Claimed (Diamond Tycoons 1)

Picking up his phone, he called his head of security. Demanded that the man meet Marc at the vault in the next five minutes. Then he grabbed his cell phone and the tablet Lisa had brought with her and made a beeline for the door and the elevator.

As if the machine understood the rage coursing through him—and the fact that Marc was one breath away from jumping out of his goddamn skin—the elevator came right away. He got on, waited for Lisa to do the same. But when Isa went to join them, he told her, “Don’t.”

She froze, eyes wide and cheeks pale. It was the last visual he had before the elevator doors slid shut.

He pulled up the video, had it running on the tablet before he even hit the vault floor. He kept it running as he did the usual security routine to open the vault, his eyes never leaving the footage as it ran through Saturday afternoon.

He paused it when Bob, his head of security, showed up. “Seven of the nearly flawless one-point-five-carat diamonds are missing,” he told Bob, as he thrust the tablet at him. “Find out what the hell happened.”

Before entering the vault, he called up the IDs of everyone who had entered in the past ninety-six hours. Lisa was right—there was no one suspicious on the list. Nobody suspicious but the woman who had spent the past three nights in his bed.

He blocked out the thought, along with the fresh wave of rage that threatened to swamp him, to pull him under. He concentrated on the job at hand.

“I want three pairs of eyes on the footage from every camera in this vault,” he barked at Bob. “I want to know what happened in this room every second of the last ninety-six hours and then I want to know what happened in every other room on this floor. In the bathroom down the hall. In the only two damn elevators that actually reach this floor. And I want to know these things in the next four hours.

“I also,” he continued, gritting his teeth and doing his damnedest not to bellow like a wounded bear, “want to know where the bloody damn hell my diamonds are. I want to know how they got out of the vault, I want to know how they got out of the building and I want to know where the hell they are right now!”

“Yes, Marc.” Bob looked as pale as Isa had right before the elevator doors closed on her. Good. It was his damn job to make sure this didn’t happen and now that it had...he damn well better figure out how to fix it.

Except it wasn’t fair to blame Bob, the little voice in the back of Marc’s head whispered. Not when Marc had knowingly, wittingly, brought an ex-thief into his building. Into his vault. Not when he’d trusted her despite her track record—and despite his misgivings. No, this wasn’t Bob’s fault so much as it was his. He was the one who had trusted Isa. He was the one who—after that first day in the vault—had given her more and more freedom at Bijoux. He had given her the run of the place because he’d begun to trust her again.

Because he’d wanted to believe in her, no matter who her father was. No matter what she’d done in her past.

Jesus Christ. Six years and he hadn’t learned a damn thing. He was still a sucker for red hair, a sweet smile and a pair of chocolate-brown eyes. Still a sucker for Isa.

No, not a sucker, he told himself viciously as more of his security team swarmed into the vault. He wasn’t a sucker. He was a goddamn fool. An idiot. A moron who deserved every bit of this. He hadn’t learned the first time, hadn’t been smart enough to keep from repeating his mistakes, so fate had stepped in to teach him a lesson once and for all.

Well, he’d learned it this time. Christ, had he ever. No way would Isa ever pull one over on him again.

Jesus, he thought even as he barked orders to start inventorying the drawers. They would have to eat the loss of those diamonds. He wasn’t going to some insurance investigator with this story. They’d laugh him out of the building. After they crucified him, that is.

Provided nothing else was missing but those seven stones, it wasn’t a big deal. They were nice stones, but they weren’t anything spectacular. They sure as hell weren’t worth enough that they would disrupt anything important, not even his profit and loss margins.

Three hundred grand retail, maybe. A hundred grand sold to a fence on the streets. That was it. A hundred thousand dollars. Is that what his love was worth to Isa? A hundred grand? Silly girl. If she’d stuck with him she could have had a lot more than that. She could have had everything that was his. He’d been so close to loving her again, so close to giving her anything and everything she could ever want.

And instead of loving him back, instead of caring about him at all, she’d done this. Stabbed him in the back even while she continued to make love to him.

His stomach clenched at the thought and for a minute he thought he was going to embarrass himself all to hell by getting sick. But he swallowed down the nausea, forced his body to take it just as he forced himself to take the pain of Isa’s betrayal. Better to deal with it now than to sublimate it and give it the power to bring him to his knees later.

He did everything he could in the vault, issued all the orders that needed to be given at this first stage of the investigation. He supposed he could thank Isa for that, too. Isa and her father. If it hadn’t been for the robbery six years ago, Marc wouldn’t be as well versed in what needed to be done.

It took him nearly three hours to make his way back down to his office. Three hours in which he watched time-lapse video of every single person who had been in the vault since Saturday afternoon. Three hours in which he had to tell his brother that they’d been robbed, again. Three hours in which he stewed and brooded and grew angrier and angrier as the truth became clear. No one had been in this vault in the past four days who hadn’t been in it hundreds of times before. No one had been in this vault who hadn’t worked for his company for at least five years. Nobody, that is, except the woman who insisted on making a fool of him over and over again.

He didn’t know what he’d find in his office, didn’t have a clue if Isa had fled the premises or if she would be stupid enough to be waiting for h

im. Nor was he sure what it said about him that he didn’t know which option he would prefer.

The choice was taken out of his hands, however, when he pushed the door to his office open and found Isa curled up on his sofa, eyes wide and feet tucked under her.

She jumped up as soon as she saw him, crossed the room at close to a dead run. “Did you find out what happened? Does Security know where the diamonds went? Or how they were smuggled out? Or—”

She broke off when he held up a hand. “I’m going to ask you once, Isa, and then I’m never going to ask you again. Did you take those diamonds?”

“No, Marc. No! Of course I didn’t. I would never do that to you. I would never do that to us.”

He stared at her for long seconds, searched her face for sincerity. Then nodded. “You need to leave.”

“Leave? But—”