Chapter Eighteen
Gabriel landed in front of the castle with a thud, and Kelly slid off his neck and watched him shift back into human form. The air around him rippled as his wings melted into his back and his scales smoothed out. In less than a minute, he stood there in human form, tall and impossibly handsome. The breeze whipped through his hair as he strode towards her.
“Isn’t it nice to be home?” he said.
“I get what you’re doing,” she said with amusement. “You’re trying to send subliminal messaging so that I’ll think I actually live here.”
“Nothing subliminal about it,” Gabriel said, grinning. “Stay here with me and give birth to my dragonlings. I’ll make it worth your while by plying you with great food, great sex, and lots of jewelry. An offer you can’t refuse.” Then his grin faded into a scowl as a cab pulled up in front of the castle. Teresa was sitting in the back seat. She climbed out and walked up the steps, with an expression of martyred dignity.
“Your mother’s secretary called me and said that my belongings are here, so I came to get my clothes. I won’t be able to get my furniture until I have a place to stay,” she said to Kelly. “I’m sure you’re delighted by this whole development. What with me being homeless and unemployed.”
“Yes, Teresa, because everything I’ve ever done has shown how I’m trying to make you miserable. Like when I warned you that coming to work for mother was a terrible idea and she would be impossible to please and never appreciate anything that you did, and I told you that Chad and his family were assholes. And so on and etcetera.”
For once, Teresa didn’t have a sharp retort. She just stared at Kelly with her mouth open for a moment. Finally she said, “I thought you were just jealous of me and Chad. And I thought you didn’t want me to work for our mother because you wanted all the glory for yourself.”
Kelly snorted. “Chad has made me nauseous from the minute I first met him. And there’s never any glory at work. I earned mother millions of dollars in recovery fees, and she’s well on the way to being able to buy back her share of the firm, and she still spends all her time eagerly waiting for me to screw up so she can berate me again.”
“Well. Anyway. You can tell Winthrop I’m sorry,” Teresa muttered to Kelly. “I shouldn’t have yelled at him.”
“He took the day off, which he apparently never does. And when he comes back,youcan damn well find him and tell him you’re sorry,” Kelly snapped at her. “He really liked you, and you hurt his feelings.”
“He liked me?” Teresa said, startled.
“No accounting for taste, is there?” Kelly turned and walked up the steps that led into the castle, with Gabriel by her side.
She went up to her room, sat down at her desk, and typed up her resignation letter, which she emailed to Allied. Then she headed back out to find Gabriel.
As she walked into the drawing room, she saw Evangeline sitting on the couch there, crying, and a crowd of guards rushing through the room. They were heading in the direction of the elevator that led to the south tower.
Kelly walked over to Evangeline and sat down next to her. “What’s going on?” she asked.
Evangeline glared at her. “You could help. You could fix this, and you’re not! My uncle’s afraid to ask you because you’ll arrest him!” And she got up and stormed out of the room.
Now what the heck did she mean by that?
Kelly sat there on the couch and waited until Gabriel came into the room about half an hour later. His face was drawn and tense, and when he settled down onto the sofa next to her, he had the thousand-yard stare of someone who’d just come back from a war zone. And the ends of his hair were singed. Only a dragon’s fire could have done that.
“We need to talk,” she said. “What the hell is in the south tower? Evangeline said that there’s something I could help with, and you’re afraid that if you ask me, you’ll get arrested.”
He heaved a sigh. “That’s not exactly it. But yes, we do need your help with something, and it would require you to set aside your professional ethics to a certain extent. Maybe a lot.”
“I’m listening. With considerable trepidation, but I’m listening.”
“What do you know about jewels that can heal the mentally ill?” he asked. “Specifically, mental illness caused by cloudy opal?”
She looked at him. “The Farriday Opal? It was stolen ten years ago and never recovered. Your father was a suspect in that theft.”
He met her gaze unflinchingly. “Yes. That was when we were still in the jewel theft business. He gave the opal to my sister Alexandra for her birthday. And she went mad within days. We got rid of the opal, of course – destroyed it – but it didn’t help.”
Understanding dawned. “And that’s also around the same time that you opened up the jewelry store and went legit. Mostly legit.”
An expression of pain creased his face. “Yes. My parents were racked with guilt. And once we saw what harm a power gem could do, we would never have risked that again.”
Kelly nodded. The odds of them ever encountering another such gem were slight – but not impossible. Frequently, famous gems, the type that especially attracted the attention of thieves, were power gems. They became famous because people could sense the power in them and were driven to find them, display them, possess them.
“You said that you quit,” Kelly said, “but you guys have been suspects in the thefts of a number of jewels over the past ten years.”
Gabriel nodded grimly. “We stopped stealing for profit. Every time we heard of a jewel with power, we would steal it to see if it could cure Alexandra. We’ve actually stolen several jewels, replaced them with paste imitations, and then put them back when they didn’t work. We did more research, and realized that we would need a gem empath working for us to help us find a solution – and also, possibly, to manipulate the powers of a healing gem, since some gems won’t operate on their own.”
