care.
“Forget it.” Alex stood and circled around the desk toward her, easy, relaxed, making her think of one of those clever, nimble border collies. Which, she supposed, made her the sheep. “Look, the door’s closed. And it’s not like I’m planting one on you, as much as I’d like to,” he added, approaching her. Julia took a few wary steps away. “Anyway, who’s going to care? It’s not like we work in the same department.”
“Wait a minute. I care.” She held on to the sudden flare of anger like a shield. “I’m not going to be the latest watercooler topic.”
He grinned. “Sweetheart, if people haven’t figured out there’s something between us by now, they’re blind.”
Sweetheart. He had no right to use the word to snatch the breath from her lungs. “Well, they’re behind the times, because there’s nothing between us,” she snapped. “It’s over, all right? Done.”
Alex blinked. “What are you talking about?”
“Us. This…thing we’ve been having,” she said, throwing her hands in frustration. “I was out of my mind to start it, I’ve been out of my mind to keep it going and now I’m finished. Want me to be any clearer? I want you out of my life.”
She’d never seen Alex in anything but easy good humor, so it took her a moment to realize he was angry. “Where’s this coming from? You don’t just come out of nowhere and cut it off.”
“I’ll do whatever I want to.”
“You said we were going to talk tonight.”
“I’m done talking,” she flared.
He rounded on her. “That’s right, you don’t talk, do you? No talk, just sex. Don’t get to know each other, don’t find out about each other’s lives, just get together to scratch an itch. Well you know what, Julia? That’s a crock of—”
A knock on the door interrupted his furious words. For a breathless instant neither of them moved. Then Julia smoothed her trim claret suit and walked over to open the door. “Yes?”
She saw a couple outside, the woman looking tense, the man clasping her hand protectively. “Are you Julia Covington?” the woman asked.
Julia nodded.
“I’m Marissa Suarez. This is my…boyfriend, Jamie Wilson. Alex Spencer said you’d be expecting us.”
Alex stepped up behind Julia and the hairs on the back of her neck rose as though in a field of static electricity.
“I’m Alex,” he said, stepping around her to put out his hand to shake. “Nice to meet you both. Unfortunately I’m late for a lunch appointment, so I’ll have to leave you in Julia’s hands.” Only Julia would have seen the spark in his eyes. “I’m sure she’ll be happy to talk with you. Julia’s always happy to talk with anyone.”
JEAN LUC ALLARD walked into the museum, sneering inwardly at the guard who stood at the front door. So tall, so cocky in his uniform, with his gun. Pathetic. He could no more block a professional like Jean from his desires than could a child.
It was always so. Those who were robbed were the weak. He was one of the strong. No one bullied him, not since he’d become a man. Not since he’d left his whoreson of a father crumpled and bleeding in that Marseilles alley, maybe dead, maybe alive. Jean neither knew nor cared, as his father had never cared all the times he’d treated him like so much filth beneath his feet. It was a debt paid, nothing more.
Jean took what he wanted and prospered. After all, there was always a market for a man with certain…talents. His clients knew how to find him, and he knew how to get them what they wished.
Like the White Star amulet.
So beautiful, so alluring, a treasure that demanded to be touched. A seductive beauty that did not easily release the mind. When he’d sat across from his contact in the dark corner of that Parisian tavern, he’d been given only a description, a location, a name. Now that he had seen her, he knew what she could drive a man to do. He knew what a man might do to possess her.
And he knew his client would pay more.
All he needed to do was retrieve her from the foolish Suarez woman. Perhaps she had been lucky since he’d been forced to place the amulet in her bag to avoid detection, but it was of no matter. He had been punished for his foolishness, and now it was at an end. The White Star was his to take.
He walked down the hallway with its echoing marble walls. Friday midday and all the little people had scuttled out of their cramped offices for lunch before their afternoon of meaningless rote work, like rats on the wheel. Pah. Fools, all of them, laboring their lives away for nothing, telling themselves they had control, deluding themselves they had security when he could move among them at will and take whatever he wanted.
And what he wanted, he thought, listening to the voices inside the open office door, was his White Star.
2
Friday, 11:00 a.m.
“PLEASE, SIT DOWN,” Julia said, waving Marissa and Jamie to seats before she crossed to her own chair.
“Thank you for agreeing to see us,” Marissa said. “I’m sorry we interrupted you.”
“It was nothing.” Julia welcomed the distraction. It let her heart level. It kept her from thinking about the look in Alex’s eyes. Instead, she studied the couple sitting across from her. For they were a couple—she would have known it before Marissa had said a thing. It wasn’t the clasped hands, but something that hummed between them, something that tied them as surely as a physical bond.
She wouldn’t have put them together at a glance. Marissa looked too polished, too fiery for Jamie’s slightly rumpled, abstracted air. They seemed…glowing, somehow, though. Connected.
Shrugging the thought aside, Julia folded her hands. “So,” she said briskly, “what have you got?”
The two of them exchanged glances. Marissa moistened her lips. “I was just on vacation,” she began. “I wound up with something, and…”
Ah, the dreaded vacation find, Julia thought in resignation, but then she realized there was a tension about Marissa, a strain in her liquid dark eyes that didn’t bespeak a flea-market tchotchke. “And?” she prompted.
“Look,” Jamie broke in. “How about if we don’t tell you anything about it. Just…look at it. Tell us what you think. Tell us if you think it’s real.” He turned to Marissa. “Okay?”
She nodded and opened up the leather bag she wore strapped across her chest. Reaching inside, she brought out an object wrapped in cloth and laid it carefully on the desktop before unwrapping it.
And Julia felt the unholy punch of excitement in her gut. This wasn’t a vacation find brought in by some poor, deluded soul. This was the real thing. Where it had come from or how it had gotten there, she couldn’t say, but she could sense the power of its age as though it were radiating waves of antiquity.
It wasn’t colored as so many of
