The Temptation (Filthy Rich Americans 5)

I reached out, grasped the cold, steel wheel, and pulled with all the force in my body as if I could wrench it open with brute force. But that was unnecessary.

The wheel turned.

NINETEEN

EMERY

When the door to the Lagerfield cracked open, I nearly collapsed into Vance. My heart was banging in my throat, clogging my ability to breathe, and when the door moved, air swept into my lungs in a rush.

I’d done it. It took nearly two hours, but I’d manipulated the open of one of the most challenging safes on the market. It wasn’t an individual effort, though. None of this would have been possible without Vance. He was the man I’d fallen in love with even as he’d warned me not to, and was literally my partner in crime now.

But there was no time to sit back and congratulate ourselves. We were way behind schedule. He had the same thought because he jerked the door all the way open, revealing its contents.

The interior setup of Lambert’s was different than Vance’s. The top section of this safe had been customized with a watch winding panel. There were eight watches displayed, separated into two rows of four, and each timepiece was housed in a circular mechanism. It would cycle every half hour, moving to mimic being worn on a wrist and charge the battery through kinetic energy.

In the center section were the velvet lined drawers, and Vance beat me to the first one. When he pulled it out, diamonds and pearls and various gemstones glinted in the low light. Serena Lambert’s jewelry collection was extensive, and spanned the next two drawers, and I tried not to think about how a single piece from it could have covered months of rent for my family when we were struggling.

The final drawer had several compartments and was mostly empty, other than a silver handgun, two spare magazines, and a few pairs of cufflinks.

All the relief that had poured through me moments ago was beginning to dry up. The bottom section of the safe was a stack of assorted documents no thicker than a few notebooks. Where were the laptops or hard drives?

I grabbed a handful of paper off the top, being mindful of what we were doing. The plan was to put everything back exactly as we’d found it, so Lambert would have no idea we’d been here. Vance worried if Lambert discovered his safe had been penetrated, it might trigger a contingency plan, and who knew what that would unleash?

One of us was an attorney, but even a layman like me could understand the top document. The prenuptial agreement looked recent, and since Vance was a faster reader than I was, he got the gist first.

He gently pulled it from my grasp and flipped to the final page, staring at the black ink scrawled at the bottom. “Shit, he already signed it.”

The prenup was between Jillian and Ansel, and his signature and the signing date adorned the bottom line of the contract. I tugged my eyebrows together as I read the neat printing. “Look at the date.”

It was only a few days before Jillian had set sail on The Trident. Her signature line was blank, though. Had this been drafted without her knowledge? What if the night I’d broken into Lambert’s safe was the first time she’d seen it?

“This is what spooked her,” I guessed. She’d felt the walls closing in and wasn’t going to be forced to marry a man she didn’t love. Especially if she was in love with someone else, someone her family would never approve.

Vance set the contract aside, and we focused our attention on the next set of documents. They looked like email printouts, and the Barlowe Pharmaceuticals logo was in the signature line for some of them. The dates were from earlier this year, so well after my father’s passing. I thumbed through the printouts, not finding anything of interest, and moved on. The next set was some sort of report. I scanned the dense text and saw the numbers in the columns, but nothing leapt out at me. It appeared to be clinical trial results of a drug Barlowe had developed.

“Any ideas on this?” I handed it over to him.

While he read, I stared at the safe critically. This couldn’t be it. What if these papers were nothing more than sensitive documents Lambert hadn’t gotten around to shredding yet?

I rose onto my knees and opened the top drawer, running my hands along the trays and beneath it, searching. He’d gone to the trouble of concealing this beautiful safe inside a fake piece of furniture, which I’d spent five frustrating minutes figuring out how to get open. My gut told me I hadn’t discovered all this Lagerfield’s secrets.

I moved on to the second drawer, sliding my gloved fingertips over the velvet lining and moving the necklaces around before putting them back in place. My search of the third drawer was just as fruitless.