Angel Condemned by Mary Stanton Page A

back on the desk. A familiar nose nudged her hip. Bree smoothed her hand over the golden head. “Hey, Sasha,” she said. “Sniff out any demons, lately?”
    Sasha looked up at her, his feathered tail waving a gentle welcome.
    Take it .
    “I can’t just take it,” she said. “It’s not mine. Besides, I don’t want to.”
    You must.
    “Sorry about that.” Chambers said. He was slightly out of breath. “Slipped right past me. The lock on the front door doesn’t catch unless we slam it shut. All kinds of street people wander in when it’s cold, but this is the first time I’ve had a dog take advantage. The street people drive Jillian crazy. The dog would really put her over the edge.”
    “Mrs. Chambers? She’s joining you in the suit against my client?”
    “Yeah.” He looked at her hand on Sasha’s head. “Dogs send her right around the bend. I see that dogs don’t bother you, though.”
    “Not as a rule,” Bree said. “Besides, I know this one.”
    “Yours, is he? Handsome animal.”
    “He is, isn’t he?”
    Sasha stood thirty inches at the shoulder. His chest was all mastiff: broad and heavily muscled. His thick, glossy coat was a color between amber and gold coins.
    “Where’d he come from? He know how to open car doors, too?”
    “I have a town house on Factor’s Walk. I think he just decided to take a stroll and find me.” She ran her fingers over his silky ears and stood up. “I’d better take him on home.” She extended her hand and said politely, “I’m glad to have met you, Professor Chambers. I’ll be in touch with your lawyers. I hope we can resolve this dispute amicably.”
    “I don’t know about that. I’m not in a real amiable frame of mind.” He sat down in his desk chair and squinted at her. “Did you take a look at the Cross?”
    “I did.”
    “Doesn’t seem like much to wreck a career over, does it?”
    She hesitated. “How did you come to be mistaken about it?”
    “I’m not,” he said flatly. “Or at least I wasn’t about the original.”
    “This isn’t the original artifact?”
    “Hell, no. This is a fake.” He grabbed the box from his desk and threw it at her. Without thinking, Bree caught it. “Take it!”
    “But you had the original?”
    He glared at her, suddenly venomous. “I’m not saying another word to you, Miss Winston-Beaufort. You want the original? So do I. I want my job back. I want my life back. That isn’t going to happen. So I want your client to roast in Hell. You want to know where the original is? You ask your goddamn client.” He leaned across the desk, his face close to hers. His breath smelled of bread. “I know things about that bastard that your rich aunt isn’t going to like to hear. You want to keep her out of a scandal? You tell her to pay up. Or else.” He was so close that his breath was hot against her cheek. So close she could see the tears in his eyes. “I don’t know how in hell I got into this mess. But somebody, somebody owes me something.”

Four
    “You have to tell Aunt Cissy that Prosper stole the real antique,” Antonia said. “I mean, my God. The guy’s a crook!”
    “Shh!” Bree said.
    Bree’s little sister took after the Carmichael side of the family. She was small—an asset for a stage actress, since so many leading men were short—and had thick, dark red-gold hair that set off her blue eyes and camellia-like complexion to stunning effect. She’d insisted on acting lessons the day she turned thirteen, and the years of training gave her voice a resonance that could be heard in every corner of the restaurant. At seven on a Monday night in February, B. Mitchell’s wasn’t all that full, but several couples were openly listening. Antonia was a hard person to ignore when she was silent, much less when she was in full cry.
    “Shh, yourself,” Antonia said. “If you don’t tell her, I will.”
    “Well, you can’t,” Bree said firmly. “All of this is unsubstantiated. The two men hate