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He reached to pinch out the candle. “I know. But he may know the murderer—or someone who does. In any case I must question him.”
“Mmm,” she murmured sleepily. “Maximus?”
“Yes?”
“Did you have my room searched at Pelham House?”
He tilted his head to peer at her face in the dark. She seemed perfectly serious. “What?”
She traced a circle on his chest with her finger. “The morning you sent the messenger to inform me you’d rescued Apollo, someone searched my rooms.” She knit her brows and looked at him. “When I realized that the emerald was real, I started wearing it all the time. I just didn’t know what else to do with it, it was so expensive. And then when I got your signet ring I strung it on the same chain.”
He remembered the chain she’d been wearing when she’d given him back his signet ring. He frowned. “Then why haven’t I ever seen the emerald on you?”
A blush rose in her cheeks. “I took it off before we’d… Anyway. I left the woods at the abbey, after you’d already raced off, and I forgot to put my fichu back on. My necklace was visible for a moment, with both the emerald drop and your signet ring on it.”
He understood at once. “Any of the guests could’ve seen it.”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“If one of them saw the emerald on you,” he said slowly, staring into the darkness about the bed, “and then searched your room looking for it, then the murderer might have been at Pelham. Might’ve eaten at my table.” The mere thought filled him with hot rage.
She stroked his chest as if to soothe him. “Then it could be any of the men?”
He considered. “Watts is younger than I.”
“Surely it isn’t he, then.”
He nodded. “That leaves Oddershaw, Noakes, Barclay, and Scarborough.” Scarborough, who had been a friend of his parents’.
For a moment they were quiet, contemplating the possibilities.
Then he stirred. “Thank you.”
“What for?”
He shook his head, for a moment unable to speak. Finally, he cleared his throat and said huskily, “For believing me. For telling me all this, even when I was initially foul to you. For being here.”
She didn’t answer, but her hand moved on his chest until it lay exactly over his heart.
And there it stayed.
MAXIMUS OPENED HIS eyes the next morning to the warm scent of Artemis in his arms. For the first time in a very long while he’d neither dreamed nor woken in the night, and he felt, in body and soul… content.
He leaned forward to nuzzle his lips against the nape of the sleeping woman he held. She was so warm, so soft, in sleep, with none of the prickling edges of the maiden warrior she showed when awake and alert. He loved that maiden warrior—the woman who looked him in the eye and told him they were equals—but this sweet, vulnerable lady made his heart ache. Like this he could imagine that she would yield to him, come softly into his arms, and agree to all that he said.
The mere thought made him huff a breath of laughter against her hair.
She stirred, making a small moaning sound. “What time is it?”
He glanced at the window—bright with the sharp, new light of day—and made an estimate. “Not more than seven of the clock.”
She exclaimed and tried to move away from him.
He hugged her tighter.
“Maximus,” she said, her voice gruff with sleep. “I have to leave at once. The servants will be up.”
He bent and licked her neck. “Let them be up.”
