“One earns a reputation in certain circles. And the broker was alsoknown to handle deals such as this professionally. He offered me the job because he believed I could manage it, and because he knew he could pay me less than others who could, as I was hungry. Not that Summerset didn’t keep my belly full, but hungry in other ways.”
She knew what it was to be hungry, in all kinds of ways.
“And you said—how long ago?”
“I’d have been about eighteen.”
Now she had to just sit there a minute. Just sit there.
“You broke into the Tate Gallery in London and stole a bunch of jewelry worth a quarter billion when you were a teenager?”
He smiled a little as he turned to their own gates. “I was precocious. It was worth that, or about that, and it’s worth more now—today’s money—and more yet to a collector, due to history and notoriety.”
She lapsed into silence again as they drove toward the castle of a house with its scatter of lights on to guide their way into welcome. The house with towers, turrets, more rooms than she could count.
A house he’d built, very likely aided in that with some of his take from stealing the emeralds.
“How much did you get?”
“I remember very well. Ten million. Enough, more than, to change my life. I’d had solid takes before that, but nothing near as exciting, or as profitable. I did some other jobs for the broker, like the Venus, but still, for the most part, preferred finding work on my own.”
Once he pulled up, stopped the car, he shifted to her. “I can’t change who I was or am, Eve, and wouldn’t. Because here I am, with you. But I can be sorry this complicates things for you.”
He’d complicated things for her since the first instant she’d locked eyes with him.
And she couldn’t be sorry for it.
“I have to think my way through it. I’ve got to get out of this dress and these damn shoes, and think.”
Then she made herself breathe. “I knew who and what you were and are when I married you. It didn’t stop me, did it?”
“That’s a fact I’m grateful for every day.”
“But I have to think.”
She got out of the car, shoved at her hair. “There’s no reason to think what happened tonight has anything to do with…” She stopped at the door. “The broker.”
“Dead, some seven, maybe eight years now. And far too professional to steal from a client when he lived.”
“He’d have known the client.”
Roarke opened the door. “Ah, there? Maybe yes, maybe no. But as a careful man who ran his business for a few decades, I’d say he would’ve done his due diligence. Now, the client might not be aware the broker knew, as the typical deal would be a down payment—wired from account to account, a portion of which would go to the person or the team doing the job, as down payment. Nonrefundable on all sides, that.”
He paused as she pulled off her shoes before walking up the stairs.
“When the job was done, the piece verified as authentic, another portion of the payments would be transferred. It would be up to the broker and client how to deliver the piece, and once done and authenticated, the remainder of the fees wired. And so, done.”
“The broker was in Dublin?”
“I’ll say he floated, though he came from Mayo. An international business he had. I want to say I never probed too deeply there, as he treated me fair throughout our… association. I never heard he treated anyone less than fair.”
“A sterling character.”
Roarke shrugged off the sarcasm. “In his way.”
The minute they hit the bedroom where the cat sprawled across the acre of bed, she pulled the dress over her head.
And made a sound like a woman having a very satisfying orgasm.
