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Chapter One
The Sweet Celestia was the most stunning thing Aria had ever seen. Pink, pear-shaped, perfect. Also twenty-five point thirty-eight carats with an estimated value of sixty-one million dollars. In eight hours, Celestia would excite the world’s richest men and women, encouraging them to compete with each other by bidding outrageous sums of money in an exclusive auction.
The winner would snatch up Celestia as a rare investment, wrap her in certificates of authenticity and store her in a secure vault where she never saw the light of day again until her owner wanted to cash in on her splendor.
That was a tragedy. It could never be allowed to happen. Like anything of rare beauty, Sweet Celestia was made to sparkle and be admired, not be locked away from view out of fear and greed.
Aria knew just who should own Celestia, and would treat her with the respect and admiration she deserved, and that person’s name wasn’t on the auction house’s private invitation list.
When she wasn’t busy with her yakuza business as onna-oyabun, Japan’s only female godmother, Shoma Oshiro was the epitome of style and refinement. She’d pay handsomely for Celestia, and the gem would grace her hand or her neck and be worshiped at the opera and the theater and in all the most celebrated company, on both sides of the law. And Aria would pocket a hefty wad of cash instead of the stuffy Swiss auctioneers, who no doubt would be insured up the wazoo, otherwise known as the very limits of financial probity.
There was just the small matter of stealing Sweet Celestia first, not getting caught and absolutely not letting anyone else beat her to the prize.
The only other professional thief who could come close to the audacious plan she’d put in motion was that dishonorable larcenous bastard known to Interpol as the Shadow, and to Aria as Cleve Jones, the man who’d stolen everything from her that mattered: her inheritance, her legacy, her father’s favor and the affections of her fragile foolish heart.
Her heart wasn’t brittle anymore and any foolishness was long replaced by the same single-minded, analytical attention to detail that’d made her father an infamous antiquities thief and con artist.
The Shadow wouldn’t be getting his fingerprint-less hands on Sweet Celestia or his damnable devilish wiles anywhere near any part of Aria. Ever again. Jail was too good for him. He could rot in a pit of death adders, perish painfully in an untimely explosion, or expire explicitly from a single sip of vile poison, and it wouldn’t turn a hair on her head.
Not like the stylist, Gustav, who was doing his best to turn every hair into a labyrinth of curls. He tugged as a hot roller snagged. “You have beautiful hair, darl. And I can’t wait to see what Santino does with your makeup. I know he’s thinking jewel tones and that will work brilliantly with the Giovanna Talessi dress, and those Sikander-Jah shoes are simply divine. Lucky thing you don’t have to walk too far in them.”
Aria giggled. It didn’t sound quite right so she added a one-shouldered shrug and widened her eyes at Gustav. All she could think was that jewel tones sounded like a bad bruise.
“Are you okay, darl? It’s a big deal, this shoot for Contessa, for a newbie like you, but you’re in good hands.”
She giggled again, and this time it sounded suitably inexperienced and silly, and Gustav—“Call me Gus, I don’t know what my mother was thinking, I’m from Liverpool”—smiled at her in the portable mirror as he backcombed with a vengeance.
She’d had to practice giggling, it didn’t come naturally, but for this particular mission she needed to be beyond suspicion. And who would suspect an airhead model wearing a dress she could barely eke a breath in, and heels that could be used effectively to kill a large man, would be capable of pulling off the theft of one of the world’s most valuable diamonds, in front of armed security, a state-of-the-art surveillance system, and the lens of famous Contessa photographer to the stars, Annie Leibaholm?
Months and months of planning, and it would all come down to the next few hours of work, which meant worrying her eyes might water out the violet-blue contacts she wore, and being able to contort her body into the preferred elegantly anorexic poses while she held the precious diamond for Annie’s shoot.
More to the point, she had to worry about the split-second sleight of hand she needed to execute with the deftness of a high-wire walker performing brain surgery to make the Sweet Celestia hers—and leave a very credible fake in the hands of Greville’s Auction House, as well as the sucker they sold it to—when she was so hungry after little but lettuce for weeks that she felt lightheaded.
She could not afford to lose focus for even a second or her ruse might unravel.
She eyed the cotton balls on the table in front of her. If you squinted they looked like marshmallows. She now understood why models ate them. No cals and apparently, they filled you up. The only thing she could do was sip her zero-sugar pop through a straw, and giggle again as Gustav made way for Santino and his pots and brushes, and Santino made way for Katerina, who zipped her into the Giovanna Talessi and strapped her into the Sikander-Jah shoes, because God forbid she should do up her own zipper and buckles.
Katerina walked around her tweaking the dress, yanking on the hemline to remove a tiny wrinkle at the hip. “No sitting before Annie calls for you.”
Aria pouted. It was a real pout. The shoes had twelve-inch spiked heels and she had no idea how long she’d have to wait.
Katerina leaned in close and tugged at the front of the dress so Aria’s breasts were more out than in. “Listen, you seem like a nice girl, but if you want to make it as a model, you need to up your game. No more giggling, pouting and sulking with magazines. Learn to make conversation. This is a tough industry and only the professional girls survive.”
Katerina gave the dress one last tug, and Aria fluttered her stuck-on lashes and waved a hand in front of her face as if she might cry. “You’re so lovely to me,” she said, while acting like a ditz.
Katerina eye-rolled and moved away.
After that there was a lot more waiting around. A professional model would’ve done it quietly without complaint. Aria sighed dramatically while flicking through back issues of Contessa and secretly keeping a watch on the security rotation in the other room, where the Sweet Celestia was on display in her glass fortress. She knew what to expect from the four security guards, the pressure sensors and the self-important PR man, but still she watched for anything out of the ordinary while Annie’s two assistants brought in a classic chaise lounge as a prop and went about setting up lights and foils for the shoot.
Finally, four hours after she’d arrived at Greville’s, ninety minutes after being brushed, teased, lacquered, painted, dressed and shod, Aria was summoned.
It was showtime, and this was the greatest deception game on earth.
Chapter Two
Gorgeous. Cleve Jones toggled the control and adjusted the camera hidden in Greville’s Auction House eleven thousand miles away in Geneva. From his villa in Ubud on the island of Bali, he now had a clearer view of the hunk of rock known as the Sweet Celestia, and it was an even more brilliant stone than he’d been led to expect.
It would make a fine asset to his patron’s collection of priceless possessions,
and in another few hours, when this publicity circus event shut down and the auction house was closed for the night, it would be his. And very shortly after that, there’d be a large sum of money that would more than cover the expense of this heist, deposited in an untraceable Cayman Islands bank account that Cleve just so happened to have the unique iris recognition for.
All that and he’d not bothered to put on a shirt, or shoes.
Funny how these things worked out.
