The Lost Enchantress (5 page)

She turned back to find Jenna still eyeing her with one silently arched brow, obviously waiting for a better answer to her question.

“Okay. So it’s been a while,” Eve conceded.

Jenna’s other brow went up as well.

Eve sighed. “A long while. Satisfied?”

“My satisfaction isn’t really the issue.”

“What can I say? I’ve been busy.”

“Not to mention the fact that when you do find time to let a man into your life, and he makes the ungodly mistake of showing some potential, you always find a way to sabotage the whole thing.”

“Potential,” Eve retorted, “is in the eye of the beholder. I give you my word of honor that the minute I behold a relationship with true potential, I’ll jump its bones.”

Jenna rolled her eyes. “Provided you remember how.”

Eve laughed. “I hear it’s like riding a bike . . . oh look, jewelry.”

Jenna had a passion for jewelry, the bigger and bolder the better. She immediately sat up straight and shifted her full attention to the stage. Eve’s love life temporarily back-burnered.

What she’d told Jenna was the truth, but slanted so it didn’t reveal more than she wanted to. Ironically, she couldn’t tell Jenna the whole unvarnished truth for the same reason she never allowed a relationship with a man to get to the serious, you-bear-your-soul-and-I’ll-bear-mine stage. She’d tried that once; it didn’t work. Being a fast learner, she knew once was enough.

She took a sip of her wine and joined Jenna in checking out the necklace being modeled by a young actress from the local repertory theatre. Ben was just slipping into high gear with his description.

“. . . a real beauty, ladies and gentlemen, a piece with true old world charm and most assuredly not the kind of thing you see everyday. Both the twenty-four-inch braided chain and the hourglass pendant are crafted from the finest gold, and our esteemed appraiser tells me that while he can’t verify it without breaking the glass, he believes the sparkly stuff inside to be diamond dust. Diamond dust,” he repeated slowly, an old hand at capturing the imagination of his audience. “Why, next to stardust, there’s nothing more magical in the entire world.”

Eve was riveted.

“And the magic doesn’t end there,” he said. “This magnificent piece has what we in the business refer to as ‘significant provenance
.
’ It comes to us through the generosity of the late Dorothy Dowling, who acquired it at a private auction of items recovered from the wreck of the good ship
Unity
. As those of you who are local history buffs know, the
Unity
was a grand old British vessel that went down right here off the coast of Rhode Island in . . . let me see now, I believe it was . . .”

Eve knew the date as well as she knew her name. October 23, 1898.

The tale of the
Unity
and her sole survivor, the “miracle baby,” as the press at the time dubbed her, was the first family story her grandmother told her, and she’d begged to hear it over and over again. The infant found floating in a wooden tub was Eve’s great-great-aunt Lydia. Lydia’s mother had been a kitchen maid, her father first footman, and they were traveling aboard the
Unity
with their wealthy employer to begin a new life in Providence.

Today, news of the disaster would be flashed around the world practically before the ship hit bottom and Child Protective Services would commandeer the miracle baby as soon as she came ashore. They would check the
Unity
’s online manifest to locate her next of kin and have her on the first flight back to Dublin.

A hundred years ago, things worked a little differently. With her parents dead and no next of kin on this side of the Atlantic, six-month-old Lydia was adopted by a local family—one of dozens that were touched by her plight and reached out to offer her a home. Decades passed before she had any contact with her relatives in Ireland.

Lydia’s son was a pilot stationed in England during World War II. On a lark one weekend he traveled to Ireland, hoping to surprise his mother with a picture of the small village where she’d been born, and when he found Glengara, he found a family. Afterwards, Grand and her aunt Lydia exchanged letters, and by the time the war ended, Lydia, a widow, had lost her only son, and Grand, who was pregnant, had lost the love of her life before they’d had a chance to marry. Lydia needed someone to help fill her empty house and empty days, and Grand needed a place to make a fresh start. In her grandmother’s words, it worked out splendidly all the way ’round.

“1898,” Ben continued after consulting his notes. “Over a century ago. And that means that what we have here is a piece of history, a genuine bit of long-lost sunken treasure. This is history and elegance and diamond dust all rolled up in one beautiful pendant. So, which of you proprietors of fine taste will start the bidding at a paltry five hundred dollars?”

Instantly a dozen paddles around the ballroom shot into the air; Ben pointed and acknowledged each in turn.

“Five hundred, six hundred, seven hundred,” he called out. “Eight hundred, nine hundred, and there’s lucky one thousand, over there by the coffee cart, the little lady in blue.”

“It’s pretty, in an old-fashioned way,” Jenna said with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. “But really, how often can you wear an hourglass?” She held the auction catalogue, open to the pendant, so Eve could see it. “And what on earth would you wear it with?”

Eve didn’t reply. She barely heard the question, her attention riveted on the gold hourglass the actress was holding up to catch the light. As the young woman twirled the pendant, delicate white beams flashed from it, slicing through the air like shooting stars. Eve was captivated, struck by a sudden sense of longing that made her fingers itch to pick up her paddle.

The bid amount was climbing steadily higher, and the number of bidders was dwindling, dropping to six, then five, then four.

Any minute
, she thought,
any minute there will be a winner.
The auction would move on to the next item and the pendant would belong to someone else. Something deep inside her rebelled at the prospect.

Her heart was pounding and Ben’s words were spinning in her head.

Don’t be a fool
, cautioned her common sense.

“Two thousand six hundred,” said the auctioneer.

And just like that, the night that had started out so unremarkably, suddenly became something else.

L
ater, she couldn’t recall actually reaching for her paddle or lifting it into the air, but suddenly it was high in the air, doing an excited little “Look at me, look at me” dance. Clearly her innate bidding style was not from the school of subtle sophistication.

It didn’t take long for Ben to notice and nod in her direction. “Ah, a new player. A bid of three thousand from the lovely Eve Lockhart.”

Three thousand dollars. Somewhere at the far outer reaches of consciousness, Eve understood that she had lost her mind. It didn’t stop her. Hell, it didn’t even slow her down. The bidding continued to climb and she climbed with it. What difference did it make? She’d blown through her rainy-day fund with her first bid. Now her vacation savings, Christmas account, and even Rory’s college fund were all lined up at the chopping block, waiting to be kissed good-bye.

Eve didn’t care. For the moment the only thing she cared about was walking out of there with the pendant. When the bidding reached five thousand, a woman seated a few tables in front of her shook her head and lowered her paddle and Eve felt a surge of glee that she knew was totally irrational.

“And then there were two,” announced Ben. From his podium onstage, he smiled at her and rubbed his palms together. “Do I hear five thousand two hundred and fifty?”

The bid increments had jumped from one hundred dollars to two-fifty, and for the first time she hesitated, wavering, but the auction warrior princess who’d commandeered her body refused to entertain the notion of quitting. Eve took a big swallow and nodded.

“Fifty-five hundred?” he asked, his gaze sliding to the opposite side of the ballroom.

And back to her.

“Fifty-seven fifty?”

Swallow. Nod.

“Six thousand?”

“Sixty-five hundred?”

Five-hundred-dollar increments now. This was crazy. She nodded.

“Seven thousand?”

“Seventy-five hundred?”

Each time the bid was tossed to Eve, she nodded quickly, before she had time to think. If she allowed herself to think, sanity might squeeze back in. She recalled reading somewhere that you should never bid at an auction without firmly fixing in your mind beforehand the maximum amount you were willing to part with. She had no such figure in mind. How could she when one didn’t exist?

She didn’t care how high the bidding went; she wasn’t going to stop.

She wasn’t going to lose.

She wasn’t leaving there without the pendant.

“Nine thousand five hundred?”

“Ten thousand?”

This time when Ben swung his attention to the other side of the room, Eve looked too. Her vision was pretty good, but ordinarily even “pretty good” wouldn’t be good enough for her to identify someone standing at the far end of a crowded ballroom. Tonight it was. Tonight she had no trouble at all recognizing the dark hair and long black coat of the opposition. And it didn’t surprise her in the least to discover that the man bidding against her was the man she’d encountered earlier. It didn’t surprise her, but for some reason she didn’t have time to stop and ponder, it made her even more determined to win.

“Twelve thousand?”

She heard someone, Jenna maybe, ask, “Are you crazy?”

You need to ask?
thought Eve.

“Thirteen? Do I have lucky thirteen? I do. I have thirteen thousand on my far left. Do I have fourteen?”

She nodded with gusto, her gaze steady across the sea of tables and elegantly clad guests. She was staring directly at him when he turned his head and stared back, and she felt it for the second time that night, the sudden, unmistakable change in the energy patterns in the room. Only much stronger this time.

Things were getting weirder. And weird was never good. Weird attracted the wrong kind of attention and went against everything she stood for. Weird invited rumors and gossip. It had the power to ruin reputations, and lives . . . hers in particular. In the news business, a good reputation was built upon being honest and levelheaded and—it went without saying—sane.

She still wasn’t giving up on the pendant. What she wanted was for
him
to give up. She wanted him to just drop his paddle and give the hell up.

In the end it was as easy as that, as easy as riding a bike or falling off a log or making a wish . . . as easy as if so much time hadn’t passed and fate was still something she could trust.

She wanted the hourglass pendant, badly, and without planning to or intending to she gathered her thoughts together until they narrowed into a single unwavering beam focused on that one simple objective.
Reality bends to desire.
Grand’s words came to her from out of nowhere. And in that instant a pale, iridescent glow materialized, forming a misty triangle that stretched from the pendant to her to the man standing all the way on the other side of the ballroom.

Eve braced for a collective gasp from the crowd, but it never came, and she understood that just like the gust of wind in the lobby, no one else saw the mysterious mist hanging in the air; no one else felt the peculiar shifts in energy. Whatever was happening, she was completely on her own. Just she and . . . she looked across the ballroom in time to see his arm drop abruptly to his side and stay there.

“Sixteen thousand?” called Ben. “Sixteen thousand?”

Her rival didn’t nod; he didn’t even move. He simply glared. At her. If looks could incinerate, she’d be ashes. She turned away so she didn’t have to see it.

“No?” Ben prompted. “All done at fifteen thousand then? Fifteen thousand once . . . twice . . . and sold for fifteen thousand to Eve Lockhart.”

The sound of the gavel coming down might have been a shot from a starter’s pistol. That’s how quickly she was on her feet and yanking her purse from the back of her chair to make her getaway. The possibility that leaving early might be construed as a sign of weakness was no longer her number one concern.

Jenna was shaking her head in amazement. “Eve, my God, I can’t believe you . . .”

Eve couldn’t believe it either, and she wasn’t about to hang around and try to come up with a plausible explanation. “Sorry, Jenna, I really have to run. I’ll call you,” she promised without stopping.

She kept walking, responding with quick nods and smiles to the congratulations and surprised looks coming at her from all sides, until she reached the area set aside for payment and pickup. Several payment lines had already formed, all of them long. Considering how the evening was going so far, she wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of standing around waiting to see what freaky thing might happen next. Her public image would take a serious hit if she were to suddenly breathe fire or be pelted by a rain of toads. And so she did something she never did: she played the journalist card.

Barbara Vines was still rushing around. Eve caught her eye, waved her over and hurriedly fabricated something about a work-related crisis. Barbara immediately led her to the last table and discreetly beckoned to a young woman who appeared to be returning from a break. “Mandy, can you please help get Eve on her way as quickly as possible?” she asked quietly.

“Of course,” replied Mandy, reaching for the American Express card Eve already had out.

“Thanks, Barbara.”

“Happy to help,” she told her. “Breaking news waits for no woman.”