The woman frantically reached for the carnation pinned to her hair.
“Flora e Blanca,las ninas,” Ian clarified. “The girls.”
“Gracias a Dios.” The woman’s breath shook on a sob. “Papa sent you to get us out?”
“Flora?” Diana eased her knife away. “Where is your sister?”
“Upstairs, the third story.” She swallowed. “Costa separated us so we wouldn’t conspire together to escape. He has some of us walk around the party, pretending we are free, but if anyone tries to lay a hand on us, Costa forces them to bid on us to drive up the money he receives.”
Ian’s stomach churned. Diana kept her expression carefully blank; she’d probably heard countless stories like Flora’s. He wouldn’t let himself think about the ones that were worse. “Where’s the back stairway that leads to where they’re keeping your sister?”
Flora shook her head. “There isn’t one.”
Before Ian could express his vehement disapproval of this development, Diana’s head snapped to the door. She clapped a hand over his mouth and whispered, “Someone’s coming.”
Her knife disappeared into the bowels of her reticule before she pulled Flora into their embrace.
The cellar door flung open. Costa swaggered through the entrance with two burly guards behind him. “What have we here?”
Diana glanced at the men under hooded eyes. “I’m afraid you caught us in a passionate moment,senor.”
Costa clucked his tongue against the back of his teeth. “Flora knows better than to offer private tastings without asking.”
The filthy scoundrel’s attention locked onto the emeralds before he perused Diana’s breasts. The man’s eyes were red-rimmed and drooping; with any luck, the blackguard had over-imbibed, and his defenses would be weak. Ian calculated that if he went right for Costa’s throat, he had a thirty-second window before the guards retaliated.
Diana squeezed his hand in warning.
“Perhaps,senor,” she drawled, “you would care to join us?”
“I don’t fuck men.”
“Neither do I.” Ian retreated an inch to snag a better view of Costa’s guards, who he was happy to note were swaying on their feet. Nearly as drunk as Costa. “But I enjoy watching.”
Costa barked a rough laugh. “You’d let your woman fuck a stranger, and this whore?”
“Yes,” Ian said in his bestof coursetone.
The smuggler curled his lip. “You are a bold woman,senora, to walk into my house wearing something that doesn’t belong to you.”
Costa shoved Ian out of the way, which Ian tolerated because it gave Diana the chance to slip him the knife she’d hidden in her skirts. He was grateful he had cold steel to grasp hold of when Costa stroked a long finger down Diana’s neck and pressed his palm on the emeralds.
“Tell me, did you steal these pretty gems yourself?” Costa rasped. “You have an enemy,mi amor, if they sent you here to tempt me. Who would do such a thing?”
Diana’s eyes held Costa’s. Ian waited an eternity for them to flick to him.
And then he moved.
He whirled around and hurled the knife to take down the guard closest to him.
The second guard was so slow to react, Ian had him unconscious with one hard punch.
When he spun around again, Diana had the blade she’d kept hidden in her reticule pressed between Costa’s legs, and handed a cloth to Flora so she could smother his nose and mouth with it. Costa wheezed a muffled protest before he collapsed with a thud on the cellar floor.
“We have five, maybe ten minutes before he revives.” Diana grabbed her skirts and stepped around the bodies.
Flora muttered something incoherent around a laugh or a sob; Ian couldn’t distinguish which one. She evaluated Costa’s prone body, then flexed her fingers.
Ian made the same motion when he itched to punch something.
