The Girl with the Emerald Ring: A Romantic Thriller (Blackwood Security Book 12)

by Elise Noble

“Okay, but let me grab some food first. I skipped breakfast, and my stomach’s protesting.”

  Emmy was the only girl Alaric had ever dated who ate more than he did. Probably because she spent half her life in the gym and ran a marathon every week. He worked out, but he’d always struggled to keep up with her. Did he mind? No way. That stamina meant she’d blown his fucking mind in the bedroom, as well as other parts of his anatomy.

  “Hurry up, Cinders. And bring me back a sandwich, would you?”

  Emmy bleeped the locks on the Aston and strolled into the store, following in the footsteps of Stafford-Lyons. Damn, that ass. It had only gotten better over the years. Mind you, Alaric had always been a leg man, and Stafford-Lyons gave Emmy a run for her money in that department, especially in those pumps. Don’t be so fucking shallow, McLain. He forced his gaze away from his ex and focused on the surveillance app on his phone. Last night, they’d taken advantage of the crowd cover to install small, wireless bugs, Russian-made, easy to hide but poor when it came to battery life. He’d set them to voice-activated mode to conserve power, and a quick check revealed everything was operating as it should. Any conversations within range would come through the car’s Bluetooth speakers.

  If he got the chance, he’d go back to the gallery at some point and retrieve the spent devices. They weren’t cheap, and Alaric was funding this fool’s errand on his own dime. Time and time again, his business partners had told him to let it go, to focus on the future, and he knew they were right, but…he just couldn’t. Even after all these years, he still felt a compulsion to clear his name, to prove he wasn’t a thief to everyone who’d doubted his word. His colleagues, his parents, his former friends… The only person from his old life who truly believed in him was Emmy. Sure, the others at Blackwood had tried to help in the aftermath of the Seaduction disaster, but they’d never trusted him again, no matter how hard Emmy had fought his corner.

  The sting of that would never fade.

  At the gallery, Henrietta encouraged a couple to buy a painting. A landscape, one that would look just darling above their fireplace, or so she claimed. If it was the one Alaric was thinking of, the horses looked like donkeys and the clouds bore more than a passing resemblance to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Silence from Hugo Pemberton. He seemed to be a man of few words.

  Alaric was about to call Emmy and ask her to pick up a packet of chips for him too when he spotted a girl heading for Stafford-Lyons’s car. A blonde teenager wearing torn black jeans and a faded hoodie over a T-shirt that showed her midriff. Even from forty metres away, Alaric could see the holes in her sneakers. A fashion statement? Alaric had never understood the attraction of adding ventilation to perfectly good clothes.

  The girl didn’t look behind her, didn’t hesitate as she unlocked the Fiesta and slid into the driver’s seat. Who was she? Alaric didn’t have time to consider the question before he frantically dialled Emmy.

  “Get your sweet ass back here. This must be a handover because the car’s on the move.”

  CHAPTER 5 - SKY

  IT STARTED LIKE any other Wednesday morning, with borderline exhaustion and an errand to run for Digger, a guy who made his money doing questionable things for questionable people. Two or three times a week, sometimes every other day, he gave me an envelope to run across London and twenty quid for the “favour.” I didn’t know what was in the envelopes. I didn’t want to know.

  Then my phone rang, and a tedious day turned worse.

  “Sky, can you pick me up? Pleeeeeeease. If I could get back to Lambeth, you know I would, right? But I’ve got no money and…”

  “And what, Lenny?”

  I’d heard it all before. Every damn excuse under the sun, but each time he called pleading, I still gave in. Out of the many, many foster siblings I’d had, Lenny was the only one who’d treated me like a human being rather than an opponent. My childhood had been one big competition, with kids vying to stay with the good families and escape the bad. I first met Lenny when I was eight and he was fourteen. We’d clicked straight away despite the age gap, and for the first time in my life, I’d had a friend. Someone to eat snacks and watch movies with. Someone to walk me to school and help me with my homework. Someone who’d comfort me when nightmares woke me up. Then Lenny had whacked our foster father over the head with a chair when he saw the fucker with his hand down my knickers. Again. His hand down my knickers again. I’d lost count of the number of times that bastard molested me, but after the chair episode, Lenny and I got split up and sent to opposite sides of London to ensure it didn’t happen again. The chair thing, not the sexual assault. Nobody seemed to care much about that.

  My new family were arseholes too, but more in the “we don’t give a shit as long as you keep out of our hair and we get our money” way. Lenny drew the short straw and got slung into a group home. So I owed him. I owed him big, and no matter how many stupid things he did and how much I complained, we both knew I’d always bail him out.

  This time, he paused before elaborating on his situation. “I’ve lost my clothes. Like, I’ve got underpants, but I dunno where my trousers went.”

  For fuck’s sake. “What have you taken?”

  He giggled, a feminine sound from the boy who’d never quite grown into a man. “Uh, I just had a few drinks.”

  Yeah, right. “Sure, Lenny.”

  “Will you come?”

  “This is the last time. You can’t keep getting wasted like this.”

  “I’ll be good from now on, I promise.”

  There was that damn giggle again, and I knew that the next time a mate offered him a can of beer or a fat joint, he’d tag along to the party. And they were always in the middle of bloody nowhere. Of course, I knew why—if there were no neighbours to moan about the noise, there was less chance of the cops getting called—but I wished that just for once, they’d pick a house near a train station.

  I scrabbled through my pockets for something to write with and came up with a half-empty cigarette packet and a stubby eyeliner pencil.

  “Gimme the address.”

  I heard mumbles in the background as he tried to work that out. Once, I’d spent two hours looking for him at “the big white house with the pool near Tonbridge.” The pool turned out to be a duck pond, and Tonbridge was actually Tunbridge Wells. I needed one of those tracker thingies they used in the James Bond movies to clip to his belt, although that wouldn’t have helped me today seeing as he’d lost everything but his bloody underwear.

  “It’s, like, an old house near Windsor. White Horse Farm. Some little village… Birmingham?”

  “Dude, that’s a city.”

  More muttering. “Try Burnham.”

  I scribbled it down. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “Can you bring crisps? Man, I’m hungry.”

  If he had the munchies, that meant he’d been smoking pot. Brilliant.

  “Yeah, I’ll bring crisps. Just don’t wander off, yeah?”

  “I won’t, I swear.”

  That bloody man-child. I glanced at my new watch. The old one had died last week when I jumped out of a window and smacked it off the brickwork on my way to the ground, and I’d acquired my new “Cucci” timepiece in exchange for a couple of fags and a Coke. As in Coca-Cola. I’d tried powdering my nose once or twice, but it didn’t agree with me, so now I steered well clear. It was almost two in the afternoon. The number three had fallen off, and now it rattled around by the hour hand as I dropped my arm by my side. I wasn’t due at work until eight, which gave me plenty of time to find Lenny, study for the GCSEs I wanted to take if I ever had time to go back to school, and still fit in a run with my crew before it got dark. Exploring abandoned buildings with them had become a bad habit, and an addictive one.

  But keeping to that schedule meant finding a set of wheels quickly. Luckily, I was passing through Kensington and there were cars parked all over the place. I just had to pick one. Something newish because I needed a satnav. The maps app on my phone
had been a bit dodgy lately. The whole phone had been a bit dodgy. Hmm… A tall brunette stepped out of a BMW on the other side of the road, and I watched as she tucked her keys into her handbag. Thick leather with a flap-over top. Too tricky.

  A wave of tiredness washed over me, and I didn’t bother to cover my yawn, even when a hoity-toity woman in a too-tight skirt suit minced past me. Who cared about her dirty look? She probably slept on a bed of feathers and had a butler to dress her every morning.

  Coffee. Before I went anywhere, I needed coffee. That glorious hit of caffeine. Thanks to a housemate’s snoring, I’d been up since six, and I hadn’t gone to bed until four last night. Same as every night. Usually, I caught up on a few hours’ kip after Stumpy buggered off to do his lunchtime shift, but thanks to Lenny, I wouldn’t have that luxury today.

  Tesco came up on my left, and I nipped inside. Lenny could bloody well wait for five minutes. Queueing up in the café, I could have been any other college student longing for her morning fix. Over the years, I’d learned to blend in—black trousers with a blouse or polo-neck jumper if I was hanging out in the Square Mile, leggings and a fitted T-shirt for parkour, jeans for the casual look, and a pussy pelmet and glorified bra when I worked at the club. I leaned my head down to pick an imaginary piece of lint off my trousers as I walked under the CCTV to the right of the counter. No sense in starring on Crimewatch if I didn’t have to.

  As I got closer to the barista, I quickly checked my wallet—a genuine Louis Vuitton I’d plucked out of a handbag in this very establishment almost a year earlier—but it only contained a fiver and a handful of change. Mental note: make sure I borrowed a car with a full tank of petrol because I couldn’t afford to buy any more.

  “An Americano, please,” I told the barista when he raised an eyebrow. I always picked the cheap option.

  “Syrup?”

  I shrugged and gave him the shy smile that had worked last week.

  He returned it. “On the house?”

  I dialled the smile up a notch. “Caramel, and thanks.”

  His eyes followed my ass all the way to the table, but I didn’t care. I hadn’t been blessed with many assets, so I had to make full use of those I did have.

  My stomach grumbled as I sipped my coffee, and the sight of the guy next to me eating a chocolate muffin didn’t help. Three hours had passed since I’d eaten bread and jam for breakfast. It should have been toast, but the toaster was broken, and I refused to fork out for another one. Someone would only trash it again.

  I’d chosen the table by the window for a reason, and as I sipped, I kept an eye on the comings and goings in the car park outside. A Toyota hatchback pulled up—a possibility because I preferred smaller cars—but the woman bleeped the doors locked before disappearing along the street. No go.

  “I haven’t seen you in here before,” the guy at the next table said.

  Please, not now. I didn’t have time to get hit on this morning. Things to do, a car to purloin.

  I put on a puzzled expression. “Nie rozumiem.”

  There were advantages to having a Polish housemate. Paulius may have struggled with the washing-up, but he offered free language lessons and his plumbing skills were on point. “I don’t understand” was one of the first phrases he’d taught me, and it came in mighty handy on occasion. The guy beside me shrugged and went back to his muffin while I carried on with one of my favourite activities: people watching.

  Not to brag or anything, but I’d got good at reading people over the years. My survival depended on it. I knew which guys would buy drinks off me in the club and which would try to cop a feel. I could pick out the arrogant assholes who’d be so busy staring at my tits that they wouldn’t notice as I nicked their wallet. And I could spot the subtle tremor of a junkie out for his next fix from a hundred yards away. Sure, I made the odd misjudgement—and once, a monumental fuck-up—but my instincts were generally right.

  Today, I watched a girl drag a poodle past on a fancy leash, pink and sparkly. Not her own dog. Nobody who’d spent thousands on a designer pooch and accessories would yank the thing along like that. A businessman walked by clutching the handle of his briefcase so tightly his knuckles turned white. He had something important in there. Cash? Jewellery? We were in a posh part of London, after all. Or just that one big contract he couldn’t afford to lose?

  A slender blonde climbed out of a Fiesta and tucked the key into the side pocket of her tailored jacket. Pale pink, and it looked like silk. She obviously had money to spend on dry cleaning, yet she drove a cheap car? A contradiction in terms, but when she tried to go in through the exit and had to backtrack, I figured she was the type of woman to own a satnav.

  I hastily drained my coffee, grabbed a basket, and caught up with her in the produce section, where she was comparing a bag of regular carrots to the more expensive organic ones.

  Oh, to have that luxury. Most of the time, I survived on instant noodles and whatever leftovers Stumpy brought back from his job in the pub. To me, vegetables were a treat. She went with the organic version—no surprises there—and as she turned, I hip-checked her hard enough to send her handbag flying.

  “Gosh, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry.”

  So far, so good. That shit went everywhere. The woman carried an entire fucking department store in her damn purse, including—I shit you not—a can of mosquito repellent. Where did she think we were? The bloody rainforest? I bent to help her scoop up all the junk and bumped her again.

  “Oops, I’m such a klutz.”

  “It’s fine.” Her words were polite, but her tone was…not angry, more jaded. “Accidents happen.”

  In the confusion, it was easy for me to slip the car key out of her pocket and into mine, and I smiled inwardly as I fished a pair of tights out of a display of cucumbers, handed them to her, and backed away. Phase one: complete.

  Where would the blonde go now? If she planned to head straight back to her car, I’d have to abort, and I kept an eye on her while I grabbed a packet of crisps for Lenny and paid. Yes, I considered nicking them, but I figured two crimes in one day would be pushing my luck.

  The blonde picked out a bag of apples to go with her carrots, then headed deeper into the store, towards the convenience food and all the other goodies I couldn’t afford. Excellent. Things were going smoothly so far.

  Still, I couldn’t shake the niggly feeling that something was wrong as I approached the car, checking carefully for watching eyes. A mum pushing a stroller, more businessmen, a group of teenagers who should have been in school. They hung out in packs. A woman exiting a flashy black sports car caught my eye, not only because of the vehicle but because of the way she walked. Confident. Self-assured. Don’t fuck with me. I waited until she passed before I carried on.

  The lights flashed as I unlocked the Fiesta, and I slid behind the wheel. Every time I did this, I got an irrational fear that the car would blow up when I started it. Damn Digger and his endless supply of knock-off action movies. But the engine turned over smoothly, and I took a second to familiarise myself with the dashboard—satnav, headlights, indicators, fuel gauge. A full tank of petrol. My lucky day, other than the fact that the interior reeked of Shimmer body spray. One of the bar girls at work tended to apply it rather liberally and it always made me sneeze, but this was a hundred times worse. It seemed the posh bird bought the damn stuff in bulk.

  The first spots of rain fell as I pulled out of the parking space, and I flicked on the wipers. How far was Burnham? I’d figure that out on the way. A guy in a Honda SUV glanced in my direction as I went past, a phone to his ear. A salesman married to his job?

  I let a black cab pull out in front of me, feeling charitable since part of my afternoon had gone to plan. My new plan, anyway. When I woke up, I hadn’t envisaged having to rescue Lenny from a farmhouse, although it didn’t come as a complete surprise seeing as I’d had to haul him out of a mausoleum last winter. He’d been doing lines off a coffin, for fuck’s sake.

 
Time and time again, I’d asked myself why I bothered, but the answer was always the same. Lenny was family, or at least, the closest thing to family that I had.

  I closed my eyes briefly at a red traffic light. Some days—okay, every day—I wished I had a normal life. But there I was, in a stolen car because I couldn’t afford to pay the train fare, and I didn’t even have a driver’s licence.

  At least the blonde had picked all the options when she specced the car. Decent speakers, AC, pale grey leather seats so comfortable I longed to stop for a snooze. But I couldn’t stop. Not yet. Maybe not for years. See, I had this big idea. Lenny called it crazy, but I preferred to think of myself as ambitious.

  I wanted a home.

  That was it. Just a home. Nothing huge or flashy, but a place I could call mine. I’d lived in nineteen different places during my childhood, and since the start of the year, I’d already moved twice.

  I was tired.

  Tired of the constant upheaval, tired of having to babysit Lenny, tired of always working or studying or dealing with arseholes. Tired of the hustle. Tired of life.

  I just wanted a tiny flat of my own so I didn’t have to carry my entire life around in my pockets in case someone decided to evict me. Which meant I socked away every spare penny I made as a shot girl in Harlequin’s nightclub, I never paid bus fares, and my current home was an empty pub shared with twenty others, most of whom spent their days stoned out of their tiny little minds.

  The light changed, and I eased forward, heading west out of London. Who knew? One day, I might even take my driving test too.

  CHAPTER 6 - BETHANY

  WHERE THE HECK was my car? Okay, I was forgetful sometimes, but I’d parked it right next to the canary-yellow SUV with the surfboard sticker in the back window. I knew I had. Unless the driver of the SUV had moved their car. Or there were two colour-blind surfers in Kensington. Or…or… No way. Who would want to steal a Ford Fiesta? It was hardly a Ferrari, and the boot didn’t even hold that much shopping.