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Elle nodded, her gaze staring for long seconds at the wall, and then she put pencil to paper.
She was good at this—much better than his sketches, as she was capturing the whole essence of what these mosaics would have been hundreds of years before.
Still nodding to herself, her focus stayed forward, drifting up and down from the mosaic to the paper.
She smelled good. Too good. Distractingly good.
No. Not the time.
Proper bed. Proper room no matter how he wanted to drive into her at the moment.
He clamped down on his rebelling cock and stood, looking at the tessera in his fingers that had fallen from the mosaic of the box when he had touched it. The slightest pressure from him and the tile had tumbled to the ground.
This room was close to crumbling. It was a miracle that it had been found in the shape that it was in.
“Elle, did you ever notice these tesserae look different than the ones you showed me in the upper chambers? They seem to be cut different.”
Her focus broke and she craned her neck to look up at him. “They are?”
“I think. They’re rougher, maybe a different tool used to cut them?”
“How odd.” She reached up and plucked the tile from his hand, leaning toward the light of the lantern. “You’re right, though. Can you find a few more of them from that wall and we’ll bring them with us?”
He motioned to the ring mosaic. “You have most of it on paper? The lanterns aren’t going to last much longer.”
“I do.”
His nod turned into a shake of his head as his eyes lifted to the giant golden ring on the wall with tiles of dusty red clumped as the ruby.
Impossible, all of this matching up with the box. But there it was.
His gaze sank down onto the top of Elle’s head, her thick chestnut hair reflecting shine from the scant light.
Impossible, her and everything roiling in his gut when he looked at her. Thought of her. Smelled her. But there she was.
He could feel himself sinking into the deep, one purpose pulling him away from the other.
Neither one of them with answers nor a clear path forward.
Any which way he looked at it, he was spiraling into disaster. But he’d come too far to change his path. Even if that path was wrong.
Push onward. That was his only option.
{ Chapter 12 }
Curled onto the settee in her drawing room, Elle stared at one of the sketches she’d made of the ring mosaic, then flipped through the pages on her lap to Rune’s sketches. There had to be something there she was missing, some shred of a clue.
Rune’s steadfast belief that none of this was happenstance was quickly becoming her own belief.
She went back to her top sketch and followed the lines of it, every corner and swoop of her pencil line. Some sort of clue had to be there.
She blinked, her eyes dry, and then lifted her head, her eyes requiring a long moment before they could focus on the trees outside the window and to her right.
Mindlessly flipping a golden tile taken from the floor in front of the ring mosaic, she stared at the leaves fluttering in the light breeze. This was the exact sort of day she loved on the island. Bright sun only occasionally marred with puffy white clouds, the smell of honeysucklein the air. A day she would usually spend riding or walking the grounds or helping out Mr. Jenson with the gardens.
Her forefinger stopped on a prickly nub on one edge of the tile. Rune was right—it was cut differently from the tiles in the upper chambers. Cruder edges, if she had to pinpoint the difference—and not just from the wear of time.
She looked down at the tessera, turning it over to the rear of the tile, and she scratched her fingernail at the dust caked to the back.
