Cutting Loose. Susan Andersen

was one thing for her to criticize herself and something else for him to do so. “Was there something you wanted, Mr. Kavanagh?”

      “Dev.”

      She gave him an “and?” look.

      “Call me Dev. Or Devlin if you insist on being formal. Mr. Kavanagh’s my dad.”

      “Okay. Is there something I can do for you, Devlin?” She stooped to fiddle with the collection of Columbia River basketry at her feet.

      “I’m trying to locate updated blueprints for the mansion. A few of the rooms look off but the place is over a hundred years old and unfortunately I don’t have the originals, either. For all I know the joint is riddled with secret passages or other hidey-holes. I’d like to know what we’re dealing with before we start tearing things apart, though, because hidden spaces might actually be a selling point, which Bren tells me is your ultimate objective.”

      The idea of a secret passage intrigued her, but she refused to be sidetracked. The sooner she got rid of Mr. I’m-too-sexy-for-my-boots the better. Yet instead of simply giving him a straight answer, she heard herself demand, “And you’re asking me because…?”

      “You appear to be the go-to girl for all the odds and ends around here. So would you happen to know where the blueprints are?”

      “No, I’m sorry.” And she truly was because the more information Kavanagh Construction had, the better the restoration was likely to turn out. And she’d love to see this old mansion fixed up the way it deserved to be. “I’m sure there’s more than one set, but I honestly don’t know where Miss Agnes kept them. All I know is that she told us Wolcott had been renovated several times. The last was when she had the interior done in 1985.”

      He nodded. “The year the Wolcott diamonds were stolen by her construction foreman.”

      Jane quit pretending to pay attention to the work she should be doing and rose to her feet to face Devlin squarely. “You know about that?”

      “Babe.” He gave her a smile she’d bet her inheritance had gotten him into more than one woman’s silkies. “I’m a Seattle boy. Those diamonds are an urban legend in this town. Everyone knows about them.”

      Well, she was a Seattle girl and-“I didn’t. Not until recently. Miss Agnes never talked about their theft or the murder of her man Henry.” She gave a shrug. “At least not before Poppy heard about it from someone and hounded her for the story.” Her lips crooked at the memory. “Poppy can be a bit of a pit bull when she gets her teeth sunk into a subject.”

      He started to take a step into the room but must have noticed her stiffening, because he stopped where he was. Bracing a muscular shoulder against the doorjamb, he hooked his thumbs in his belt loops and studied her. “Henry, huh? Was that the business manager guy who was killed when the thief came back to recover the diamonds he’d hidden?”

      “You’re the expert, Seattle Boy.”

      “Hey, I was a kid when it all went down. I was interested in murder and mayhem but mostly fascinated by the idea of a multimillion-dollar set of jewelry still floating around somewhere.”

      “Yes, well, Henry was her man for all matters. He was her butler and secretary and advisor and I think probably her lov-” Jane cut herself off, appalled.

      What was she doing? She’d already established she didn’t know Devlin. And while assigning him dependency problems might have been jumping the gun a bit, there was no reason to offer him blanket trust, either. So why had she almost blurted out that she and her friends believed Henry had probably been more to Miss Agnes than a simple employee? It wasn’t as if their mentor had admitted as much to them. But the way Agnes had looked when she’d talked about him and the fact he wasn’t even supposed to have been there the night it was popularly believed that Maperton had broken in to retrieve the diamonds that had gone missing the year before, they had all sort of assumed Henry had probably been her lover as well as the man who kept her home and affairs running smoothly.

      But she certainly didn’t plan on cozying up to Devlin Kavanagh with the speculation.

      “Well, listen.” She gave him her best businesslike smile. “I have work to do. As I said, I really don’t know where the blueprints may be. I’m not even sure any exist. But I will keep an eye out for them.”

      He looked at her for a moment, then stepped back, his hands shoved into his jeans pockets. “Thanks. I’ve got a partial set from the kitchen addition that was put on in 1909. I’ll head downtown to see if King County records has the originals or any of the updates since then.” He gave her a brief head-to-toe once-over, licked his bottom lip and nodded. “See ya around, Legs.”

       Legs? She stared from the now-empty doorway to the limbs in question, encased in plain old dark Levi’s that she’d paired with a black blazer and a white shirt. She had fairly long legs, but they were certainly nothing to write home about. She’d always thought they were on the skinny side herself, which hardly qualified them as showgirl material.

      Then she gave herself a mental shake and a stern directive to forget about it. But good grief. The man was a walking, talking Hazardous to Women zone. She imagined that with his confidence and those eyes and that body, females had been dropping at his feet since the day he hit puberty. Maybe even before.

      Well, not her. As far she was concerned, he was Mr. Invisible from this point on. She was keeping her distance. Putting him out of her mind.

      Getting her butt back to work.

      Putting Miss Agnes’s collections in order so she could start researching and cataloging them was a huge undertaking, and she was happy as a pig in a puddle at the prospect of getting her hands on them. At the same time she was a little daunted by the scope of the museum bequest, and she needed to get moving on it. She had never headed an undertaking of such scale before, and she was laboring under a deadline.

      “So here the clock is ticking and I’ve been spinning like that Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil all day long wasting time just trying to figure out where to start,” she confessed to Ava when her friend dropped by to see how she was doing later that afternoon. “Then, too,” she added wryly, “I keep getting caught up in the nostalgia of so many of the pieces-upshot of which is that I haven’t actually started anywhere.”

      “Jane, Jane, Jane.” Ava picked up a first-edition book, ran her fingers over the ancient leather binding, then carefully set the volume back on the shelf where she’d found it and looked up to pin Jane in place with her gaze. “It’s a no-brainer. When in doubt, start with the jewels.”

      A startled laugh burst out of Jane and she gave her friend an impulsive hug. “You, Ms. Spencer, are a genius! I’ve been doing a bit of this and bit of that with all the collections, when I should be concentrating on the Met’s stuff. The jewelry is an excellent place to start, since that’s part of their haul.” Grabbing up her slim Apple notebook, she started for the stairs. “Come on. I’ve got the codes for the safe in here. Let’s go see what’s in the vault.”

      I T WAS ALMOST 5:00 p.m. by the time Dev let himself back into the mansion. He probably should have called it a day and headed for the apartment his sister Maureen had rented for him in Belltown. But the skies had opened up, the place didn’t feel like home yet and he’d just as soon build a fire in the little study up on the second floor, drink his Starbucks drip and listen to the rain bouncing off the windows while he went over the information he’d gathered from the County Assessor’s office and the Department of Development and Environmental Services.

      Not that it was much. Before 1936 the records that the Assessor’s Office kept for buildings had been compiled in longhand on four-by-six-inch cards with lots of revisions and cross-outs and not a single photograph. Pretty much useless, in other words.

      But luckily he’d been able to get a Flexcar from the share-a-ride program he belonged to, and more helpful were the photos taken of the mansion from the late thirties on, which he’d run to ground at the Washington State Archives at Bellevue