“It’s not the only one,” Duke said. “Now come here, lass.”
I struggled to get to my feet. Everything in this penthouse made a girl want to lie down and stay down. As I walked to the fireplace, I glanced over at a closed door. Duke’s bedroom.
“I saw that,” he said.
“You saw nothing.”
Smiling, Duke reached up and started to take the mirror down from over the mantel, then paused and looked at me. “I want something in return for opening my safe for you.”
“Oh, dear.”
“Nothing salacious,” he said.
Pity. I didn’t say that out loud. “What do you want?”
“Your hat.”
A glimpse into the Duke of Chicago’s famous top secret safe…in exchange for my hat.
“I think you’re lowballing yourself,” I said, “but if you want it, it’s yours.”
I took off my hat and tossed it to him. He caught it midair and clutched it to his chest.
“Now why did you want my hat?”
“I didn’t. I wanted to see you with your hair down.”
He raised his hand to my hair, touched a strand that had fallen over my face, and pushed it behind my ear.
“That’s all?” I asked. “My hair for your deepest secrets? Duke, you got suckered.”
He shook his head as he went to work on the combination lock, spinning the knob this way and that.
“How wrong you are, Rainy March. That,” he said as the safe door popped open, “was a steal.”
Chapter Five
After the slightest of pauses—I think Duke was steeling himself—he reached in and removed a plain black hatbox. He carried it over to the sofa and set it in front of us on the coffee table.
“I had to hide everything I took,” Duke said. “You know the saying…keep it under your hat.”
He lifted the lid, and sure enough, a black silk top hat sat inside. When he took out the hat, I could see it was only a cover for an assortment of small things carefully wrapped in linen handkerchiefs.
Duke picked one up and unwrapped it.
“Davey’s watch,” Duke said. “A Cartier. He showed it off to everyone. They were still quite novel then. On men especially.”
“Wristwatches were for women?”
“Back then,” Duke said, “they were like bracelets with timepieces. Davey had his pocket watch stolen once, and when he bragged about how hard it would be to steal his watch later, I nicked it while he was sleeping.”
“How old were you?”
“Ten,” Duke said. “I gave it back the next day. A few years later, before he shipped out, he joked that I could have his watch if he got his head knocked off. I would rather have his head on than the watch, but beggars can’t be choosers.”
He wrapped the watch up again and returned it to the hatbox.Koshka strolled over to the coffee table and eyed the treasures with curiosity.
Duke untied a piece of twine wrapped around a small brown paper rectangle. A book?
