father had set aside a generous trust that he regularly topped up with dividends from his advertising business.
Rozi had the same private education paid for by their grandparents as all the cousins had been afforded, but Rozi’s parents had always lived paycheck to paycheck. Rozi supported herself and didn’t have a buffer.
“I could make the finances work,” Rozi said with a scowl of insult. “But I’m worried about the earring Kaine Michaels has. It sounds like Viktor has been making offers to him. I know you said it looks like a lost cause there. Tell me again what he said about Benny?”
“I presume he was talking about Benny,” Gisella muttered.
At first, she’d been convinced Kaine had been referring to Rozi. Whenever anyone mentioned her cousin, Gisella’s thoughts always went to the one who’d been her constant companion since they’d been infants. While Gisella’s mother had worked, Rozi’s mother had minded Gisella like one of her own. She had pushed Rozi and Gisella in a side-by-side stroller, braided their hair into matching pigtails, dressed them in each other’s clothes and dropped them on the same day into the same kindergarten classroom.
Gisella had a half-dozen cousins, though. Along with Rozi’s three siblings, their uncle Ben had two children. All of them were as dear to her as the next. Kaine could have been talking about any of them that day. However...
“Benny’s the only one I haven’t been able to reach,” she said, hating herself for doing exactly as Kaine had asked. She had spoken to each of her cousins in turn, trying to pass along his message. “Everyone else has said they’ve never met him. When Uncle Ben gets back from Florida, I’ll ask him where Benny is. See if there’s a way to reach him. Even so—”
“I know. Benny can be a rascal, but he wouldn’t hurt a flea.”
“Exactly.”
Yet Kaine Michaels had some kind of grudge against him. It didn’t make sense.
“Well, I know you don’t want to talk to Kaine, but I think we should make another offer. If we’re going to get these earrings, now is the time. Before...”
Gisella knew what Rozalia was hesitating to say aloud. Their grandmamma was eighty-one and recovering in Florida from a bad bout of pneumonia she had suffered this winter. It was a stark reminder they were running out of time to get the earrings back to a woman they both loved with all their hearts.
“I won’t go to San Francisco, if that’s what you’re suggesting.” Gisella never wanted to see Kaine Michaels again in her life. “He hates me.” The contempt was mutual.
“No, you should go to Hungary,” Rozi agreed. “The Rohans are your relatives. I’ll take a crack at Kaine Michaels myself.”
Something in Gisella screeched and fishtailed. Rozi was pretty in a wholesome way with thick brunette hair, a creamy complexion and a trim if almost boyish figure. She didn’t draw men as inexorably as Gisella’s more classic and voluptuous attributes. They had never been rivals for a man and Gisella didn’t want Kaine anyway!
Even so, she felt oddly threatened by her cousin approaching him. If anything, she ought to be worried he would crush tender Rozi even worse than he’d managed to dent Gisella’s more stalwart soul. They had exchanged a few words and one kiss. He shouldn’t have left her feeling so trampled and discarded. She was stronger than that.
Maybe Rozi’s earnest and engaging personality would inspire a kinder response in him. Persuade where she had failed. She ought to let Rozi at least try. For Grandmamma.
“I always thought if I went to Hungary, we’d go together,” Gisella said sullenly.
“Me, too.” Rozi made a face. “I’m dying to learn more about the earrings. And look at this guy.” Rozi pulled her phone from her pocket to show her a photo. “Tell me he’s not reason enough for a ten-hour flight.”
Gisella glanced at the photo under a headline claiming Viktor Rohan was Europe’s most eligible bachelor. He was very handsome, but she noted his good looks the way she recognized that her other male cousins were attractive—objectively and without stirrings of feminine interest. He didn’t produce a fraction of the heat in her blood that merely thinking about Kaine did.
“Have them both,” Gisella said, determined to stop thinking about Kaine. “I’m swearing off men. They’re a waste of my precious time.”
Rozi chuckled and looked at the photo again, voice softening to a dreamy whisper. “What if we could actually get the earrings for Grandmamma, Gizi?”
“I would love that,” she said with equal yearning.
The tale of the earrings had always struck a chord in her. It had been such a huge sacrifice on Grandmamma’s part. Ezti had sold a cherished gift from her lover to buy a fresh start in the New World. That bold move had been the foundation for the abundant life Gisella enjoyed. How could she not be moved and thankful? How could she not want to repay her grandmother by getting back the earrings that should have been hers all this time?
“Let’s do whatever it takes,” Gisella said, growing solemn and holding out her pinkie.
They linked their little fingers the way they’d done a thousand times when making a pact. “For Grandmamma.”
KAINE MICHAELS WASN’T surprised when he saw Gisella Drummond enter the private lounge where his staff was celebrating his latest app going public. He was furious, of course. She was deliberately misunderstanding him, but he had to admire her moxie.
You’re not the cousin I want to talk to, he had replied to someone named Rozalia when she had tried to set up a meeting a few days ago.
Gisella wasn’t either, but he found he wasn’t disappointed. Maybe he’d even left his wording open to interpretation, curious to see if she’d make another attempt to “persuade” him.
She really ought to be ashamed of herself, walking in here without an invitation, but he doubted she possessed such a thing. For starters, where would she keep it? There was absolutely no room for anything but sex appeal in that little black dress she was almost wearing.
He had thought her stunning when all he’d seen of her was loose waves of caramel hair, a slender back and an ass that could stop traffic atop legs that went for miles.
Tonight, she captivated him just as easily and completely. How? This was California. Beautiful women were low-hanging fruit here. He didn’t have a type, but found himself partial to everything about her. Her height, her buttermilk skin, her elegantly refined bone structure.
In a land where everything was fake from eyelashes to teeth to breasts, she stood out as a natural beauty. She wore makeup, but not a candy coating of it. Hers was applied in subtle shades that accentuated her high cheekbones and glossed her luscious mouth.
Coders in sweatshirts and khakis turned their heads to watch as she wove toward Kaine. The twenty-somethings adjusted their glasses and the forty-somethings sucked in their stomachs. The women in pencil skirts narrowed their eyes with envy.
Her aloof expression took no notice of anyone except him as she moved through mirror-ball sparkles that glittered off glowing white twigs against a bath of purple light cast by black bulbs.
“Gentlemen,” she said as she arrived into his circle. She barely raised her voice above the thump of the DJ’s playlist, neatly interrupting a movie producer trying to talk Kaine into investing in his latest blockbuster. “I need Mr. Michaels.”
Kaine had an idea where her audacity came from. Her father owned a well-respected advertising firm. She’d been raised in upper-class circles thanks to a private education. Even so, she was a goldfish, not a shark. One who still managed to blow a few bubbles and shoo the bigger fish away. They dispersed without hesitation,