The Sapphire Affair (Jewel #1)

A green taxi.

Passengerless and idling at a red light. He sprinted to the door, grabbed the handle, and slid inside.

The cabbie arched a bushy eyebrow. “Oui?”

Jake gave the address of his hotel in the seventh arrondissement. Then added in French, “Quickly, please.”

“How fast?”

“As fast as you can.”

“It’ll cost you extra.”

“Yes. I know,” he said drily.

The light changed, and the cab peeled away, leaving two Irish Stradivarius thieves in his wake on the outskirts of Montmartre. His breath came fast as he settled into the backseat, slinging the backpack around to his front. Blood from the knife cut drizzled along his skin. Tugging at the waistband of his shirt, he wiped away the blood. The cut wasn’t deep; it was merely a superficial wound.

“You running away from something?” the cab driver asked in French as he tore through side streets toward the Seine.

“No. I don’t run away. I’m returning something to its rightful owner.”

That was what he did.




Several hours later, his forearm was cleaned up, his shirt had been changed, and the seven-figure violin was safe and sound and heading home. He stepped out of the terminal in Florence, greeted by a gleaming black town car and his client, Francesca Rinaldi, with jet-black corkscrew curls and outstretched arms.

“Do you have it?” she asked, breathless.

“I told you I did,” he said, because he’d called her on his way to the airport, telling her he’d tracked it down. For a brief moment on the flight from Paris to Florence, he’d wondered what it would sound like to pluck one of the strings on that violin. He was intrigued, simply because it was a damn Stradivarius and he couldn’t help but wonder if it would actually sound like a dull twang after being manhandled by criminals who thought they could get a cool mill for something that everyone knew was missing, or if it would still sound like some kind of siren song, as it was supposed to.

He didn’t touch it, though. Not his place. Not his job.

“I want to see it,” Francesca said, her eyes wide and eager, her voice desperate and hungry. She placed her palms together, as if praying.

He took off his backpack, unzipped it, and removed the precious object from its special transport. He opened the case and showed her what was inside.

“Oh God, it’s perfect,” she said, relief in her voice, tears streaming down her cheeks, as she reached for the violin. She brought it to her cheek and sighed happily as she cozied up to it. Just as quickly, she tucked it back inside and gripped the case tightly in her arms. Like a mother holding her once-missing baby. Her gaze landed on his wrist. “You have a cut. Did you get in a fight?”

“I wouldn’t call it a fight exactly. But they seemed keen on testing their knife’s sharpness on my arm,” he said, deadpan.

“A knife!” she shrieked, covering her mouth. “Are you OK?”

He waved off her worry.

Truth be told, the knife had surprised him, given the general level of stupidity the thieves displayed in stealing something that was virtually impossible to fence. That’s probably why it had been chucked in a pile of laundry when the scums who stole it realized there was no true black market for a Stradivarius. The two Irish men had lifted this violin from Francesca’s niece, a world-renowned musician, at a Dublin train station a few months ago, with dollar signs in their eyes. After trying to peddle the violin in the underground market where not even the most stalwart criminal collectors would touch an item whose provenance was so well-documented, they’d turned to Craigslist to try to pawn it off, and that’s how Jake had tracked them down. This hadn’t been an easy gig, but it wasn’t the toughest job either in his years as a retrieval expert. Some called him a private detective, others dubbed him a bounty hunter, and sure, technically, he was that, too. Most of the assignments were to hunt down goods—usually precious objects, and every now and then he’d need to find a person. So, retrieval expert seemed to work as a catchall title.

Francesca preferred to call him a bounty hunter.

“Do you need a Band-Aid?”

Jake shook his head and laughed. “I don’t do Band-Aids.”

“Why not? Not rugged enough?” she asked with a playful pout.