“It will work,” Kat said. “It will work if we have you.”
“I can’t make another stone like that. Not in three days.” He ran a varnish-stained hand across his scruffy face. “Not ever.”
Kat shook her head. “I don’t need a stone, Charlie. I need a con.”
“No. No,” he said, and his gaze flew to the door, as if there were something lurking outside, beating against the side of the house like the snow and the wind, fighting to get in.
“Yes, Charlie.” She reached for his hand. “I’ve been trying for days to think of someone she doesn’t know—someone we can trust to work inside. But then I realized that someone she knows is the perfect person.”
“Eddie. You want Eddie.”
She would have given anything to tell him he was wrong, but Eddie was the master, the best. He was also on the other side of the world and the other side of a line that said no one steals the Cleopatra Emerald, so Kat shook her head and stared up at the next best thing.
“Uncle Eddie can’t…No, Uncle Eddie won’t help me, Charlie. Not this time. This time I need you.”
“I loved her, Katarina.” Heartbreak seeped into his eyes. It seemed to take him a moment to realize what he’d said. “And so did he.”
When Charlie pulled away, the best hands in the business were shaking. His lip quivered. And Kat hated herself for bringing that darkness to his door.
“I’m sorry, Charlie.” She hesitated for a moment but then leaned down and kissed his head. She started for the door. “I won’t bother you anymore.”
“Margaret Gray.”
Kat stopped and turned. She watched him run a hand through his hair in a gesture she’d seen his brother make a thousand times.
“Her name is Margaret Gray,” he said slowly. “And I never want to see her again.”
CHAPTER 30
It was almost dusk by the time the small motorboat made it back to the W. W. Hale. It said a great deal about Kat’s current state of mind that she really didn’t want to crawl aboard the larger, safer vessel.
“Maybe I could just sit here for…a week or two,” she told Hale.
“Not this time,” he said, grabbing her hand and pulling her on board.
Marcus stood ten feet away, posture perfectly straight, a tray of tea and scones in his hands.
Simon had covered the ship’s massive windows with figures and formulas, and he pointed between them and Gabrielle. Ordinarily, this would have been a source of very little concern, except that Gabrielle was wearing high heels and a rappelling harness and arguing.
“Kat!” Simon threw up his hands in disgust and walked toward her. “Will you tell your cousin the kind of damage falling from over a hundred feet can do?”
On the deck above, the Bagshaws were yelling something about old wiring systems and backup generators, neither bothering to remove their protective headphones, so they just yelled louder.
“Why don’t you just ask Kat?” Hamish yelled.
“Yeah,” his brother countered. “Be that way and I’ll ask Kat!”
“Guys,” Gabrielle said, but the word was lost amid the smoke and the headphones. “Guys!” she tried again. “Kat’s here!”
Hamish was oblivious as he turned and pointed. “Hey, Kat’s here.”
It was Nick alone who looked from Kat to the way Hale leaned against the rail with his arms crossed. It might have been a perfectly adequate poker face anywhere else in the world, but it wasn’t quite good enough for Monte Carlo.
So Nick stepped closer to Kat and asked, “Where were you?”
“Austria,” Hale answered, but Nick acted like he hadn’t even heard.
“You fly off in the middle of the night, leaving nothing but a shopping list and an I’ll be back. So where were you?” Nick wanted to know.