“Mother!”
Gabrielle was ice and steel—all that was cool and calm and beautiful. She did not yell. She froze. And even Irina could see that something wasn’t quite right with her daughter.
“Who is running the Bird in the Hand?” Gabrielle asked.
Irina shook her head. “No one. There’s no one here except us. I’d know, you know. I’ve been working this job for months.”
“Did you know the earl is nearly bankrupt?” Hale asked, but Irina waved the fact aside.
“Of course. He’s draining the estate dry before he dies. It’s no secret. He thinks that will punish his nephew and drive his daughter to the altar.”
“Why are you here, Mother? If the money is running out.”
Irina’s look was bemused and maybe a little disappointed. Clearly, she hadn’t trained Gabrielle as well as she’d thought.
“Money comes and goes, darling. Tiaras are forever. So are titles.”
Gabrielle practically rolled her eyes. “You’ve been a countess, a duchess; I seem to remember a six-month period when I was twelve where you were known exclusively as Princess Mariah. You can be a countess any time you want.”
“Oh, Gabrielle. The best lie is the truth. Surely you know that. Kat knows that. Otherwise why would W. W. Hale the Fifth have just walked through these doors? This one job can set me up for the rest of my life. And it will set you up too if you play your cards right. It’s a shame Fletcher is so fond of redheads. Maybe if we—”
“Who stole the egg, Irina?” Hale pushed away from the doorframe and crossed the room in three long strides. He wasn’t the cool, calm inside man, the flirt, the playboy. Not even the heir. He was a boy who had lost his grandmother too soon and wasn’t going to stop until he had this one small piece of her back where it belonged. “The Egg of the Magi, who stole it?”
Irina could have acted confused, could have lied. But she didn’t. Kat could see it in her eyes as she said, “What are you kids talking about? Did Uncle Eddie put you up to this?”
“The Egg of the Magi is missing, Aunt Irina,” Kat said. “Someone’s running the Bird in the Hand, and we need that egg before it’s sold on the black market and lost forever.”
Irina’s eyebrow went up. For the first time, she looked at her sister’s daughter as if she might be a fool.
“The Egg of the Magi is not missing.”
“Do you know where it is?” Kat asked.
“It’s downstairs!” Irina snapped.
Kat looked at Hale, who said, “Show us.”
If the servants thought it strange to see their future mistress, the young American billionaire, his assistant, and the new maid traipsing through the manor house, all in a row, while the rest of the guests were gathering in the blue parlor for tea, no one said so. It was the kind of house—the kind of world—where the help learned early on to see everything and say nothing.
When the future countess threw open the doors to the library, there wasn’t a soul inside. The room was long and stretched the width of one of the newer wings of the house, and she walked like a queen across the rich red carpet until she reached the glass case that sat framed by a bay of floor-to-ceiling windows.
Perhaps it was the late afternoon sun, the cool clear glass of the case, but the object on the pedestal seemed to have its own light—to glow from within.
“Here,” Irina said, gesturing toward it. “Here is your precious egg.”
Gabrielle and Hale looked at each other, as if to say well, do you want to steal it or should I?
Gabrielle was actually reaching for a fireplace poker, preparing to strike the glass and have done with it, when Kat backed away from the case and said, “Fake.”
“No, Kat, dear. The earl assured me that this is the Egg of the Magi. It can’t be a fake.”
“Oh, it’s a fake,” Kat said. “A good one. Good enough to be one of Uncle Charlie’s, in fact, but it’s a fake for sure.”
“How do you know?” Irina asked.
She raised an eyebrow. “I have an Egg of the Magi. A real one, remember?”
Kat could feel Hale at her elbow, easing closer for a better look.
Irina and Gabrielle flanked them on either side, four sets of eyes staring at the glistening gems and polished gold. Perhaps that’s why no one heard the library doors open until a familiar voice rang out.
“Found it!”
As soon as Kat turned she recognized the pristine uniform of an earl’s footman and the boy inside it. Hamish was every bit a Bagshaw as he strolled through the main door of the room, a delicate bundle in his outstretched hands.
“Old fella had this in with his skivvies, but—”
“I’ve got it!” a nearly identical voice rang out from the doors that led onto the mansion’s back patio. Angus Bagshaw was slightly shorter and slightly heavier than his brother, but in their matching livery they looked almost like twins, especially when they met in the center of the room, their hands holding nearly identical eggs.
“Fakes,” Kat said with a single glance.
“Your fiancé is crazy,” Gabrielle told her mother. “You can still pick ’em.”
But Irina merely shrugged. “Older men have their merits, dear. Older rich men have many of them.”
“Where is it?” Hale was asking, turning to Kat.
“We’re going to find it, Hale.”
“Are we? Or are we going to spend who-knows-how-long scouring this place, finding nothing but more and more proof that the Earl of Greymore is crazy?”