Knaves (21 page)

“
Don’t worry yourself, Hayden.” Karla placed a gentle hand on his chest. “We did enough to hurt him.” She glanced back at her Uncle. “You’ve left plans to cover the rest.”

Coilin nodded.
“The mayor has that video, and from what I understand the police have been finding plenty more such things at Chateau de Tour. Valmont’s going to be crucified, don’t you worry about that.”

Hayden gave a short, humourless laugh at that.
“Good,” he said simply. Then he frowned. “What about the girl, Safiyah? Will they find her?”

Coilin sighed and Karla
’s expression was pained. “I don’t know,” he replied at last. “But they’ve got more of a start than I would have expected.”

“
What do you mean?”

“
For a mute, Latour seems very eager to start talking, if you take my meaning. He’s been writing down all sorts of stuff, apparently. They’ve already arrested the brothel owner who sold him Safiyah, and it seems there are some very big names attached to the prostitution rings she was running. Expect some important heads to roll in the next few days.”

“
Vive la revolution,” Hayden said sardonically. “What about Eloise? Can they pin her murder on him as well?”

It was Karla who spoke now. Her voice was a little bitter, but also tender.
“You have to let her go, Hayden.”

“
It’s not like that!” he snapped and then winced again. “I want justice,” he said quietly. “I want that bastard to burn—for what he did to you. And yes, for what he did to her as well, but you most of all.”

“
If you want justice,” Coilin intervened kindly, “then the best thing the two of you can do is get out of here. They won’t be able to pin Eloise’s death on Valmont—he’s too clever for that—and at the moment he has no idea who stole his money. Uncovering that will take an age if your brother’s as clever as he says he is, but if you two stand up in court and your past lives are revealed…” His let his statement drift away.

“
Tobias came through then?” Hayden asked, somewhat sceptically.

“
He did indeed,” Coilin replied expansively. “You both gave him enough time to do whatever it was he was doing and now we’re all very well off indeed.”

“
We?” Hayden raised an eyebrow.

Karla patted him on the arm.
“Come on, Hayden, you couldn’t expect me to leave Uncle Coilin out, could you? Toby was a little gem.”

Hayden laughed bitterly at this.
“The Tobias I know is a cheating, conniving, lying swine. He’s more a gambler than I’ll ever be. The difference is that I don’t clean out countries.”

“
I like him already,” Karla said with a smile. “We have to go, Hayden,” she continued gently. “If anything, us two testifying against him might give the defence just enough to let him slip off the hook. We’ve done all we can. I don’t like it any more than you, but we’ll only make things worse, as well as the fact it won’t be long before they arrest one of us—or both.”

Hayden nodded without speaking. At last he asked:
“And is someone going to tell me why a half-naked doctor is standing in my room?”

When at last the three of them left the room, Hayden forced himself to walk as upright as he could, stifling gasps of pain with each step. His beard and glasses wouldn
’t have fooled anyone who knew Doctor Girard, but it was enough to get them past the bored police officer at the door. The good doctor himself had insisted on being tied up before they left: they’d all understood the reasoning behind that, but Coilin kept to himself his observation that it was interesting how the other man had insisted that it was Karla who bound him to the bed and gagged him. No doubt Sasha Girard would have enough sexual fantasies to please him for years to come.

They came to the car that Coilin had hired for them, a much more nondescript affair than the Jag that they
’d taken to Monte Carlo. “You’ll find a change of clothes in the boot,” he told them, and I’ve got your passports here.

“
Who are we?” Karla asked.

“
You, my dear, are Lucia Baretti, from Florence. And you, you’ll be travelling as Andrzej Piotrowski. How’s your Polish?”

“
Terrible.”

“
Well, keep your mouth shut, and if you do have to say anything just make sure it’s in very heavily accented English. Actually, be like Latour and pretend you’re a mute.”

Hayden laughed at this.
“What about you?”

“
Oh, don’t worry about me,” Coilin replied expansively. “I have a few loose ends to tie up at this end. But I do suggest you get as far away from Europe as you can: it could get tricky for a while.”

“
Where do you recommend, Uncle?” Karla asked. “Africa? America?”

“
Too close and from what you’ve said before people will are still looking for you out west in connection with the Wallenstein. I’d recommend Asia. China perhaps, or the south-east.” He looked up at the sky. “Summer’ll be over soon. I hear Japan’s a lovely place to be in the Autumn. Go on, take a break and enjoy yourselves for a while.”

“
I’ve always wanted to visit Kyoto,” Karla said. She lifted herself on her toes and kissed him on his cheek while Hayden held out his hand. Both of them paused for a moment, watching each other carefully. Then Coilin took it and shook it warmly. “Take good care of her,” he said quietly.

“
I shall,” Hayden said, then he turned to join Karla, taking the passenger seat as he slowly and painfully eased himself into the car.

Coilin watched them drive away and then looked up at the sky once again. Certainly the temperature was a degree or so cooler than it had been for a long time, even in this clement part of the world. Autumn would soon be coming and he wondered if they would take his advice.

“Japan,” he mused to himself. “Distant, orderly, cultured and civilized. What on earth could possibly go wrong?”

Rocks

Diamonds are forever. Men rarely last the night.

If there’s one thing Karla Pietersen loves more than sex, it’s diamonds—and she knows how to use all her charms to get what she wants. The Wallenstein diamond is the ideal match for an intrepid con artist, as perfect as Karla herself, and she has devised a cunning scheme to make it hers.

Unfortunately for Karla she’s not the only one with her sights set on the Wallenstein. Charismatic Hayden Carter enjoys stealing other men’s riches as much as he enjoys stealing other women’s hearts, and his own plan to possess a flawless gemstone is not going to be hindered by a woman’s ambition. Nor is Hayden the type of man to fall for Karla’s usual tricks—if anything, he intends to take more than the purloined diamond.

Yet when the original owners of the Wallenstein hire a hitman to track down what is theirs, Karla and Hayden find themselves thrown together in the bizarrest of circumstances. And when their passions are stimulated by more than wealth they discover that maybe it’s not only diamonds that last forever.

The Crystal Fragments Trilogy

When the heart is stronger than stone.

This brings together all three Crystal Fragments books into one volume. When Kris Avelar runs away from another failed love affair to an isolated cottage in Scotland, her desire to be alone is nothing compared to that of the stranger she meets: Daniel Logan. Tall, handsome, but also scarred by more than the marks which line his face, his attempts to push her away only inspire her to greater curiosity about him—a curiosity that will lead to dark and forbidden desires as she enters his private world.

As she discovers that this mysterious stranger is actually Daniel Stone, the charming and urbane founder of Stone Enterprises, she seeks to discover more about him—just as he becomes increasingly obsessed with her. Yet if Kris is the most perfect lover that Daniel has known since the death of his wife, she is not the first, and others will seek to come between the two of them and their happiness.

When Daniel is caught up by his own dangerous past, Kris sets out to save him and to show that while everyone else will turn against him, she is determined never to let him down—or let him go. It is at that time that she discovers that her own submission, what she has thought of as a weakness inside her, is actually the source of her greatest strength.

The trilogy includes:

Fractured Crystal: Sapphires and Submission

Fragile Crystal: Rubies and Rivalries

Refracted Crystal: Diamonds and Desire

Orfeo

The road to heaven leads through hell.

They called him the black Orpheus, a New Orleans singer whose voice could instill desire in the angels themselves or tame the darkest demons. But nothing inspired Orfeo more than the rich and beautiful mistress of Xanadu, Ardyce, the woman who came to hear him sing each and every night.

Determined to make her his, thus begins a sensuous seduction and passionate romance. Orfeo’s desires must face another challenge, however: the lusts of Earl, the criminal kingpin of New Orleans’ underworld. When his love is stolen away Orfeo descends into that underworld to rescue her, seeking the only woman he cares for before a hurricane sweeps across the city and the levees break, throwing everything they have ever known into chaos and destruction.

The Long Last Summer (as Miriam Lawless)

A tale of innocence and of experience.

At the beginning of the long, hot summer of 1976, two young boys—Jake and Mark—are riding out into the fields that lie beyond the small mining town which is all they have known for their brief lives. The eldest of the two, Jake, wishes to show his brother something of the innocent pleasure that he has begun to discover in the wider world.

For their young mother, Kitty, such pleasures are tinged with the bitterest experience that for one of them this may be the last summer that he will ever know. As doctors fight to combat the disease that also took Jake and Mark
’s father, so Kitty struggles as a single woman to raise her children in a provincial town where the close embrace of a community also represses all her desires to better herself.

For Doctor Reuben Heppner, the struggle to cure a young boy is a means to leave behind the messy chaos of his own divorce and redeem himself, but with Kitty Donahue he also starts to believe that her happiness will be the key to both their salvation. And yet as the summer burns on so tempers and desires begin to blaze with a heat that threatens to destroy everything, for even the longest summer must come to an end.