Follow the Sun Read Free Page B

more history books, when she remembered it. Chastising herself for being senile at twenty-six, she hurried into the galley, went to a dining booth built into the wall, and knelt under the table.
    She slid aside a specially designed panel and reached into the base of the booth, where a small safe was secured. A tiny light fixture, keyed to the opening of the panel, illuminated the safe’s well-worn dial.
    The safe had belonged to Royce for many years, and in its time had protected jewels worth millions of dollars. He had given it to her as a sentimental weddingpresent, and along with it the promise that he’d teach her everything he knew about diamonds.
    Tess spun the dial quickly, and the door popped open. She reached in, pushed aside personal jewelry, personal papers, and a cloth bag containing a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of uncut Brazilian diamonds-she had to deliver the diamonds to a wholesaler in Los Angeles the next week—and grasped a piece of deer antler the size of her thumb.
    Her heart pounding with excitement, she quickly closed the safe and remained crouched under the table, studying the gift her father had given her not long before his death.
    The amulet had been caressed by respectful fingers until it was nearly white. It was made from the curving tip of a deer antler, and the blunt end was covered by a cap of gold topped by a tiny ring, so that the amulet could be worn on a chain.
    Her father had told her that the amulet had come to him from his father, Benjamin Gallatin, a blacksmith on the Cherokee reservation in Oklahoma. It might have been made by Benjamin’s father, Silas, the half-Cherokee son of Katherine and Justis.
    Enchanted, Tess studied the most important aspect of the amulet—the Cherokee symbols carved deeply into its surface. She went back to the cabin and retrieved the gold medallion she’d left laying among her books.
    The symbols on the medallion were undoubtedly separated into words or phrases, and she squealed with delight when she saw that one of the phrases matched the symbols on the antler amulet.
    The security buzzer sounded, meaning that someone had stepped on a detection panel hidden in the bow deck. Tess went aboveboard and met a tall teenage boy carrying an enormous arrangement of cut flowers in a ceramic base.
    “Hiya, Tess,” he said, peeking through the flowers. “Some guy called the shop and ordered these for ya. Mom said to tell ya she’s thrilled to have a partnerwho gets guys to order two hundred dollars’ worth of flowers.”
    “Brandt, good lord, who sent these?”
    “Uh, uh …” He nodded toward a card stuck in the jungle of blossoms.
    Tess opened it and read, “I’d like to bump into you again and throw you some more lines. How about coming aboard for that margarita? Jeopard.”
    She groaned at his determination. Dammit, why did this gorgeous, mature-looking man have the silly technique of a lounge lizard?
    J EOPARD HATED PEEKING out the yacht’s window. In the old days his agents had called him the Iceman, because of his emotionless facade and unbending dignity. The Iceman had confronted Third World dictators face to face without breaking into a sweat; he’d impressed the most brutal terrorists with his utterly cold demeanor; he’d traded urbane witticisms with powerful women and watched with objective pleasure while they turned into purring kittens.
    And now he was hiding behind a curtain and cursing forcefully because the teenage delivery boy was still in Tess Benedict’s cabin twenty minutes after delivering
his
flowers.
    Jeopard smiled sardonically.
    If Mrs. Benedict was a cradle robber, then he might as well pack his gnarled old body back to Florida.
    But there
was
hope—if he could impress her enough. After all, this was the self-serving woman who, at twenty, had married a wealthy man almost three times her own age.
    It was definitely no love match, judging by the information Jeopard had received. She’d known from the beginning that