smiled again. That tone might intimidate the handmaidens downstairs, but she still looked like a freckle-faced kid to him. He hadn’t forgotten the cockeyed tiara or her desire to slice off poor Lincoln’s puny banana penis.
“Which means,” he said, “that you didn’t.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Again, I fail to see why that angle concerns you.”
“It concerns me because I am going to continue looking for Lincoln. For me, this is just a setback, not the end. And I’m hoping you’ll help me in any way you can. But if you really were in love with him, you might not be as eager to see him get caught.”
She had picked up a pencil and was tapping the eraser absently against the polished-mahogany desktop. A fidgeter. Earlier, she’d been twisting her ruby ring so much he’d been surprised she hadn’t unscrewed her finger.
In PR you had to learn to read people quickly and he knew what that meant. In his experience, fidgeters were impulsive people, given to emotional decisions. Occupying their hands helped to slow them down, to sort things through in a more orderly fashion.
She brought the eraser to her lips and nipped it thoughtfully with her teeth. An oral fixation, too. He took a minute to admire her mouth, which was her sexiest feature. Full lips with a lot of rich natural color, a broad span and the beginning of a laugh line. Those lips were a neon sign, labeling her accessible, innocent and generous.
Lincoln Gray probably trolled the upscale resorts, searching for women with mouths just like that.
“I’m not sure I understand,” she said finally. “Caught for what? If your sister put his name on her accounts, that means the money was legally his, doesn’t it? Ethically it’s mean and rotten, but people don’t get tossed in jail for being morally bankrupt.”
“I don’t intend to toss him in jail. I just want to—” He hesitated. “Talk to him.”
To his surprise, she laughed. It was a decidedly non-Armani laugh—light, unaffected, hitting several musical notes that were easy on the ears.
He wasn’t sure exactly what had struck her as so funny, but he was glad she could laugh at anything today. Tracy hadn’t so much as smiled for weeks after Lincoln left and she still sometimes cried herself to sleep. Either Allison Cabot was stronger than she looked or her heart really hadn’t been bunged up much by her fiancé’s defection.
“Sorry,” she said, putting her pencil down so that she could wipe her eyes. “It’s just that men are so predictable. My father would have said exactly the same thing if he were alive today. I assume your talking will be done with your fists?”
He smiled. “I can’t imagine it would come to that. I never met the guy, but I’ve seen pictures. I don’t think he’d want to risk messing up his handsome face.”
She nodded. “Yeah. Little Lord Fauntleroy meets Batman. Not much of a match.”
It was his turn to laugh. No one had ever compared him to Batman before, though he assumed it had something to do with his coloring. But the vision of Lincoln Gray dressed up in black velvet knee pants, lace collar and ringlets was just too perfect.
And she was right about the rest of it, too. The primitive part of him would dearly love to kick Little Lord Fauntleroy’s ass.
“How much money did he take from your sister? Has he left her in serious financial trouble?”
“Not really. Luckily most of her assets aren’t liquid. It’s not easy to abscond with real estate and trust funds. But he cleaned out their joint account—a few hundred thousand—and her secondary safety deposit box, which had a lot of fancy jewelry. Not bad for less than two months’ work.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Were they heirlooms? I have a ring of my mother’s—” She frowned, touching the ruby ring again. “I might have hired a private detective and tracked him down myself, if he’d gotten his hands on this.”
“Yes, some of them were family pieces. One in particular is an irreplaceable loss. A large gold brooch, shaped like a peacock, with emeralds and sapphires in its tail. It’s tacky as hell. I’ve seen jewelry out of a gumball machine that was more restrained. But it’s a valuable piece with a long history.”
Mark tried to mask the fury that boiled in his veins every time he thought of that asinine Gray standing in the bank vault, stuffing the Travers peacock into his pocket like a kid stealing gum at the drugstore. That scum wasn’t capable of recognizing real worth—in women or in gemstones.
“It’s been in the family for almost four hundred years,” he finished. “I intend to get it back.”
“But it sounds quite valuable. What if he’s already sold it?”
He shrugged. “Then we’ll have a problem.”
The buzzer on her desk sounded. With an apologetic grimace, she turned and answered it. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry to bother you, Ms. Cabot, but the man from Cuddles is here and the order is all wrong. Mrs. Blakeley’s crib didn’t come and you know the baby is due in—”
“It’s all right, Sylvia. I’ll be right down.”
Allison clicked off the speaker and turned to Mark.
“I’m going to have to deal with this,” she said.
“That’s all right. I’ll wait.”
“No.” She wiped her hand over her eyes. “Honestly, I think I’ve talked about this all I can today. I’m feeling a little muddled. It has been—” Her voice trembled slightly and she coughed to hide it. “It’s been a strange day. I’m sorry for everything your sister has lost, but I’m not sure how I can help you. Lincoln didn’t leave me a forwarding address.”
“But he might have said something—some detail that could give us a place to start.” He tried to read behind those sad green eyes. She looked incredibly tired, as if all the fiery indignation of the knife-throwing episode had died away.
Maybe he could fan the flame.
“He made a fool of you, Allison. Even if he didn’t break your heart, he wasted months of your life. He left you alone again, with the biological clock ticking louder than ever. Wouldn’t you like to see him get what’s coming to him?”
She hesitated just long enough. Damn it—Mark had his answer. Just like Tracy, this woman was still soft in the head where Lincoln Gray was concerned. Was the guy really that good in the sack? If not, he must have been putting stupid-drops in their bottled water.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “I have to think.”
He made a small, harsh gesture with his left hand. Women didn’t think. They emoted and they dithered and they let bastards like Lincoln Gray get away and start this madness all over again with some other weak-minded female.
“Try to understand…” She sighed. “Just this morning, I woke up believing that this man would be my husband—my lover, for life. The father of my children. It’s a little difficult, a few hours later, to send the bloodhounds after him.”
He
