He reached into his inner jacket pocket and pulled out a black velvet jewel box tied with a red satin bow. Mel’s heart skipped a beat as she took the box from him.Oh, dear Lord, he would.
She tried to keep her fingers from trembling as she tugged the bow free, then carefully lifted the hinged lid. Inside, snuggled in the black velvet lining,lay the most beautiful diamond necklace she’d ever seen. And, frankly, she’d seen quite a few.
Oh no, oh no, oh no.
She lifted the necklace, her practiced eye examining the stones, her stomach twisting as she took in the high quality of the diamonds and the incredible workmanship. The necklace had to cost around half a mil, and that meant that this was bad. This was very, very bad.
She looked at him, her expression surely reflecting both fear and disbelief. She didn’t even try to hide it.
“Oh, Gramps,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “What have you gotten us into now?”
* * *
DIAMONDS MIGHT BEa girl’s best friend, but right then both diamonds and women were giving Kyle Radley no end of trouble.
He stood next to an oversize buffet in his grandmother’s living room as the din of fifty or sixty voices surrounded him, bouncing off the marble and polished wood, seeping under the Chippendale chairs, and creeping behind the French tapestries hanging on the walls. He ignored them all, concentrating instead on coming up with a solution that didn’t involve stealing a five-hundred-thousand-dollar necklace from his grandmother.
Nothing. He couldn’t come up with one single alternative.
If he wanted to keep Miss Emily out of trouble—not an easy task—he was just going to have to buckle down and swipe the necklace. Right now. Tonight. Before it was too late.
Even though he’d seen it with his own two eyes, he still couldn’t quite believe she’d stolen from her own sister. And not a trinket. No sir. At a family gathering last week, she’d hauled away a diamond necklace that would have felt right at home among the crown jewels.
Kyle had witnessed the event, and his former-cop instincts had kicked in. He’d confronted his grandmother right then and there, but she’d refused to return the thing, citing a sisterly right to the necklace that Frances had apparently inherited from their father. Kyle didn’t remember any family stories about the piece, but he was hardly in a position to challenge Emily’s memory. Not when she had the necklace tucked into her brassiere, and Frances’s jewelry box was conspicuously empty.
Frances might be a sweet old thing to Kyle, but she was also thenumero unothreat to Miss Emily’s role as the Empress of Emerald Cliffs. The two sisters had a long-standing feud that even their shared devotion to Kyle couldn’t seem to reconcile. Where social status was concerned, family loyalty meantnothing, and when Frances realized Emily had swiped her necklace, Kyle knew she’d call the cops faster than Miss Emily could line up a blind date for him.
In retrospect, he probably should have simply told Frances and let the chips fall where they may. After all, someone needed to teach Miss Emily that she couldn’t have every little thing she wanted in life. But considering she was pushing ninety, it seemed a little late for that lesson, and besides, did he really want his grandmother frisked and finger-printed at her age?
No, he didn’t. And so he’d wimped out, deciding instead to simply grab the necklace and return it to Frances’s house himself. With any luck, he’d get it back before his aunt even realized it was gone.
His grandmother would be furious, but he’d face her wrath when he had to.
Right then the woman in question was holding court across the room, silver-gray hair piled on her head, a shocking-purple gown clinging to a figure that still made heads turn. Only, now it wasn’t because of her curves, but because…well, because she was Emily Radley. The self-appointed social director of Emerald Cliffs and the nearby communities along the Pacific Coast Highway.
A crowd of a dozen senior citizens gathered around her as she regaled them with tales from herstudio days. He could hear only the high points as words like “Garbo,” “Mayer,” and “those fabulous Technicolor musicals” drifted by on the floral-scented air.
He’d been reared on her stories, and he loved every one of them. Out of habit, he started to drift in that direction, but he caught himself and stopped. Not only did he need to take advantage of the opportunity to sneak upstairs, but he also didn’t want her to notice him. Lately Miss Emily’s conversations with him were touching less on her old movie days and more on his love life. So far she hadn’t used the party as an excuse to play matchmaker. He’d almost asked her if she felt ill, but had decided not to press his luck.
And her silence reallywasluck. He may have worked for ten years as a Los Angeles cop, getting down and dirty with the south-central gangs, but the horrors he’d seen didn’t even come close to rivaling Miss Emily’s guerrilla tactics where his love life was concerned. He didn’t know how long the respite would last, but he was grateful for it, though he feared she was simply planning her secondary campaign.
Abigail Van Martin, his grandmother’s best friend and his self-appointed great-godmother, marched toward him, her cane more of a prop than a necessity. “Kyle, darling, you shouldn’t be here.”
“I know.” He ran his fingers through his hair, causing Abby to frown. When he was eight, she would have smoothed the hairs back into place. Today, thankfully, she kept her hands to herself. “I should be at work. I’ve been at work all day. I’ve been busting my tail trying to solve this Driskell mess.”
Kyle had retired from the force to open his own security consulting company, Integrated Security Systems, and for the first year things had been going great. Then Ethan Driskell had purchased Integrated’s top-of-the-line burglar alarm system, and three weeks later thieves had wiped him out, the value of their haul totaling over nine million dollars.
For Driskell, a millionaire several times over, the theft was serious but not devastating. For Kyle it was a public-relations disaster. He needed to find the flaw and find it fast, before word got around and his growing client list shrank to nothingness.
So, yes, he needed to be at the office rather than standing around at his grandmother’s party. But Miss Emily’s antics had sucked him in, and he was here for the duration.
Abby squinted at him, her glasses hanging from a chain around her neck. “Driskell?” She shook her head, confused. “I meant why are youhere?In the corner. You should be out circulating. Meeting the young ladies.”
Kyle couldn’t help but laugh. His entire business could be collapsing around his ears, and Abby and Emily would only wonder if he had a date for the event. “I knew it was too good to last. Grandmother’s gone the entire party without mentioning my pathetic bachelor state. Don’t tell me she enlisted you as the second guard.”
Abby sniffed. “I was simply making an observation. But your grandmother is right.”
He stifled a sigh, half wondering if he should invent a girlfriend and short-circuit the old ladies’ campaign altogether. The idea amused him, especially since it held an irony his grandmother was eventually sure to see. How many times had she told him the story of her fake fiancé, created by the studio to make her seem that much more desirable when the “wedding” fell through?
