Читать книгу Gabriel West: Still The One - Фиона Бранд - Страница 9

One month later, Auckland, New Zealand.

Gabriel West was back in her life.

Dr. Tyler Laine’s fingers slipped on her laptop keyboard. The machine beeped, and a cartoon character popped onto the screen. A little balloon message sprang out of the side of its head, politely asking if she needed help.

For long seconds, Tyler stared blankly at the ridiculous creature with its cheerful face, her overtired mind abruptly incapable of grasping the simple actions required to close the help file.

She’d been making lists, staring at lists, for hours, trying to shed some light on the mystery of who had walked into her family’s vault and stolen a set of ancient jade artifacts that had been under her care for the past three months, before her reputation and her career were shredded beyond redemption. She needed to make sense of a burglary that didn’t make any kind of normal sense.

The jade pieces were unique, priceless, but it wasn’t so much the quality of the objects, but their age and the mystery shrouding them that had caught and held the attention of experts and collectors alike.

Jade, like many minerals, could generally be traced to its country of origin. It was simply a matter of profiling the mineral content and then matching it up with the characteristics exhibited by jade from different countries or locations. Sometimes the jade could even be traced to the particular mine it had come from. The set of three objects had been analyzed and identified as extraordinarily high-quality nephrite, originating from the Sinkiang region in China. The objects: belt and scabbard accoutrements, and a round vessel carved in the shape of a bird, had also been dated. They were neolithic in origin and had been carved approximately three and a half thousand years ago, during the Shang dynasty. All three pieces were old enough, and rare enough, to be the jewel in any collection without the added mystery of how they had come to be included with Maori grave goods on the small island nation of Aotearoa, New Zealand, thousands of miles away from China.

It wasn’t unusual for artifacts to be stolen from museums, or looted from archeological sites. The theft of artifacts from war-torn countries was rife. But it was unusual for anyone to want to steal artifacts that were so world-renowned they could never hope to display them.

Anger flickered, warming her, but even that emotion had become faded, distant, as exhaustion closed in on her, sucking the last remnants of her vitality so that she simply sat, motionless, her eyes fixed on the screen until the minute irritation of the electronic flicker made her blink.

A fine tremor ran through her, jerking her back to an awareness of just how punchy she’d become. Her mind was functioning, barely, but her body was closing down; her pulse slow, viscid—her breathing shallow and long-drawn-out.

She hadn’t slept more than four hours in the last seventy-two, and she couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten anything that could remotely pass for a square meal. She could remember taking a few bites of a sandwich in the half-hour respite she’d had between police interviews that afternoon, but she couldn’t for the life of her recall what had been in the sandwich. She’d been having trouble concentrating all day, her mind blanking out for short periods of time. If she closed her eyes now, she would fall asleep in her chair.

Her hand found the mouse, her fingers stiff and clumsy as she moved it on the pad until she located the electronic cursor on the screen, then centered it on the cartoon character.

Help.

She took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “If you’ve got an FBI unit on hold…maybe.”

She clicked the mouse, bringing up the menu, then closed the file, sending the little intruder back into its hidey-hole.

Right now she could use the FBI, Interpol, the CIA, a SWAT team…whatever.

Letting out a breath, she hooked off her spectacles, sat back from the bright glow of light pooling her desk and ran a hand over her sleek knot of hair to loosen the tension.

The list of private collectors she’d been compiling from Laine’s sales records dating back for the past ten years was starkly illuminated by the bluish glow of the screen. The names could have been written in Chinese characters for all the good it did her.

Her eyelids drooped again, and a picture of West strolling toward his car as she’d left for work this morning floated into her mind and she blinked, banishing the image.

She desperately needed to work, to focus, but the fact that the husband who had walked out on her five years ago was now practically her next-door neighbor kept distracting her, so that she found herself staring into space, precious minutes out of her long working day lost.

Her stomach rumbled. Frowning, she checked her watch. Almost eight. Past time she was out of here.

“Cancel the FBI unit.” She smothered a yawn as she saved the file to a disk. “What I need is an analyst.”

The tawny gleam of light off an egg-shaped tiger’s-eye worry stone caught her eye as she waited for her computer to shut down. Absently, Tyler picked it up, her fingers smoothing the silky curves, her mind abruptly shifting back to a time, eight years ago, when she’d been mesmerized by eyes that had burned with the same intense shades of gold.

Gabriel.

Dispassionately, she examined the tension that held her motionless when all she wanted to do was leave the office, drive home, ransack the fridge for a snack, then crawl into bed and forget that the world she’d so carefully constructed around herself since she was eight years old was coming apart.

She was crazy even to examine the past. Five years ago she’d asked West to leave, and the husband she’d never been able to tame had packed his bags and walked, leaving for another secret assignment in some foreign country—preferring the edgy danger of the SAS, the hardship and the uncertainties—maybe even a bullet in the dark—to spending time with her.

For months she’d clung to the fantasy that he’d come back.

Well, he had come back. She just hadn’t ever imagined it would be five years later, and that they’d be neighbors.

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 mystery of who had owned and used the jade, and how Chinese artifacts had come to be entombed in a Maori burial cave aside, the pieces had grabbed her at a deeper level than any other artifacts ever had. She’d experienced moments of connection with other objects before, as if the artifact in some strange way held the essence of a different time or place, or even a person, but never as strongly as this.

When the jade had been stolen, she’d felt a sense of violation out of all proportion to what she should have felt—as if the thief had walked into her home and taken a very private possession.

Despite the fact that her only link with the jade was a purely business one, and that the possession of the pieces was open to public debate, in a strange way, on a very personal level, the jade had belonged to her.

Fifteen minutes later, Tyler drove into the underground entrance of her apartment building, escaping the leading edge of a tropical storm front that had swept down from the north.

She parked in her space, gathered her briefcase, and locked the car, shivering as a damp blast of air tugged at her lightweight jacket and skirt, and frowning because the garage was close to pitch-black. Several of the lights must have died at once, or else the storm had knocked them out, leaving only the lights above the elevator and those in the stairwell shining.

Thunder rumbled and a flicker of lightning briefly lit the gloom as she walked toward the stairwell. Her apartment was on the ground floor—a luxury she’d been happy to afford for herself because the gardens around the apartment block were so beautiful. When she came home from work, she liked nothing better than to sit out on her tiny sun-drenched terrace, surrounded by cool, glossy green rhododendrons and nikau palms and fall asleep on her lounger reading a book.

A footfall registered, out of sync with hers. She paused to listen, but almost instantly shook off the paranoia that gripped her. No other vehicle had entered the garage since she’d arrived. What she’d heard had probably been an echo of her own step bouncing off the concrete walls.

Lately, she’d been jumping at her own shadow. A few odd things had happened, including several phone calls from someone who’d hung up as soon as she’d answered. On a couple of occasions she’d been certain that she’d been followed, even though she hadn’t so much as caught a glimpse of anyone.

Another footfall sounded, this time sharply distinct. A raw flash of alarm went through her and her step quickened. She threw an assessing glance around the gloomy cavern of the garage.

A hand snaked out of darkness and closed on her arm, wrenching her to a halt. Adrenaline flooded her system, almost stopping her heart. Her arm jerked in automatic reflex as she spun, teeth bared, and stepped into her attacker, throwing him off balance as she snapped her elbow into a face that was eerily blanked out by a balaclava. He grunted with pain and released his hold. A second man materialized out of the smothering blackness and ripped the briefcase from her.

Fear and rage and the sharp instincts of a child who’d spent more time defending herself than she’d ever spent with tea sets or dolls burst hotly through her. With her right hand now free, she swung, fingers bunched into a tight fist, and connected with the solid bone of a jaw, snapping her attacker’s head back. A strangled sound burst from his mouth, and the balaclava was knocked askew, giving her a glimpse of dark skin and high, slanted cheekbones as she wheeled, holding her handbag to her chest so that there was nothing trailing for either man to grab, and flung herself toward the elevator.

A hand snagged at her jacket. Gritting her teeth, she wrenched free. Hair spilled around her face, half blinding her, and in that moment the doors of the elevator slid open. Relief flooded her as light flared across the bare expanse of concrete, spotlighting her in its beam so that she felt like a rabbit caught in the glare of headlights. West’s startled gaze locked with hers, then white light exploded in her head.