Cindy Gerard – The Millionaire's Club: Jacob, Logan and Marc: Black-Tie Seduction / Less-than-Innocent Invitation / Strictly Confidential Attraction (страница 2)

Act cool. Don’t let on that you may have just discovered what must have appeared to be nothing more than an old, musty-smelling saddlebag to the late Jonathan Devlin’s family. Nothing more than a novelty item someone might want to bid on to decorate a bar or a tack room—instead of a major historical find.

Well, they could bid, she thought fiercely, but she was going to leave here with the contents of this box. That’s because she knew something no one else did. She was ninety-nine-point-nine percent certain that she knew who the saddlebag had once belonged to.

“What’s got you so fidgety?” Alison asked, wandering back to Christine’s side. She tried to peek into the box.

Christine quickly flipped the lid shut.

“Can you keep a secret?” Christine whispered, cutting a covert glance around her.

Alison frowned. “If the secret is that you’re having a minor manic episode, no, I don’t think so. The paramedics who treat you will need details.”

Ignoring her friend’s sarcasm, Christine gripped Alison’s arm and pulled her close. She lifted the lid on the box. The smell of old leather and dust seeped into the air. “See this saddlebag?”

“Oh—I get to look inside now?”

Christine pulled a face. “Yes, you get to look inside.”

Still acting wary, Alison did.

“Notice the rose tooled on the cover flap?”

From Alison she got a slow, skeptical nod.

“The rose is what drew my attention. So I checked inside the bag,” Christine confided in a low voice, “and found a pair of six-shooters. Old six-shooters, with roses carved into the ivory handles.”

“And…” Alison said in a leading tone as Christine cast more worried looks around them.

“And there’s also a delicate little purse. Again—old. Rose-colored—with what appear to be rose petals inside. Plus—” she huddled up with Alison and whispered “—there’s a map.”

She snatched Alison’s hand back with an apologetic look when Alison started to reach inside the saddlebag. “A map with hearts and roses twining around the edge.”

“Okay. I’ll play along,” Alison said, still frowning as though she thought Christine had blown a circuit. “I’m guessing there’s some major significance to all these roses?”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Christine said. “I’m positive these things once belonged to Jessamine Golden.”

When Alison made a “who?” face, Christine closed the box, then tugged Alison away from the table and hustled her into the line of people waiting to acquire bidding numbers.

“Jessamine Golden is a legend in Royal,” she explained in a low voice so no one would overhear. “She was an outlaw a hundred years ago who not only stole the heart of the town sheriff, Brad Webster, but legend has it that she also stole a huge gold shipment and hid the treasure somewhere in the Royal area. And she loved roses.

“Thanks,” she said absently when the clerk gave her a paddle with a number on it. She walked Alison to the row of seats lined up in front of the podium where the bidding was already under way.

“Anyway, the rest of the story is that the mayor of Royal back then was Edgar Halifax—”

“Halifax?” Alison interrupted. “Any relation to Gretchen Halifax, our illustrious city councilwoman?”

Gretchen Halifax wasn’t an illustrious anything except in her own mind, and both women knew it, but Christine didn’t want to get sidetracked with talk about Gretchen. She’d had to deal with Gretchen on the new Edgar Halifax display at the museum and that had been more than enough exposure to the woman. Christine always was willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, but in this case the stories about Gretchen appeared to be true. The councilwoman was pompous and self-important and on more than one occasion had been very condescending toward Christine.

“Yes, I think Gretchen is some distant relative, but the point is Edgar Halifax and his men were supposedly killed by Jessamine Golden over the stolen gold. There’s also speculation that Jessamine killed the sheriff, too, because when she disappeared, neither one of them was ever heard from again. And the gold was never found.”

Christine tugged Alison down on the chair beside her, facing the auctioneer. “I think the map in those saddlebags is a map to where Jess hid the gold!” she whispered fiercely.

Alison searched her friend’s face. “All right. Did you eat an entire bag of chocolate before you came here?”

The look on Alison’s face coupled with her silly question finally made Christine laugh. “No,” she assured her friend, “I did not eat any chocolate, and will you quit looking at me like I’m an alien? I’m serious. You know that I volunteer time at the Royal Historical Society when I’m not pulling double shifts at the hospital. I do a lot of research there, and Jess Golden’s story caught my attention. And, Alison, I swear those have to be Jess’s things in that box that came out of Jonathan Devlin’s attic.”

“Out of Jonathan Devlin’s attic?” Alison shook her head. “Boy, the Devlins didn’t waste any time clearing out old Jonathan’s house. He only died a few days ago—they haven’t even buried him yet, have they?”

“Not yet, no. But you know his sister Opal? A month ago, when Jonathan went into a coma, it was expected that he’d never recover. I guess from the start there was no brain activity. Anyway, Opal had been going through his house for weeks in anticipation of his death, setting aside things to put up for auction.”

“Gives me warm fuzzies all over thinking about her sorrow over the loss of her brother.”

Christine smiled. “Tell me about it. Opal’s a sentimental and sympathetic soul all right,” she said, matching Alison’s sarcasm. “But back to the topic at hand. One of the reasons I’m so convinced these are Jess Golden’s things is that for a very brief time—around 1910 or so—she lived in Jonathan Devlin’s house.”

“Okay,” Alison said carefully but looking as if she was a little more on board, “let’s say you’re right. Let’s say those are Jess Golden’s things because she left them in the house when she skedaddled out of town after she did her dastardly deed. What then?”

“Then I’m going to buy them,” Christine stated emphatically. “For the Historical Society to put on display in the museum. That box contains priceless historical artifacts—not to mention, it might lead to the gold. What a find it would be for the town.”

“Well, you’d better get your paddle ready, Miss Supersleuth. They just brought the box to the podium. It’s the next item up for bid.”

Jake Thorne wasn’t sure what it was about Chrissie Travers that lit his fire, but every time he showed up someplace and she was there, it was as though some kinetic energy source set all his senses on supercharge and he homed in on her like a bear scenting honey.

He propped an elbow on the bar where he stood at the side of the room and got comfortable. Then he just enjoyed the hell out of watching her in typical Prissy Chrissie mode, all stiff and proper and tense, while his mind—already shifting into autopilot—started hatching plots to irritate her. Just a little. Because, man, she was some fun when she was riled.

And he ought to know. He’d spent a month in the Royal hospital five years ago after an oil-well fire had knocked him on his ass. The burns hadn’t been the worst of his injuries. The smoke and fire inhalation and the resulting damage to his lungs had been. Chrissie had been his respiratory therapist, and once he’d felt human again, he’d found a hundred hot buttons to push on the uptight, serious and tolerate-no-nonsense Chrissie Travers. He was pleased to say that he’d personally pushed at least ninety-nine of them at some time or another.

Her bidding paddle shot up in the air. Whoa. What have we here? he wondered when she lifted it above her head. Straight up. No hesitation. As high as she could raise her arm.

Seemed the lady aimed to buy something. Judging by her body language, she meant to have it at any cost.

He watched both Chrissie and the bidding with interest. She cast a flurry of darting looks around her, those big hazel eyes warning off anyone who even looked as if they wanted to raise their paddle. Interesting. The bidding was slow and it looked as though she was going to get the box of, hell, box of rocks for all he knew, for a song.

Or is she? he asked himself and felt the beginnings of an ornery grin. Just as the auctioneer was about to start a “Going, going, gone,” with Chrissie as the high bidder, Jake’s paddle seemed to sort of pop up in the air, all of its own accord.

Hmm. Looked as though he was in the bidding now, too.

Chrissie’s head whipped around, her fine blond hair flying around her face, her big hazel eyes snapping with smoke and hellfire as she searched the room for the culprit who dared to enter the bidding at this late hour.

When her gaze finally landed on him and he acknowledged with a grin and a friendly wave of his paddle that, yeah, he was the one who’d jumped in and spoiled her party, he swore to God lightning zapped out of her ears and shot twin puffs of smoke in its wake.

And when after a fierce flurry of bidding action between them ended with a gavel rap and a resounding, “Sold!” and Jake was the lucky owner of a cardboard box containing he had no idea what, the look she sent him could have set a forest ablaze.