being photographed with the egg today, in fact.”

  Beside her, Kat could feel the viscount bristle. “Surely that’s not necessary.”

  Kat glanced up at him. “The publicists assure us that it is.”

  “But…” the man stammered. “It could break.”

  Kat could feel everyone looking at her, waiting. A maid was helping Marcus with the last of the bags. The rest of the guests were already inside, warming up with fresh scones and hot cups of tea. But Kat just looked down at the old man.

  “Don’t worry, my lord. The Magi Miracle Network will make sure that the egg stays in the exact condition that it was in when you entrusted it to us.”

  This, at last, seemed to appease him. “Very well. But do me a favor and don’t mention the egg to my new lady. Won’t set too well, my giving it away. She likes the shiny, you see.”

  Kat felt Hale’s hand shift at her waist, a physical sign that something about these words might matter.

  Kat thought about what Gabrielle had said. When the earl died, his personal wealth would pass to whatever wife he might leave behind. And the egg was personal wealth.

  “My lord,” Hale said, “I hadn’t realized you’d remarried. Congratulations.”

  “He’s engaged,” the viscount rushed to correct.

  “I’ll be married soon enough, boy. And then you’ll be out of the picture as soon as my son and rightful heir comes along. Isn’t that right, Allaway?”

  “It is, my lord,” the lawyer agreed.

  “Would have had an heir already if Georgie hadn’t been a…” He gestured wildly, as if the word girl was one he couldn’t bring himself to say. “But don’t you worry. The real Viscount Marley will be here within the year. Just you wait.”

  Hale’s smile looked natural. Calm. Only Kat could see him force it.

  “Of course, my lord. Congratulations on the happy event,” Hale said, but Kat couldn’t keep from glancing at Lady Georgette—the “Georgie” who would always be too small, too frail, too female to ever fully have her place at the family table. And Kat’s heart broke for her.

  “Who is the lucky lady?” Hale asked the earl.

  “Ah,” the old man beamed. “I’m the lucky one, my boy. See for yourself. She’s right behind you.”

  Kat felt herself turn. The wind blew her hair from her face with a cold slap, but nothing compared to the sound of the voice that said, “Is someone talking about me?”

  But the words were almost lost amid the crash of luggage hitting the gravel drive and the spinning of the maid in the too-short skirt. Kat hoped she was the only one who heard Gabrielle’s shocked whisper. “Mom?”

  Kat remembered her mother. Not everything—she’d been too young for that. But memories would come back to her occasionally, even after all these years. A smell of baking bread. The sound of pigeons when they scatter. Old haunting folk songs sung in Russian in the middle of the night. These things came to Kat in waves and fits and starts. But never did her mother seem so close and quite so far as when she was in the same room with her Aunt Irina.

  That was what Kat thought when she heard the sitting room door slam behind her.

  “Oh, don’t be silly. I’d love to show our guests to their chambers!” Irina had called down the long hall, her words bouncing off of polished floors and three-hundred-year-old family portraits.

  The earl had smiled and nodded, as if all men should be so lucky as to find such a natural hostess to marry. The viscount had scowled, as if his uncle’s new paramour lacked the good sense to know exactly which tasks should be left to the help.

  But none of that mattered to Kat.

  Hale spun and Gabrielle dropped the luggage she’d been carrying, letting it bounce on the soft sofa and tumble to the floor.

  Kat could only look at the woman who, in the right light and the right clothes and the right circumstances could almost be her mother’s twin. “Is it you?” Kat asked.

  Irina scanned Kat from head to toe, and for a moment she seemed more like Gabrielle than her lost sister.

  “Of course it’s me. I would have thought that obvious, Katarina. Or have you lost your mind as well as your heart.” Smoothly, she turned to Hale. “Hello, darling.” She leaned up and offered her check for a kiss. “It is so good to see you, dear. Let me look at you. Oh, Gabrielle, why didn’t you see him first? For that matter, why didn’t I see him first?”

  “Mother! Listen to us,” Gabrielle was shouting, crossing the room. Even in the maid’s uniform with her gorgeous hair pulled back in a tight bun at the back of her neck, she moved like a swan, like a ballerina, ready to leap from the stage at any moment. “Are you running the Bird in the Hand or aren’t you?” Gabrielle asked and, at last, Irina stopped smiling.

  “Of course not. Why would I do something silly like that? I’m going to be the next Countess of Greymore, or haven’t you heard?”

  “Mother!” Gabrielle exclaimed and Irina whirled on her.

  “Don’t give me that look, Gabrielle. You should be so lucky as to land a man like the earl when you’re my age.”

  “He’s forty years older than you!”

  “I know.” Irina practically squealed. “Isn’t it perfect?”

  “So what con are you running?” Hale leaned against the door that separated the sitting room from the bedroom of the huge suite that the Hale heir had been given. He kept his arms crossed and his voice even, but Kat could feel his patience running out.

  “Why should there be a con?” Irina said as she walked to one of the gilt-framed mirrors and fingered her already perfect hair. “The man is going to marry me. And then he’s going to die, and I’m going to be the Countess of Greymore until that little slimeball Fletcher marries, and makes me the Dowager Countess, but, then, the countess is all that matters, isn’t it?”

  “Mother, I—”

  “Oh, Gabrielle! You should marry Fletcher! It’s perfect. Of course, we can’t let on that you’re my daughter. I’m certainly not old enough to have a daughter your age, but it is perfect! But we have to get you out
of that dreadful uniform first. If a future earl is drawn to a maid, then it’s always for the wrong reasons.”

  “Mother!”

  Gabrielle was ice and steel—all that was cool and calm and beautiful. She did not yell. She froze. And even Irina could see that something wasn’t quite right with her daughter.

  “Who is running the Bird in the Hand?” Gabrielle asked.

  Irina shook her head. “No one. There’s no one here except us. I’d know, you know. I’ve been working this job for months.”

  “Did you know the earl is nearly bankrupt?” Hale asked, but Irina waved the fact aside.

  “Of course. He’s draining the estate dry before he dies. It’s no secret. He thinks that will punish his nephew and drive his daughter to the altar.”

  “Why are you here, Mother? If the money is running out.”

  Irina’s look was bemused and maybe a little disappointed. Clearly, she hadn’t trained Gabrielle as well as she’d thought.

  “Money comes and goes, darling. Tiaras are forever. So are titles.”

  Gabrielle practically rolled her eyes. “You’ve been a countess, a duchess; I seem to remember a six-month period when I was twelve where you were known exclusively as Princess Mariah. You can be a countess any time you want.”

  “Oh, Gabrielle. The best lie is the truth. Surely you know that. Kat knows that. Otherwise why would W. W. Hale the Fifth have just walked through these doors? This one job can set me up for the rest of my life. And it will set you up too if you play your cards right. It’s a shame Fletcher is so fond of redheads. Maybe if we—”

  “Who stole the egg, Irina?” Hale pushed away from the doorframe and crossed the room in three long strides. He wasn’t the cool, calm inside man, the flirt, the playboy. Not even the heir. He was a boy who had lost his grandmother too soon and wasn’t going to stop until he had this one small piece of her back where it belonged. “The Egg of the Magi, who stole it?”

  Irina could have acted confused, could have lied. But she didn’t. Kat could see it in her eyes as she said, “What are you kids talking about? Did Uncle Eddie put you up to this?”

  “The Egg of the Magi is missing, Aunt Irina,” Kat said. “Someone’s running the Bird in the Hand, and we need that egg before it’s sold on the black market and lost forever.”

  Irina’s eyebrow went up. For the first time, she looked at her sister’s daughter as if she might be a fool.

  “The Egg of the Magi is not missing.”

  “Do you know where it is?” Kat asked.

  “It’s downstairs!” Irina snapped.

  Kat looked at Hale, who said, “Show us.”

  If the servants thought it strange to see their future mistress, the young American billionaire, his assistant, and the new maid traipsing through the manor house, all in a row, while the rest of the guests were gathering in the blue parlor for tea, no one said so. It was the kind of house—the kind of world—where the help learned early on to see everything and say nothing.

  When the future countess threw open the doors to the library, there wasn’t a soul inside. The room was long and stretched the width of one of the newer wings of the house, and she walked like a queen across the rich red carpet until she reached the glass case that sat framed by a bay of floor-to-ceiling windows.

  Perhaps it was the late afternoon sun, the cool clear glass of the case, but the object on the pedestal seemed to have its own light—to glow from within.

  “Here,” Irina said, gesturing toward it. “Here is your precious egg.”

  Gabrielle and Hale looked at each other, as if to say well, do you want to steal it or should I?

  Gabrielle was actually reaching for a fireplace poker, preparing to strike the glass and have done with it, when Kat backed away from the case and said, “Fake.”

  “No, Kat, dear. The earl assured me that this is the Egg of the Magi. It can’t be a fake.”

  “Oh, it’s a fake,” Kat said. “A good one. Good enough to be one of Uncle Charlie’s, in fact, but it’s a fake for sure.”

  “How do you know?” Irina asked.

  She raised an eyebrow. “I have an Egg of the Magi. A real one, remember?”

  Kat could feel Hale at her elbow, easing closer for a better look.

  Irina and Gabrielle flanked them on either side, four sets of eyes staring at the glistening gems and polished gold. Perhaps that’s why no one heard the library doors open until a familiar voice rang out.

  “Found it!”

  As soon as Kat turned she recognized the pristine uniform of an earl’s footman and the boy inside it. Hamish was every bit a Bagshaw as he strolled through the main door of the room, a delicate bundle in his outstretched hands.

  “Old fella had this in with his skivvies, but—”

  “I’ve got it!” a nearly identical voice rang out from the doors that led onto the mansion’s back patio. Angus Bagshaw was slightly shorter and slightly heavier than his brother, but in their matching livery they looked almost like twins, especially when they met in the center of the room, their hands holding nearly identical eggs.

  “Fakes,” Kat said with a single glance.

  “Your fiancé is crazy,” Gabrielle told her mother. “You can still pick ’em.”

  But Irina merely shrugged. “Older men have their merits, dear. Older rich men have many of them.”

  “Where is it?” Hale was asking, turning to Kat.

  “We’re going to find it, Hale.”

  “Are we? Or are we going to spend who-knows-how-long scouring this place, finding nothing but more and more proof that the Earl of Greymore is crazy?”

  “We’ll find it!” Kat said again. She was no longer sure if the words were for him or for herself. She wasn’t even sure if there was a difference.

  Kat was aware of the room. It was one of the byproducts of being Uncle Eddie’s niece and Bobby Bishop’s daughter. Some part of her brain was always calculating angles and measuring time, and so as the Bagshaws fought and Gabrielle scolded and Irina argued, a part of Kat was walking the perimeter of the large room, whispering in her ear that all was not as it seemed.

  “Kat?”

  She heard Hale’s voice. She felt his presence at her shoulder, large and warm and comforting. But it was that other Kat—the one that was encoded deep inside her DNA that was already inching toward the fireplace along the west wall of the massive room. She was already reaching, twisting, turning and pushing until she heard the inevitable…click.

  “What do we have…” Kat started slowly as the bookshelf beside the fireplace began to move and shift, swinging open like a pair of great double doors to reveal a room that was long and narrow. Overhead, lights sputtered to life, filling the space with a harsh glare that bounced off of what looked to be a sea of gold and rubies and sapphires. There were mirrors on the walls, and the image reflected back and forth in what appeared to be a never-ending hallway. Eggs of the Magi—thousands of them—stretching out as far as the eye could see.

  She glanced at Hale who looked as if he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  Three Days Before the Auction

  Greymore Castle, England

  The Earl of Greymore’s Christmas house party was nearly as old as the earldom itself. For hundreds of years, it had been the site of scandal and drama and more than one heiress compromised beneath the mistletoe by an impoverished nobleman who was more than willing to take the girl—and her dowry—off of her father’s hands.

  But this year’s party had a flavor and a feel like no one could remember. There were, for instance, the two new footmen who somehow managed to set the drawing room of the family wing on fire and forced the evacuation of the earl’s private chambers for more than eight hours. There was the new maid who, while presumably cleaning the earl’s office, was drawn into a screaming match with the future countess over the location of an antique armoire and whether or not it should be moved to reveal whatever was behind it.

  And, of course, there were the guests. A
side from the normal collection of lords and ladies from all over England, this year the guest list included the usual rush of dowager duchesses and aging viscounts, a few members of the landed gentry and a variety of young misses, each of whom hoped to catch the eye of the earl’s heir and eventually become a countess in her own right.

  But the most troubling thing, it seemed, was the weather.

  Gray clouds moved over the winter sun and the wind turned crisp, and eventually even the fires in the big rooms were not enough to fight the chill.

  Perhaps that was why Kat’s hands were cold and her head was hurting. Every time she smelled pine needles she wanted to sneeze. And every time she felt the anger that was brewing inside of Hale she wanted to scream.

  But she could do neither. So Kat simply settled for looking harder.

  There were a dozen eggs in the kitchen—all fake. A very good replica was displayed on the landing at the top of the west stairwell, and at least twenty eggs—in all shapes and sizes—adorned the Christmas tree that the staff spent the better part of the day erecting in the grand hall.

  Hamish and Angus each found a stash of eggs beneath the mattresses of the family bedrooms and an almost comically large egg lived in the center of a dormant fountain in the formal gardens.

  The sky darkened and the guests drank tea and Kat and her friends looked.

  And looked.

  Until Kat pushed her way into one of the storerooms off the kitchen and feared that she could look no more.

  When a pair of strong arms snaked around Kat’s stomach and pulled her back, she might have fought—once upon a time. But Kat the Burglar had changed, it seemed. Because all she did was sink into the embrace and feel warm for the first time that day.

  “Any luck?” Hale’s breath was warm against Kat’s ear. His lips brushed against her in a whisper of a kiss.

  “No.” Kat forced herself to pull away and turn, look up at him. She didn’t like what she saw. “What’s wrong?”