“The one you’re not wearing.”
“It’s Saturday, darling.”
“It’s—right.” The first, life-altering sip woke up her brain. The second was just luxury. “We were going to sleep in, hit the gym, take a swim. We talked about maybe wandering around the street fair.”
“And seeing how many street thieves we could spot between us. Murder plays hell with even the best-laid plans.”
“Especially the victim’s. Anyway, thanks for the coffee.”
When she’d gulped it down, she handed the mug back to him, then headed into the shower to complete the process of waking up.
She’d never know how Roarke did it. Whether he bagged eight hours of sleep—rare—or two, he could get up, dress, buy a small planet, hold a virtual meeting with somebody in Mumbai, then sell the small planet he’d just bought at a profit, all before breakfast.
That alone was likely one of the reasons he’d been such a successful thief. Now, of course, she had to deal with the fact he’d been successful enough to steal a bunch of emeralds that ended up in the secret vault of a dead man.
No reason, she thought as she stepped into the drying tube, no reason at all to think that long-ago theft had any connection to last night’s theft and murder.
And still.
She grabbed a robe, this one the color of the wine she’d enjoyed the night before, and stepped out.
Roarke sat, tablet in hand, cat sprawled across his lap. Domed plates and a pot of coffee waited on the table. He glanced up, smiled at her in a way that made her regret duty called.
“Off you go now, mate.” He nudged the cat down. Galahad slid himself to the floor, stretched, stalled, then stalked away to sprawl again in a patch of sunlight.
As Eve walked over to join him, Roarke poured her more coffee.
“Okay, let’s just get this out of the way.”
“Fully awake now, are you, Lieutenant?”
“Yeah. While it’s unlikely something you stole when you were eighteen connects to the case other than the fact you’re the reason it was in the damn vault, it’s tricky.”
“It is a bit, isn’t it then?” He lifted the domes off a full Irish breakfast.
“A bit? Roarke—”
“The only person who can connect me to the Royal Suite died seven years ago in March, at the age of a hundred and six, from natural causes. I checked. Well, there’s Summerset,” Roarke added with an elegant shrug. “But I think we can be confident in his discretion.”
Since Summerset was more than Roarke’s majordomo, but the man who’d taken him in, a brutally beaten boy, and given him a home, had stood as a father, Eve couldn’t argue that one.
“The point is,” she began as she sampled the Irish bacon—so damn good—“part of the investigation has to probe into the original theft. How those jewels—all the contents of the vault, but those jewels particularly—came into the victim’s possession. Who knew about the vault, about the contents?”
“Understood. It would be difficult, even for you, Lieutenant, to find any crumbs to follow back to that brilliant night. You’ll contact Scotland Yard, Interpol, Tate security, their insurance investigators. And you’ll find I left not a single crumb for them to follow.”
She ate some eggs. “Now you’re bragging.”
“I can’t deny it’s a fond memory for me. Near to six months of preparation as I recall, the mental and physical challenge of it, perfecting the timing, creating the tools, learning how to, in a way, dance under, over, around the beams.”
He smiled in memory. “A kind of ballet, or kata. A combination of both.”
She had to admit, it didn’t annoy her as much as it should that she would have loved to have seen him do it.
He buttered a slice of toast, offered it to her. “I was young, Eve, but never reckless. I knew if I could succeed with this, I could do anything I needed to do.”
“What about Brian, your other friends in Dublin back then? The people you ran with?”
“Not a word to any of them, no. If I’d failed, it would pull them down into it, wouldn’t it? There’s a reason Brian punched me in the face whenwe walked into the Penny Pig a few years ago. I pulled back from my mates, slowly, gradually, then all at once.
