She kept her back to him and continued to wash her dish. Then, she set it on the rack to dry and reached for another one in the basin.
Provoked, Jasper went to her side and stilled her arm. “Stop being fractious and look at me.” He peeled from her hands the cloth and the bowl she’d been pointlessly washing and moved her away from the sink.
“You’re being a bully,” she said. Sudsy dish water dripped onto his hands as he held her wrists up between them.
“You cannot come to Scotland Yard any longer, Leo, nor can you insert yourself into any of my investigations. But I will not stay away. And we don’t need to cease speaking altogether.”
She stared up at him, but the fire for an argument left her eyes.
Her wrists were still in his hands as he lowered their arms. She didn’t move to pull free. Jasper slid his hold from her wrists to her hands. As one second fell into the next, he became less and less inclined to relinquish them.
He lost track of how long they stood there in suspended silence. Leo’s gaze drifted from his eyes to his collar, then down to where their hands were joined. As though possessing a different mind than his own, his thumbs moved, circling the centers of her palms. Her skin was impossibly and stirringly soft—except for one spot on her right hand. His thumb met with the raised ridges of her scars. A memento of the night she lost every person she’d loved as a child. Feeling the scars now sent a jolt through him as effectively as an electrical charge.
He dropped her hands, and Leo caught her breath, her cheeks beginning to glow pink again. Clenching her fists at her side, she retreated a few strides.
“Claude will be wondering where I am.” She opened a space between them, and Jasper was, at once, grateful and bewildered. A hot coiling in his chest centered around his left pectoral muscle. Distractedly, he rubbed it through his shirt.
He shouldn’t be feeling this.
He had no right to feel it.
“I’ll summon a cab,” he said. But she shook her head.
“No, I’m only walking to the morgue. Claude and I will go home together.” She went to the swinging door and pushed it open, so disconcerted that she forgot to say anything more as she left.
Chapter Twenty
Nothing should have kept Leo awake that night. It had been a long, exhausting day, and when she’d at last settled into bed, she’d closed her eyes with the certainty that sleep would claim her.
Instead, her mind churned. The various outcomes of the investigation had been, for the most part, good. Three murders had been solved, including the Jane Doe that had been weighing on Jasper for the last month. And now, Leo understood why.
The mention of his mother had stunned her, but it was the circumstances of her death that continued to whip up Leo’s curiosity. Beaten to death while carrying a child—Jasper’s sibling. But who had killed her, and why? And had that been when Jasper went into the streets? Lobbing all her questions at him would have only made him regret saying anything at all, so she’d bitten her tongue. He didn’t deserve an interrogation today, of all days.
There would be no avoiding a scandal in the newspapers the next day. Scotland Yard would handle the story of Mr. Nelson’s disappearance the best it could. Leo presumed they would not reveal the truth—that their lead detective had relinquished thesuspect to Andrew Carter willingly to save a woman from having her eye cut out. There would be some explanation…that Mr. Carter had battled the arresting officers, that Mr. Nelson had an accomplice waiting to ambush them, or whatever suited the Yard best.
But it would still be a disaster.
The papers would feature the explosion at Henderson & Son, along with the tragic story behind the reason for Mrs. Nelson’s dynamite plot. Jack Henderson had bound the Nelsons by legal contract not to sell their story to the newspapers, but as they were now dead, that contract was effectively severed. Scotland Yard would have no qualms about explaining the Nelsons’ motives, if only to focus the story on the manufacturing company’s evil deeds and not their lead detective’s shortcomings.
Once the factory was renovated, which the foreman said could take months, Mr. Henderson might suffer such backlash after the deaths of the Nelson children came to light that he’d have no choice but to change his pigments to a formula that was more modern and safer, just as Lawrence Wilkes had tried convincing him to do. So, even though Mrs. Nelson had not lived, her revenge had been realized. Leo found she could not be upset for it. Of course, she would have much rather not been inside the factory when the timed bomb had gone off. But, in the end, it had all been relatively bloodless. Just as Mrs. Nelson had designed.
Earlier at the morgue, as the evening ushered in and there was no sign of Jasper, Leo had begun to doubt he would be coming by after all. Instead, she’d typed her statement. It had taken several tries. She’d had so much to say, but every time she would start adding things, she would see Jasper’s incandescent glare after being forced to relinquish Mr. Nelson to an East Ripthug. With it, came the inexplicable and most unwanted feeling of culpability.
She had nothing to feel guilty for, nothing at all. And yet, there had been a hollow pit in the very center of her chest when she thought of how much strife Jasper would suffer for the mess at the London Hospital. And worse, that he might blame her, at least partially. Alongside the image of Mr. Carter’s blade glinting in her peripheral vision, now burned into her memory was Jasper’s disappointed grimace when he realized he would need to give Mr. Nelson up in order to protect her.
So, she’d shortened her sentences to the barest essentials. No one at the Yard would probe too deeply into a woman’s observations anyhow. She’d bottled that bitterness up and let it propel her to Charles Street, where she had planned to give Jasper the typed paper and then take her leave.
Things had gone awry the moment she stepped into that kitchen.
Leo sat up in bed, leaning back against her pillows. Around midnight, she’d tried to occupy her mind with another book, but the distraction hadn’t been successful. Time and again, her thoughts returned to Jasper, spinning her away from the wash basin and standing so close that she could see his carotid artery beating in his throat. She’d noted the warmth of his body, the scent of something earthy and masculine. It was only when his thumbs began to massage the cups of her palms that she realized she’d stopped breathing.
Leo pushed off the blanket, no longer chilled despite the lack of heat in her room. The stoneware hot-water bottle under her bed coverings, which warmed her when first climbing under the covers each night, had long since gone cold. She pressed a hand to her forehead. She wasn’t feverish. No, she was just being ridiculous with these thoughts of Jasper. It was all due to the tumultuous events of the day; she was certain of it. That, andhaving entered the kitchen at Charles Street to find him bare-chested—a second time in one day at that.
He’d hurried to put on his shirt, though doing so must have irritated the gash along his back and shoulder. However, Leo’s memory would not allow her the grace to forget the image of him, even as briefly as she’d seen it. No, her cursed brain would store it forever with fastidious detail. Details she should not be cataloguing again and again in her mind, as if she were writing a damnable coroner’s report. Specifically, Jasper’s broad shoulders, the lines of definition along his abdomen and forearms, both of which were more muscular than she’d even thought to imagine, and a dusting of golden-brown hair just beneath his navel. A small, horizontal scar on his right shoulder from the shallow swipe of Sir Nathaniel’s sword in January; three moles scattered like a constellation of stars on his left shoulder; and a larger scar in the shape of an arch over his left pectoral.
Leo closed her eyes. All night, she’d been restless, unable to stop raising the image of Jasper’s bare torso. Both viewings of it had startled her to the point of distraction. Now, however, she had the time and privacy to study it for more minutiae.
Every additional exploration ended with that arched scar over his pectoral.
