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A discreet cough broke into his reflections.
Cat O’Connell wavered upon the threshold like a flame. Her skin shone pale as marble, smooth black hair framing her narrow face and a waif-thin slenderness masking what he knew from painful experience was a wiry tenacity.
In a borrowed gown whose bodice had been hastily pinned, Cat looked like a child playing dress up in her mother’s clothes. But not like any child he’d ever known. Hauteur sparked along her limbs. Flashed in her lightning-sharded green eyes like a challenge.
He pushed aside the unfinished note as if he could push away his uncomfortable reaction to her appearance. Hid his momentary discomfort in another swift glance at the clock. “I’d wondered if you’d thought better of our agreement.”
She saw the track of his gaze. “I overslept,” she offered in a grudging tone that dared him to argue.
He noted the faint smudging beneath her wide, doelike eyes, the chalky undertone to her milky flesh. Did she think he scolded over a few minutes? He’d not begrudge anyone a dreamless night. He’d had too few of them himself over the years. But perhaps with Cat’s help he’d find an answer to the questions that had long plagued his sleep.
He glanced at his father’s diary brooding at the edge of his desk. What had his father worked so hard to keep hidden? Clearly something of import. Why else would Cat have been sent here to steal it? Two rea
sons. Someone wanted to read it for himself. Or didn’t want it read at all. “Have you eaten?” he asked.
“A bite in the kitchen.” A mischievous glint lit her eyes. “The servants watched every clack of my jaw. I think they expected me to swipe the silver if they so much as blinked.”
He laughed, the sound loud in the solemn tomb of a room. “And did you?”
A shutter came down over her face, the light doused. “I don’t double-cross, Kilronan. Nor do I go back on my word.”
Was that an accusation? A veiled response to her locked door? He’d caught her in the act of theft. She could hardly complain if his trust was lacking. “You only vowed to stay and help me with the book. Robbing me blind while you did so was never part of our bargain.”
She blinked, chewing on her bottom lip. A mannerism he’d grown to know in just the few hours they’d spent in each other’s company. Then, with movements unconsciously provocative, she reached into the gaping bodice of her green muslin. Pulled forth one teaspoon. Placed it on the desk before him. Squared it up so its bowl pointed at him like an arrow.
“Anything else residing in there? The rest of the set? The pot, perhaps?”
Downswept lashes hid her eyes, giving him no hint of her thoughts. “I’ve room for it, I suppose. But no. There’s naught but me left in here.”
Had he been the youthful scoundrel who’d played London like a game he’d have teased her with flirtatious innuendo. Had he been the undisciplined rogue who’d hopped from scrape to scrape and bed to bed with a youthful exuberance his older self both scorned and envied, he’d have asked her with sly gallantry to prove her innocence.
His skin prickled as if too tight for his bones and a sudden heat raised a sheen of sweat across his shoulders. The knotted muscles of his leg throbbed with every push of blood from his heart.
He did neither of those things. Feeling as ancient as the volumes surrounding him, he rose. Dusted the breakfast crumbs from his breeches. Ushered Cat to a chair. And handed her the diary.
Cat tried not to dwell on the humiliating withdrawal of the pilfered teaspoon from her bodice. Nor on the inexplicable urge that had her confessing to the crime almost before she’d been accused. What had she been thinking to rummage about in there as if panning for gold? Had she been testing his honor? Had he been testing hers? And who’d come out the winner?
It had been such a minuscule event, but for some reason, it solidified the arrangement between them like a contract.
“Why is knowing what’s in this book so important?” she asked. That you would stoop to bartering with a thief, hanging unspoken between them.
Kilronan plowed a hand through his thatch of auburn hair, and Cat found herself transfixed by the tanned face beneath the arching brows, the austere, angular features. He held himself with all the bearing of one born to privilege and power. Confident. At ease in his own skin. Shoulders erect. Eyes piercing.
Something that even with all his wealth Jeremy had never been able to achieve.
Only Kilronan’s plain coat and leather breeches, the smell of cheroot smoke clinging to the folds of his clothes, and the shrewdness in his keen gaze gave a hint there might be more to this earl than the typical wastrel playboy who spent his days in extravagant, aristocratic boredom. His nights between the legs of his latest mistress.
A frisson of excitement or foreboding danced across her flesh, and she felt as if she’d stumbled from danger into catastrophe.
“Why? The book belonged to my father,” he answered. “I found it among his things after—” He crossed to the window, twitching the curtain aside to scan the street. Turned back. “My father was murdered, Cat. Six years ago by members of the Amhas-draoi. You’ve heard of them?”
“Warriors of Scathach. Guardians of the divide.” Cat had even seen one once, albeit from a distance. A giant of a man with the dense muscles of a fighter and a gaze like a razor. He’d radiated violence and magic in equal measure. “What did the last earl do to have the Amhas-draoi after him?”
Kilronan paced the room with a strange, half-halting gait as if an invisible wire stretched from his spine down his leg. But at her question, he pulled up short. “Do?” He paused as if deciding how best to answer her.
She tilted her head in question, but he didn’t finish his thought. Instead, pulling a cheroot from his pocket, he lit it from the hearth fire. Inhaled on a long, slow drag before tossing the whole into the grate. Straightening, he lost the stony implacability, but a grim light still crouched in the corners of his eyes. “I lost everything the night my father was murdered.”
“Except a title. Property. Rents—”
