Relief swamped her. She’d breached the fortress.
And what a fortress it was. As a jeweler, she’d seen plenty of grand halls, but this went beyond grand. The floors and staircase were of fine Italian marble, the curtains were of damask with gold threads, and the chandelier sparkled so brightly that it could only be crystal.
She couldn’t help gawking as the butler left. Was that a Rembrandt? She tried to look casual as she strolled over to look at it. She’d seen a Rembrandt once at a museum, but she wasn’t that familiar with fine paintings.
“Where the hell have you been these past two days?” demanded a hard voice from the stairs.
Isa stiffened, then turned to face her husband. “Why, good evening, Mr. Cale.” She cast a meaningful glance at the servants. “It’s nice to see you, too.”
Victor went rigid. Which had to be difficult, since he was already stiff as a starched cravat. Sadly, it only made him look more dashing. Despite the fact that he wore only a figured blue banyan over his shirt, waistcoat, and trousers, he looked every inch a man of distinction as he came down the last few steps.
It would be too much to hope that he had turned out to be a long-lost duke, and wanted to be rid of her so he could marry someone more appropriate. That would suit her nicely.
“Jenkins,” he barked as he marched toward her. “Mrs. Franke and I will be upstairs in my sitting room. We have urgent business to discuss, and we do not want to be disturbed.”
The butler didn’t so much as lift an eyebrow. “As you wish, sir.”
Well. Victor certainly had the aristocratic arrogance down pat.
Pausing only long enough to let the footman take her cloak and hat, Victor grabbed her arm and urged her toward the stairs. “You and I need to talk.”
“I couldn’t agree more, so there’s no need to manhandle me,” she snapped as she wrestled free of his grip.
“Forgive me,” he said acidly. “I forgot how independent you’ve become.”
I had to be; my husband left me, she wanted to retort, but the servants were listening with obvious interest.
“How did you find me?” he asked as they ascended the stairs.
“Mr. Gordon recognized your phaeton as belonging to the Duke of Lyons, with whom he’d once had dealings. He directed me here.” She shot him a sideways glance as they reached the next floor. “How do you know the Duke of Lyons?”
“He’s a friend,” he said tersely, but he wouldn’t look at her.
“He must be quite a good friend,” she said as Victor showed her into a well-appointed sitting room.
She spotted a bedchamber through an open adjoining door, and realized that the sitting room was part of a large suite. No doubt there was a dressing room connected to it as well.
“Very impressive,” she murmured. “How did you manage to make a duke’s acquaintance?”
Ignoring the question, Victor shut the door, then rounded on her with a black look. “Where were you today? Attempting to flee me?”
She glared at him. “I had business out of town. It had nothing to do with you—the trip was planned long before you came here. I wasn’t going to put it off simply because you decided to show up and make trouble.”
“What sort of business? Where?”
The suspicion threading his voice inflamed her. “Where were you?” she countered. “Oh, wait, I already know. You were at my shop, attempting to poison my partner against me.”
Victor scowled. “Is that what he told you?”
“He told me you made all sorts of wild speculations about how I was breaking into houses and stealing diamonds and trying to sell them to him.”
He had the good grace to look uncomfortable. “I didn’t say that . . . exactly.”
“Then what did you say, ‘exactly’?”
“Nothing that wasn’t true.” He raked his fingers through already mussed hair. The gesture was so familiar that it sparked a reaction deep in her belly.
She forced herself to ignore it. “You mean you told him the parts of the story that would make me look bad, and left out anything about yourself. Because you hoped that if you went around spreading rumors about me, you could bully me into doing your bidding. Why else would you wait years to come after me?”
Eyes alight, he stalked up to her. “I waited years because I didn’t know where the hell you were.” He seemed oddly sincere. “Your note said you were leaving me. You didn’t bother to mention where you were going. So how the devil was I supposed to—”
“Note?” she broke in. “What note?”
He glowered at her. “The note you left for me in our apartment that night you were sick. The note that said our marriage was a mistake, and you wanted something else out of life than being my wife.”
He’d muttered the same sort of accusations the night of the play. “Victor,” she whispered, “I never left you any note.”
Shock lit his face. Then his eyes narrowed. “Don’t lie to me. It was written in your hand.”
“It’s not possible, I tell you!” Her mind whirled. “I would never have written such a note, I swear.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “It was sitting on our bed. Jacoba fetched me at the shop in the middle of the night. She said you’d left her house to return to our lodgings while she was asleep. When she woke to find you gone, she went there but you wouldn’t let her in. She said she was worried about you, afraid you might be delirious from the fever. So I hurried back to our apartment. But you weren’t there. And that’s when I found it.”
“A note saying I’d left you?” she asked incredulously. What he was suggesting was unbelievable. Who would have written—
“Jacoba . . .” she whispered. Could Jacoba have forged such a note? Could she have feigned Isa’s hand well enough to persuade Victor?
Her distress seemed to sink in, for he stiffened. “Stay here,” he ordered and headed for the door to the bedchamber.
“Where are you going?”
“To get the note.”
“You . . . you kept it?”
“Of course.” His eyes darkened to a smoky brown. “Did you think I would have thrown the evidence away? I kept it so I would remember,” he growled, “and learn from my mistake in ever trusting you.”
With those harsh words, he went into the other room. She sank onto a nearby settee, her hands shaking. His words pounded in her ears. It was sitting on our bed . . . Jacoba fetched me . . . you wouldn’t let her in . . .
Would her sister, her own sister, have lied to her face about him? Torn her purposely from her husband without a whit of remorse?
When Victor reentered, Isa shot to her feet. “No,” she said firmly. “I don’t believe you. You’re lying! This is just a ruse to get you back into my good graces so you can use me again.” She fisted her hands against her stomach.
“Use you? The way you used me?” He thrust a sheet of paper at her.
She took it with shaking hands. Yellowed with age, the paper had clearly once been crumpled, then flattened out. The cruel words written on it, though faint, were still readable.
They just weren’t hers.
“I didn’t write this.” She lifted her gaze to him. “It’s not my handwriting, I swear!”
“It damned well looks like yours,” he ground out.
“I know. It’s a close approximation. But not mine.”
She hurried over to a writing table with a quill and inkwell atop it. Finding some paper, she scribbled the same words as in the note. Then she returned to hand the two sheets to him.
When he stared down at them, the blood drained from his face. “You’re toying with me. You made your writing different.”
“You know it’s not that easy.” She stared at him. “Think, Victor—how often had you seen my penmanship when you got this? Once? Maybe twice? It’s not as if we were writing notes and letters to each other. When we weren’t working, we were in each other’s pockets. And you only courted me a few weeks before we married. We were . . . hasty.”<
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“True,” he clipped out.
“I’ve never seen this note before today. I most certainly didn’t write it.” When his eyes still smoldered with suspicion, she added, “I swear it on my father’s grave.”
That, at least, had some impact. A muscle jumped in his jaw. “Someone wrote it. If not you, then who?”
“Jacoba, probably.” The thought of her sister betraying her so horribly stopped the breath in her throat. “She used to imitate Papa’s hand, too, so we didn’t have to bother him while he was working. He hated being interrupted for what he called ‘silly things’ like paying bills.”
Victor’s breath came in hard, short bursts. “You’re saying that you never left me.”
“Yes. Until this moment, I assumed that you’d left me.”
“I don’t . . . understand,” he said in a guttural voice. “How could she . . . Why would she—”
“Destroy us? Separate us?” A vise tightened around Isa’s chest. “To get what she wanted. Or rather, what Gerhart wanted.”
Awareness dawned in his face, turning his features to granite. “The royal diamonds.”
With a nod, she sank back onto the settee, the note in her hand. “They told me you were gone. They said you took the earrings from the parure in exchange for helping them get into the strongbox; that you wanted us to travel separately to thwart whomever might come after us. They claimed that you planned to meet us in Paris.” She lifted her gaze to him. “But you never came.”
“I never came because I never knew where you’d gone,” he ground out. “And I damned well never helped them get into the bloody strongbox!”
He seemed genuinely outraged. But there was one detail he hadn’t explained. “So how did Gerhart and Jacoba get the jewels?” She searched his face. “Answer me that.”
“I can’t. When I left the shop to check on you, Jacoba stayed behind. I wasn’t worried about that because the cases and the strongbox were all locked up. They were still locked when I returned. If she stole the diamonds while I was gone, I don’t know how.”
He glanced away. “I eventually came to think that you must have switched the jewels out while at work. I had no other explanation for it. Your ‘abandonment’ of me seemed to be tied to the theft of the jewels.”
“I would never have stolen anything!” she protested.
His gaze shot to her. “But you might have made a false key from my keys and given it to your family.”
“Right. Because I was such a master criminal at eighteen,” she said bitterly.
“Someone fashioned those imitation diamonds,” he pointed out. “Neither Jacoba nor Gerhart had the ability. Are you trying to tell me you had nothing to do with that, either?”
She stared down at her hands. The only way to get through this was to unravel the past—and that meant telling the truth. Or as much of it as she dared.
“I think it’s time you tell me what really happened that night,” he said in a cold voice. “Because you and I clearly have very different versions of it.”
8
VICTOR PACED BEFORE the settee, his thoughts racing. Isa hadn’t written the note. She hadn’t left him. Or so she said. And it was hard not to believe her, when she looked as stunned as he felt.
He stiffened. It could still be all an act. She could still be trying to rewrite the past so he wouldn’t take vengeance on her. There had been a theft, after all, and clearly she’d had something to do with it.
But she’d also been very forthcoming so far. If she was trying to allay his suspicions, wouldn’t she just pretend not to know anything about the theft?
Her eyes looked tormented as she met his gaze. “Before I tell you what happened, I need to clarify one thing. Are you saying you had absolutely nothing to do with the theft of those diamonds?”
He drew himself up stiffly. “Until the fakes were discovered, a week after the parure was taken to the palace, I didn’t even know there had been a theft.”
She gaped at him. “The imitations were discovered that soon? But I never saw anything in the papers about it—”
“You were in Paris, remember?” he growled. “You were already living off the spoils.”
When she flinched, he muttered a curse, then strode to the fireplace and back, trying to calm himself. He would get nowhere if he didn’t control his feelings. If he reacted emotionally, it would be too easy for her to slip something past him. He had to behave as an investigator. He had to interrogate her with logic and reason.
Though that would be a great deal easier if he weren’t interrogating the only woman who turned all his logic and reason into pudding.
He frowned as he came to a halt in front of her. Not this time, damn it.
“It wasn’t in the papers,” he said tersely. “The royal family didn’t want to look like fools, and the jeweler didn’t want his reputation damaged. Since no one could be sure whether the jewels had been switched at the palace or at the jeweler’s, they didn’t want to reveal the theft publicly until they found the thieves. Which they never did. Without any evidence, they couldn’t even prosecute anyone.”
“So they never knew it was my family?” she said incredulously.
“Not for certain. At first, I wasn’t even sure.” His voice hardened. “I thought my wife had deserted me, because she was afraid that I would lose my post and she’d end up having to take care of me.”
Anger sparked in her eyes. “I would never have—”
“You were upset when I left you at Jacoba’s that night, if you’ll recall.” He stared down at her. “You were worried about my not having a position.”
She jumped to her feet. “I was worried about trying to get you out of there before you told Jacoba that the jewels were going to the palace the next day!”
That threw him off guard. “Why?”
“Because I knew what they were planning, and I was trying to prevent it.”
Now he really was all at sea. “By insulting me?”
“No!” She muttered a Dutch oath. “Of course not. I had a great deal on my mind. They’d been pressing me to switch the imitations for the real ones, and I’d been stalling. I didn’t want to do it.” Her gaze swept him and softened. “I was so happy with you. I wanted no part of stealing any jewels. But they just kept badgering me and badgering me—”
“So you gave in.”
“Verdomme, no! I played sick. I knew it was the last day for the diamonds to be in the shop, but I was fairly sure Gerhart and Jacoba didn’t know. They must have found out somehow. My sister said that you told her, but most of what she said was lies, so—”
“I did tell her,” he said ruefully. “We were in the hall, and I was concerned about you. I assured her that she wouldn’t have to worry about taking care of you beyond that night, because the jewels were leaving the shop, and the jeweler had already said that I could have a night off after the royal commission was done.”
Isa let out a long breath. “Oh, Lord, and I was trying so hard to keep it from them. I thought if I could just put them off until the next morning, it would all be over and they couldn’t do anything about it.” Her voice grew taut. “I never dreamed they would take matters into their own hands.”
He stared her down. “You’re saying you had nothing to do with it. That you didn’t help them get me out of the way so that the diamonds could be stolen.”
“No!” She wrapped her arms about her waist. “I was asleep while all that was happening.”
Something horrible occurred to Victor. “So you were still at their house when I went to our lodgings to find that note. You never left.”
She shook her head. “I slept until long after your shift ended.”
“But after I went home, I went to their house next, praying that you might be there. I pounded on the door. No one answered.”
“I never heard you. Jacoba had given me something for my supposed sore throat,” Isa said, her expression wrought with betrayal. “It must have had laudanum in it.”
; A dark hum began in his ears. “They planned it,” he bit out. “They planned the theft, they planned to separate us.”
Her face went ashen.
“They had to have guessed you wouldn’t switch out the parure.” He went up to her as she shook her head in denial. “Come now, Isa, they must have planned it. How else did the forged note get into our apartment?”
“Our apartment was hardly secure. And if they’d asked the landlord, he would probably have—”
“They didn’t—I questioned him a number of times. But let’s say they got in through the window or something, and planted the note. That still doesn’t explain how they breached the strongbox at the shop. Jacoba must have had a copy of the key, which meant they got hold of my keys somehow before that night.” The hum in his ears rose to a roar. “Unless you gave them my keys.”
“Blast you, no! I told you, I wanted no part of it!”
“Then why did you make the imitation parure?”
She blinked. Then she seemed to collapse into herself. Pressing her fingers to her eyes, she turned to wander the room. “It didn’t start out as a scheme to steal anything, I swear. Jacoba had read about how popular fine paste gems were becoming, how people liked to own jewels that looked identical to those of their betters for a fraction of the cost. So when the jeweler gained the commission to create the royal jewels for the prince’s new bride, Jacoba figured that if I could copy part of them, we could sell the copies for very good money.”
“I didn’t even know you had that particular talent,” he bit out.
“Yes, I realize that,” she said with an edge to her voice. “You always thought me a quiet little mou—”
“Don’t say it,” he snapped. “If I’d had any idea that you hated me calling you Mausi, I never would have.” He stepped toward her, fighting the urge to touch her. “And don’t put words in my mouth about what I thought of you, either. I was in love with you then, too.”
The words hung between them, making him regret he’d said them. Except that they were true, and she needed to hear that he had never used her. Not the way she’d implied.
“Meanwhile,” he went on, his tone sharpening, “your sister and brother-in-law were developing a plan to steal diamonds, and you were designing fake royal jewelry, and apparently you saw no reason whatsoever to let me in on the secret. Your own husband. Whom you’d promised to love and obey.”
When the Rogue Returns Page 10