a couple of them though.”
“I don’t need—”
“Yammer, yammer, yammer,” he said with a wave of his hand, and had her eyes going huge. “Come sit on my lap.”
“If you think that’s even a remote possibility, you need immediate professional help.”
“Ah well. I’m going to buy some of those diamonds,” he continued. “They need the blood washed from them, Eve. They may only be things, as Laine Gannon said, but they’re symbols, and they should be clean ones. You can’t resolve death, as you said. You do what you can. And when you wear the stones that cost all those lives, they’ll be clean again. They’ll be a kind of badge that says someone stood for the victims. Someone always will. And whenever you wear them, you’ll remember that.”
She stared at him. “God, you get me. You get right to the core of me.”
“When I see you wear them, I’ll remember it, too. And know that someone is you.” He laid a hand over hers. “Do you know what I want from you, darling Eve?”
“Sweet-talk all you want, I’m still not sitting in your lap in Central. Ever.”
He laughed. “Another fantasy shattered. What I want from you is the fifty years and more I saw between the Gannons today. The love and understanding, the memories of a lifetime. I want that from you.”
“We’ve got one year in. Second one’s going pretty well so far.”
“No complaints.”
“I’m going to clock out. Why don’t we both ditch work for the rest of the day—”
“It’s already half-six, Lieutenant. Your shift’s over anyway.”
She frowned at her wrist unit and saw he was right. “It’s the thought that counts. Let’s go home, put a little more time into year two.”
He took her hand as they walked out together. “What’s done with the diamonds until they’re turned over to whoever might be the legal owner?”
“Sealed, logged, scanned and locked in an evidence box that is locked in one of the evidence vaults in the bowels of this place.” She slanted him a look. “Good thing you don’t steal anymore.”
“Isn’t it?” He slung a friendly arm around her shoulders as they took the glide. “Isn’t it just?”
And deep, deep under the streets of the city, in the cool, quiet dark, the diamonds waited to shine again.
To see where the story began . . . turn the page for an exciting excerpt taken from
Hot Rocks by Nora Roberts
Available now from Jove Books!
A heroic belch of thunder followed the strange little man into the shop. He glanced around apologetically, as if the rude noise were his responsibility rather than nature’s, and fumbled a package under his arm so he could close a black-and-white-striped umbrella.
Both umbrella and man dripped, somewhat mournfully, onto the neat square of mat just inside the door while the cold spring rain battered the streets and side-walks on the other side. He stood where he was, as if not entirely sure of his welcome.
Laine turned her head and sent him a smile that held only warmth and easy invitation. It was a look her friends would have called her polite shopkeeper’s smile.
Well, damn it, she was a polite shopkeeper—and at the moment that label was being sorely tested.
If she’d known the rain would bring customers into the store instead of keeping them away, she wouldn’t have given Jenny the day off. Not that she minded business. A woman didn’t open a store if she didn’t want customers, whatever the weather. And a woman didn’t open one in Small Town, U.S.A., unless she understood she’d spend as much time chatting, listening and refereeing debates as she would ringing up sales.
And that was fine, Laine thought, that was good. But if Jenny had been at work instead of spending the day painting her toenails and watching soaps, Jenny would’ve been the one stuck with the Twins.
Darla Price Davis and Carla Price Gohen had their hair tinted the same ashy shade of blond. They wore identical slick blue raincoats and carried matching hobo bags. They finished each other’s sentences and communicated in a kind of code that included a lot of twitching eyebrows, pursed lips, lifted shoulders and head bobs.
What might’ve been cute in eight-year-olds was just plain weird in forty-eight-year-old women.
Still, Laine reminded herself, they never came into Remember When without dropping a bundle. It might take them hours to drop it, but eventually the sales would ring. There was little that lifted Laine’s heart as high as the ring of the cash register.
Today they were on the hunt for