The Heiress's 2-Week Affair

Chapter 2

She had to be out of her mind, Anna Worth Rothchild thought.

It was past eleven o’clock, and by all rights, she should have been in bed. The all-night parties that Vegas was so famous for no longer interested her. They never really had, but she’d pretended they did for his sake. Now, instead of curling up in her queen-sized bed, sleeping peacefully, here she was pulling up into her old driveway. Summoned by the distraught note in her ex-husband’s voice when he’d called her less than an hour ago.

She was an idiot for doing this.

What she should have said to him, Anna silently lectured herself as she got out of her ice-blue sports car, was “Tell it to your little bimbo, Rebecca Lynn. Whatever’s wrong in your life isn’t my problem anymore.”

But that was just it—it was still her problem. Her problem because she chose it to be. And that, sadly, was because reasonable, independent woman that she was, she nevertheless still loved the man. Loved him despite the fact that he had, as the old jazz songs went, “done her wrong.”

There was a term for women like her, Anna mused, and if she had half a brain, she’d turn around, get back into her car and drive back home. There was no reason for her to be here.

Yes, between the two of them, they had four daughters in common. Anna’s natural child, Silver, was her ex-husband’s daughter whom Harold later adopted. Silver grew up in the vicinity of three stepsisters from Harold’s first marriage—twins Natalie and Candace and their younger sister Jenna. Raising these girls together would forever bind Anna and Harold to one another. But he had made it perfectly clear he wanted to spend the rest of his life with that gold-digging slut who was only four years older than his twin daughters. He deserved everything that happened to him for being such a fool. For throwing away their marriage after all the years she’d stood by his side, taking care of every detail, leaving him free to handle his businesses and his hotels.

So why was she here? Why did she even care if Harold was distraught?

Because she did, Anna thought with a sigh, wrapping her ermine stole tighter around her shoulders against the April evening chill. It was as simple as that. She just did.

About to ring the doorbell, she was caught off guard when the door suddenly swung open and Clive, Harold’s butler for the past twenty-five years, firmly ushered out a tall, dark-haired man with an olive complexion. The well-built, exotic-looking man was far from happy to be leaving the premises. Although he was wearing formal attire, it appeared somewhat rumpled.

The intruder nearly knocked her down as he was being hustled out of the mansion. The unexpected close contact allowed Anna to catch the faintest whiff of a sweet scent. It was vaguely familiar and nudged something distant in her consciousness, but she couldn’t place it.

The next moment, the memory was gone. The thought that the scent was something a woman might wear whispered through her mind as she regained her balance. The latter was accomplished largely due to Clive’s swift action. Seeing her predicament, he quickly caught the former mistress of the mansion by the arm and kept her from falling.

“Sorry, ma’am, didn’t mean to be forward,” he apologized, withdrawing his hands the moment she regained her footing.

Anna smiled. After all these years with the family, Clive was still incredibly formal. She sincerely doubted that they made people, much less butlers, like him anymore.

“Apology more than accepted, Clive. If you hadn’t caught me, that oaf would have mowed me down.” She glanced over her shoulder and saw the stranger was retreating through the gate. She decided the man had to belong to the car that was parked down the street. “What was that all about?”

“I’m sure I don’t know, ma’am. He’s one of those ruthless reporters, I believe.”Anna was certain that Clive knew far more than he was saying. Nothing happened in this house or to this family that the gray-haired man was not aware of. “So nice to see you again, ma’am,” he said warmly, deftly changing the topic. “Mr. Harold is expecting you. He’s in the den.”

The butler dutifully escorted her to the room. Along the way she noted some changes. There were expensive, somewhat showy, paintings gracing the walls. Rebecca Lynn’s handiwork, no doubt, she mused. If there was a spare dime lying around, the woman would find something to spend it on.

Opening the den’s double doors for her, Clive unobtrusively backed away and withdrew, moving as silently as a shadow.

Harold, his back to her, was alone in the room. When he turned around, she was struck by how drawn he looked. His hand was wrapped tightly around a chunky scotch glass. The glass was almost empty.

Her first thought was that something had happened with the eye candy he referred to as his third wife. Had she been a lesser woman, she might have secretly gloated at the thought. But Anna was made of better stuff than that, and she found her heart aching for him, aching despite the fact that he had been less than kind during the final days of their marriage.

“All right, Harold, I’m here,” she declared, crossing to him. Removing her wrap, she carefully draped it over the back of the cream-colored leather sofa. “What’s the big emergency that couldn’t wait until morning?”

On his best day, Harold Rothchild was never one of those men who exuded power. What power he had he inherited from a father who had been almighty, leaving no room for a son to emerge and become his own man, even if he was handsome enough to turn a few heads. All his life, Harold had searched for a way to do that, to become his own man. Years after Joseph Rothchild’s death, Harold was still searching.

Draining his glass, he placed it on the desk and cleared his throat before finally giving her an answer. He felt a tightness in his chest. “It’s gone.”

He wasn’t making any sense, and there was panic evident in his blue eyes. Anna put her hand on her ex-husband’s, as if to silently reassure him that she was there for him. “What’s gone, Harold?”

“The ring.” His voice seemed to crackle with the stress he was experiencing. “My father’s ring. The Tears of the Quetzal. Candace kept asking me questions about it. When she asked to see it, I said no. I thought she’d get angry, but she just said, ‘All right.’ After she left, I had this feeling that something was wrong,” he confessed, almost talking to himself. “So I went to the safe to look at it—and it was gone,” he wailed. “And now something bad is going to happen. I can feel it. Something awful.”

Anna didn’t follow him, but then, Harold had always been secretive when it came to the ring and its origins. All she had ever gotten out of him was that, in the right hands, it brought true love to its owner within sixty seconds. In the wrong hands, dire things came to pass. Personally, she’d always thought it was all just empty talk, something to glorify the ring, nothing more. She’d only seen it once herself, and it was far too gaudy for her taste.

“Worse than the ring disappearing?” she asked.

Harold seemed to go pale right in front of her eyes. A line of sweat formed on his forehead. He sounded almost breathless when he said, “Much worse.”

Natalie Rothchild felt sick to her stomach. It took all she had to keep the light breakfast down that she’d consumed this morning.

After working her way up within the Las Vegas Police Department to the rank of detective in a relatively short amount of time, there weren’t many things that still got to her. She’d learned to harden herself, to separate herself from her work. She kept a firm, if imaginary, line drawn in the sand for herself. Her professional life was not allowed to cross over into her personal life—what little there was of it.

Natalie was well aware that if she began to take her work home with her, she would burn out within six months—the way Sid Northrop, one of the homicide detectives on the force when she’d first joined it, had.

But this was different. This was personal. And she hadn’t been summoned to the scene because it was personal. She’d come because she’d overheard the dispatch put the call out on the police scanner. According to the information, a hysterical nanny had come home with her two charges only to find the children’s mother dead on the living room floor. Natalie was about to ignore it because two other detectives were being called in to handle the homicide and God knew she had enough on her plate already without being Johnny-on-the-spot for yet another murder.

But the address that the dispatch rattled off stopped her cold. The address belonged to Candace.

A wave of fear mingled with disbelief washed over her. Her hands felt icy as she held onto the steering wheel. Even though she and her sister lived in two different worlds and didn’t interact, she still felt an obligation to keep tabs on Candace. Her twin sister had cotton candy for brains, not to mention that Candace’s self-esteem was like a giant champagne bucket with a hole in the bottom. She seemed in desperate need of adulation and found it living her life on the wild side.

If anyone needed a keeper, it was Candace. And even though they no longer had anything in common but blood, Natalie secretly had appointed herself her sister’s protector, keeping Candace out of harm’s way whenever she possibly could.

Damn, but she’d really dropped the ball this time, Natalie upbraided herself grimly.

In Candace’s condo now, she fought back anguished tears as she looked down at her sister’s battered face and body. The room looked like a battlefield, and Candace was lying on the floor next to the marble coffee table, her limbs spread out in a grotesque, awkward fashion like a cartoon character that hadn’t been drawn correctly. The scarlet dress that Candace had undoubtedly paid a fortune for accented the pool of blood that encircled her head lying on the ivory rug.

“You shouldn’t be here,” a gruff voice behind her admonished.

She blinked twice, banishing her tears before she glanced over her shoulder at Adam Parker, one of the two detectives who had been called in.

“Yeah, well, neither should she,” Natalie bit off angrily. Reaching out, she adjusted the right side of the front of Candace’s dress to cover her exposed breast.

“Hey, you know better than to touch anything,” Miles Davidson, the other detective, pointed out, crossing over to her.

Yes, she knew better. But this was her sister, and at least in death, Candace needed a little respect.

“I just wanted to cover her,” Natalie answered quietly, rising to her feet. It didn’t matter that, at one time or another, half of Vegas had probably seen Candace naked; she didn’t want this being the final impression those processing the scene came away with. Taking a cleansing breath, Natalie looked over toward Parker, the older and far more heavyset of the two detectives. “What have you got?”

His frustrated expression answered before he did. “You got here fifteen minutes after we did. Nothing so far,” he replied somberly. “The ME can answer a few basic questions for us once he gets her on the table.” Natalie continued to look at him expectantly. The ME had been on the scene when she arrived. Parker exhaled sharply. “Right now, it looks like time of death was around eight, maybe nine o’clock last night. We looked around and robbery doesn’t seem to have been a motive. Nothing’s been taken.” He pointed toward Candace’s throat. “She’s still wearing a diamond necklace.” A weary sigh escaped his lips. “Judging by her bruises and the state of this room, I’d say this was personal.”

Squatting down again, Natalie looked at her twin’s right hand. Last night, while heating up a frozen dinner, she’d kept the TV on for background noise. A program devoted to fawning over celebrities had been on, and they had gushed over live film clips from the gala in progress at The Janus.

She hadn’t been surprised to see Candace on camera. Candace had a penchant for showing up anywhere that a camera was rolling. What had surprised her was that her twin was flashing the Tears of the Quetzal, holding it up for the camera to capture. Natalie knew for a fact that her father kept the ring under lock and key, refusing even to allow any of them to see it, much less flaunt it in public.

How had Candace managed to get it away from their father?

And who had taken it off Candace’s finger?

“The ring’s gone,” she told Parker quietly.

“Ring? What ring?” Davidson blinked, suddenly looking more alert.

Parker didn’t need to ask. Natalie knew he was already aware of what she was referring to. “You mean that big golf ball-sized rock that your dad’s got hidden away in some faraway safe?” When his partner looked at him in surprise, Parker shrugged the wide shoulders beneath his worn all-weather coat. “What? I read People magazine. Sue me.”

“That’s the one,” Natalie replied with a sigh, standing up again. Her grandfather, Joseph, had owned the diamond mine from which the multifaceted, near priceless gem had emerged, or so she had heard from her stepmother. Her father’s fortune was partially built on it.

Did he kill you for it, Candace? Did whoever did this to you try to take the ring only to have you fight him off? You should have let him have it. It was a stupid rock…it wasn’t worth your life.

A thought suddenly hit her, and she looked up at the two detectives. “Anyone notify my father yet?”

Parker and Davidson exchanged looks. She had her answer. Notification of a loved one’s death was never high on anyone’s to-do list.

“Not yet,” Parker answered grimly.

Natalie nodded, already resigned to her part in this. “I’ll do it. Let me know what the ME comes up with as soon as there’s a report.”

Parker frowned, but his tone was kind as he tried to make her understand his position. “Natalie, we can’t have you—”

She stopped him before he could finish voicing his protest. “Unofficially,” she emphasized. “Notify me unofficially.” There was no room for argument in her voice. She looked around. “Where are the kids?”

“Kids?” Davis echoed.

“Kids,” she repeated. “Candace’s kids. Mick and David. My sister has—had—two children. Dispatch said the nanny found her and called this in. Where are they?”

“Take it easy. She took them back to her sister’s house. Don’t worry, Sanchez went with her,” Parker said, mentioning another detective. “Um, correct me if I’m wrong, but from what I heard, your sister really didn’t keep close tabs on her kids.”

“No, she didn’t.” She needed to get in touch with the nanny, Natalie thought as she left.

She had the woman’s name and number programmed into her cell phone. She’d already checked out Amelia Pintero’s background to satisfy herself that her young nephews were in good hands—and not because Candace had asked her to. Candace, as she recalled, was just glad to have someone else take care of them for her. She would have used Gypsies if they’d crossed her path before Amelia had.

Natalie knew that it was a given that she wouldn’t be allowed to investigate her sister’s murder, but there was no law that said she couldn’t look into it on her own when she was off duty. And even if there was, there was no way she was about to abide by the restriction. She and Candace hadn’t gotten along in a long time, but blood was blood and after all was said and done, Candace was still her sister. More, she’d been her twin. A part of her was dead.

She deserved some answers—and the killer deserved to be put away for the rest of his life. It was as simple as that. And she planned to kick off her investigation by going to The Janus, the casino where Candace was last seen. She was going to have to find a way to get a look at the security tapes, to see if someone had followed her sister when she left the casino—or if, and this scenario was far more likely, Candace had elected to leave the casino with someone new.

In her heart, Natalie had always known that men would be her sister’s downfall.

And that makes you different how? a mocking tone in her head queried. For her, it hadn’t taken a squadron of men; all it had taken was one. One man who had sworn his love for her, given her an engagement ring and then pulled a disappearing act.

It had made her back away from the entire species.

Damn, she hadn’t thought about Matt in, what? A couple of months or so.

Now was not the time for a stroll down memory lane, Natalie chided herself as she pulled up in her father’s winding driveway.

Natalie took a deep breath, bracing herself for the ordeal ahead. It didn’t really help.

With effort, she got out of her car.

The walk from the driveway to the front door felt exceptionally drawn out and almost painful, a little like a prisoner walking the last mile before his execution, she mused.

Clive answered the door. He smiled at her, looking both formal and kind at the same time. It was a feat she never quite understood how he accomplished. A pleased light entered his hazel eyes. “Miss Natalie, what a pleasant surprise.”

She knew he meant it. For a second, she allowed herself to absorb his words, and then she set her mouth solemnly. “Not so pleasant I’m afraid, Clive. Is my father home?”

To his credit, Clive displayed no curiosity, asked no questions. “Yes he is, Miss, but I fear that he doesn’t seem to be himself today.”

Natalie looked at the butler in surprise. Had her father heard about Candace? But how? The police were keeping everything under wraps for now. Their main logic behind this was to stave off the media vultures for as long as possible. They could feed on this kind of fodder for six, nine months at a time. And they would. But right now, they weren’t supposed to know.

Had there been a leak?

“Why?” she pressed. “What’s wrong, Clive?”

She knew that the man was very closemouthed, but she also knew that while she’d lived in this cold mausoleum of a house, she had been his favorite. So she looked up at the tall man and waited for a response.

It came. “It’s the Tears of the Quetzal, Miss. I’m afraid that someone seems to have made off with it.”

An image of Candace, flaunting the ring in front of the cameraman, flashed through her mind. It was immediately followed by the sight of her lifeless body lying on the rug, her hand denuded of the legendary ring.

“You can say that again,” she murmured under her breath. “Where is he?”

“He’s on the terrace, Miss. He’s been there for most of the night. I tried to get him to come in, but…” His voice trailed off.

“You’re a good man, Clive. But some people won’t allow themselves to be helped.” She was talking about Candace—not her father—but for now, it was applicable to him as well.

Turning, Natalie made her way to the back of the house, no small feat. As far as houses went, she’d always felt that this one could have provided shelter to a small third world country. Neither she nor her stepmother, Anna, had cared for its enormity, but Candace had loved it and her father’s current wife, Rebecca Lynn, the world’s only living brain donor, had actually been lobbying for something even bigger and more ostentatious.

Maybe the Taj Mahal was up for sale, Natalie thought sarcastically. She could remember thinking when they first moved to this house that she needed to drop bread crumbs to mark her way or be forever doomed to wandering the halls, looking for the way out.

She’d found the way out years ago.

Finally reaching the back of the building, she walked out onto the terrace. She was immediately struck by her father’s profile as he sat at the table. He was still a handsome man, Natalie caught herself thinking. But right now, he looked gaunt and incredibly weary, as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders.

That was Rebecca Lynn’s fault, no doubt. He was trying to keep up with a woman half his age who was determined to “do it all.” Either that, or become a young widow. God knew she wouldn’t put it past Rebecca Lynn.

She didn’t say anything until she was almost at his elbow. “Hi, Dad.”

She’d startled him. He sucked in his breath, his body tense and rigid. “Natalie, what are you doing here?”

There was no point in beating around the bush. It only prolonged the inevitable, and that wasn’t her style. “I have some terrible news, Dad.” Natalie sat down at the table and placed her hand over his. Her father wasn’t the touchy-feely type, but this time, she thought some contact might actually help. “Candace is dead.”

He visibly paled but didn’t look nearly as surprised as she thought he would. She supposed that, given Candace’s lifestyle, all of them had been expecting this day now for a long time. “When?”

“Last night.”

He slowly nodded his head, as if that helped him take in the information. “Where?”

“They found her body at her condo. The nanny came home with the kids after a sleepover and discovered her. She called the police.” She enunciated the words slowly, refusing to allow her voice to break, her emotions to leak through. Her feelings were private, even from her father. “Candace was murdered.”

It took Harold a moment to process the information she’d given him, and then he looked up at her, his expression devoid of emotion. “Did she have the ring on her?”