Page 30 of The Duke and Lady Scandal
“Go on.”
“He came to Princes,” she said with quiet intensity. “The tall man from Hawlston’s walked right into my shop.”
Drake worked to give nothing away. He’d honed the ability to withhold reactions, especially any emotion. It wasn’t out of a desire to be cold, merely a necessity of the job. Emotion clouded judgement.
But she’d already broken through, aroused him, confounded him, and the fight for cool dispassion was harder now.
Fear, which he’d learned to beat back years ago, made his pulse tick in his neck. All the heat of their momentary collision turned to a trickle of ice down his spine.
Nothing about the man visiting her shop made sense except in the worst of scenarios. If this was the man she’d overheard, and he’d had the audacity to go to Princes, Drake suspected therewasa plot afoot. Perhaps the thief wanted no witnesses who could connect him to the mischief he was about to get up to.
“Did you speak to him?” As forthright as she was, he imagined she might confront him on the spot.
“No. In fact, I stayed in the back room and did my best to remain hidden.” She swallowed hard as if recalling the moment. “Mr. Gibson dealt with him. He’s our resident goldsmith and gem expert, though he knows antiquities too.”
“Did he buy anything?”
“No. He inquired about having a gem cut.”
Drake arched a brow and his mind spun with possibilities. The one difficulty of stealing famous jewels was disposing of them to buyers who would not recognize them as filched gems. That required a jeweler and gem cutter of skill and discretion.
“Is your Mr. Gibson a trustworthy man?”
“Of course he is.” She crossed her arms and glowered at him. “He ran the shop with my father for years and is all but a part of our family.”
“Very well.” He raised a hand and softened his tone. “I meant no offense. So you saw this customer from a distance? Could it have been another man with a dark beard and dark glasses?”
Thatwas the most sensible conclusion. The description was vague enough to fit a hundred men.
She drew her lower lip between her teeth rather than answer, and he felt a bit of the dread in his gut ebb away. Perhaps it wasn’t the same man after all.
“You’re not certain?” he guessed.
“I am.” She curled her hands into fists. “But he did not... look exactly the same,” she finally confessed.
“Ah.”
“But itwasthe same man. You yourself implied that he might have been concealing his appearance the first time I saw him.”
“He may have been, which makes this identification all the more dubious.” In most cases, he’d dismiss the matter now, and he wasn’t sure why he found himself willing to entertain her story.
“I know his voice. I’ve replayed the whole thing in my mind over and over, hoping to remember something new or find some additional detail.”
Good grief, the lady sounded like him when a twisted case gnawed at his mind.
She held his gaze and said nothing. In those blue eyes of hers, he saw certainty and could not detect a single flicker of doubt.
“I know it was him. Do you ever get a sense here?” she asked him, pressing a hand against her chest. “Or here?” She moved her hand lower, splaying her fingers over her middle.
He was transfixed. His imagination spun too-vivid thoughts—his own hand spread across her body, encircling the gentle curve of her waist, gripping the curve of her hip, pulling her againsthim. He still felt the heat of her, of that brief moment of holding her in his arms.
Then he cursed his wayward thoughts and racked his brain to remember what she’d asked him.
“The sharpness of my memory tells me it was the same man, the same voice, but my intuition knows too,” she said.
“I do know that feeling.” The insistent tug of intuition, the hunch that led him to hidden facts.
“Then please believe me, Inspector.” She took a step closer, then another. Soon she was near enough to touch again.
