Page 105 of Merciless Heir
She presses her lips together a moment. “Getting or not getting the tiara, you mean?”
“Let’s cut the not out of that.”
Her eyes narrow and she starts to pace, a surefire sign there are a million things going on in her head. “You’ll get what’s yours. You always do.” She takes a deep swallow of her drink, the shake a little more pronounced, and it sends ice through my veins. “But the rest of it is something we need to understand.”
“It’s more want, unless you think it’s a setup.”
“I don’t know. That’s the problem. I keep pivoting from one thought to another and everything is neat and simple until it isn’t and…are we looking at this in the wrong way?”
“What do you mean?”
“The amount paid for the tiara was a hell of a lot. We’re talking hundreds of millions.”
I shrug, even though nonchalance is as far from me as it’s ever been in my life. “Everyone in there can afford it and when I have it back, providing you don’t steal it from me, I can double that. After I get it evaluated.”
“You’re a fucking bastard, Kingston.”
She doesn’t say how dare you. She doesn’t say I wouldn’t steal it. No. She throws an insult.
It’s in line with how she is, so why the fuck do I get the feeling Sadie’s evasion means something?
“So you’ve told me. Do you have it?”
Sadie stills. “Do I look like I have it on me?”
Again, it’s in what she says, down deep. Or what she doesn’t say. I get to my feet, intent on getting to the bottom of her little games, finding out why she’s agitated enough I can see it. But she jumps in.
“Kingston, did you hear anything back yet about Jenson?”
“Not yet. It takes a few days. I’m not breaking any laws. Innocent until guilty is still a thing, so I’m fast tracking legal avenues. With his layers of lawyerly ways, it’s taking a little longer. He clearly knows how to circumvent certain tax laws.”
I got that report when I went through private emails on my separate server. And I almost laugh. He’s also not breaking laws, bending, but not breaking. I didn’t know the old conservative guy had it in him to play that way.
“Okay. So if we’re looking at this wrong, let’s look at the tiara. I’ve only seen the necklace and it’s beautiful. So why hide things like this away? From what I’ve read of your father he wasn’t flashing your money, but the jewels are heirloom, they’re something that should have been on display in some way, not hidden and buried beneath rumor. Did he say why?”
I shrug again and come up to her. “I’ll play, Sadie. For now. No, he didn’t say. We never knew if they were real or lost to time or just something once worn and labeled Sinclair. They were talked about, whispered about, but he and our grandfather never said a word about them existing outside something that might once have been family bling.”
“Don’t you think it’s strange?” I’m close enough I can see the slight dilation of her pupils, the tiny flutter of her pulse point in her throat, the softening of her mouth as she looks at me. And my guts twist and libido hums.
“I wouldn’t know. It just was.”
“These are things you yourself told me bring a certain something to the family and Minchini is a name to be revered. So?”
I breathe out and shake my head, and I step away a little. “For some reason we don’t know they were hidden, and it seems deliberately so. In the family there were whispers from aunts and cousins of the rumors. Never around my father, but kids hear things. You name it, we heard it. They were cursed, so were locked away.”
“Do you think your father would buy into that?”
“Fuck no. He liked money and had no time for pretty stories.”
She raises a brow and I scowl.
“Fuck you, too.”
“You have.”
I half laugh. “The tales ran the gamut from bad luck to loss in a card game, to being stolen long ago. There was one of them being melted down to solidify the family fortune, a rumor which brought the old man out in hives because of how it made his family look. Christ, Sadie, you name it, I heard it. Like they were even fake and made by Reardon, Minchini’s one-time apprentice. That was a popular one.”
“I’ve never heard of a Reardon, but if so, then it could make them either worth even more or nothing.”