it to him. “And you are never a man a woman can predict.” She watched as he set his untouched glass on the coffee table and sank into a side chair. Alone, he looked tired. Run-down. Beat. Maria couldn’t help wondering just what had happened over the last two days to steal the spunk and style from Peter Kauffman.
She perched on the arm of the sofa across from him and pursed her lips. When it was obvious he wasn’t going to volunteer any information, she said, “She was the one at the auction you went after, wasn’t she?”
He hesitated, then nodded.
“Former lover?”
He hesitated again, then nodded.
“Why do I get the impression there’s more to it than that?”
“Why do you keep asking that same question?” he said with a scowl.
She couldn’t help it. She smiled. “Why are you not being honest with me? Have I not stuck my neck out for you several times in the past? Are we not friends? Suddenly this woman breezes back into your life, and you trust no one but her?”
Peter let out a weary sigh and dropped his head back against the cushions. “She’s not just any woman,” he finally said. “She’s the one who changed my life.”
“I see,” Maria said quietly, though she didn’t, not really. Peter’s past was as blank to her as hers was to him, and for a moment, she considered letting the whole thing drop. True, he was her friend, but there was a reason she’d kept their relationship strictly sexual. She didn’t want to deal with anyone else’s baggage.
She thought of the way he’d looked at Katherine Meyer, with tenderness in his eyes and a longing she’d not seen on another man’s face in…years. And she suddenly wondered if she’d been fooling herself. Maybe he’d been the one keeping their relationship strictly sexual. Maybe she wasn’t as in control of things as she thought she was.
“I’m a good listener, Peter,” she said in a softer voice.
He lifted his head and studied her with speculative eyes. Then rose and walked to the window where he looked out at the rain dousing the city in waves. “There’s not much to tell,” he said as he pulled the curtain to the side.
“Oh, I think there is. It’s obvious she wriggled herself under your skin. In fact, I think, somehow, she broke your heart.”
When he scoffed, Maria knew she was right.
And it wasn’t jealousy that coursed through her as she looked at his somber face reflected back into the room by the window pane, but curiosity. No matter what he said, this woman meant more to him than just about anything else. It was written all over his face, in the deep lines around his mouth and in his haunted eyes. Though she’d vowed never to let herself get close to another like that again, she wasn’t so completely coldhearted that she couldn’t empathize with someone going through the same thing.
“Why don’t you tell me about this pendant and what she was doing at the auction?”
He dropped the curtain and turned to look her way. “It holds evidence pertaining to a crime she witnessed in Cairo when she was working there. We met there. She’s been in hiding ever since for fear of retaliation by the real criminals.”
“You knew about this?”
He shook his head. “I thought she was dead.”
“Oh.”
And that was how the woman had broken his heart, Maria realized. Her gaze dropped to his untouched glass on the table in front of her as links to the story fell into place. “She faked her death.”
“Yeah. She was afraid they’d come after her family if she just disappeared. She had to make it look like she’d died.”
“Where is her family now?”
“She doesn’t have any left. Her mother passed about two years ago. Heart attack.”
“Why did you not know about any of this?”
“She didn’t trust me with it. There were other things between us then.”
“I see,” Maria said again. But her brow wrinkled as she thought through what he’d said. “Why did she come back for it now?”
“Because I was selling it, and she was afraid it might fall into the wrong hands.”
“But you didn’t sell it.”
“Nope,” he said, moving to study a painting on the far wall. “I didn’t. She picked up the wrong necklace at the auction.”
“It seems to me a woman who can break into a Worthington auction and steal a prominent piece of art from underneath security’s nose isn’t helpless. You’ve had that pendant for years, and your security isn’t