by Sarah Morgan
“It has sentimental value for my grandmother.” And her grandmother was growing frail. Gisella wanted to put it in her pale, elderly hand before another health issue arose to alarm all of them.
“You care about her very deeply.” He seemed to delve into her soul with his piercing golden eyes.
“I do.” A lilt of hope infused the words as she sensed he was coming around. “She’s a very special woman.”
“I’m sure you take after her.” It was a thick piece of flattery, something she knew better than to fall for. Even so, his smoky voice caused her to blush.
It was inexplicable. He wasn’t going out of his way to stoke the sexual awareness between them. She was simply aware it was there. Intensely aware. She didn’t know why she was reacting to him so blatantly. She wasn’t even sure she liked him. He seemed quite arrogant and ruthless.
But fascinating. She knew a lot of rich and powerful men. None radiated this innate confidence. None wore impervious armor that begged her to see if she could pierce it.
Maybe if she’d had lovers, she would have found her sensual side long ago, but she had a silly pact with her cousin to wait for that elusive thing Rozalia kept insisting was real—love.
Gisella had been humoring Rozi when she had made her vow of chastity. They’d been thirteen and sex had sounded ridiculous enough that Gisella had been happy to put it off. Until now, she hadn’t met a man who had tempted her enough to break her promise.
But here she was, locking gazes in a staredown that filled her with anticipation. So much so, if he slid his attention downward, he’d see her nipples straining visibly against the lace of her bra and the light jersey of her top.
“How much would you like for it?” she asked, struggling to stay on task.
“It’s not for sale.”
He sounded so firm, so smug, she scowled in consternation.
“Such a beautiful face shouldn’t wear such an angry frown.” He ambled closer and grazed her jaw with the side of his knuckle. “It might stay that way. Shall we go?”
She ignored the way his light touch made her breath stutter and tightened her mouth with resolve. She was an only child, used to getting everything she wanted.
“How can I persuade you to change your mind?”
“You can’t.” His mouth pulled into a wicked grin. “But I’m tempted to let you try.”
She narrowed her eyes. “I don’t use sexual favors to get what I want,” she informed him coldly. “If I kiss a man, it’s because I want to.” There. It was a dropped glove, but it was true. If she thought a man boorish, she told him so.
If she found a man enthralling… Well, he was the first to fascinate her like this. She wondered if he might become her first in other ways. This power struggle was inordinately exciting.
“Is that so,” he murmured. All the humor bled out of his expression, leaving it full of grave angles. He seemed to consider her words while the backs of his fingers continued to caress her throat where her pulse thrummed like a hummingbird’s wings.
What was she doing? This was madness. He was a stranger. Voices were conversing in a nearby room.
But she wanted him to kiss her. It wasn’t about the earring. He was unlike any man she had ever met. If he walked away and she didn’t at least know what it felt like to have his mouth on hers, she would always wonder.
She stared into eyes that had become the incendiary gleam of liquid gold and dared him to make her day.
His hand came back to her jaw, his touch firm as he bent his head.
He claimed her mouth without ceremony, as if they’d been kissing like this every night for years. And, oh, did he know how to kiss.
This was what she had sought all her life. A man who met her strong personality with an even stronger one. One who took her out of herself with a twist of his mouth against hers, parting her lips and sinking into a hungry, passionate ravaging that dismantled her even as he promised she would be safe in his strong arms.
She became a molten substance as he gathered her hair and squeezed an arm across her back. She pooled like quicksilver against him, curves fitting into the dips and contours of his chest, arms curling around his tense waist to settle her fingers against the warm hollow of his spine.
She had never been kissed like this. Carnal and possessive, urgent and lazy at once. Her scalp stung under the clench of his hand in her hair. Heat consumed her, burning up any memory she had of other men. A moan of pleasure escaped her, but it contained loss. She understood that every kiss that had come before this one had been a manufactured fraud. This was the real thing. She could never settle for less again.
And he was already pulling away.
Her lips clung to his as his hand moved to the side of her face. His mouth lifted away. It was too soon. A sob of protest arrived as a lump in her throat. His breath was as ragged as hers, feathering across her wet lips. She refused to open her eyes, not wanting him to see how completely he had owned her in this too-brief encounter.
He knew, though. He spoke in a gravelly whisper that caressed her cheek and lifted the hairs on her scalp. “I’ll lock the doors and take everything you’re offering, but you’re not getting the earring.”
“What?” She blinked her eyes open and the world came back into focus. She saw the colorful mural on the ceiling, the gilded light fixture. Its glow haloed his dark hair, turning him into an archangel.
“A valiant effort, though.”
She made herself step back, feeling the loss of his heat like a splash of icy water down her front. The barest hint of her lipstick shaded his mouth. She wanted to use her thumb to erase it. She wanted to keep touching him. Lock the doors and stay in here and discover everything he could teach her.
She had always wondered what it would feel like to discover her chemical match. To be devoured by true, animalistic passion.
It was terrifying, as it turned out. Deliriously perilous, yet treacherously alluring.
“That wasn’t—” She cut herself off as she absorbed the jaded look in his eyes. Which was a harder kick to her pride? His thinking she had been trying to manipulate him? Or confessing her passion had been real when his was clearly nonexistent?
“Here comes the frown again. I didn’t expect you’d take this so hard.” The corners of his mouth deepened in a curl of merciless amusement. “It makes denying you what you want so much more satisfying.”
Her ears rang with the double entendre while her scrambled brain finally began to comprehend what was going on.
“Are you telling me you’re doing this as some sort of vendetta against me?”
“What I’m doing—” his voice turned to granite “—is getting your cousin’s attention.” His tone was hard enough to make her insides shiver with foreboding. “Pass the message along. I expect a phone call.”
CHAPTER ONE
One week later…
“DID YOU SEE my text? I asked you to pick up lattes.” Gisella pouted with disappointment as her cousin, Rozalia, showed up empty-handed in their workroom above the family jewelry store, Barsi on Fifth.
“I didn’t look at my phone.” Rozi peeled off her raincoat and hung it, but missed the hook so the coat dropped to the floor with a flump and a spatter of raindrops. She didn’t notice, only splaying out her hands as though stopping traffic. “I have big news.”
Gisella bit back scolding her cousin. Their mothers were half sisters and a decade apart in age. Rozalia had been born a few months after Gisella, but they had had very different upbringings. Gisella’s mother, a career academic, had had her one baby late in life. At the sight of a dropped jacket, she would have stridently pointed out the need to keep everything neatly in its place, especially when all Gisella’s clothes were top-brand and tailored.
Rozalia’s mom had married young and lived for her husband and four children. For her, things didn’t matter. People did—which was why Gisella had always envied Rozi and secretly wished they were twins instead of cousins.
“Someone…�
� Rozi said with great drama—because her family was nothing if not rife with artists and performers, “…wanted a deal on a custom engagement ring.”
“That’s nice,” Gisella said mildly. Such things were their bread and butter, but she knew better than to insist Rozi get to the point. She was clearly eager to make a Broadway production out of this. “Who would that be?”
“An agent. For an auction house.” Rozi touched her chin and lifted a musing gaze to the ceiling. “A firm that may or may not have handled the Garrison estate last week.”
Gisella’s heart dropped to roll around the legs of her work stool. It took everything in her to pretend she didn’t go both hot and cold with yearning and embarrassment. Fury and shame.
She felt so foolish for letting Kaine kiss her. She had been lost in some deranged space between flirting and taunting when she invited it. She wouldn’t have let him touch her, however, if she’d known he was exercising some kind of wrath against her family. His toying with her, kissing her the way he had, was just wrong.
I’m getting your cousin’s attention.
His detachment had driven the spike of his rebuff that much deeper. It still stung like mad.
Gisella turned back to the empty platinum pendant setting pinched in the vise on the bench. “We know who won everything at that auction.”
And who had lost.
She had. Even her dignity had been left in that room full of a dead woman’s valuables as she’d rushed to get away from him.
“Oh, forget Kaine Michaels. Or rather, remember what he said about other interested parties? There was a representative on the phone, calling from Hungary.”
Gisella set down her wheel and lifted her magnifying glasses as she swiveled to face Rozi again. “So?”
“He was calling on behalf of Viktor Rohan. According to the agent, he was—” she air quoted with her fingers “—highly motivated to buy the match to the one his mother possesses.”
“Oh, my God, Rozi.”
“I know.”
Sixty-odd years ago, the earrings had been sold months apart on different continents. Finding the one here in America had been years of hard work. They had long ago given up finding the other one, hitting nothing but dead ends every time they tried.
“Guess what else? He’s your cousin.”
“Viktor Rohan? I’ve never even heard of him.” She fully pulled off her eye protection and set it aside. “How?”
“Second cousin, I guess. Your grandparents were brother and sister.”
“He’s descended from Istvan’s sister?”
Rozi nodded.
Istvan had asked their grandmother, Eszti, to marry him when they’d been at university together. He’d given her a pair of earrings as an engagement present and she should have married him and kept those earrings all her life. Instead, student demonstrations had turned violent. At Istvan’s urging, Eszti had sold one of the earrings in Hungary to come to America, unwed and pregnant. Her lover had died before he could follow as promised, leaving her alone in a new country.
Broke and desperate, with Gisella’s mother an infant in her arms, Eszti had married Benedek Barsi, a kind, older man. A goldsmith. Benedek sold the second earring and they started the jewelry store where both Gisella and Rozalia now worked. Eszti was grandmother to both of them, but Gisella didn’t have any Barsi DNA. She had Istvan’s blood—which was how she could be related to Viktor Rohan where Rozi wasn’t.
“Have you never been curious about that side of your family?” Rozi asked her.
“Oh, please. You know what Mom is like. But I agreed with her lack of sentiment in this case. Grandpapa always treated us like we were his. I was never so curious I wanted to hurt him by looking into Grandmamma’s first love. It wasn’t like I could meet Istvan. He died before my mother was born.” Gisella shrugged it off.
“But you’re curious now?” Rozi pried, grinning.
“If he has the other earring, of course I am!”
They laughed and Rozi clapped her hands and bounced in her lace-up boots. “Think of what it would mean for Grandmamma, Gizi.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Gisella cautioned. They had both dreamed for years of returning the earrings to their grandmother, but Gisella had just had her dream popped like a soap bubble by that wretched Kaine Michaels. Oh, she never wanted to think about him again! “Viktor lives in Hungary? What sort of person is he?”
“Rich! He has homes all over Europe, far as I can tell, but he has a family home in Budapest. His mother lives there. I have an email address for her. I’m thinking you should see if she’s willing to meet you, seeing as you’re a long-lost relative and all.”
“Will do. What’s your workload like? Can you get away for a bit?” For the first time in a week, the sun broke past the dark clouds inside her, sending warm beams of excitement through Gisella.
“I could, but—” Rozi gave a small wince.
“If it’s money, don’t even. You know I’ll cover your side of it.” Along with her comfortable income from her work here at the jewelry story, Gisella’s parents were very well off. Her mother was shrewd with investing and had no one to inherit her fortune except her one child. Gisella’s father had set aside a generous trust that he regularly topped up with dividends from his advertising business.
Rozi had the same private education paid for by their grandparents as all the cousins had been afforded, but Rozi’s parents had always lived paycheck to paycheck. Rozi supported herself and didn’t have a buffer.
“I could make the finances work,” Rozi said with a scowl of insult. “But I’m worried about the earring Kaine Michaels has. It sounds like Viktor has been making offers to him. I know you said it looks like a lost cause there. Tell me again what he said about Benny?”
“I presume he was talking about Benny,” Gisella muttered.
At first, she’d been convinced Kaine had been referring to Rozi. Whenever anyone mentioned her cousin, Gisella’s thoughts always went to the one who’d been her constant companion since they’d been infants. While Gisella’s mother had worked, Rozi’s mother had minded Gisella like one of her own. She had pushed Rozi and Gisella in a side-by-side stroller, braided their hair into matching pigtails, dressed them in each other’s clothes and dropped them on the same day into the same kindergarten classroom.
Gisella had a half-dozen cousins, though. Along with Rozi’s three siblings, their uncle Ben had two children. All of them were as dear to her as the next. Kaine could have been talking about any of them that day. However…
“Benny’s the only one I haven’t been able to reach,” she said, hating herself for doing exactly as Kaine had asked. She had spoken to each of her cousins in turn, trying to pass along his message. “Everyone else has said they’ve never met him. When Uncle Ben gets back from Florida, I’ll ask him where Benny is. See if there’s a way to reach him. Even so—”
“I know. Benny can be a rascal, but he wouldn’t hurt a flea.”
“Exactly.”
Yet Kaine Michaels had some kind of grudge against him. It didn’t make sense.
“Well, I know you don’t want to talk to Kaine, but I think we should make another offer. If we’re going to get these earrings, now is the time. Before…”
Gisella knew what Rozalia was hesitating to say aloud. Their grandmamma was eighty-one and recovering in Florida from a bad bout of pneumonia she had suffered this winter. It was a stark reminder they were running out of time to get the earrings back to a woman they both loved with all their hearts.
“I won’t go to San Francisco, if that’s what you’re suggesting.” Gisella never wanted to see Kaine Michaels again in her life. “He hates me.” The contempt was mutual.
“No, you should go to Hungary,” Rozi agreed. “The Rohans are your relatives. I’ll take a crack at Kaine Michaels myself.”
Something in Gisella screeched and fishtailed. Rozi was pretty in a wholesome way with thick brunette hair, a creamy complexion and a trim if almost
boyish figure. She didn’t draw men as inexorably as Gisella’s more classic and voluptuous attributes. They had never been rivals for a man and Gisella didn’t want Kaine anyway!
Even so, she felt oddly threatened by her cousin approaching him. If anything, she ought to be worried he would crush tender Rozi even worse than he’d managed to dent Gisella’s more stalwart soul. They had exchanged a few words and one kiss. He shouldn’t have left her feeling so trampled and discarded. She was stronger than that.
Maybe Rozi’s earnest and engaging personality would inspire a kinder response in him. Persuade where she had failed. She ought to let Rozi at least try. For Grandmamma.
“I always thought if I went to Hungary, we’d go together,” Gisella said sullenly.
“Me, too.” Rozi made a face. “I’m dying to learn more about the earrings. And look at this guy.” Rozi pulled her phone from her pocket to show her a photo. “Tell me he’s not reason enough for a ten-hour flight.”
Gisella glanced at the photo under a headline claiming Viktor Rohan was Europe’s most eligible bachelor. He was very handsome, but she noted his good looks the way she recognized that her other male cousins were attractive—objectively and without stirrings of feminine interest. He didn’t produce a fraction of the heat in her blood that merely thinking about Kaine did.
“Have them both,” Gisella said, determined to stop thinking about Kaine. “I’m swearing off men. They’re a waste of my precious time.”
Rozi chuckled and looked at the photo again, voice softening to a dreamy whisper. “What if we could actually get the earrings for Grandmamma, Gizi?”
“I would love that,” she said with equal yearning.
The tale of the earrings had always struck a chord in her. It had been such a huge sacrifice on Grandmamma’s part. Ezti had sold a cherished gift from her lover to buy a fresh start in the New World. That bold move had been the foundation for the abundant life Gisella enjoyed. How could she not be moved and thankful? How could she not want to repay her grandmother by getting back the earrings that should have been hers all this time?