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She rather doubted he was ordering one of her sisters or her mother down here.
Flipping the phone closed, he moved to the table next to her bed and flipped on the light.
Holding his hand beneath the brightest area of the lamp’s glow, he turned the stones with a finger, studying them carefully.
“What the hell is going on?” Piper whispered as trepidation began to rise inside her.
The panicked feeling that tightened her stomach shortened her breath and left her with the sensation of being unable to fill her lungs.
“Piper.” Dawg lifted his gaze as Timothy rushed into the room, magnifying glass in hand. “These aren’t glass.” Lifting his gaze to Timothy Cranston, he motioned him over. “Tell me what these are.”
Dropping the stones in Timothy’s hand, Dawg stared down at him with a dark glower.
Holding his hand beneath the light, Timothy moved the magnifying glass over his hand and studied the colored objects with a frown.
“Where did you get these?” he asked Dawg, never taking his eyes from his palm.
“Piper brought them home from New York.” The growl in Dawg’s tone was a dangerous rasp. “She says she picked them up at a craft store.”
Timothy didn’t bother to lift his head or his gaze from the magnifying glass.
“She didn’t get these at a craft store,” he murmured. “Where else did you go?”
“What are they?” she questioned him warily.
“Emeralds, rubies, diamonds, and sapphires, Piper. These aren’t pretty crystals and colored glass, sweetheart. Now, tell me where else you went.”
Piper shook her head, swallowing tightly.
Diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and sapphires?
God, no wonder she’d thought they looked so much more brilliant after she got them home than they had when she first picked them out at the craft store.
“I rented a car and drove outside the city for a meeting, but I never had that shopping bag out of the car. When I returned the car, everything had fallen out of the bag to the floor, and the stones I bought were scattered on the back driver’s-side floorboard.”
Timothy jerked his head around to glare at her then.
“A rental car?” he questioned her, his tone icy.
Piper nodded slowly. “It was a rental.”
“What was the name of the agency?” Tim asked.
“Riley’s Rentals.”
Tim nodded slowly before lifting his gaze to Dawg’s. “That’s Genoa property.”
Genoa property.
Piper had heard of the Genoa family and the Mackays’ run-in with them six years ago, just before Piper and her family were brought to Somerset.
The crime family had first butted heads with the Mackays when a family member, the niece of head of the family Rudy Genoa, had come for vengeance against John Walker Jr. and his lover, Sierra Lucas, for a broken engagement.
Marlena and her associate, Gerard Andrews, had been responsible for the half million dollars Rudy Genoa had advanced them to ensure Marlena caught John Walker’s attention and kept it.
Expensive clothes, salons, and an apartment on Park Avenue. She’d been plucked, polished, and perfected—until the night John had learned she was also fucking his friend and fellow attorney, Gerard Andrews. The same ma
n who had assured the Genoa family that if John married Marlena and had a child with her, then the attorney would willingly put his name behind the defense of Genoa family members in court.
