The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) Read Online Free

arrowed into him until his stomach muscles tightened. Her eyes were deep and shadowed, a combination so mysterious compared to the vivid contact lens blues of the trophy wives, he felt a quixotic urge to scotch the auction, lose his set-up money, dump the fakes and inform Lord Seymour’s daughter that she should quaff the good stuff with her staff rather than sell it. There was, he had learned, always more money to shake from the rich, but self-respect was less available. He didn’t hurt women. Another way to fill his account would appear as easily as Lord Seymour’s daughter.
    He lifted his hand to signal a waiter hovering with a tray of caviar toast points, needing something to bring him back to the moment before he completely forgot his part. The movement shifted his dinner jacket sleeve away from the edge of his cuff. The small diamond centered in the ornately scrolled platinum rectangle winked at him with the memory of Nora holding the tiny box of cuff links and saying,
You have to look first class. I know how these people dress. It’s the little things that trip the other ranks.
    In three weeks, the bulldozers would arrive and Nora’s monument would disappear. Pieces might go to the basement of an unvisited local museum, but her face would never feel the mist on its marble cheeks again or become warm on a sunny August day. And the putti at her feet, the only images of Robbie he’d ever made, would be separated from her again. No, he couldn’t cancel this auction, not even for eyes like Miss Mancini’s.
    “I selected the Pluvialis for special tastings in the cave.” He swallowed his self-disgust. “Shall we continue inside?” His gesture toward the structure included the Johnsons and Christina. If Miss Mancini didn’t fuss, he’d get what he needed, and Morrison and Mancini would be unscathed.
    Jack looked eager until his wife dug her elbow into his waist and spoke for both. “We’ll let you two catch up alone. I’m off to visit that other thing. In England, do they call it the loo or the WC? I always forget.” She hauled the oilman off with a grip that creased his jacket.
    “I asked how you knew about the pinot for the Gregorys.” Her voice was quiet and uninflected as he unlatched the rustic wooden door to the private cave. “Who are you?”
    “Who do you think advised them to request that vintage?” Wisps of Miss Mancini’s hair that were too fine to stay in her bun floated on the back of her neck, but that shouldn’t blind him to the fact that she knew how to shake money from the rich tree too, given the Johnsons’ obvious fondness for her. He steered her into the dim light of the stone structure. “You do work for me.”
    “I do not work for you.” Although each word was distinct as if forced individually through her lips, she was quiet enough that the tasters standing at the exclusive bar fifteen feet away couldn’t hear.
    “Shall I inform the people outside that you’ve resigned?” In this intimate space separated from the buzzing crowd, he could smell the light combination of her scents. Nothing like the complexity of wine yet equally as alluring. He wanted to lean closer, but that would show his interest.
    “You wouldn’t.” Her tension was obvious in the visible delineation of her neck tendons. Luckily, the two patrons and bartender were so focused, they hadn’t glanced at his little drama.
    “Think they’ll listen to you?” He inhaled. No masking perfume, not for a woman who loved wine and made a living using her senses, only hints of simple fruits clinging to her hair and skin. “Or me?”
    “Everyone knows me! They’ve never met—” she glanced at the men on the other side of the cave, and he knew she revised her sentence, “—you.” She rubbed two fingers over the skin at her temples, perhaps to loosen where her tightly scraped hair had pulled her eyes into a slight squint.
    “You’ve convinced them they already know me. Jolly good job.” He studied the