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“Stay around until everyone is gone.”
He reached out and brushed his hand up and down her bare arm. She shivered. Crowds of people parted as he stalked through them to the diamond display. The necklace rested on a pedestal in the middle of the room, out of its usual protective glass case. Presumably, why Leonard insisted on his own personal overnight security. Though she didn’t understand why Leonard didn’t just take it home with him tonight.
No matter. Her cousin’s confidence would be her gain.
No one got too close to the necklace with Jake standing guard. But she had every intention of getting too close. And she was prepared to do anything to make that happen.
A shiver of excitement coursed through her body.
She’d been raised to be a good girl. Her grandmother had insisted she be the perfect young woman as befitting American royalty. In public. In private, her grandmother taught her how to fight, how to swear, and how to drink a man under the table.
Being the good girl at the party sucked. She was ready to be alone with Jake and unleash her bad side.
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A museum employee escorted out the stragglers and she made her way over to the middle of the room. To the diamond. To Jake.
“Miss Staffordshire, may I show you out?”
She recognized the museum employee’s polite way of kicking her out.
“She’ll be staying with me for a bit,” Jake said.
He didn’t have to come to her defense, but she liked that he did.
“But Mr. Staffordshire said—”
“I’m well aware what Mr. Staffordshire said, but Anastasia would like to see her family’s necklace one last time in private. Surely you wouldn’t deny her that?”
The man wilted under Jake’s stare. “Of course not, Mr. Hoffman. I will see you at seven in the morning in order to complete the transfer of the necklace into private hands. We’ll be sorry to see it go. Not only is it a popular item, but I’ve always loved the stories.”
Ana looked away from the pity in the man’s gaze. She didn’t want it. Didn’t need it.
The museum director nodded one more time, told Jake he’d set the alarm system and then left the display gallery. Moments later they heard the echo of a slamming door, sealing them in the museum. Alone.
With the necklace, which was practically a personality itself.
They circled the display stand in opposite directions. She studied the necklace from all angles.
“It’s breathtaking,” Jake said, breaking the oppressive silence. “But it’s so cold just sitting on the display.”
“Like my grandmother said, it was meant to be worn.”
The diamond itself could be detached from the necklace. It could be reattached to several other pieces of jewelry Ana usually kept in her safe deposit box, but were now tucked into the carry-on bag in the trunk of her car.
“I used to love seeing Gretchen wear it as a bracelet,” Jake said. “She looked like a queen when she’d move her hand around with the huge stone dangling from her wrist.”
“She had such skinny wrists.”
They met on the far side of the necklace. Jake reached out and took Ana’s wrist in his hand, wrapping his fingers around it. His fingers overlapped. “Like yours.”
Could he feel the pounding of her pulse?
“I liked the painting that hung in the main hall of Grandmother wearing the diamond in a tiara. She looked like a queen.”
Grandmother had been very queenlike.
The Staffordshire family could trace their lineage back to British nobility and the early settlement of the New World. The diamond had been brought by a relative from England for his beloved who’d sailed with her family the previous year.
