Page 77 of Under Arthur’s Protection

I put my free hand on top of his. A hand sandwich. What was I doing? And why hadn’t I noticed my knees were bracketing his? Or that I was close enough I could lean forward and smell his cologne. Maybe he could hug me one more time, so I could stop feeling like such a mess.

“Hungry?” he said, pulling his hand and arm free.

“I’m not sure.” I began placing my tools back into the first aid kit.

He stood, crossed to the pantry, and laughed.

I loved that sound. “What?”

“Would you believe they have all the ingredients for Hettie’s puttanesca?” He pulled a box of spaghetti off the shelf as I turned around. “Canned tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, pasta. Even olives.”

The vision of Arthur at the stove in his Cornwall cottage flooded my brain. The way I’d practically hidden around the corner to watch him tearing off bread and dipping it in the sauce. The way he’d seemed so peaceful in his gray T-shirt and joggers.

That was the moment I wanted to go back to. I wanted to stare for a little longer, and share in the quiet moment he’d been having. But there was no going back. “Should you be cooking with that arm?”

“My nurse took excellent care of it.” He winked at me, and that wink settled in all sorts of places it didn’t belong.

Take the first aid kit back and get your head on straight.

“I’d like the pasta very much, thanks.”

While he cooked, I cleaned up, put everything back where it belonged, then tracked down my messenger bag. Work would surely fix my brain. The laptop lid had a dent, and a few pixels in the upper-left corner were flashing in odd colors, but at least the machine worked. I was going to owe Sam a replacement.

Arthur didn’t chop as quickly as he had at the cottage, but his knife skills were still impressive.

Imagine if he’d pulled the knife out of the sword case and⁠—

The garlic hissed as he threw it into the pan of oil. The scent had no business being so comforting.

“What were they trying to accomplish, Arthur?”

“Sorry?” He grimaced while twisting the olive jar’s lid. He didn’t ask for help, but tried four times until it popped open.

“At the archive. If they were willing to go that far to take the sword, there has to be something about it we’re missing.”

“I’ve been thinking the same thing.” He drained some olives in the sink and brought them to the cutting board.

I pulled out my pen and notebook. Doodling would get my brain back into thinking mode. “It can’t be the black market people, either the owners, or the auctioneers the FBI took it from. They wouldn’t have bothered to plant a forged document. They’d simply take it back, right?”

“Makes sense. So you think the sword is special?”

“Somehow, yes. But what? Why?” I wrote Hopkins at the top of the page and underlined it. “Dr. Hopkins sent us to Champagne. He told us the archive might have records linking the inscription to the literary tradition. Instead we got a fake sketch and three men in a parking lot.”

Arthur cleaned and sliced the ingredients, then tipped them into the pan. “He also sent you to Fergus.”

“And to Malta.” I flipped through my earlier notes. “I’m fairly certain the sword itself is seventh century. Fergus’s earliest date for Novae Avallonis was in the 1600s, and the sketch claimed the inscription was added in the 1700s.”

“And Malta says the phrase inside the church dates to at least the fourteenth century.”

“What if Malta was supposed to be another dead end, and Lance got lucky with the translator?”

Arthur chuckled to himself and shook his head. “Then Hopkins has been running a pretty sophisticated operation.”

“That’s what scares me.” I stared at the name on my page. “I should look into him more closely. Maybe I can figure out what he’s actually been doing.”

Chapter 25

Arthur