Gentlemen Prefer Nerds (21 page)

Fabian strode off over the fine white sand. His gunshot wound was throbbing and he had a spray of red welts across his thigh where he’d run into a jellyfish. These were mere inconveniences next to the pain of knowing that his own brother—his only brother—had tried to kill him. Had tried to kill the woman Fabian—

He glanced back. Maddie was limping along, head down, keeping a distance of twenty paces just to let him know that all his facts about sunrises and sunsets hadn’t impressed her. He smiled, knowing how her mind worked. His smile faded. Hearing the second shot and the splash of her falling into the water had been the darkest moment of a very dark journey. He couldn’t afford to care, not in his business.

He kept walking. The sun was hotter as it rose in the sky, burning his shoulders and frying the top of his head. The crystal clear water, bright blue sky and curving beach could have adorned a picture postcard but it suddenly seemed the bleakest landscape on earth—

What’s this?
He bent down and picked up a large water bottle half buried in the sand. The lid was screwed on and it was a third full. He unscrewed the lid and sniffed. It smelled okay. He tipped a few drops onto his palm and tasted. Fresh. He lifted it to his lips and drank. It was warm. The finest wine had never tasted so good.

Maddie came up to him. “Where did you get that?”

He wiped his lips and held out the sandy bottle of water. “Buried treasure.”

Eagerly she took a swig. A drop escaped and snaked down her neck. “I’m never going to dream about a tropical holiday again. I’ll go to Europe instead. Somewhere with ice and snow. Finland, maybe.”

Silence fell.

Fabian picked up a flat shell and turned it over in his hand. “Roland is my younger brother by eighteen months. My mother spoiled him as a child.”

“Brothers. I can’t get over it. At the Gala, there was a moment when I thought you two looked similar. The eyes and the chin, a bit around the mouth.” She eyed the level of water in the bottle and took another sip. “Go on.”

He flung the shell wide, skipping it over the sea. “I don’t blame Mother for how Roland turned out. He’s always been difficult. When we were young he was a right little daredevil.”

“I’ll bet you were too.”

He conceded this with a lift of his shoulder. “We got into a tremendous number of scrapes together. Somehow we always got each other out of trouble too.” Bending for another shell, he turned it over, remembering a pond on their estate where he’d taught Roland how to skip stones. “In many ways we’re not alike. I take risks but I stay on the right side of the law.”

“What about whisking me away from the police?”

“Unless it’s necessary to do otherwise,” he amended.

“The ends justify the means?”

“At times.” He gave her a quick glance. “You didn’t object. Not much anyway.”

“I had no choice.”

“Exactly. You prove my point. You must have learned something from your father.”

“My father isn’t part of this discussion. I take after my mother’s side of the family.”

“I’ll have to accept your word for it,” he said dryly. “As I was saying. I’m on the side of law and order. Roland, on the other hand, exempts himself whenever it suits him.”

“The champagne diamond. How could he steal from your parents? And what did he mean when he said he’d been banished from the family?”

Fabian was silent, deciding how much he could reveal. What the hell. She knew the worst already. “Roland was always Mother’s favorite—” He shot Maddie a quick glance. “Don’t read anything into that. In spite of what he said on the boat, I’m not jealous of him.”

“I didn’t say a word,” Miss Innocence murmured.

“Shall we continue to the headland?” Fabian walked on slowly. “He was a mama’s boy, hanging around while she was getting ready to go out. He loved to watch her dress, put on her makeup—”

“Does he also listen to soundtracks from old musicals?” Maddie walked through the shallows, cooling the soles of her feet. “Liam’s partial to
South Pacific.
”

“Liam? But he’s so—”

“Big and brawny? Means nothing.”

“Roland’s not gay. It’s possible he could be bisexual. But I don’t know and I don’t want to. Where was I? Oh yes, Roland adored the Licciardo jewels with a magpie’s love of anything shiny and sparkly. As a small boy, whenever Mother went to the safe to get earrings or a bracelet for an evening out, he would stop whatever game we were playing and tag along after her. As he grew, he learned the origin, history and value of the various jewels.” Fabian recalled the hours Roland spent poring over books and later, the internet. “He’s always loved the collection far more than I.”

“Weren’t you interested in the collection at all? I can’t imagine not being fascinated by gems with hundreds of years of legend and intrigue.”

“I have a strong appreciation for family tradition. And of course I understand their value. But I don’t love jewels for their own sake, the way Roland does. The way you do.” He slapped the bottle against his thigh. “I’d give him the whole damn lot if I could.”

“Why don’t you?” Maddie asked. “Then maybe he wouldn’t steal.”

“Do you really think giving someone everything they want so they don’t take it by force is a good thing? Or that it would stop them from stealing more and more?”

“Well, not when you put it like that. But it doesn’t seem fair. Why not share the collection between the children? Do you have any other siblings?”

“No, there’s just Roland and me. I couldn’t share even if I wanted to. The family tradition of the eldest child inheriting the entire collection has been carried through five generations. The terms of my mother’s will are ironclad. The collection can’t be broken up.”

“Surely she could alter tradition—and her will—if she wanted to,” Maddie protested.

“At one time, she might have wanted to. But not now. When Roland was eleven years old, my father told him he would never inherit any of the jewels. Roland was devastated. And furious. His obsession with the collection increased. We grew apart as his resentment of me took hold. I tried to mend our relationship but Roland’s bitterness only increased with time. It doesn’t help that I’m also going to inherit the title and the family estate. My parents have every intention of bequeathing him an inheritance equal in value to mine but he cares nothing for that.”

“I almost feel sorry for Roland.”

Fabian raised an eyebrow. “You must be joking.”

“No, seriously. I can imagine him as the youngest, clamoring for his mother’s attention yet taken less seriously than you, his accomplished elder brother. Don’t go getting a swelled head but you’ve probably always been smarter, stronger, better-looking—the superior son in every way. No wonder Roland was bitter—you were genetically endowed with all the natural advantages. And you got the jewels too.”

Fabian had no false modesty—he knew he had natural advantages plus a head start in life through the sheer good fortune of being born into money. But he’d built on those advantages with years of discipline and hard work. As for Maddie’s assessment of Roland, well, she didn’t know his brother the way he did. And yet, at times he felt sorry for his brother too. When he didn’t want to give him a good thrashing, that is. As he’d said, it was complicated.

“When Roland was sixteen he fell in love with a girl,” Fabian went on. “He stole an amethyst bracelet from the collection for her birthday. It wasn’t an important piece but it was pretty. I believe she gave him her virginity in return.”

“I’ll bet your parents were amused.”

“He’d been in other trouble too—getting drunk, ‘borrowing’ my father’s car and crashing it. They decided to send him to live with my Aunt Helena, my mother’s sister, in South Africa.”

“So the accent is genuine.”

“Yes, that one is. He can put on a dozen accents that sound authentic. He’s an accomplished mimic and an excellent actor. He always took the lead role in school plays and was in the Drama Club at university.”

“And his name, Roland Price, where does that come from?”

“Price is Helena’s married name. He goes by it in South Africa.”

“Did he mind being sent away?”

Fabian nodded. “You can imagine his bitterness at being uprooted from a large home and private school in England and sent to an isolated farm halfway around the world. Once there, Helena poisoned his mind further with her resentment of her sister, my mother. She, too, was the younger sibling who didn’t inherit any of the Licciardo jewel collection.”

He stopped abruptly and pointed, his gaze tracking movement in the water near the rocky headland. “There’s a sailboat.”

“Where? Oh, thank God.” Maddie waded into the water and waved her arms over her head. “Help! Over here!”

The sailboat was perhaps half a mile away. The tiny figures moving around on deck didn’t seem to have seen them so she ran higher up the beach. Fabian cupped his hands and called out. Despite their efforts, the boat changed tack and headed away from the island.

Maddie’s arms flopped to her sides. “They didn’t see us.”

“There’ll be more.” Fabian resumed the trek along the water’s edge toward the point.

Maddie walked in silence, no doubt going over everything he’d told her so far. Her anger seemed to have faded a bit with understanding. Maybe he should have confided in her from the beginning. But secrecy was his way of life. And his parents wouldn’t appreciate a stranger knowing their family’s dirty secrets.

“How did you feel, losing your brother?” she asked.

Fabian shrugged and glanced away. “We hadn’t been close for some years.”

In truth, he’d felt the loss keenly. He and Roland were brothers—playing together, fighting and making up, going on adventures. After Roland was sent away, Fabian had suddenly been an only child. He’d lost his brother and his best friend all at once. Of course, the estrangement had begun years earlier, all because of the jewels. They were a curse.

“Did he never come home again?” Maddie asked.

“He returned to England to go to Cambridge. And promptly got into trouble. At Helena’s instigation he stole a pair of star sapphire earrings. She claimed they’d been hers and Isabella had taken them. That was a lie, by the way. Roland didn’t stop there. He took a man’s emerald ring for himself. He denied it, my parents couldn’t prove it, and so both pieces are lost. After that the relationship between my parents and Roland deteriorated to where my father won’t even speak to him. The champagne diamond theft added insult to injury.”

“And how does your mother feel?”

“Outwardly she’s washed her hands of him. Deep down he’s still her son and she believes he can be brought back into the fold.”

“So you run around mopping up after him,” Maddie said.

“I promised her I would keep him from being arrested. For my father’s sake I can’t let Roland destroy the Montgomery family name.”

He’d always felt personally responsible for his brother. His father was too authoritarian to relate to his more sensitive son. And his mother was too indulgent to discipline him. Fabian had kept Roland in line. That is, until he’d turned thirteen and become more interested in his friends than his pesky little brother. Looking back, that was the beginning of the family troubles.

“My parents tried one last time to help him,” Fabian went on. “When he graduated from university with an economics degree, they gave him the most lucrative of the family businesses to run—a pasta sauce company.”

“Pasta sauce?” Maddie chuckled. “It’s an odd thing for English aristocrats to be into.”

“Don’t forget my mother is Italian. The recipe is almost as old as the Licciardo jewels. Unfortunately Roland considers pasta sauce unbearably common, even though the company provides him with independent wealth and the opportunity to more or less do as he pleases.”

Maddie stopped at the base of the rocky point. “No wonder Roland could afford to have a pink diamond specially grown and cut to substitute for the Rose.”

“Not to mention his gambling habit and penchant for jet-set living,” Fabian added. “Villas on the Mediterranean and oceangoing yachts don’t come cheaply.”

“If he’s got all that, why does he need to steal? He could buy gems.”

“I know. It doesn’t make sense. I can only think he’s punishing our parents and me. He feels cheated and he wants what I have. He wants the mansion in the country and the fashionable townhouse in London. He wants the title and hereditary seat in the House of Lords. And the gem collection, of course. He wants the lot.” Fabian squinted into the sun as he scanned the horizon. “I dare say he even wants you now.”

“Thanks a lot,” Maddie said dryly. “Except for one thing—you don’t have me.”

“I know that. But he doesn’t.”

“Which I guess would prove you’re not in collusion with Roland,” she said slowly.

“I assure you, I’m not.” He paused. “I didn’t mean to suggest you’re not desirable on your own account.”

“Forget it. I’m through with being a glamazon.” She climbed, stepping from rock to rock. Then she stopped, teetering on the top of a boulder. “Hey, do you still have the sapphire necklace? I completely forgot about it.”

“Yes.” Fabian reached into the front of his boxer shorts for his wallet, a supple black leather folder. He opened the zippered coin pocket and pulled out the sapphire necklace. “Please, no jokes about the family jewels.”

Maddie burst out laughing. “Oh, come on, that’s just begging for it. Although strictly speaking, they belong to the jewelry store you borrowed them from.”

Her words were a reminder of their external obligations, of the world beyond this beach. Where presumably they’d be returning before too much longer. He replaced the necklace in his wallet and stuffed the wallet down his shorts. “Once we’re rescued, we’ll be pulled in different directions. We won’t see each other again.”

“I know.” Maddie sobered.

In her panties and broken bra, scraped and battered, her hair a matted mess, she was one of a kind. If only he’d made love to her when he had the chance.

Maddie moistened her dry lips. Just once before she died, she’d like to have an orgasm. She was pretty sure Fabian could give her one. Sunburn reddened the bridge of his nose; dried blood beaded a shallow scrape on his cheek. Roland was boyishly handsome but Fabian had something extra—an energy, an intensity, that transcended differences of hair color and skin tone. Even stripped down to his boxer shorts and covered in sand and bits of shell, he was tall, broad-shouldered and lean but muscled, with a warm Mediterranean glow to his smooth skin. Italian blood.