afraid I can’t give these a value,’ she said cautiously. At least not the sort of value he was after.
‘Why not?’
There was no way she could skirt around it. No way she could soften the blow. She could only hope that he wasn’t the type of man to shoot the messenger.
Making herself look him in the eye, she took a deep breath and said, ‘Because they’re synthetic.’
CHAPTER TWO
SYNTHETIC?
Will tensed. Impossible. They couldn’t be. He must have misheard. Been distracted by the effect Bella appeared to be having on him or something. Because she was certainly distracting.
The minute he’d laid eyes on her, standing there stock still, staring at him from inside her shop, he’d clocked the long dark hair, the body poured into a clingy dress and the knee-high boots, and a shaft of awareness had shot through him making his gut tighten and his blood heat.
When she’d finally sprung into action and let him in, he’d fought back the nausea that always surged up inside him at the sound of a lock sliding into place by resolutely focusing his attention on something else. In this case, her.
Within a split second of running his gaze over her curves, the simmering awareness had turned to lust. Which had swelled to almost uncontrollable proportions when he’d spotted the flush hitting her cheeks and a reciprocal flame of desire flickering in the depths of her darkening eyes. He’d taken her hand, her scent enveloping him and vaporising his equilibrium, and had had to drum up every ounce of control he possessed not to haul her into his arms, push her back and spread her over the table.
Once he’d managed to rein in that oddly violent reaction, he’d toyed with the idea of asking her out for dinner. God knew after spending the last couple of months sorting out his father’s estate, he could have done with a bit of distraction and some light female company.
There was nothing particularly unusual about that. Will liked women; they liked him. He was currently single and he had no problem with affairs, as long as they remained hot and short. With his DNA anything else was out of the question.
No, what was unusual was that to his growing frustration it appeared that, while he still ached with raging desire, Bella had obliterated whatever spark of attraction she’d experienced, and had retreated behind an air of aloof detachment.
Which wasn’t just unusual. It was baffling. And strangely disappointing, since he could barely remember the last time he’d had the opportunity to explore the heady delights of searing mutual attraction.
Not that he let it show, of course. No. He’d got used to arranging his face so that it didn’t reveal what he was thinking or feeling years ago.
Perhaps a bit too well, Will thought, frowning and shifting in the chair. From the way her head was tilting and her eyebrows were creeping up, Bella was obviously waiting for some sort of response.
He rubbed a hand over his jaw and snapped his mind from perplexing women and evaporating dinner plans to the startling revelation that the samples he’d grabbed from the front of the safe and brought to be valued were synthetic.
How the hell could the stuff be synthetic? The collection had been built up over decades. Generations of his male ancestors had given the finest jewellery to their wives, and he was pretty sure that while virtually every single one of them had been lousy at keeping their marriage vows, they’d always bought the best.
Setting his jaw, he arched an eyebrow. ‘Synthetic?’ he echoed.
Bella nodded. ‘The settings are real. The metal is genuine. And original. But the stones are paste.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Pretty much. You see here?’ She held up the engagement ring his father had given to his mother, and leaned forwards.
Will’s initial instinct was to jerk back, but as that would imply he considered her some sort of threat—which was absurd—he held himself steady, even if it meant her proximity made his skin tighten and tingle.
Forcing himself to keep his eyes on the ring and well away from her mouth and the alluring way it moved, Will dragged his attention to what she was saying. ‘The lustre is too dull and the light comes in at all the wrong angles. I’d need to double check, but I suspect the originals have been replaced with cubic zirconia.’
As her words sank in Will’s blood chilled and he ruthlessly suppressed the mind-scrambling effect Bella seemed to have on him.
How on earth could this have happened? As far as he knew, the collection hadn’t left the safe it was stored in for years. ‘When?’
‘It’s impossible to say, but the settings look as if they’ve been manipulated recently. Probably within the past year or so.’
His jaw tightened and he sat back, making sure that his expression didn’t reveal any hint of his thoughts. He might not care about the collection per se, or even the unforeseen plummet in its value, but he did care that the discovery that someone had been ransacking it had been made on his watch. He was its current custodian and it was therefore up to him to find out who and why and how far they’d gone. And then decide what he was going to do about it.
‘I am sorry,’ she said quietly, giving him a look full of sympathy he really didn’t need.
Resisting the temptation to toss the whole lot in the bin, Will stuffed the jewellery back in his pockets. ‘I trust your conclusions will remain confidential,’ he said curtly.
Bella nodded. ‘Of course.’
‘Good. In that case, I’d like you to take a look at the rest of the collection.’
‘There’s more?’
Her eyes widened and sparkled, and Will’s mind briefly went blank. Determinedly switching his focus to the dozens of boxes still in the vault and what might be lurking within them, he pushed his chair back and stood up. ‘A lot more.’
‘When?’
‘Now?’
‘I’ll get my things.’
For someone who’d just been told that the ten items of jewellery in his possession were in fact worthless fakes, Will appeared remarkably sanguine, thought Bella as they purred through the streets of central London. If it had been her, she’d have been wailing from the rooftops and tearing her hair out.
Quite what reaction she had been expecting she wasn’t sure, but it certainly hadn’t been complete indifference.
However, the moment they’d climbed into his car—his chauffeur-driven blacked-out-windowed car, no less—Will had hauled out his smartphone and had remained glued to it practically ever since, issuing a barrage of instructions to a string of poor hapless souls on the other end of the line, only one of which appeared to relate to the rest of the jewellery he wanted her to check out. The vast majority apparently pertained to some kind of complicated share-dealing business, which no doubt accounted for the chauffeur-driven car, the cashmere coat and the six-figure watch he wore.
There’d
