mansion. The unexpected close contact allowed Anna to catch the faintest whiff of a sweet scent. It was vaguely familiar and nudged something distant in her consciousness, but she couldn’t place it.
The next moment, the memory was gone. The thought that the scent was something a woman might wear whispered through her mind as she regained her balance. The latter was accomplished largely due to Clive’s swift action. Seeing her predicament, he quickly caught the former mistress of the mansion by the arm and kept her from falling.
“Sorry, ma’am, didn’t mean to be forward,” he apologized, withdrawing his hands the moment she regained her footing.
Anna smiled. After all these years with the family, Clive was still incredibly formal. She sincerely doubted that they made people, much less butlers, like him anymore.
“Apology more than accepted, Clive. If you hadn’t caught me, that oaf would have mowed me down.” She glanced over her shoulder and saw the stranger was retreating through the gate. She decided the man had to belong to the car that was parked down the street. “What was that all about?”
“I’m sure I don’t know, ma’am. He’s one of those ruthless reporters, I believe.” Anna was certain that Clive knew far more than he was saying. Nothing happened in this house or to this family that the gray-haired man was not aware of. “So nice to see you again, ma’am,” he said warmly, deftly changing the topic. “Mr. Harold is expecting you. He’s in the den.”
The butler dutifully escorted her to the room. Along the way she noted some changes. There were expensive, somewhat showy, paintings gracing the walls. Rebecca Lynn’s handiwork, no doubt, she mused. If there was a spare dime lying around, the woman would find something to spend it on.
Opening the den’s double doors for her, Clive unobtrusively backed away and withdrew, moving as silently as a shadow.
Harold, his back to her, was alone in the room. When he turned around, she was struck by how drawn he looked. His hand was wrapped tightly around a chunky scotch glass. The glass was almost empty.
Her first thought was that something had happened with the eye candy he referred to as his third wife. Had she been a lesser woman, she might have secretly gloated at the thought. But Anna was made of better stuff than that, and she found her heart aching for him, aching despite the fact that he had been less than kind during the final days of their marriage.
“All right, Harold, I’m here,” she declared, crossing to him. Removing her wrap, she carefully draped it over the back of the cream-colored leather sofa. “What’s the big emergency that couldn’t wait until morning?”
On his best day, Harold Rothchild was never one of those men who exuded power. What power he had he inherited from a father who had been almighty, leaving no room for a son to emerge and become his own man, even if he was handsome enough to turn a few heads. All his life, Harold had searched for a way to do that, to become his own man. Years after Joseph Rothchild’s death, Harold was still searching.
Draining his glass, he placed it on the desk and cleared his throat before finally giving her an answer. He felt a tightness in his chest. “It’s gone.”
He wasn’t making any sense, and there was panic evident in his blue eyes. Anna put her hand on her ex-husband’s, as if to silently reassure him that she was there for him. “What’s gone, Harold?”
“The ring.” His voice seemed to crackle with the stress he was experiencing. “My father’s ring. The Tears of the Quetzal. Candace kept asking me questions about it. When she asked to see it, I said no. I thought she’d get angry, but she just said, ‘All right.’ After she left, I had this feeling that something was wrong,” he confessed, almost talking to himself. “So I went to the safe to look at it—and it was gone,” he wailed. “And now something bad is going to happen. I can feel it. Something awful.”
Anna didn’t follow him, but then, Harold had always been secretive when it came to the ring and its origins. All she had ever gotten out of him was that, in the right hands, it brought true love to its owner within sixty seconds. In the wrong hands, dire things came to pass. Personally, she’d always thought it was all just empty talk, something to glorify the ring, nothing more. She’d only seen it once herself, and it was far too gaudy for her taste.
“Worse than the ring disappearing?” she asked.
Harold seemed to go pale right in front of her eyes. A line of sweat formed on his forehead. He sounded almost breathless when he said, “Much worse.”
Natalie Rothchild felt sick to her stomach. It took all she had to keep the light breakfast down that she’d consumed this morning.
After working her way up within the Las Vegas Police Department to the rank of detective in a relatively short amount of time, there weren’t many things that still got to her. She’d learned to harden herself, to separate herself from her work. She kept a firm, if imaginary, line drawn in the sand for herself. Her professional life was not allowed to cross over into her personal life—what little there was of it.
Natalie was well aware that if she began to take her work home with her, she would burn out within six months—the way Sid Northrop, one of the homicide detectives on the force when she’d first joined it, had.
But this was different. This was personal. And she hadn’t been summoned to the scene because it was personal. She’d come because she’d overheard the dispatch put the call out on the police scanner. According to the information, a hysterical nanny had come home with her two charges only to find the children’s mother dead on the living room floor. Natalie was about to ignore it because two other detectives were being called in to handle the homicide and God knew she had enough on her plate already without being Johnny-on-the-spot for yet another murder.
But the address that the dispatch rattled off stopped her cold. The address belonged to Candace.
A wave of fear mingled with disbelief washed over her. Her hands felt icy as she held onto the steering wheel. Even though she and her sister lived in two different worlds and didn’t interact, she still felt an obligation to keep tabs on Candace. Her twin sister had cotton candy for brains, not to mention that Candace’s self-esteem was like a giant champagne bucket with a hole in the bottom. She seemed in desperate need of adulation and found it living her life on the wild side.
If anyone needed a keeper, it was Candace. And even though they no longer had anything in common but blood, Natalie secretly had appointed herself her sister’s protector, keeping Candace out of harm’s way whenever she possibly could.
Damn, but she’d really dropped the ball this time, Natalie upbraided herself grimly.
In Candace’s condo now, she fought back anguished tears as she looked down at her sister’s battered face and body. The room looked like a battlefield, and Candace was lying on the floor next to the marble coffee table, her limbs spread out in a grotesque, awkward fashion like a cartoon character that hadn’t been drawn correctly. The scarlet dress that Candace had undoubtedly paid a fortune for accented the pool of blood that encircled her head lying on the ivory rug.
“You shouldn’t be here,” a gruff voice behind her admonished.
She blinked twice, banishing her tears before she glanced over her shoulder at Adam Parker, one of the two detectives who had been called in.
“Yeah, well, neither should she,” Natalie bit off angrily. Reaching out, she adjusted the right side of the front of Candace’s dress to cover
