So in Love by Karen Ranney

title, his home, his land, and his fortune. “I am late of Paris,” he added. “You must be aware of the troubles there. Families have been separated.” He waved his hand in the air, unwilling to continue further with his charade of grieving kin.
    The man’s eyes didn’t soften. If anything, his gaze grew more calculated. A born tradesman, he evidently sniffed out a profit. Very well, Nicholas would allow him to believe that there was something in this situation for him.
    “And what would the troubles in France have to do with me?” Talbot asked, glancing down at the card. “Count?”
    The tone in which he referred to his ancestral title grated on Nicholas’s nerves. He knew himself that there were hundreds of minor nobility living in England and Scotland. Men whose familial titles were not as ancient as the du Marchand name. But the dull-witted man evidently didn’t know the difference.
    “Did she come to sell some jewelry? A stone, perhaps?”
    The man’s smile widened. “I couldn’t tell you that one way or the other.”
    Nicholas strode confidently toward the workbench, his hand clenched around the top of his cane. Once, it had boasted a gold-encrusted crest of his family. But he had sold the gold a few months ago, and it was safer, at least in Paris, to pretend that he was not an aristocrat.
    “I am prepared to make the knowledge worth your while,” he said softly. Those who had attended him in the past would have warned the fool that he was at his most dangerous when he was softly spoken. Any idiot could yell or shout, but managing to convey displeasure while never raising his voice took some skill.
    “I am looking for a certain stone,” he said. “Something that may have been offered you by a French émigré.”
    The laughter his comment received was another irritant, but Nicholas cut off any response and put an amiable smile on his face. When the fool stopped laughing, he waited a few moments and then spoke again.
    “Is my request so amusing, then?”
    The goldsmith turned and opened a drawer in his workbench. Scooping up a handful of stones, he turned and tossed them onto the top of the glass case. Sapphires, rubies, diamonds all tumbled in a glittering array to rest against the wooden rail.
    “Here, take your pick. I’ve been offered all of these.”
    Nicholas fingered the gems, pushing them into a line with the tip of his index finger. “They’re paste.”
    “Indeed they are, and not even good representations of the originals, if I might add. Your countrymen tried to pass them off as real. I keep them to amuse myself.”
    “Or sell them to unsuspecting customers?” Nicholas did not doubt the goldsmith’s greed. It was there in his eyes, in the way he slid his fingers over the fake jewels. When the goldsmith didn’t answer his taunt, he continued, “I’m looking for a ruby. A ruby roughly in the shape of a heart,” Nicholas said, maintaining his affable tone. “The Somerville Ruby.”
    The goldsmith looked interested, but he didn’t volunteer any information.
    Nicholas drew himself up, fixed one of his most imperious looks at the other man. “My wife was the daughterof the Duke of Somerville,” he said. “The gem was part of her inheritance.”
    “I haven’t seen it, Count.”
    Patiently, Nicholas continued. “It was taken from our possession. I believe it to be in Edinburgh.”
    “And the woman you asked about? Do you also believe her to have some connection with the gem?” Talbot asked casually.
    “I do,” Nicholas said, giving him the information grudgingly. However, there was no need for the goldsmith to know that he’d followed his daughter from France, that he would have been ignorant of her escape from the convent had it not been for his former housekeeper. Justine was as loyal to him now as she had always been, and as talented in bed. The only change the passing years had made in her had been a touch of gray in her striking red hair.
    And, perhaps, a surprising