by Nora Roberts
seems so long ago that we were happy. Maman grows thin and Papa’s beautiful hair more gray every day.
“While he lay in his bed, he had me bring to him a little wooden chest. It appeared plain, as one in which a peasant girl might hide her trinkets. He told us that the queen had sent it to him, enlisting his trust. One day, we would return to France and release the contents to the new king in her name. I was tired and ill and wished to lie down, but Papa made both Maman and me swear we would bide by his oath. When we had sworn, he opened the box.
“I have seen the queen wear such things, with her hair piled high and her face glowing with laughter. In the simple box, the emerald necklace I had seen once upon her breasts seemed to catch the light of the candles and throw it upon the other jewels. There was a ruby ring with diamonds like a starburst and a bracelet of emeralds to match the necklace. There were stones yet to be set.
“But as I looked, my eyes were dazzled. I saw a diamond necklace more beautiful than all the rest. It was set in tiers, but each stone, some bigger than I have ever seen, seemed alive of its own. I remembered Maman speaking of the scandal of Cardinal de Rohan and the necklace of diamonds. Papa had told me the cardinal had been tricked, the queen used, and that the necklace itself had disappeared. Still I wondered as I looked into the box if the queen had contrived to find it.”
Whitney set the paper down but her hands weren’t steady. “The diamond necklace was supposed to have been broken up and sold.”
“Supposed,” Doug repeated. “But the cardinal was banished, and the Comtesse de La Motte was caught, tried, and sentenced. She escaped to England, but I’ve never read anything that proved she had the necklace.”
“No.” Whitney studied the page of the journal. The paper itself would’ve made any museum curator worth his salt drool. As for the treasure, “That necklace was one of the catalysts for the Revolution.”
“It was worth a pretty penny then.” Doug handed her another page. “Care to estimate what it might be worth today?”
Priceless, Whitney thought, but knew he wouldn’t understand her meaning. The sheet he’d given her listed in detailed inventory what the queen had entrusted to Gerald. Jewels were described and valued. As with the pictures in the book, Whitney found them unexciting. Still, one shone out among the rest. A diamond necklace valued at more than a million lives. Doug would understand that, Whitney mused, then set the paper aside and took up the journal again.
More months had passed and Gerald and his family were settled on the northeast coast of Madagascar. The young girl wrote of long, harsh days.
“I yearn for France, for Paris, for my room and the gardens. Maman says we must not complain and sometimes goes with me for walks along the shore. Those are the best times, with the birds flying and shells to find. Maman looks happy then, but sometimes she looks out to sea and I know she too longs for Paris.
“Winds blow in from the sea and ships come. News from home is of death. The Terror rules. The merchants say that there are thousands of prisoners and many have faced the guillotine. Others have been hung, even burned. They talk of the Committee of Public Safety. Papa says that Paris is unsafe because of them. If one mentions the name of Robespierre, he will not speak at all. So while I long for France, I begin to understand that the home I knew is gone forever.
“Papa works hard. He has opened a store and trades with other settlers. Maman and I have a garden, but we grow only vegetables. Flies plague us. We have no servants and must fend for ourselves. I regard it as an adventure, but Maman tires easily now she is with child. I look forward to the baby coming and wonder when I will have my own. At night we sew, though we have few coins for extra candles. Papa is constructing a cradle. We do not speak of the little box hidden under the floor in the kitchen.”
Whitney set the page aside. “How old was she, I wonder.”
“Fifteen.” He touched another paper sealed in plastic. “Her record of birth, her parents’ marriage lines.” He handed it to Whitney. “And death certificates. She died when she was sixteen.” He picked up a last page. “This gives us the rest of it.”
“To my son,” Whitney began and glanced up at Doug. “You sleep in the cradle I made you, wearing the little blue gown your mother and sister sewed. They are departed now, your mother giving you life, your sister from a fever striking so quickly there was no time for a doctor. I have discovered your sister’s journal and read it, wept over it. One day, when you are older, it too will be yours. I have done what I thought I must, for my country, my queen, my family. I have saved them from the Terror only to lose them in this strange, foreign place.
“I have not the will to continue. The sisters will care for you as I cannot. I can give to you only these pieces of your family, the words of your sister, your mother’s love. With them, I add the responsibility I took for our queen. A letter will be left with the sisters, instructions for passing you this package when you are of age. You inherit my responsibility and my oath to the queen. Though it will be buried with me, you will again take it up and fight for the cause. When the time is right, come to where I rest and find Marie. I pray you do not fail as I have done.”
“He killed himself.” Whitney set the letter down with a sigh. “He’d lost his home, his family, and his heart.” She could see them, French aristocrats displaced by politics and social unrest, floundering in a strange country, struggling to adjust to a new life. And Gerald, living and dying by his promise to a queen. “What happened?”
“As best I can make out, the baby was taken into a convent.” He shifted through more papers. “He was adopted and immigrated with his family to England. It looks like the papers were stored away and just forgotten until Lady Smythe-Wright unearthed them.”
“And the queen’s box?”
“Buried,” Doug said with a faraway look in his eye. “In a cemetery in Diégo-Suarez. All we have to do is find it.”
“And then?”
“Then we take a stroll on easy street.”
Whitney looked down at the papers in her lap. There were lives scattered there, dreams, hopes, and loyalty. “Is that all?”
“Isn’t it enough?”
“This man made a promise to his queen.”
“And she’s dead,” Doug pointed out. “France is a democracy. I don’t think anyone would back us up if we decided to use the treasure to restore the crown.”
She started to speak, then found herself too tired to argue. She needed time to take it all in, evaluate her own standards. In any case, they’d yet to find it. Doug had said it was the winning. After he’d won, she’d talk to him about morals. “So you think you can find a cemetery, stroll in, and dig up a queen’s treasure.”
“Damn right.” He gave her a quick, dashing smile that made her believe him.
“It might already have been found.”
“Uh-uh.” He shook his head and shifted. “One of the pieces the girl described, the ruby ring. There was a whole section on it in the library book. That ring had been passed down through royal succession for a hundred years before it was lost—during the French Revolution. If that or any of the other pieces had turned up, underground or otherwise, I’d’ve heard about it. It’s all there, Whitney. Waiting for us.”
“It’s plausible.”
“The hell with plausible. I’ve got the papers.”
“We’ve got the papers,” Whitney corrected as she leaned back against a tree. “Now all we have to do is find a cemetery that’s been around for two centuries.” She closed her eyes and went instantly to sleep.
It was hunger that woke her, the deep, hollow kind she’d never experienced. On a moan, she rolled over and found herself nose to nose with Doug.
“Morning.”
She ran her tongue around her teeth. “I’d kill for a croissant.”
“A Mexican omelette.” He closed his eyes as he pictured it. “Cooked to a deep gold and just busting with peppers and onions.”
Whitney let that lie in her imagination, bu
t it didn’t fill her stomach. “We have one brown banana.”
“Around here, it’s serve yourself.” Rubbing his hands over his face, Doug sat up. It was well past dawn. The sun had already burned off the mist. The forest was alive with sound and movement and the smells of morning. He glanced up to the treetops where birds hid and sang. “The place is loaded with fruit. I don’t know what lemur meat tastes like, but—”
“No.”
He grinned as he rose. “Just a thought. How about light fare? Fresh fruit salad.”
“Sounds delightful.” When she stretched, the lamba slipped off her shoulder. Fingering it, Whitney realized Doug must have spread it over her the night before. After all that had happened, all they’d seen, he could still manage to surprise her. As if it were the most elegant of silks, Whitney folded and repacked it.
“You get the fruit, I’ll get the coconuts.”
Whitney reached up into the branches. “These look like stunted bananas.”
“Pawpaws.”
Whitney picked three and grimaced at them. “What I wouldn’t give for one lowly apple, just as a change of pace.”
“Take her out to breakfast and she complains.”
“Least you could do is buy me a Bloody Mary,” she began, then turned to see him halfway up a palm tree. “Douglas,” she said, moving cautiously closer, “do you know what you’re doing?”
“I’m climbing a goddamn tree,” he managed as he shinnied up another foot.
“I hope you’re not planning on falling and breaking your neck. I hate to travel alone.”
“All heart,” he muttered under his breath. “It’s not so different from climbing into a third-story window.”
“A nice brick building isn’t likely to give you splinters in sensitive places.”
Reaching up, he yanked off a coconut. “Stand back, sugar, I might be tempted to aim for you.”
Lips curved, she did so. One, then two, then three coconuts landed at her feet. Taking one up, she smacked it against a tree trunk until it cracked. “Well done,” she told Doug when he dropped to the ground. “I believe I’d like a chance to watch you work.”
He accepted the coconut she offered and, sitting on the ground, pulled out his pocketknife to carve out the meat. It reminded her of Jacques. Whitney touched the shell she still wore, then pushed back the grief.
“You know, most people in your position wouldn’t be so—tolerant,” he decided, “of somebody in my line of work.”
“I’m a firm believer in free enterprise.” Whitney dropped down beside him. “It’s also a matter of checks and balances,” she concluded with her mouth full.
“Checks and balances?”
“Say you steal my emerald earrings.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
“Let’s keep this hypothetical.” She shook the hair back from her face and gave a fleeting thought to digging out her brush. Food came first. “Well, the insurance company’s stuck with shelling out the cash. I’ve been paying them outrageous premiums for years and I never wear the emeralds because they’re too gaudy. You hock the emeralds, someone else buys them who finds them attractive, and I have the cash to buy something entirely more suitable. In the long run, everyone’s happy. It could almost be considered a public service.”
He broke off a piece of coconut and chewed. “I guess I never thought about it that way.”
“Of course the insurance company’s not going to be happy,” she added. “And some people might not appreciate losing some particular piece of jewelry or the family silver, even if it was too ornate. You’re not always doing a good deed by breaking into their house, you know.”
“Guess not.”
“And I suppose I have more respect for straight, honest stealing than computer crimes and white-collar swindling. Like the crooked stockbrokers,” she continued as she sampled coconut. “Fooling around with some little old lady’s portfolio until they’ve pocketed the profits and she’s left with nothing. That’s not on the same level with picking someone’s pocket or lifting the Sydney Diamond.”
“I don’t want to talk about the Sydney,” he mumbled.
“In one way it does keep the cycle going, then again…” She paused to dig out more fruit. “I don’t think robbery has a very good occupation potential. An interesting hobby, certainly, but as a career, it has its limitations.”
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about retiring—when I can do it in style.”
“When you get back to the States, what’s the first thing you’re going to do?”
“Buy a silk shirt and have my initials monogrammed on the cuffs. I’m going to have an Italian suit to go over it and a sleek little Lamborghini to set it all off.” He sliced a mango in half, wiped the blade on his jeans, and offered her a piece. “What about you?”
“I’m going to stuff myself,” Whitney told him with her mouth full. “I’m going to make a career out of eating. I think I’ll start out with a hamburger, smothered with cheese and onions, and work my way up to lobster tails, lightly broiled and drowned in melted butter.”
“For somebody so preoccupied with eating, I don’t see how you’re so skinny.”
She swallowed mango. “It’s lack of occupation that leads to preoccupation,” she told him. “And I’m slender, not skinny. Mick Jagger’s skinny.”
Grinning, he popped another piece of fruit into his mouth. “You forget, sugar, I’ve had the privilege of seeing you naked. Yours ain’t exactly an hourglass figure.”
With a brow lifted, she licked juice from her fingers. “I’ve a very delicate build,” she said, and when he continued to grin, she moved her gaze up and down him. “And, you’ll remember, I also have had the fascination of seeing you stripped. It wouldn’t hurt you to pump a little iron, Douglas.”
“Obvious muscles get in the way. I’d rather be subtle.”
“You certainly are.”
He shot her a look as he tossed a coconut shell aside. “You like biceps and triceps bulging out of a sleeveless T-shirt?”
“Masculinity,” she said lightly, “is very arousing. A confident male doesn’t find it necessary to ogle an over-endowed woman who chooses to wear tight sweaters to disguise the fact she has a very small brain.”
“I guess you don’t like being ogled.”
“Certainly not. I prefer style to cleavage.”
“Good thing.”
“There’s no need to be insulting.”
“Just being agreeable.” He remembered too well the way she’d wept in his arms the day before and how helpless he’d felt. Now, he found he wanted to touch her again, watch her smile, feel the softness. “Anyway,” he said, working his way back from a long drop. “You might be skinny, but I like your face.”
Her lips curved in that cool, aloof smile he found maddeningly alluring. “Really? What about it?”
“Your skin.” Going with the impulse, he ran the back of his knuckles down her jawline. “I came across this alabaster cameo once. It wasn’t big,” he remembered as he traced a finger down her cheekbone. “Probably wasn’t worth more than a few hundred, but it was the classiest thing I’d ever picked up.” He grinned, then let his hands roam into her hair. “Until you.”
She didn’t move away, but kept her eyes on his as his breath feathered over her skin. “Is that what you did, Douglas? Pick me up?”
“You could look at it that way, couldn’t you?” He knew he was making a mistake. Even as his lips brushed over hers he knew he was making a very big mistake. He’d made them before. “Since I did,” he murmured, “I haven’t known exactly what to do with you.”
“I’m not an alabaster cameo,” she murmured as her arms wound around his neck. “Or the Sydney Diamond or a pot of gold.”
“I’m not a member of the country club and I don’t have a villa in Martinique.”
“It would seem…” She traced the outline of his mouth with her tongue. “We have very little in common.”
“Nothing in common,” he correcte
d as his hands slid up her back. “People like you and me can’t bring each other anything but trouble.”
“Yeah.” She smiled and the eyes beneath the fringe of long, luxurious lashes were dark and amused. “When do we start?”
“We already have.”
When their lips met, they were no longer a lady and a thief. Passion was a great equalizer. Together they rolled onto the soft forest floor.
She hadn’t meant for it to happen, but she had no regrets. Attraction that she’d felt from the moment he’d removed the sunglasses in her elevator and looked at her with his clear, direct eyes had been edging toward something deeper, broader, more unsettling. He’d begun to touch something in her, and now with passion, he released a great deal more.
Her mouth was as hot and hungry as his. That had happened before. Her pulse raced—no new experience. Her body stretched and arched at the touch of a man’s hands. She’d felt those sensations before. But this time, this first and only time, she let her mind go and experienced lovemaking as it was meant to be. Mindless, liberating pleasure.
Though the surrender of her best defense, her mind, was complete, she wasn’t passive. Her need was as great as his, as primitive, as overwhelming, as elemental. When they undressed each