The Diamond Affair Read online

  He shrugged. "Could be a million reasons. The wife might be mad at him for something. She might be planning on leaving him and needs the diamond to exchange for cash. Same goes for the daughter. We also don't know if he's got mistresses he might have told, nor do we know if the wife and daughter have confided in anyone else. The web can widen exponentially without his knowledge of it."

  "Great. It's going to be impossible to find out who took it."

  "Maybe not. We just have to systematically find all potential suspects then eliminate them one by one. First we start with the wife and daughter."

  He made it sound so easy. "Okay. So let's go talk to them."

  "Whoa, not yet. We can't just ask questions like we did with Aaron."

  "So what do we do?"

  "We? We do nothing. I break into their house."

  It was tempting to let him do it, to stay as far away from Beauvoir and Frankie as possible, but she knew Beauvoir's house. She'd been there once before to value some diamonds from his vault. She knew the layout. Besides, it would be faster with two.

  ***

  Ruby was relieved when she learned that Jake didn't actually mean breaking and entering the Beauvoir's house like cat burglars in the dead of night. More like infiltrating in broad daylight. Beauvoir's mansion was located behind a huge fence in Melbourne's blue-blooded suburb of Toorak. Like its neighbors, the house was old, grand, and came with a housekeeper.

  Complete with overalls, toolbox and a fake ID, Jake charmed his way past the elderly woman into the house. Finding out he actually had charm beneath his rough exterior was an eye-opening experience. The man certainly knew how to use his looks to full advantage, and when he turned on a high-voltage smile as well, the housekeeper was a goner.

  Ruby tagged along behind with a clipboard. He hadn't wanted her there. Too risky, he'd said. They'd argued for some time but she'd eventually beaten him down by assuring him the workaholic Beauvoir wouldn't be home.

  Dressed in the pants suit she'd worn to work the day before, she looked like any official-looking employee of the Australian Gas Authority, a government organization that Jake had made up. Ruby got the feeling he'd used the disguise before. He seemed way too smooth, too at ease, to have been doing it for the first time.

  He explained to the housekeeper that they were investigating a gas leak down the street and had to check all the nearby houses to ensure their services weren't affected. He then repeated his claim when they came across the lady of the house a few minutes later in one of the lounge rooms.

  Sonya Beauvoir looked up from the fabric samples laid out on her white couch. An exquisite woman, she was tall, blonde and striking in a yellow summer dress that revealed a lot of cleavage and tanned skin. Her gaze swept past Ruby as if she wasn't even there and settled on Jake. She smiled and extended her hand.

  "Hello. My name is Sonya." Her voice was soft but her smile was predatory. She held onto his hand a few moments longer than polite but he didn't seem too eager to extricate himself.

  "Tom from the Gas Authority. My partner and I have to test all your outlets."

  She let go of his hand and held out her arms in a come-get-me gesture. "My outlets are yours to test." The smile never left her lips.

  He smiled too and pointed to the fireplace. "That gas?"

  "No. But the central heating is gas. The unit's upstairs. Care to take a look while your colleague checks down here? I'll show you of course."

  Of course. Could she be any more obvious? Ruby cleared her throat. "That won't be—"

  "I'd love to," Jake cut her off.

  Ruby glared at him. He'd told her in the car that he wouldn't leave her on her own and now he was, just so he could be alone with a woman with too much time on her hands and not enough modesty. Damn him. He was supposed to be doing a job—her job—not flirt with the megalomaniac's wife. Not completely forget Ruby even existed.

  "But first I need to give my colleague some guidelines," he said. "She's new."

  Okay, so he hadn't forgotten her existence, but he was still leaving her there without a clue what she was supposed to be doing.

  He winked at Sonya—winked!—then turned to Ruby. She put as much of her annoyance into her glare as she could but only got a raised eyebrow in response. The idiot had no idea what he was doing wrong. Either that or he just didn't care. The lure of Sonya, with her long legs and luscious figure, was apparently too tempting.

  Men!

  "You know what to do with these?" he asked, handing Ruby a small case he extracted from his toolbox. It was the case with the bugs.

  She took it. "I think I can manage." He'd shown them to her earlier. "See you soon," she said, emphasizing the soon.

  He gave her one of his crooked smiles then left with Sonya. Ruby waited until their footsteps faded before placing a bug under the phone cradle. She straightened just as the housekeeper entered.

  "This way," the woman said. "Through here."

  Ruby pulled out a few bugs from the case and shoved them into her jacket pocket. She followed behind the housekeeper, discretely placing bugs under hall stands, tables, and inside lamp shades as they walked through the rooms. She also did a serviceable job as a gas technician, inspecting the outlets she was shown and making a point of sniffing the air to check for leaks.

  When they reached the hallway leading to the back door, the housekeeper said, "The barbeque is gas."

  Ruby followed her gaze to the undercover seating area with a built-in barbeque. "Thanks. I'll be a few minutes."

  "I'll be in the kitchen," the housekeeper said, pointing to a nearby door. "When you're ready you can come in and check the stove."

  Ruby was glad to see the back of her. It wasn't that the housekeeper suspected anything, more that Ruby couldn't relax with her around. Keeping up the disguise was mentally taxing, not to mention hell on her nerves.

  She didn't have any bugs left but if they were to find out who knew about the Florentine, they'd need to do more than plant listening devices. They'd need names of Beauvoir's business contacts, other close family members that may have been told about the diamond, and they'd need emails and phone records. The task was beginning to seem insurmountable.

  She wouldn't find any of those things standing around in the hallway, and she doubted Jake would be able to do much under the watchful Mrs. Beauvoir. Ruby was about to head into another room, see if she could find Guy's study, when she heard a door slam outside.

  "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 s
chool. 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 Florentine."

  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.