Jerkily, Tyler set the tiger’s-eye stone down. The gleam of the worry stone continued to draw her eye as she slipped the disk into a side pocket in her handbag, unplugged her laptop and placed it into her briefcase along with the notes she’d made. She snapped the case closed and picked it up by the grip, hooked her handbag over her shoulder and rose to her feet.
She should have gotten rid of the tiger’s eye years ago. She must have thrown it away a dozen times, only to pull it out of the bin and dust it off. The problem was that it was irritatingly beautiful. The hot flashes of gold and copper always caught at her and she just couldn’t bring herself to chuck something so elegant and enduring away.
Her problem was she never could let go, never could throw away something she’d cherished, even if the cherishing was well in the past. Once she loved someone or something, she hung on for grim death. When it came to relationships, her loyalty wasn’t in question, just her sanity.
Which was probably why she’d never quite been able to cut West out of her life.
The thought hit her square in the chest, literally stopping her in her tracks. The possibility—however remote—that West could still have some call on her emotions.
Uh-oh. No way. She didn’t still care for West.
There were lots of reasons why she shouldn’t even like him…if she ever thought of him at all, although the last few months, crazy as it seemed, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him. It was as if her mind had been caught up in some kind of loop. She’d even dreamed about him, which was beyond strange, because she hadn’t glimpsed him more than a handful of times in as many years.
She’d attributed the phenomena to stress and a ticking biological clock. She was twenty-eight, alone, and still tied to a marriage with West for the simple reason that neither of them had bothered to dissolve it.
Maybe it was cowardly, but she’d become used to living in relationship limbo, and had even welcomed it at times because it was a convenient shield when all she’d wanted to do after West had left was crawl into a dark hole and hide. It had taken her months to feel even remotely normal, and then she’d made sure she was too busy with study and work and establishing her career to think about him or the shipwrecked marriage—or to want the turmoil of falling in love again.
The thought that she’d clung to the legalities of her marriage because some remote part of her still wanted West made her go still inside, but she refused to yield to the possibility. She wasn’t that needy.
West still affected her, she was big enough to admit that, but any woman with red blood pumping through her veins would find it hard to ignore him.
She stepped out of her office and pulled the door closed behind her. Stop thinking about him.
There was absolutely no point. Like the jades and artifacts she worked with, Gabriel West was past history—way in the past. She had wanted forever, and he hadn’t. End of story. Getting close to West had been beyond what she could achieve. She simply hadn’t had what it took to unlock whatever had passed for his heart.
She strolled slowly along the deserted, darkened corridor, shoes sinking into thick soft carpet as she passed the open double doors to one of the main display rooms. The musical ripple of water from a fountain almost masked the faint click of a door closing.
She froze. A chill swept down her spine. Someone was in the building with her.
Gently, she opened her briefcase, extracted her cell phone and pressed the short dial that would put her through to the night watchman. No alarms had gone off, the security system hadn’t been breached, but that didn’t mean safety. The stolen artifacts had disappeared without one alarm being tripped.
It could be the night watchman, or a staff member working late, as she was. The auction house was huge, and dealt in art, antiques and estate jewelry as well as Asian and Pacific-Rim artifacts. A number of Laine’s staff had clearance to be in the building, although after the theft had been discovered three days ago they’d clamped down on security, and most of the keys had been handed in and security clearances revoked.
Before the call could be picked up, the night watchman, Charlie Watson, stepped through a side door.
“Everything all right, Miss Laine?”
Tyler let out a breath and disconnected the call. “I heard a noise and got spooked. I was just ringing you to check if there was anyone else in the building.”
Charlie’s gaze lacked its usual warmth and slid away too quickly. “It was probably Mr. Laine you heard. He just left.”
Mr. Laine. Last week Charlie would have referred to her adoptive brother as Richard. Tyler’s stomach tightened at the loss of Charlie’s easy manner. Everyone at Laine’s was on edge; the police investigation and the intense media speculation had seen to that. But now that the first shock of the theft had passed, an uncomfortable speculation had set in—the kind of speculation Tyler should have been prepared for.
She had worked hard for Laine’s—she’d worked even harder to be a part of her family—but there was no getting past the fact that she had been adopted into the wealthy jeweler family, not born into it. Pretty clothes and an exclusive education aside, she was the cuckoo in Laine’s nest, with a murky past the media had latched on to like a starving dog closing its jaws on a juicy bone. She didn’t need it spelled out that Charlie, who had always gone out of his way to be pleasant to her before, thought it was more than likely that she had had something to do with the theft.
He strolled past her into the display room. “Guess we’re all a little jumpy since the theft.”
He cast his eye over a glassed-in display of ivory that Tyler had catalogued and put together just before the jade had disappeared from a vault that had ten-inch steel walls, twenty-four-hour computer and camera surveillance, and a time lock that sealed it shut from five-thirty at night until eight in the morning.
A wave of weariness washed through Tyler as she slipped the cell phone back into her briefcase. “What do you think of the ivory?”
Charlie shoved his hands in his pockets and stared assessingly at the exquisitely carved set of Indonesian amulets. His gaze studiously avoided hers. “Not as pretty as the jade.”
In Tyler’s mind, as outwardly plain and workman-like as the jade was, nothing was as “pretty.”
When she’d first held the scabbard accoutrement she’d been filled with an inexplicable excitement that had gone beyond the thrill of finding artifacts that had been made and used by people not just centuries ago, but milleniums. Her palms had tingled, and heat had swept through her. She’d lost long minutes while she’d sat, the piece held loosely cupped in the palms of her hands—her mind oddly disconnected. It had taken the persistent buzz of the phone on her desk to pull her back to the present, and even then the subtle, tingling flow had continued, as if the crystalline grains contained within their cool green matrix the fiery imprint of life. The belt ornament and the carved bird had both felt similar, but neither was as powerful as the scabbard accoutrement, which was a warrior’s piece, worn thin with time—smooth and uncomplicated—designed to encircle the sheath of a sword and proclaim, in this instance, not the warlord the warrior fought for, but his faith.
It was possible the warrior had either been a warlord himself, with no further insignia other than the solar symbol required, or he could have been one of the early warrior monks, predating the Shaolin.
The
