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“Lissa! You really are here,” she said, walking toward the woman. Falling into her arms, she sobbed against her white dress, burying her face against her body.
“What’s wrong? What happened to her?” asked Lissa, frowning at the room full of men. “What did you do?”
“Babe, let them speak,” smiled Alec. “Hi, Sage. Are you okay, honey?”
“Y-yes. N-no.”
“Let’s get her to the cottage, then we can all speak, okay?” said Mike. He grabbed her elbow, leading her down the long path to the cottage. When she stumbled for a third time in her heels, Mike just picked her up and carried her.
“I’m too heavy,” she said, staring at his handsome face. He laughed, shaking his head.
“Sage, you don’t weigh as much as my laundry bag. You’re barely a hundred.”
“One-sixteen,” she whispered. “I’m small. I know.”
“Maybe I like small,” he said, staring at her as he artfully walked the path without even glancing at his direction.
“You kissed me in the maze,” she whispered.
“You don’t have to whisper,” he smiled. “We tend to know everything that goes on around here. The whole compound will know by tomorrow that I kissed you, that I carried you, and that we slept in the same place.”
“B-but they’ll think that we’re a couple.” Her eyes were wide with shock.
“Do you have a boyfriend? A husband? A fiancé?”
“No, no, and no.”
“Then we’re good. Besides, you have the most beautiful eyes of anyone I know. I’d like to drown in those for a while if you don’t mind.”
“This is the strangest experience of my entire life,” she muttered.
“Hold on, precious. It’s about to get stranger.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“I know you’re feeling overwhelmed, Sage,” said Eric. “We’re here to help, not make it worse. Can you tell us everything that happened? What brought all this about?”
“I’m not even sure I know,” said Sage. “As I said earlier, Smith had two men in the store with a velvet pouch filled with loose diamonds. I knew immediately that they were real. Not just real, but probably the best quality I’ve ever seen. I could tell that they’d been removed from their mounts. He tried to tell me they were fake.”
“Did you get a good look at the men?” asked Luke.
“No. Well, one. He was just evil-looking. His eyes were nearly black, and it was as if I could feel the evil coming from his body. They both turned their heads down and looked the other way. But he got angry with me because he called me doll, and I told him to stop.
“The whole thing made me nervous. While Smith was gone to lunch, I was scheduled to leave for Los Angeles on a buying trip. I noticed that he put the pouch in the safe. When I’m there, I leave it open a crack in the office. He shoved it into a corner of the safe, hoping I wouldn’t notice. I didn’t want to leave it there, so I took the pouch with me.
“I met with a mentor of mine, Hiram Silverstein. He owns the oldest jewelry store in the diamond district of New York. He said there’d been two recent, large jewelry heists. One was in Brazil, but it was all fully constructed pieces. Mostly emeralds and topaz. The other was in Prague. Loose diamonds of the highest quality.
“When I got back to New Orleans, I was going to drop some things off at the house, but when I saw it burned down, I got scared. I should have stopped, but I was worried that they were there. I immediately went to the store and took everything out.”
“Are those heists related to what you wanted us to look into?” asked Mike, staring at Eric and the others.
“Maybe. We didn’t have all the intel yet,” said Hex.
“Did you know that your maid was caught in the fire?” asked Mike. Sage covered her mouth, shaking her head as tears began to fall.
“N-no. Clara. She was all I had,” she cried.
“She’s not all you have,” said Mike, hugging her to his body. “You have us.” Nate looked at his brother, staring into his eyes. He didn’t want to say ‘us.’ He wanted to say ‘me,’ but he was scared that he’d frighten her.
