Roses in Moonlight (22 page)

“Oops,” she said.

“They’ll manage to get another,” he said. He frowned at the very normal and ordinary items there, then took her bag and upended it.

A handkerchief came out of one of her unzipped hidden pockets after a fair bit of shaking. Samantha blinked in surprise.

“What in the world is that?”

He peered at it, then reached out and picked it up. It was tied up like a little hobo bundle, which he then gingerly untied. He peeled back the corners, then looked at the small linen packet it revealed. He looked at her.

“What do you think?”

“Too small to be a bomb.”

He smiled briefly, then set it down on the table. He pulled out a pocketknife.

“Are you supposed to have one of those?” she asked.

“Don’t tell.”

She would have smiled, but she was actually slightly unnerved to find that she had again been used as a courier without her knowledge.

Derrick carefully slit open one end of the small linen package, tipped it, then jumped a little as a handful of gems spilled out into his hand.

She squeaked.

Derrick poured the gems onto the coffee table and simply stared at them. He looked at her.

“What do you think?”

She took the handkerchief the little packet had been wrapped in and looked at it. “Sixteenth-century bobbin lace. It’s new.”

“It’s not very clean.”

“I mean, it’s not vintage,” she said. She looked at him. “We’re looking at a piece of Elizabethan lace that hasn’t been around for four hundred years. It’s new.”

He blinked. “You think it was planted on you when we were fetching the lace?”

“I don’t know what else to think.” She shrugged helplessly. “It’s not like I’ve dumped out my bag since then. I was too busy stuffing things into it.” She spread the lace out carefully. She could hardly believe she was examining yet another piece of Elizabethan textile, much less one that was antique, but not antique. She sighed. “It’s not clean, no, but it’s also not showing any age spots. And yes, it’s worn a little on this edge here and it’s been repaired here, but on the whole, it’s in very good condition.” She looked at him. “New.”

“I’ll be damned.” He shook his head. “I wonder why?”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “There’s no way those guys last night could possibly have known I had that. Is there?”

He looked into the empty hearth for a moment or two, then reached for her purse and looked at it. He finally turned it inside out. He looked at her. “Do you mind if get a little more friendly?”

“With my bag?”

“That, too.”

She blinked, then smiled. “You’re crazy. And yes, go ahead.”

He looked in the pockets, then ran his fingers over the lining.

And he stopped.

He reached for his knife, then looked at her. “Mind?”

“No,” she said, feeling a little breathless.

He unpicked stitches she wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t been looking for them. She felt her mouth fall open as he pulled out a small plastic bag of gems.

“Well, this is interesting.”

“Damn that Lydia Cooke.”

He laughed a little. “That’s a pretty big assumption.”

“That bag never leaves my person,” she said. “The only time I’ve been without it is in Newcastle.” She looked at him. “Jet lag, you know.”

“Understandable.” He set the bag down on the coffee table next to the other loose gems. “Notice anything interesting?”

She looked at both collections, then frowned. “Well, apart from the fact that I’m seeing double is the fact that I’m seeing double.”

He lifted his eyebrows briefly. “I’d have to dig out a jeweler’s loupe, but I imagine those are quite similar sets of stones.”

“What?” she said in surprise.

He started to answer, but his phone beeped at him. Samantha watched him read a text, then put his phone away.

“Oliver and Peter are here. We’ll set up in Cameron’s office downstairs. Lots of comfy chairs and secure lines for Internet surfing. I’ll build a fire and we’ll do a bit of researching.”

“What are we going to do with the loose stones?”

“Oh, I’ll just shove them in a pocket.”

“Better check for holes first.”

He looked at her and smiled. “You know, you’re fairly funny for a textile historian.”

“Did you expect me to only be able to talk about bobbins and patterns?”

He shook his head, then took the linen, the handkerchief, and the small plastic bag full of gems and shoved it all in her bag he’d turned back outside out. He scooped up the loose gems, then stood and put them in his pocket. She gaped at him.

“You just shoved a fortune in gems in your pocket.”

“A fortune, do you think?”

“Well, the lace alone is very valuable—”

“Which is why it’s in your purse.” He put his pocketknife into a different pocket, then held out his hand for her. “Let’s go.”

“You’re crazy.”

He pulled her to her feet. “Sometimes I worry that I am.”

She let him lead her out of the study and partway down the stairs before she had to say something.

“You can’t just leave those stones loose.”

He smiled. “You can’t help yourself, can you?”

She sighed. “I really don’t want to be an historian any longer.”

“But you can’t seem to keep away from it.”

“It keeps finding me,” she said defensively. “It isn’t as if I
asked
someone to plant priceless gems on me.”

“Twice, apparently.”

She looked up at him. “Are you trying to be helpful here?”

He smiled. When he smiled, she wanted to run. Admittedly, the man was just too handsome for her peace of mind, but that had been easier to ignore when she didn’t like him. But when he smiled at her as if he actually thought she wasn’t completely intolerable, it was very bad.

“Detour through the kitchen for a container,” he said, pulling her that way once they’d reached the bottom of the stairs. “So, does it really bother you to be pulled back into something you don’t want to do?”

“A little.”

“You’re very good at it, if that makes it any easier.”

She sighed, then looked up at him. “This is the last thing I investigate.”

“Ah, an investigative historian.” He shot her a smile. “Sexy.”

She felt her mouth fall open. “What happened to you? You’re so . . . happy.”

He laughed a little. “We are looking at a large fortune in Elizabethan gems and you have a piece of new but old lace and no one to claim it. What’s not to be happy about?”

She supposed he had a point.

She just hoped he didn’t pay a very steep price for that giddiness. She hoped
she
didn’t pay a price for the same. She had gone to Ambleside, sure that her adventures with thugs were over. Now, though, she had been drawn back into the thick of things, against her will and better judgment.

Though she had to admit, if she was going to be thrown into craziness, she couldn’t think of anyone better to be there with than the man walking next to her, humming something that sounded remarkably like a battle dirge.

D
errick
walked into Cameron’s downstairs office to the usual confusion that accompanied a collection of his lads setting up shop.

He had to shake his head briefly over the possessive term. They were his, he supposed, given that they worked for the company he now owned. They were loyal and seemed to enjoy their work, but whether that was because of the company or him, he couldn’t say.

How they had all come to be involved in that company was, he had to admit, perhaps slightly random. Oliver had rescued him and Cameron both one night along a deserted side street in London. Cameron had invited him to come in for an interview. Oliver’s unflinching expression during the hearing of a private investigator’s report of his entire life had earned him both a job and trust. Peter had come a bit later, a lad with a particular set of skills and a willingness to use them.

Their expertise in antiques, his and theirs, had come by working for Cameron for so long. It could be safely said that Robert Cameron had an uncanny knack for rooting out things that were staggeringly valuable. The lads enjoyed that part, but Derrick was sure it was the spy bit that they loved the most. He trusted them implicitly.

But they did tend to make a bit of a mess with their cables and cords and high-tech intrusion sweeping devices.

Oliver looked at Peter from where he had opened his laptop right in the middle of Cameron’s desk, his preferred place to roost. “Clear?”

“Still working on it,” Peter said, his head bent over his own laptop.

Samantha leaned closer to him. “Why are you bothering out here in the wilds of Scotland?” she asked.

“Thugs are everywhere,” Peter said absently.

“Cynic,” Oliver stated.

Peter only grunted and continued with his work.

“Where’s Rufus?” Derrick asked politely.

“On the way to London, leading our thugs on a merry chase,” Oliver said. “He’s a couple of hours out still.”

Derrick frowned. “Then how did you get here?”

“Rented a car, mate,” Oliver said. “You didn’t expect us to take the train, did you?”

He wouldn’t have been surprised, but then again, he’d been quite surprised several times over the past few days so perhaps he wasn’t one to judge. It had been one of those weeks.

“But,” Samantha said slowly, “won’t bad guys trace you from your credit card?”

Oliver lifted an eyebrow. “We’re ghosts, miss. That, and Peter had to have something to do on the drive north.”

She looked at Derrick with a frown. “What does he mean?”

Derrick shrugged. “Paperwork problems. Happens all the time.”

“You hacked into a rental car company’s system to erase paperwork?” Samantha asked uneasily.

“Not to worry,” Peter said, still peering at his screen. “Car’ll be back in Inverness with a bow on the bonnet by tomorrow night. They’ll never know.”

Samantha frowned thoughtfully, then leaned closer to him. “Is this what you do?” she asked. “This kind of thing? For tracking down antiques?”

“We’re a full-service operation,” Oliver said.

“Except for cleaning,” Peter said. “We don’t pick up cleaning.”

Derrick pursed his lips. “I think before we go any further, introductions are in order. Samantha, that’s Oliver, who doesn’t know when to shut up, and Peter, who is very shy around girls. You’ve already met Rufus, who isn’t here. Lads, this is Miss Samantha Drummond, who didn’t steal a very valuable piece of Elizabethan lace but unbeknownst to her seems to have picked up another freeloader.”

“Do we get to see?” Oliver asked. “Just curious.”

Derrick looked at Samantha. “Why don’t you show them what you found in the lining of your purse.”

Bless the girl, she didn’t hesitate. She simply walked over to the desk and deposited the bag of stones next to Oliver’s computer. Oliver looked at Peter.

“Clear
yet
?”

“Done,” Peter said, setting aside his laptop. “What’ve you got there?” He walked over to peer at the pile on the desk, then let out a low whistle. He pulled a jeweler’s loupe out of a pocket and set it alongside Oliver.

Derrick stood back and watched the pair do the other thing they did best, which was to appreciate things that cost vats of money.

Oliver sat back, considered, then looked at him. “Not modern.”

Derrick only lifted an eyebrow and said nothing.

Oliver frowned and went back to his study. Derrick waited for a bit, then finally cleared his throat.

“Five,” he suggested.

“Bollocks,” Oliver said with a snort. “Ten or none.”

Derrick waited until Peter had finished his perusal, then looked at his chief hacker. “Well?”

“Twenty,” Peter said firmly. “Not a penny less.”

“Twenty what?” Samantha asked.

Peter glanced at her only as quickly as good manners dictated. He was, for all his swaggering, all thumbs when it came to the opposite sex. “Twenty million quid,” he said. He shot Derrick a look. “Just a guess.”

“What do you think, boss?” Oliver said.

“I haven’t had a chance to look,” Derrick said. He looked at Samantha. “Want to go first?”

“Oh,” she said, hesitating, “I don’t know anything about gems.”

“Derrick will give you the lecture,” Oliver said. “Boring unsuspecting lassies is what he does best, but boring them with lectures about the various methods of cutting gems over the centuries is what he likes the most.”

Derrick rolled his eyes. “I have no preference.”

Oliver tsk-tsked him. “Shouldn’t lie. It’s bad for you.” He shifted. “Here, Miss Drummond—”

“Samantha.”

Oliver smiled. “Samantha. You take my chair while you’re looking. And Derrick can indeed give you a lecture that would leave you begging him to stop, but perhaps today I’ll give you the quicker one. It’s all about the cut. Well, quality helps as well, but the cut’s the thing. These would be worth more if they’d been in an original setting—and that setting had been either perfectly preserved or repaired flawlessly—but they’re worth plenty as is.”

Derrick had his own look after Samantha had finished, then looked at Peter.

“Fifty.”

“Well, you
are
the expert,” Peter said seriously.

Samantha shook her head. “Fifty million
pounds
?”

Derrick shrugged. “There are a lot of them and that’s just a guess. It isn’t so much what they’re worth as what someone would be willing to pay for them. There is that certain
je ne sais quoi
that comes with owning something from the past, so unless we were to find the right sort of lad or lassie to pull out the bank draft, I might be grossly overestimating the value.” He shrugged. “I’d have to think about a buyer or two in order to be more accurate.” He scooped the stones back up into the bag, then nodded toward the fire. “Let’s go poke around online for a bit. Oliver, do you have another tablet handy for Samantha?”

“Always. Samantha, let me set you up.”

Derrick left her in good hands, though he had to admit there was something about how happy Oliver looked to be helping her that set his teeth on edge. It didn’t help that Oliver waggled his eyebrows at him as he was seeing Samantha seated.

Derrick left the office before he did something stupid.

Elizabethan gems. Why wasn’t he surprised?

He ran up the stairs, collected his computer, then trotted back down to the office. Samantha was already engrossed in what she was doing. Oliver looked up when he closed the door behind him.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Think you can track down those Ambleside lads and find out where else they’ve been?”

“Might be able to.”

“Any word from Rufus?”

“Still the same. He sent me the plate number. I’ll see where that leads.”

Derrick nodded, then looked at Peter. “And you?”

“I’m snooping.”

“Care to divulge where?”

“Stolen property lists.”

Well, that might have been interesting, but Derrick suspected what they were looking at wouldn’t find itself listed on any stolen property—

He stopped in midstep. Maybe that wasn’t quite true. He had to wonder what might turn up if he looked for the theft of a substantial number of gems, say, in a different century. He had his doubts such a thing might appear on any easily found list, but the miscreant—if he’d been caught—might show up in some popular jail or other.

He went to sit across from Samantha. “How are you?”

She didn’t look up. “Reading email.”

She was starting to sound like one of the lads. “Anything interesting?”

“My parents told me to come home immediately.”

“Did Gavin tattle on you?”

She looked up then. “He did, actually. He said I was over here without supervision. I’m guessing Lydia told him I quit.”

“I’ll supervise you,” Derrick said. “You can tell them I said as much.” And whilst she was doing that, he would check Gavin’s email account to find out exactly what Lydia had told him.

“And just who are you, O Responsible One?” she asked politely.

“A pirate,” Peter said.

“Rabble-rouser,” Oliver suggested.

Derrick shot them both a pointed look. “A respectable businessman dealing in the acquisition of exclusive antiquities. Tell them you’re helping me with a research project. Or you could just tell them to go to hell.”

She laughed uneasily. “I’ll think about it and email them later. I’ll definitely be rude to my brother now, though.”

“He would deserve it, the annoying git,” Peter said, then he looked up quickly. “Sorry.”

Samantha only smiled and went back to her emailing. Derrick watched her thoughtfully for a moment or two. He had to admit that she had changed. The clothes were different, obviously, but it was something more than that. She was sitting in the midst of a roomful of pirates and she looked comfortable. Happy, even.

It was amazing what a little time traveling could do for a woman.

He put his head down and concentrated on his own business, because it was safer that way and would probably save Oliver’s life. If he had to look at that smirk one more time, he was going to wipe it off rather abruptly.

He decided it made sense to start with the gems not sewn into Samantha’s bag. Those, at least, he thought he could safely say had come from the sixteenth century. It would have been helpful to have ascertained the date whilst he and Samantha had been visiting the last time, but since he hadn’t, he would just have to guess. People had looked when he’d shouted that the queen was coming, so that put it definitely pre-1603.

He searched for an hour before he sighed and looked off into the fire. He had a headache and was no closer to where he wanted to be than he had been before he’d started.

He was tired, more tired than he cared to be. He didn’t particularly want a nap, but he definitely needed a change of scenery.

“Derrick?”

He looked at Samantha quickly. It was, he was fairly sure, the first time she had called him by his given name. Oliver cleared his throat, because he obviously had something stuck there. Derrick sent him a look that warned him that that thing might be his fist very soon if he didn’t shut up, had a single lifting of a single eyebrow as his reward, then looked back at Samantha.

“What?”

“Do you think,” she began slowly, “that we could find a list of inhabitants of the Tower?” She looked at him knowingly. “Just for curiosity’s sake.”

He considered, then looked back at his screen and sent her an email. He watched out of the corner of his eye as she blinked, then pulled it up.

You’re brilliant
.

She smiled, but she didn’t look at him.

He attacked the problem with renewed vigor. It took him another hour to find what he was looking for. When he did, he had to simply sit there and stare into the fire until the information settled into his brain in a way he could process it.

Sir Richard Drummond had been incarcerated in the Tower in 1602.

He looked at Samantha. “Feel like a drive?”

“What?” she asked in surprise.

“I need to think.”

“That means trouble,” Peter said, scratching his cheek.

Derrick scowled at him. “What are you doing?”

“Hacking your email.”

“How’s it going?”

“You write very boring ones.”

Derrick blew out his breath. “Fix that, would you?”

“Working on it.”

Derrick considered, then looked at Oliver. “Will you look for something for me?”

Oliver looked at him. “Of course. What?”

“Sir Richard Drummond. He was tossed in the Tower in 1602. I’m curious as to why and what happened to him.”

Oliver sent him a look he had difficulty interpreting, though he had the feeling Oliver was putting together pieces that might not have been particularly apparent to anyone else. Oliver glanced at Samantha.

“A relation?”

“I hadn’t considered that,” Derrick said, wondering why he hadn’t. He looked at Samantha. “Are you related to a Richard Drummond?”

“The Shakespearean actor?”

“The sixteenth-century version,” Derrick clarified.

“I have no idea.”

“I think you’ll know soon.” He rose and set his computer aside, then took hers and did the same. “We’ll be back in a couple of hours, lads. I have my phone.”

Oliver looked at him. “Are you sure?”

“We’re driving to the coast and back,” Derrick said with a smile. “I think we’ll manage.”

“Taking the Vanquish?”

“Aye.”

“Damn,” Oliver grumbled. “There goes my chippy run.”

“Stay out of my car,” Derrick warned. “And stop hanging things from the mirror.”

Oliver only smirked and bent to his work. Derrick ushered Samantha out of Cameron’s office, bid good-bye to Madame Gies, then walked with Samantha out to the garage.

“We’ll need jackets,” he said.

“I’ll run back in,” she said.

“No, you stay. I’ll fetch you something.” He went back inside, grabbed a jacket for himself and something else that looked like it might have belonged to Sunny, then went back out into the garage. Samantha was considering the horsepower there and frowning thoughtfully. “Well?” he asked.

“Do you Camerons drive anything but low-slung sports cars and Range Rovers?”