Chapter 7: The Necklace

The pearls turned up at eight o'clock, in Jax's suitcase, under a pair of leather trousers.

The housekeeper found them while she was putting away Jax's socks.

She brought them downstairs on a folded napkin, and nobody in the dining room said anything for a moment.

"I knew it," Phillip said.

He had not known it.

He had been in his study since midnight, and he had slept in his shirt.

"Jax Rowan took my mother's pearls," Linnea whispered, and she covered her mouth with both hands. "I can't believe it. I thought we were friends."

"We are," Jax said. "I'd never steal pearls. I steal hearts and the occasional fork."

"You were upstairs when they went missing."

"I was nowhere near upstairs."

"Where were you?" Phillip asked.

Jax looked at me.

I opened my phone and turned it around so the whole table could see.

"Monday night," I said. "Red. Jax, eleven p.m. to three a.m. Nightcap, live set, Hollow Room."

"What is that?" Phillip asked.

"A club on Ludlow," Jax said. "I play in a bathrobe. It's a bit."

"It was also streamed," Willem said.

He had a laptop under his arm.

He set it down and pressed play on a video of Jax on a tiny stage in a silk robe, mid-solo, under a clock on the back wall that read 1:44.

Forty thousand viewers had left comments at the bottom.

Most of them were proposals.

"He left this house at ten-thirty and came back at ten past three," I said. "The doorman wrote it in the log."

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Husband Moved His Mistress In So I Invited My Three Lovers from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.