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Although he’d mentioned her before, that time it struck me.
“Your investigator is a woman?”
“The one coming is. I have two. The other one will remain in London and look into the staff and assess outside motives for someone to pull this shit.” His aura changed, and he said, “Don’t drink anymore Amaretto unless Stevenson gives it to you himself.”
I felt gooseflesh glide over my skin when I asked, “Why?”
“I’ve been feeling sluggish the last few days, including right now, and it isn’t just having half a whisky at midday. Daniel and I had a talk about how this started, you mentioning the flute from your dream, and he told me Portia has been dreaming too, and she seems more highly-strung when she’s here, sometimes even erratic. I grew concerned, mentioned it to Dad. He’s a G and T man. After dinner, he goes for port or brandy. Mum is G and T too, and after dinner brandy or sherry. He says they’re not experiencing any changes, though he’s noted that Mum seems more vague than normal.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I asked Daniel, and Portia likes to unwind at the end of an evening with an Amaretto too. She’s been drinking it from the decanter in the Wine Room. Daniel also isn’t experiencing this, but outside lager, he’s a vodka man.”
“Are you saying…?”
I couldn’t bring myself to finish it.
“I’m saying I’ve noticed a marked change in your affect when we finish the night with a drink. You seem you, but hazier, and you yourself have told me you’ve felt off. Then there are your dreams, and the things that happened to you are frightening, your responses natural to them. But Daniel mentioned in passing that Portia was very upset by how scared you were with what Brittany did. She said, you might not enjoy horror movies and scary things, but she’s never seen you like that.” He gave me a ghost of a smile. “She said you’re always together.”
It was nice Portia thought that of me.
But he still wasn’t saying outright what I thought he was saying.
So I asked after it. “Do you think someone put something in the alcohol?”
“I think I told Stevenson to carefully switch all of it out but keep what’s been decanted so my investigator can take samples of it. The new will still be out for anyone to slip something into it, so Stevenson knows if we call for a drink, he’ll have bottles locked away and will serve us directly from them.”
One could say there was no way to express how I really, really didn’t like this.
Which was why I tried, perhaps hopelessly, to offer, “They’re just dreams, honey, and some woman touched my face in the pitch dark wearing a dead woman costume in the middle of the night. My response to that wasn’t unwarranted.”
“I don’t disagree,” he returned quietly. “But I’m a busy man, Daphne. A lot on the go all the time, and people who depend on me. I enjoy it greatly, but it can get hectic and consuming, so I work out daily to clear my head and have time to narrow focus on one thing so I can be fresh when I see to the rest. Bottom line, I stay fit. Occasionally, I can go at it hard, and that can be exhausting. But this is something else. For instance, I don’t sleep heavily. You leaving me in my bed is something I’d normally notice. I had no idea you’d gone. Didn’t feel a thing.”
More indication of why that had tweaked him so much.
Oh, and the reason he had such a fantastic body.
“Stevenson won’t mind,” he continued.
“It’s not that. It’s just…in all this, the idea that someone may be drugging us…” I shook my head. “The rest of it is not cool. It’s freaky and weird and scary as hell. But that’s something else entirely.”
“Well, if my intention was to terrify the occupants of a house, drugging them so their reactions to what was found were more pronounced would make sense.”
“And again,” my voice was high-pitched, “why would someone do that?”
Ian reached out and cupped my jaw. “And again, it’s in hand. We know it’s being done. We’re looking into it. It has to be an inside job, so it isn’t as if the cast of characters is infinite. We’ll sort it, put a stop to it and deal with them when we discover who they are.”
I drew in a shaky breath to calm myself, then let it out.
Ian watched me do that and then, taking his hand from my face, he said irately, “I wish I could take you to London now. But regrettably, if we leave, the jig might be up and the person doing this might make their escape.”
“Ugh,” I grunted, and it was me sagging into the couch.
Ian gave me a few moments to get over it, before he queried, “Do you need to freshen up for dinner?”
“Probably,” I mumbled, though I had no idea what that meant.
That said, I’d only done the basics after our shower. Our thwarted plans were to spend the day in bed after he had his chat with his dad. Ian had returned my vibrator, which boiled down to him showing me where it was. It was still charged up and waiting.
