“Yeah, I do.” He held up his hand. The sapphire ring glittered on the top knuckle of his pinky finger. “I don’t want this ring. She gave it away to shame me, to show how easily she could do it. I don’t want anything to do with her or this ring.”

“Then give it to me.” Patrick held out his hand, and without hesitation, Liam yanked the ring from his finger and slapped it in Patrick’s palm.

“I’m trusting you to do the right thing with it,” Liam said.

Patrick nodded. “I will,” he said, because suddenly he had a far bigger mystery to solve.

11

Gwen retreated to her grandfather’s office on the top floor of the Blackstone Bank after the courtroom debacle. She resisted the urge to point out that she’d been right about the bad publicity that would come from challenging the memoir in court. By the time the reporters were done with the story, every bookstore in town would be swamped with advance orders for the memoir.

It was water under the bridge. What still haunted her was the strange encounter with Liam Malone.

“Giving your ring away was a foolhardy thing to do,” her grandfather said, scowling at her from the opposite side of his desk. “What on earth possessed you?”

Her cousin Edwin and Uncle Oscar looked equally baffled as they waited for her answer. It had been an impulsive move sparked by an instinctive need to defend herself against that awful man’s contempt. The odd thing was how easy it was to give her wedding ring away.

“I want to see what he does with it,” she said. “It will tell us what sort of man he is.”

Oscar sat in a chair near the window, rolling an unlit cigar in his hands. “If you want to know who he is, I’ll commission a dozen Pinkerton detectives and have a complete report by the end of the week, but why do you care about this no-account laborer?”

Uncle Oscar had been on the witness stand most of the morning. He hadn’t seen Liam and didn’t understand their concern.

“He looks like Theodore,” her grandfather said. “The same eyes. The same coloring, the same shape of his jaw.”

Oscar set down his cigar, his expression hardening as he understood Frederick’s reasoning. “Preposterous. Willy Blackstone is dead and gone. So is Theodore. Don’t start imagining things.”

“We can’t bury our heads in the sand and pretend this doesn’t exist,” Edwin said.

“He’s nobody,” Oscar snapped.

“He’s not nobody, he’s got my wedding ring,” she said, and Oscar whirled on her.

“For pity’s sake, I’ll buy you another ring, but you are to let me handle this from here on out, do you understand me?”