The Diamond Affair (6 page)

"Do whatever
it takes to find her." The voice came from the direction of the garage. It
belonged to Guy Beauvoir.

And he was coming
her way.

CHAPTER 5

Panic squeezed
the air out of Ruby's lungs. The second it took her to gather her wits and will
her legs to move almost cost her. Fortunately Beauvoir was too intent on his
phone call to see her.

She opened the
nearest door and fled into the kitchen. The housekeeper looked up from the
bench where she was chopping vegetables. "Ah, you're here."

Ruby managed a
smile through her chattering teeth. She leaned against the door to try to catch
more of Beauvoir's conversation as he walked past on the other side. The housekeeper
frowned. "Lung condition," Ruby told her. "I sometimes lose my
breath for no reason. Just give me a minute."

"Ah." She
went back to chopping her vegetables.

Ruby pressed her
ear to the door. Beauvoir's footsteps came closer. Then they stopped right outside.
Ruby glanced around the kitchen. The only place to hide was the huge walk-in
pantry. She could make it if she ran...

But the kitchen
door didn't open.

"Hi,
Pumpkin," said Beauvoir on the other side. Pumpkin? His wife must have
returned.

"Hey, Dad."
Not the wife, the teenage daughter. "Home early?"

Ruby heard Beauvoir
sigh heavily. "Yeah. Just a business problem to sort out. Nothing to worry
about."

"Want to
tell me about it? I might be able to help."

Beauvoir's soft
laugh infiltrated through the door. "It's okay. You've got enough to worry
about with school. How's the study going?"

"The same."

"Good, good.
Your mother home?"

"Sonya?"
The daughter's tone changed from light to sneering. "Yeah, there's a man
from the gas company here. They're upstairs. Together."

Footsteps receded
down the hall and Ruby breathed a sigh of relief. That had been close. Too
close.

The kitchen door swung
open and she skipped backward out of the way.

"Who are
you?" snapped a dark-haired teenager with thick black kohl outlining her
eyes.

"Gas
company," Ruby said.

"Another
one," the girl said with a roll of her eyes. She pushed past Ruby and went
straight to the pantry where she scanned the shelves. "I told you we'd run
out of chocolate biscuits," she said to the housekeeper.

"Sorry,
Penny, I forgot."

"Forgot! For
God's sake, how hard is it to remember to buy chocolate biscuits? Now what am I
supposed to eat?"

"There are
other biscuits to your left."

"I don't
want other biscuits, I want Tim Tams." The girl swore, grabbed a packet of
biscuits and left. The kitchen fell strangely quiet after she'd gone, like the
aftermath of a violent storm.

"Sorry about
that," the housekeeper said with a shrug. "She's a...challenge. The only
one who can handle her is her father."

Ruby approached
the large stovetop and began twiddling knobs, pretending she knew what she was
doing. "Your employer work from home much?"

"Sometimes?"

"Is he close
to his family? Do they spend a lot of time together?"

The housekeeper
shrugged then chopped a carrot in half. "Not really. He's too busy. He's a
good father though. Penny has everything a girl her age could want, but she
spends most of her spare time on her computer." She clicked her tongue. "Such
a waste of time, but then what's a girl her age supposed to do? Mr. Beauvoir
thinks she's too young to go to parties and he doesn't even like her going
shopping without the chauffeur escorting her. She leads a very sheltered life,
poor thing."

"So she's
not a tearaway teen?"

"Oh no."
She chopped through another carrot and half of it fell to the floor. "She's
mostly a good girl."

As long as she
gets her chocolate biscuits.

***

Jake was prying Sonya's
fingers off his arm for the hundredth time when he heard a man's voice
downstairs.

She clicked her
tongue. "My husband's home." She sounded annoyed, but her husband's
presence didn't stop her from touching Jake's arm again with her killer
fingernails. He owned knives that weren't as sharp as those talons.

"I've gotta
go," he said.

"But you
haven't finished checking the heater."

"It's fine. I
need to go see if my colleague needs help."

"Why would
she need help?"

"She's new."
And she was in Beauvoir's lair. Bile rose to his throat and adrenalin pumped
through his veins. He'd screwed up big time. He'd let Ruby convince him she
needed to tag along, and while it had seemed a good idea to have someone who
knew the layout of the house, in the end it hadn't mattered. Matt would never
forgive him if something happened to Ruby. Hell, Jake would never forgive
himself.

He raced down the
stairs, an indignant Sonya trailing behind. They reached the bottom just as Beauvoir
came into view in the hallway. He walked toward them, a dark-haired girl standing
behind him. She took one look at Jake and Sonya, curled her lip in disdain,
then pushed open a door and disappeared into the room beyond.

Jake willed his
heartbeat to slow down. He needed to remain calm and in control to pull this
off. He
needed
to pull this off if Ruby was to stay safe.

"Australian
Gas Authority," he said.

Beauvoir grunted
and kept on walking, punching numbers into his phone. If only Jake could get a
hold of it.

"What are
you doing home early?" Sonya asked, following her husband. They both
entered the lounge room where Jake had first met the lady of the house.

"Quit
talking," Beauvoir said to his wife, "I'm trying to listen to my
messages."

"You've got
that bloody thing pressed to your ear all the time lately," she railed at
him. Jake could just imagine her fingernails digging into her husband's skin as
she'd done to Jake earlier, but probably without the come-get-me smoky eyes.

"I've got a
business emergency," he said to her.

"It's always
an emergency."

"This
emergency concerns you too, my little viper." His tone was condescending, nasty.

"Unless you've
lost all our money, it doesn't."

"It's
my
money, not yours. And I haven't lost it. What I have lost is that diamond I
showed you the other night."

"The one you
were going to have made into a necklace? The Florence?"

"The Floren
tine
."

Sonya swore, her
words as colorful as anything Jake had heard from the mouths of his SAS
comrades. "You fucking idiot! How can you lose a whopping big yellow
diamond?"

"Someone
stole it," Beauvoir said on a grunt.

"Who?"

"A woman."

"Your lover?"
It was said matter-of-factly, without emotion. Did Sonya know her husband had a
lover? Interesting on two counts: one, that he probably did have a lover, and
two, that she didn't care. Did she have one of her own?

"A business
associate."

More swearing came
from Sonya. "You need to improve security. What's that lazy sonofabitch Frankie
doing to get it back?"

"He's on to
it. And if you'd leave me alone for five seconds, I could call some people and
pull in some favors."

Sonya appeared at
the door, grumbling under her breath. She spotted Jake and she smiled, her
troubles seemingly forgotten. "You're still here? Shall we go upstairs—?"

"No. Where's
the kitchen?" Hopefully Ruby was in there using her disguise to keep a low
profile.

Sonya sighed and
pointed down the hall to the door the girl had entered. At that moment, she
came back out and barreled past Jake just as he was reaching for the handle.

He watched as the
girl eyeballed her step-mother then disappeared up the stairs, taking two at a
time. Sonya, ignoring her, gave Jake a finger wave.

"If you ever
need to come back, I'll be happy to accommodate you," she said with a
flick of her long blonde hair. "Any time."

"I'll be
sure to let everyone at the Gas Authority know."

Her smiled
wavered only slightly.

Jake pushed open
the kitchen door and spotted Ruby at the stove. Good girl. She was still in
disguise. Did she even know Beauvoir was home? From the paleness of her face,
he guessed she did. She stared at him through big, round eyes and smiled wanly.

He let out a
pent-up breath. It was
his
damn fault she looked so terrified.

"You're
here," he said, relief making his voice gruff. "Good." He nodded
at the housekeeper. She smiled back.

Ruby joined him
and now that she was up close, he could see she was shaking. He put his hand on
her shoulder and rubbed gently, massaging the knot of tension. "Good,"
he said again, more softly. "You okay?"

She nodded. "Can
we go?"

"We'll take
the back way," he said to the housekeeper. He took Ruby by the hand and
pulled her after him. He checked the hallway but Sonya had gone and her husband's
voice drifted down from the lounge.

They left through
the back door, down the side of the house and out through the side gate. They'd
parked his SUV in the next street, away from view and in keeping with their
door-knocking routine.

As soon as she was
inside the car, Ruby let out a long, shuddering breath. "That was close."

"Yeah."
Too damn close.

CHAPTER 6

Ruby bent over as
far as she could in the limited space of the front seat and put her head in her
hands. She wanted to puke.

Jake pressed his
hand to the back of her neck. His fingers felt cool on her skin, reassuring. She
didn't want him to stop. With his other hand, he started the car and threw it
into gear.

"Are you going
to throw up?" he said. "I can pull over."

She sat up and he
removed his hand. She wanted to grab it and put it back but thought he might
need it since he was driving very fast through narrow streets. At least he was
concentrating. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel and his unblinking
gaze didn't waver from the road.

"I shouldn't
have let you come," he said. Maybe it wasn't concentration, maybe it was
anger.

"Why not?"

"Because
there was always a risk of Beauvoir returning home early."

"We didn't
know that. And I would have insisted on coming anyway. Besides, it was easier
with two people in such a big house." The implication that this was his problem,
not hers, rankled. She'd got him into this, not the other way round. If anyone
should be feeling guilty, it was her.

Oh God. If
anything had happened to Jake because of her...

Maybe she was
going to puke after all. "How'd it go upstairs?" she asked, trying to
distract herself from her roiling stomach and him from his guilt trip. "Find
anything or were you too distracted?" Relief made her snarky—at least that's
what she told herself.

"I was
questioning her," he said, "trying to find out if she knew about the
Florentine."

"Right.
Questioning
.
I bet you used the oldest technique in the book too."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning you
had to flirt with her to get some answers. And probably more than flirt too."

He smiled. "Does
that bother you? That my job sometimes goes beyond the beat ‘em up and shoot
‘em down?"

"Yes!"

His smile
vanished. "Why does it matter how I get the answers?"

"Because, because...you're
prostituting yourself," she blurted out.

He grunted a laugh.
"Thanks for your concern, Ruby, but I think it's a little misguided."
Mischief teased his lips. "Or are you jealous?"

"Don't be
ridiculous." She crossed her arms and sensed, rather than saw, him
grinning at her. "Just watch the road."

Jealous. Ha. She
barely knew the man. He could be heading to Sydney to follow a girlfriend, or
even a wife for all she knew. He didn't wear a ring but many men didn't these
days.

He pulled over,
parking the SUV under a shady tree in a quiet back street.

"Why are we
stopping?" she asked.

"This is as far
as we can go and still listen into their conversations."

"Oh."

He unbuckled his
seat belt, hopped out of the car then climbed into to the back seat. He opened
a heavy-duty silver case and fiddled with some knobs and wires attached to an
electronic device. A voice crackled out of the speakers—the housekeeper telling
Sonya what was on the menu for dinner. The conversation stopped and the only
sound was the turning of pages. A magazine? Jake fiddled some more then shook
his head. "No other conversations going on anywhere in the house," he
said.