Eve opened her mouth, then slid her gaze to Roarke's profile. "No, not tonight. I've got other plans."

"Do you?"

"Yeah. Got a problem with that?"

"None whatsoever." He topped off their wine. "Now, we have a few minutes before the next act. Why don't you tell me why you're so sure Leonard Vole is guilty."

"Too slick not to be. Not slick like you," she added and made Roarke grin. "His is a – what do you call it – a veneer. Your slick goes down to the bone."

"Darling, you flatter me."

"Anyway, this guy's an operator, and he does a good job with the honest, innocent act of a hopeful, trusting man who's down on his luck. But great-looking guys with beautiful wives don't piddle time away with older, much less attractive women unless they have an agenda. And his goes a lot deeper than selling some goofy kitchen tool he invented."

She sipped her champagne, settling back as the house-lights flickered to signal the end of intermission. "The wife knows he did it. She's the key, not him. She's the study. If I were investigating, she's the one I'd be looking into. Yeah, I'd have myself a nice long talk with Christine Vole."

"Then the play's working for you."

"It's pretty clever."

When the curtain rose, Roarke watched Eve instead of the courtroom drama.

She was, he thought, the most fascinating of women. A few hours before, she'd come home with blood on her shirt. Fortunately, not her own. The case that caused it had opened and closed almost immediately with the dead she stood for and a confession she'd drawn out within an hour of the crime itself.

It wasn't always that simplistic. He supposed that was the word. He'd seen her drive herself to exhaustion, risk her life, to bring justice to the dead.

It was only one of the myriad facets of her he admired.

Now she was here, for him, dressed in sleek and elegant black, her only jewelry the diamond he'd once given her, dripping like a tear between her breasts, and her wedding ring. Her hair was short, a careless cap of dozens of shades of brown.