Read The Diamond Affair for Free Online

something then
shut it before she could put her foot inside. As much as her curiosity burned
to know why he'd hung up on his father, it wasn't her business.
    The phone beeped
to indicate a message had been left. Jake ignored it.
    When they got
back to his apartment, he continued to ignore it. If Ruby knew she had a
message on her phone, it would drive her nuts until she listened to it. Then
again, she had no self-control which was why she had to keep only one chocolate
bar in the pantry at all times. Any more and she'd eat the lot in one go. She
bet Jake's chocolate lasted for months. That's if he even ate it.
    "Will coffee
help you think?" he asked as coffee poured from the café-style machine
into a mug.
    "Think?"
    "About who
could have stolen the Florentine."
    "I'm telling
you, I don't know." She rubbed her forehead. The piercing headache had thankfully
subsided, replaced by a dull throb.
    "Then let's
think about who else might know he had it." He added the right amount of
sugar and milk to the mug and handed it to her. "If you were Beauvoir, who
would you tell?"
    She sipped the
coffee and sat at the kitchen table, watching his back as he made his own. The
black T-shirt stretched across his shoulders, taut in all the right places and clinging
to every muscle as they moved beneath the cotton. Nice. Very nice.
    Then there was
the bottom half. The black jeans fit snugly around his—
    "Personally
I wouldn't tell anyone," he said, turning around. He caught the direction
of her gaze and one corner of his mouth lifted in a smile.
    Oops.
    "My brother."
She held the mug in front of her face to hide her blush as best she could. "And
Aaron too, just because I know it would be a dream of his to see it."
    His smile
vanished. "Your loved ones," he said, flatly. He leaned against the
kitchen bench, cradling his mug in both hands and studying the contents as if coffee
were the most fascinating thing.
    Didn't he have
anyone to care for him? What about his father? Maybe he was the problem. Or
maybe Jake was the one with the problem, not his dad.
    Don't do it. Don't
dive into those muddy waters . She needed to keep
focused on the dangers of Beauvoir and not the dangers of whatever lurked
within Jake Forrester. "Do you know if he has any loved ones?" she
asked.
    He looked up, his
expression hard and closed. "My sources told me he remarried a woman
twenty-years his junior. He also has a seventeen year-old daughter from his
previous marriage."
    "Okay."
But she shook her head. "Why would his family steal from him? It doesn't
make sense."
    He shrugged. "Could
be a million reasons. The wife might be mad at him for something. She might be
planning on leaving him and needs the diamond to exchange for cash. Same goes
for the daughter. We also don't know if he's got mistresses he might have told,
nor do we know if the wife and daughter have confided in anyone else. The web
can widen exponentially without his knowledge of it."
    "Great. It's
going to be impossible to find out who took it."
    "Maybe not. We
just have to systematically find all potential suspects then eliminate them one
by one. First we start with the wife and daughter."
    He made it sound
so easy. "Okay. So let's go talk to them."
    "Whoa, not
yet. We can't just ask questions like we did with Aaron."
    "So what do
we do?"
    "We? We do
nothing. I break into their house."
    It was tempting
to let him do it, to stay as far away from Beauvoir and Frankie as possible,
but she knew Beauvoir's house. She'd been there once before to value some
diamonds from his vault. She knew the layout. Besides, it would be faster with
two.
    ***
    Ruby was relieved
when she learned that Jake didn't actually mean breaking and entering the Beauvoir's
house like cat burglars in the dead of night. More like infiltrating in broad
daylight. Beauvoir's mansion was located behind a huge fence in Melbourne's blue-blooded
suburb of Toorak. Like its neighbors, the house was old, grand, and came with a
housekeeper.
    Complete