To Love a Thief by Darcy Burke Read Free Book Online Page A

didn’t change—he wasn’t agitated for angry, but resolute and logical. His skills as a constable hadn’t diminished.
    “We should notify Bow Street, shouldn’t we?” Moss asked.
    “Yes, but first I’d like to see if anything was taken.” Carlyle focused his attention on Jocelyn. “Are you up to going through the house with me?” His stare was intent as usual, but carried a gleam of authority. He was in his element, solving a crime. She was going to have to tell him what she believed had happened, and he wasn’t going to like it. Not when she’d committed a crime too.
    She squared her shoulders. “Where do you want to start?”
    “Your bedchamber, I think.”
    Jocelyn couldn’t help the flush that crept up her cheeks. Was it inappropriate to allow a man into your bedchamber for the purposes of solving a crime?
    She led him up the back stairs, climbing two flights to the first floor. At the threshold to her bedchamber, Jocelyn froze. Her room hadn’t just been searched. It had been destroyed. Her bed had been pulled apart and the pillows cut open. The drawers in the dresser set in the corner were all open, with the contents spilling out. Even the draperies on the window hung at an angle.
    She stepped inside and moved into the tiny dressing chamber. This too had been ransacked. Her clothes lay strewn about the floor and, perhaps most telling, her mother’s jewelry box was in pieces on the dressing table. And that made her furious.
    “Is there anything missing?” Carlyle asked from behind her.
    She went to the dressing table and picked up one of the shattered pieces of the jewelry box. Now was the time to tell him. She had to. After seeing him with the retainers, his concern for the entire situation, she wondered if he could help her. But would he? “I don’t think so.” She turned to face him. “I know what they were looking for.”
    The treasures in her pocket suddenly felt like lead weighing her down. She pulled them out and turned them over in her palm so he could see them clearly.
    He stepped in front of her, staring at her hand. “You did take them.”
    She jerked her head up. “You knew?”
    He raised his gaze to hers, but she couldn’t discern what he was thinking—was he disappointed, angry, something else? “I suspected, which is why I came to see you today. I heard your pocket jangling when we left the office the other night, and when Lady Aldridge told me some things were missing from her jewelry box, I wondered if you’d taken them. Particularly when she said one of them was the pendant her husband had given her.”
    “It’s my pendant. Just as these earrings and this brooch also belong to me.”
    He stared at her. “You stole them.” His tone was still even, but beneath its deceptive calm seethed a current of anger.
    He was angry then. She was getting there too. “I recovered them. It’s not stealing if they’re mine.”
    “You can’t prove that—or so you told me. And you’re mistaken. Lord Aldridge said the pendant wasn’t yours.”
    She moved a bit closer as she glared up at him. “You don’t find it rather coincidental that he has three items identical to mine? I might’ve been able to eventually accept the pendant was simply an exact version of my mother’s, but not these earrings and the brooch too. No, these items belong to me .” She curled her fingers around the jewelry in her hand. “Furthermore,” she swept her hand out, indicating the devastation of her room,” he doesn’t want me to have them back.”
    His face was impassive, his eyes dark and devoid of emotion. “What were you doing in his study?”
    He was well-versed in intimidation, but Jocelyn wasn’t having it. She regretted using him for her own ends, but she didn’t regret trying to uncover Aldridge’s deceit. “Looking for proof that he’d either purchased these items or maybe … something else. And there are other missing items, so I was looking for them.” She lifted her chin.
    His