by Eve Devon
“What the—”
“I kid you not.” Okay, so he might have had some pretty impressive video jiggery-pokery to help him arrive at that conclusion, but even so.
“Idiot of Steel,” Sophie declared. “Complete and actual Bastard of Steel.”
Honeysuckle smiled. “God, it’s good to hear your voice, sis.” There was no hesitation. No judgment. You took away all the sibling rivalry over the years and Sophie knew she wouldn’t do what Adam had accused her of. Even if Sophie had seen the tape, she would have understood quickly that for Honeysuckle to do that would be playing so far against type that something else must be going on.
Why couldn’t Adam be like that? She’d really thought what they shared had been more. The way he’d touched her. The way he’d looked at her when he was moving within her. She couldn’t have got that wrong. Couldn’t have.
“You want me to fly out there,” Sophie suggested with her most gentle tone.
And see what mess she’d got herself into this time? Definitely not. Besides, if she suddenly got herself arrested, she’d get one phone call, right? She could divulge all then.
She didn’t know why she wasn’t more stressed out about Adam implying she’d stolen the Pasha Star. Maybe it was that the idea was so utterly preposterous in her head she felt no one, bar an imbecile, would believe it either.
“No. It’s okay. Thanks for letting me vent, though. I actually rang for something else. Do you know where your Steel Hawk key is?”
“Um, I could probably lay my hands on it. Has to be around here somewhere.”
“Try your jewelry box. You know that thing filled with bling you never wear.”
Honeysuckle heard Sophie softly swear as she stubbed her toe, presumably getting out of bed to go and root through her closet.
“Okay, give me a minute here to search. Why do you need the key anyway?”
“Because I’m really hoping that the tree stamped onto the back of it is a better image. If it is, I can use it to search some records over here. I think whoever wrote that biography is connected to Zarrenburg. Maybe even the royal family. Someone is trying to make Steel Hawk look bad. Lots of things have come to light since we got here.” She couldn’t tell Sophie over the phone about someone stealing the Pasha Star. It was too dangerous, given that they were trying to pretend it hadn’t been stolen. Plus, Sophie would really worry, and she didn’t want that for her.
“But the coronation went off smoothly, right? I mean I saw a little of it on the news, and everything is okay with the exhibition?” Sophie’s antennae were up. So much for being subtle.
“Yes. The exhibition is running fine. But someone hacked into Adam’s new software and is trying to make it look like Steel Hawk isn’t as good at their job, anymore.”
“That’s Adam’s problem surely. Or have you got it so bad that after he accuses you of something you would never do, you’re going to help him. Am I going to have to start calling you Idiot now?”
“I might be about as unimpressed with him as can be right now, but I’m not about to let someone come in and make him look like he’s incompetent, when that is the very last thing he is.”
“Wow. This is more than having it bad. This is sounding a lot like lo—”
“Sophie, I can’t let someone attack Steel Hawk like this,” Honeysuckle insisted, cutting her sister off. “I’m part of them now. And I’m telling you that I will find out who is doing this to us, who is hurting Steel Hawk, who is hurting Adam, and get them put away for it.”
“Do you think someone could be hurting you? What about Lou?”
“Lou isn’t involved. And what I thought I saw? It’s a good job I never told anyone because I was about as wrong as could be. And okay, I’m a Hawk, but so are you and Mom and Dad, and no one’s coming after you, are they?”
“No. I’ve been keeping a close eye. Everything’s fine here.”
“So why me? I’m no one. I may be Adam’s assistant, but anyone who did any research would know I don’t have the security clearance they’d need to do real damage. I’m useless to them. And I could hardly be used against Adam as leverage. I mean, the man wouldn’t even care, Soph.” She sighed as some of the hurt crept through.
“Hey, what were you talking about a tree for?” Sophie suddenly said. “I don’t have one on my key.”
“You don’t. There is no tree? No portcullis—um, a sort of gate that looks like a grid?”
“Nope.”
“Great. Another dead end.”
“I have the female chromosome symbol on mine and a word I can’t quite make out.”
“What?” Honeysuckle sat up straight. It had never even occurred to her that the symbols on Sophie’s key might be different. “Oh my God. Can you send me a photo now?”
“Sure.”
Honeysuckle’s thoughts raced as she waited for the image to appear on her cell.
No one had gone after Sophie’s key, so were the keys really a clue? But maybe whoever was doing this didn’t know there was a second key.
Her phone pinged to signal an incoming multimedia message, and she opened up the file and stared.
On the back of Sophie’s key, there was a female chromosome sign and what looked like the word “Burgh”. A misspelling of Burg? Zarrenburg?
Reconnecting to her call, she said, “Sophie, this is going to sound weird, but I need you to find a pair of pliers and open up the key by holding the head and twisting the shank to unscrew it.”
“What if I break it?”
“If you break it, I’ll fix it. Once you’ve got it open, you’ll find a piece of paper inside. It will probably show the two symbols on the key, but I need you to send me a photo of it all as soon as you access it. And, Sophie? I know you can take care of yourself. But I want you to put the key somewhere you feel is safe, okay? Either thread it onto a chain and wear it, or put it where you know no one would find it. There’s a possibility someone might come after it.”
“Honeysuckle, you are safe in Zarrenburg, right?”
“I’ll be fine. There are guards all over the place.”
“And Steel Hawk protects its own. Idiot of Steel won’t let anything happen to you, right?”
“Right,” she confirmed, because it was what Sophie needed to hear.
She stared down at her phone for a few moments before drawing a deep breath and flicking her hair over her shoulder. She didn’t have time to think about Adam. She needed to get back to the records vault.
She was halfway back out the room when she sensed his presence. Turning abruptly, she asked, “How long have you been standing there?”
Chapter Seventeen
Adam shoved his hands into his pockets. “I’ve been here since before ‘come on, pick up, pick up, pick up’.”
He watched as Honeysuckle looked as if she was concentrating on putting her phone in her pocket, but after she’d slipped it in, he saw the way her hands ran nervously down her thighs, and when she lifted her head, she was flushing scarlet.
“Well, you haven’t had me arrested yet, so I take it I’m free to carry on about my business,” she said with a touch of defiance that stirred his blood and made him disbelieve all over again the way she’d talked with Sophie on the phone.
“Maybe I figure you can take me to Edward,” he replied, steeling his heart and mentally reminding himself that he’d sworn he’d never let another woman take him for a ride.
He took a step forward, and she took one backward, and he hated she could be afraid of him. Hated that as he was standing there listening to her on the phone with her sister, hearing how he had hurt her, hearing that she had thought they were more, his heart had actually ached.
She’d had no idea she had an audience, and the way she had spoken was not that of a thief.
She’d defended Steel Hawk.
She’d defended him.
<
br /> Damn, but he didn’t know what to think. Every time he’d closed his eyes, he saw her with Edward Long.
“Edward is still missing?” Honeysuckle asked with a frown.
Adam had no clue where the man was. He’d had Anton search the castle. He’d been phoning Max to get him to switch the GPS tracking back on Edward’s phone when he heard Honeysuckle returning.
Part of Adam acknowledged it was a blessing he didn’t know where Edward was. Because if he did, and he got his hands on him…
The other part was cautioning him to collect facts before wading in.
If Edward had instigated all of this, Adam needed to make sure he had proof that would stick. It was the only way Steel Hawk would be able to cut Edward from the business and start the work to rebuild their reputation again.
“Where did you sleep last night?” Honeysuckle asked. “When I came back, you weren’t here.”
“I spent the rest of the night setting up the new security case for the exhibition. I got a couple of hours’ sleep down there.”
Honeysuckle nodded and then licked her lips and squared her shoulders. “I know you know I didn’t steal the diamond, Adam. I knew it as soon as you let me walk out of here last night.”
Adam’s gaze narrowed.
All the things he’d accused her of being last night, and still he hadn’t quite been able to bring himself to have Anton take her in for questioning.
“Do you still believe I had sex with Edward in the throne room?” she asked when he remained silent.
He couldn’t answer.
His brain said yes, and it caused him actual physical pain.
His heart said no, and he worried she would use that to destroy him.
The longer he stayed silent, the more fidgety she got. She hugged her arms around herself, winced, and then dropped them back to her sides.
Without thinking, Adam stepped forward and touched her. Taking her hand, he lifted her arm. “Did I hurt you last night when I grabbed your wrist?” He’d been so incensed, so sickened, felt so betrayed when the images had burst onto the screen, he hadn’t stopped to consider how strong he was in comparison to her.
Again it flashed through his mind that there was no way she could have knocked him to the floor.
But if she truly hadn’t been there, that meant she hadn’t been there having sex with Edward either.
“You haven’t answered my question,” she said, standing her ground, her hand so soft in his, her big, shiny eyes staring up at him.
Now he tried to picture the footage in his head. Now he tried to recall the devastation he’d felt when he’d seen the woman he’d made love with, making out with the company’s lawyer. So he could harness the anger to protect himself.
Protect his heart.
But she looked at him and made it so damn difficult.
Because as much as she believed his heart was apparently made of steel, with her, it turned out, it wasn’t.
He stroked his thumb over the pulse point on her wrist and watched as her lips parted a little for him.
Dare he trust?
Or should he keep her close and remain vigilant?
He couldn’t get clear of hearing her on the phone. Her every word had stemmed from her connection to him. There had been nothing of Edward in there.
“Well, I guess that’s not an outright yes,” Honeysuckle said finally. “I’ll take it for now.” Removing her hand from his grip, she cleared her throat. “Do you want to pool information, or am I not to be trusted with anything?”
She was tacitly letting the subject go, and he was going to roll with that. It would give him the breathing space to allow his brain to recover and think. Think about who could be doing this if it wasn’t Honeysuckle and Edward.
“Show me what you have,” Adam said, refusing to let a smile form when Honeysuckle rolled her eyes and muttered something about “reciprocal sharing of information”.
He followed her down to the records vault as she told him about the tree and then Sophie’s key.
After introducing Adam to the librarian, she showed him the articles she’d been reading.
“I couldn’t get a sharper image of the tree,” she told the librarian apologetically. “Have you had any luck turning up a similar picture to the one of the tree from my key?”
“I’m sorry, but there is nothing,” the woman said, and Adam could see the disappointment in the set of Honeysuckle’s shoulders as she took a seat back at the table.
“Out of interest,” Adam asked, thinking that now they had to chase down every possible lead, “did you get any hits at all when you searched for ‘tree’?”
“Hundreds,” the librarian said. “But, of course, they all stem from ‘family’, as in ‘family tree’.”
Adam felt a pulsing behind his eyes. A shiver swept over the top of his spine. “You mean as in the family tree of the Zarrenburgs?”
“Yes. We have many books that depict the royal family tree. Would you like to see those as well?”
“Absolutely,” Adam and Honeysuckle said in unison.
But then Honeysuckle added, “Actually, could we start with the records from the 1800s up to right before the portcullis was removed from the Zarrenburg flag in 1851, please.”
Adam took a seat opposite Honeysuckle and watched her collecting all the articles she had been reading, so that she could push them out of the way in preparation for new information to be placed in front of her.
She looked up, caught him staring and, damn, if she didn’t blush again. All the things he had accused her of being—all the different versions of her—but the blushing remained consistent. Whichever role she was playing, he could still get her to blush.
That was real.
That was honest.
Alexa had probably never blushed in her life. Perhaps that had been how she’d managed to fool him so badly.
Honeysuckle passed him her cell phone. “This is the back of Sophie’s key. See the female symbol and the word?”
“Looks like ‘Burgh’,” he commented, shaking the phone to look at it both portrait and landscape, and then tapping the screen to zoom in on each symbol individually.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“What are you thinking?”
“A tree, the Zarrenburg flag”—she leaned forward and kept her voice low—“the symbol for a female and the word…name, ‘Burgh’… I think we’re looking at Rose Hawk trying to tell Steel Hawk there was another female member of the royal family!”
Adam blew out a breath. “Why wouldn’t she tell the Zarrenburgs?”
“Maybe this is about protecting Steel Hawk. Giving us a secret we could use if we needed to. Think about it. If she made these keys right after Prince Randolph died, it seems so relevant. She would have known Prince Stefan had changed the flag. Why use the old symbol if it didn’t mean something?”
Adam stared at the Steel Hawk key hanging from Honeysuckle’s neck. “But history shows our relationship with Zarrenburg has been mutually beneficial since 1851. There has never been any enmity between us.”
“True.” Honeysuckle didn’t look like she could let it go, though. “But it wouldn’t hurt to correlate what we have with who was born within a certain number of years before 1851.”
“If this is about an illegitimate member of the Zarrenburgs,” he said, looking to ensure the librarian was out of earshot, “we’re not going to find evidence of it in formal documents of the Zarrenburg family tree.”
“It’s worth a shot,” she said, looking determined. “If you need to get back to the exhibition or check in with Anton, I could stay here and search.”
“No. Anton has everything in hand. He’ll phone if there is anything I need to know about the diamond. Gustav has put a public statement out about the power outage. It’s a case of waiting to see wha
t happens next. The idea of waiting doesn’t bore you?” he slipped in at the end.
“Huh?”
“Well, don’t you usually move on when you get bored?”
“You think the only reason I’m still here is that it’s exciting?”
He stared at her for long moments and finally cut her some slack. “No. Actually I don’t.”
“I can hardly pretend you didn’t hear me on the phone to Sophie. You know why I’m here.”
“Because of Steel Hawk.”
He waited for her to say more. To say it was because of him. Because he wanted to be looking into her eyes when she said it.
Instead she said, “Right. Because of Steel Hawk.”
And he was a masochist.
The librarian came back with a leather foolscap folio. “You will need to wear these linen gloves to handle the pages of this book.” She passed the pair she was holding to Honeysuckle, who quickly put them on and began turning pages, skimming names and dates.
While she was doing that, Adam asked, “Do you know if this word means something specific or is it a name, perhaps?” showing the librarian a close-up of the word on Honeysuckle’s phone.
“It is a common name here.” The librarian looked uncomfortable, as if she knew where they were going with their questions and didn’t want to have to say she couldn’t give out information about possible illegitimate members of the royal family. “You will not find any records of that name here. We only have the Zarrenburgs.”
“Of course. We understand.”
The woman seemed to consider for a moment and then, with a quick pursing of her lips, leaned forward and whispered, “I have been instructed by His Majesty to provide you with all possible assistance, so I suggest you visit the History Center in the city to look at birth records for that name.”
“One last thing,” Honeysuckle said. “Would you know if the name Burgh was popular in the 1800s?”
“Back then, I am not so sure. You should speak with our previous royal biographer. She was always down here, researching and filling in her knowledge gaps. Ask Gustav Ambrus if he knows how to contact her.”
