“Thirty-seven-fifty,” Lange countered.
“Four,” Riley said. Oh, he was in it now. He knew Harry had no desire for the necklace, he was only goading him on. He didn’t know what Harry was playing at and at this point he didn’t care. He had finally figured out just what treasure he had been about to throw away and he wasn’t letting some grouchy old man yank it out of his hands.
“We’ve got a bid of four thousand. Do I hear forty-five?”
“Forty-two-fifty,” Lange said before the words were out.
“Forty-two-fifty, going once, going twice.”
“Five,” Riley said quickly.
“Do I hear fifty-two-fifty?”
He waited for the other guy to counter, holding his breath. While Lange might have endless pockets, Riley unfortunately did not. He did have a healthy nest egg he had built through shrewd investments and he had no problem using some of it for this cause. At heart, this was about a scholarship fund in his niece’s name, not about Claire’s necklace.
The silence seemed to drag on while everybody waited for the little drama to play out.
“Five thousand, going once...going twice...”
Lange made a little gesture of defeat to Riley, that smirk still on his features.
“Sold, to the new police chief for five thousand dollars. Chief, do you want to come up and collect your item?”
As he made his way to the dais, he heard the swell of whispers, the speculation about why the unattached chief of police would spend five grand on a pretty piece of jewelry.
“That’s going to look smashing with your badge,” his sister Angie teased as he passed her.
He ignored her and Alex’s narrow-eyed look of suspicion. Out of the corner of his gaze, he caught his mother’s bright, delighted smile, but he didn’t return it, focused only on moving forward to reach out for his prize.
He supposed while he was up there, he might as well pick up the necklace, too.
*
As Riley seemed to move toward her in slow motion, Claire couldn’t manage to grab hold of her wildly whirling thoughts.
Five thousand dollars for her necklace! It was outrageous. She had been hoping for a tenth of that and would have been over the moon if it had sold for a thousand. Five! What was Riley doing?
She couldn’t hear anything over the pounding of her pulse in her ears as Riley continued moving toward her, his green eyes full of an emotion she couldn’t name. He looked delicious in an elegant tux that seemed out of character but absolutely right on him.
She had tried not to stare at him all evening—when he’d been dancing with his mother, when he’d stopped to tease Angie, when he had flirted outrageously with a couple of the older ladies who came to the senior citizen beading group. She couldn’t help it if he happened to spend entirely too much time in her line of vision. Purely unintentional, she had told herself.
Now she couldn’t seem to look away.
“Hi,” he murmured when he was only a few feet away. The auction was continuing on without them. They could have been selling the deed to her house for all she knew or cared right then.
She cleared her throat and worked the fastenings connecting the necklace to the form. “You paid entirely too much for this.”
“I disagree. It’s for a good cause.”
Claire was entirely too aware that several people around them—primarily his family and her mother—were just as oblivious to the auction still going on, focusing instead on their little drama.
“Um, I have a box for it so you can take it home.”
“I’ll just take it now. No box necessary. Thank you.”
He held out a hand and she didn’t know what else to do. She handed it to him and couldn’t help thinking how incongruous it looked, all those pretty, glittery stones in his masculine fingers.
“Turn around,” he ordered.
She stared. “Excuse me?”
“Turn around so I can put the necklace on you.”
They were drawing even more attention, Claire thought as she stood frozen. Harry Lange, of all people, was giving them a very amused look, as close to smiling as she’d ever seen him. Strange. Ruth was glaring, no surprise there. Jeff and Holly were both looking baffled, while Katherine and Mary Ella beamed at each other.
“I don’t understand,” she finally said.
“What’s to understand? I bought it for you.”
“You...what?”
“It’s yours. It rightfully belongs to you. You named it the Heart of Hope, didn’t you?” he said, his voice low. “I figure it’s only proper, then, that it should belong to the person who is actually the Heart of Hope’s Crossing.”
She stared at him, her heart pounding at the heat in his eyes and the glittery emotion there.