Secret Star. Nora Roberts
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M.J.”
“Just in here. They’ll be fine as soon as they see you.” He took her arm, felt the quick, hard tremors in it. But in the doorway of the living room, she stopped, laid a hand over his arm.
Inside, Bailey and M.J. stood, facing away, hands linked. Their voices were low, with tears wrenching through them. A man stood a short distance away, his hands thrust in his pockets and a look of helplessness on his bruised and battered face. When he saw her, his eyes, the gray of storm clouds, narrowed, flashed. Then smiled.
Grace took one shuddering breath, exhaled it slowly. “Well,” she said in a clear, steady voice, “it’s gratifying to know someone would weep copiously over me.”
Both women whirled. For a moment, all three stared, three pair of eyes brimming over. To Seth’s mind, they all moved as once, as a unit, so that their leaping rush across the room to each other held an uncanny and undeniably feminine grace. Then they were fused together, voices and tears mixing.
A triangle, he thought, frowning. With three points that made a whole. Like the golden triangle that held three priceless and powerful stones.
“I think they could use a little time,” Cade said quietly, and gestured to the other man. “Lieutenant?” He motioned down the hall, lifting his brows when Seth hesitated. “I don’t think they’re going anywhere just now.”
With a barely perceptible shrug, Seth stepped back. He could give them twenty minutes. “I need your phone.”
“There’s one in the kitchen. Want a beer, Jack?”
The third man grinned. “You’re playing my song.”
“Amnesia,” Grace said a little time later. She and Bailey were huddled together on the sofa, with M.J. sitting on the floor at their feet. “Everything just blanked?”
“Everything.” Bailey kept her hold on Grace’s hand tight, afraid to break the link. “I woke up in this horrible little hotel room with no memory, over a million in cash, and the diamond. I picked Cade’s name out of the phone book. Parris.” She smiled a little. “Funny, isn’t it?”
“I’m going to get you to France yet,” Grace promised.
“He helped me through everything.” The warmth in her tone had Grace sharing a quick look with M.J. This was something to be discussed in detail later. “I started to remember, piece by piece. You and M.J., just flashes. I could see your faces, even hear your voices, but nothing fit. He’s the one who narrowed it down to Salvini’s, and when he took me there… He broke in.”
“Shortly before we did,” M.J. added. “Jack could tell the rear locks had been picked.”
“We got inside,” Bailey continued, and her tear-ravaged eyes went glassy. “And I remembered, I remembered it all then, how Thomas and Timothy were planning to steal the stones, copy them. How I’d shipped one off to each of you to keep it from happening. Stupid, so stupid.”
“No, it wasn’t.” Grace slid an arm around Bailey’s shoulders. “It makes perfect sense to me. You didn’t have time for anything else.”
“I should have called the police, but I was so sure I could turn things around. I was going into Thomas’s office to have a showdown, tell them it was over. And I saw…” She trembled again. “The fight. Horrible. The lightning flashing through the windows, their faces. Then Timothy grabbed the letter opener, the knife. The power went out, but the lightning kept flashing, and I could see what he was doing…to Thomas. All the blood.”
“Don’t,” M.J. murmured, rubbing a comforting hand on Bailey’s knee. “Don’t go back there.”
“No.” Bailey shook her head. “I have to. He saw me, Grace. He would have killed me. He came after me. I had grabbed the bag with their deposit money, and I ran through the dark. And I hid down under the stairs. In this little cave under the stairs. But I could see him hunting for me, blood all over his hands. I still don’t remember how I got out, got to that room.”
Grace couldn’t bear to imagine it—her quiet, serious-minded friend, pursued by a murderer. “The important thing is that you did get away, and you’re safe.” Grace looked down at M.J. “We all are.” She tried a bolstering grin. “And how did you spend your holiday?”
“On the run with a bounty hunter, handcuffed to a bed in a cheap motel, being shot at by a couple of creeps—with a little detour up to your place in the mountains.”
Bounty hunter, Grace thought, trying to keep pace. The man named Jack, she supposed, with the bronze-tipped ponytail and the stormy gray eyes. And the killer grin. Handcuffs, cheap motels, and shootings. Pressing fingertips to her eyes, she latched on to the least disturbing detail.
“You were at my place? When?”
“It’s a long story.” M.J. gave a quick version of a handful of days from her first encounter with Jack, when he’d tried to take her in, believing her to be a bail jumper, to the two of them escaping that setup and working their way back to the core of the puzzle.
“We know someone’s pulling the strings,” M.J. concluded. “But we haven’t gotten very far on figuring that out yet. The bail bondsman-cum-black-mailer who gave Jack the fake paperwork on me is dead, the two guys who came after us are dead, the Salvinis are dead.”
“And Melissa,” Grace murmured.
“It was Melissa?” Bailey turned to Grace. “In your house?”
“It must have been. When I got home, the cop was there. The place was torn up, and they’d assumed it was me.” It took a moment, a carefully indrawn breath, a steady exhale, before she could finish. “She’d fallen off the balcony—or been pushed. I was miles away when it happened.”
“Where did you go?” M.J. asked her. “When Jack and I got to your country place, it was locked up tight. I thought…I was sure you’d just been there. I could smell you.”
“I left late yesterday morning. Got an itch to be near the water, so I drove down the Eastern Shore, found a little B-and-B. I did some antiquing, rubbed elbows with tourists, watched a fireworks display. I didn’t leave until late today. I nearly stayed over another night. But I called both of you from the B-and-B and got your machines. I started feeling uncomfortable about being out of contact, so I headed home.”
She shut her eyes a moment. “Bailey, I hadn’t been really thinking. Just before I left for the country, we lost one of the children.”
“Oh, Grace, I’m sorry.”
“It happens all the time. They’re born with AIDS or a crack addiction or a hole in the heart. Some of them die. But I can’t get used to it, and it was on my mind. So I wasn’t really thinking. When I started back, I started to think. And I started to worry. Then the cop was there in my house. He asked about the stone. I didn’t know what you wanted me to tell him.”
“We’ve told the police everything now.” Bailey sighed. “Neither Cade nor Jack seem to like this Buchanan very much, but they respect his abilities. The two stones are safe now, as we are.”
“I’m sorry for what you went through, both of you. I’m sorry I wasn’t here.”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” M.J. declared. “We were scattered all over—one stone apiece. Maybe we were meant to be.”
“Now we’re together.” Grace took each of their hands in hers. “What happens next?”
“Ladies.” Seth stepped into the room, skimmed his cool gaze over them, then focused on Grace. “Ms. Fontaine. The diamond?”
She rose, picked up the purse she’d tossed carelessly on the end of the couch. Opening it, she took out a velvet pouch, slid the stone out into her palm. “Magnificent, isn’t it?” she murmured, studying the flash of bold blue light. “Diamonds are supposed to be cold to the touch, aren’t