he was already pulling away.
Her lips clung to his as his hand moved to the side of her face. His mouth lifted away. It was too soon. A sob of protest arrived as a lump in her throat. His breath was as ragged as hers, feathering across her wet lips. She refused to open her eyes, not wanting him to see how completely he had owned her in this too-brief encounter.
He knew, though. He spoke in a gravelly whisper that caressed her cheek and lifted the hairs on her scalp. “I’ll lock the doors and take everything you’re offering, but you’re not getting the earring.”
“What?” She blinked her eyes open and the world came back into focus. She saw the colorful mural on the ceiling, the gilded light fixture. Its glow haloed his dark hair, turning him into an archangel.
“A valiant effort, though.”
She made herself step back, feeling the loss of his heat like a splash of icy water down her front. The barest hint of her lipstick shaded his mouth. She wanted to use her thumb to erase it. She wanted to keep touching him. Lock the doors and stay in here and discover everything he could teach her.
She had always wondered what it would feel like to discover her chemical match. To be devoured by true, animalistic passion.
It was terrifying, as it turned out. Deliriously perilous, yet treacherously alluring.
“That wasn’t—” She cut herself off as she absorbed the jaded look in his eyes. Which was a harder kick to her pride? His thinking she had been trying to manipulate him? Or confessing her passion had been real when his was clearly nonexistent?
“Here comes the frown again. I didn’t expect you’d take this so hard.” The corners of his mouth deepened in a curl of merciless amusement. “It makes denying you what you want so much more satisfying.”
Her ears rang with the double entendre while her scrambled brain finally began to comprehend what was going on.
“Are you telling me you’re doing this as some sort of vendetta against me?”
“What I’m doing—” his voice turned to granite “—is getting your cousin’s attention.” His tone was hard enough to make her insides shiver with foreboding. “Pass the message along. I expect a phone call.”
One week later...
“DID YOU SEE my text? I asked you to pick up lattes.” Gisella pouted with disappointment as her cousin, Rozalia, showed up empty-handed in their workroom above the family jewelry store, Barsi on Fifth.
“I didn’t look at my phone.” Rozi peeled off her raincoat and hung it, but missed the hook so the coat dropped to the floor with a flump and a spatter of raindrops. She didn’t notice, only splaying out her hands as though stopping traffic. “I have big news.”
Gisella bit back scolding her cousin. Their mothers were half sisters and a decade apart in age. Rozalia had been born a few months after Gisella, but they had had very different upbringings. Gisella’s mother, a career academic, had had her one baby late in life. At the sight of a dropped jacket, she would have stridently pointed out the need to keep everything neatly in its place, especially when all Gisella’s clothes were top-brand and tailored.
Rozalia’s mom had married young and lived for her husband and four children. For her, things didn’t matter. People did—which was why Gisella had always envied Rozi and secretly wished they were twins instead of cousins.
“Someone—” Rozi said with great drama, because her family was nothing if not rife with artists and performers “—wanted a deal on a custom engagement ring.”
“That’s nice,” Gisella said mildly. Such things were their bread and butter, but she knew better than to insist Rozi get to the point. She was clearly eager to make a Broadway production out of this. “Who would that be?”
“An agent. For an auction house.” Rozi touched her chin and lifted a musing gaze to the ceiling. “A firm that may or may not have handled the Garrison estate last week.”
Gisella’s heart dropped to roll around the legs of her work stool. It took everything in her to pretend she didn’t go both hot and cold with yearning and embarrassment. Fury and shame.
She felt so foolish for letting Kaine kiss her. She had been lost in some deranged space between flirting and taunting when she invited it. She wouldn’t have let him touch her, however, if she’d known he was exercising some kind of wrath against her family. His toying with her, kissing her the way he had, was just wrong.
I’m getting your cousin’s attention.
His detachment had driven the spike of his rebuff that much deeper. It still stung like mad.
Gisella turned back to the empty platinum pendant setting pinched in the vise on the bench. “We know who won everything at that auction.”
And who had lost.
She had. Even her dignity had been left in that room full of a dead woman’s valuables as she’d rushed to get away from him.
“Oh, forget Kaine Michaels. Or rather, remember what he said about other interested parties? There was a representative on the phone, calling from Hungary.”
Gisella set down her wheel and lifted her magnifying glasses as she swiveled to face Rozi again. “So?”
“He was calling on behalf of Viktor Rohan. According to the agent, he was—” she air quoted with her fingers “—highly motivated to buy the match to the one his mother possesses.”
“Oh, my God, Rozi.”
“I know.”
Sixty-odd years ago, the earrings had been sold months apart on different continents. Finding the one here in America had been years of hard work. They had long ago given up finding the other one, hitting nothing but dead ends every time they tried.
“Guess what else? He’s your cousin.”
“Viktor Rohan? I’ve never even heard of him.” She fully pulled off her eye protection and set it aside. “How?”
“Second cousin, I guess. Your grandparents were brother and sister.”
“He’s descended from Istvan’s sister?”
Rozi nodded.
Istvan had asked their grandmother, Eszti, to marry him when they’d been at university together. He’d given her a pair of earrings as an engagement present and she should have married him and kept those earrings all her life. Instead, student demonstrations had turned violent. At Istvan’s urging, Eszti had sold one of the earrings in Hungary to come to America, unwed and pregnant. Her lover had died before he could follow as promised, leaving her alone in a new country.
Broke and desperate, with Gisella’s mother an infant in her arms, Eszti had married Benedek Barsi, a kind, older man. A goldsmith. Benedek sold the second earring and they started the jewelry store where both Gisella and Rozalia now worked. Eszti was grandmother to both of them, but Gisella didn’t have any Barsi DNA. She had Istvan’s blood—which was how she could be related to Viktor Rohan where Rozi wasn’t.
“Have you never been curious about that side of your family?” Rozi asked her.
“Oh, please. You know what Mom is like. But I agreed with her lack of sentiment in this case. Grandpapa always treated us like we were his. I was never so curious I wanted to hurt him by looking into Grandmamma’s first love. It wasn’t like I could meet Istvan. He died before my mother was born.” Gisella shrugged it off.
“But you’re curious now?” Rozi pried, grinning.
“If he has the other earring, of course I am!”