He paused with his hand halfway to the knob, turned to her instead, and cupped her cheek. “Just one more,” he murmured before he lowered his lips to hers.
He made it count. Where his embrace a minute earlier had soothed and steadied, this one stole her breath and made her head swim. She held tight, praying with every shared beat of their hearts that this moment would be one of many more. Perhaps not today, but surely they could make a way for themselves. He could come back. She could follow him. Something. Because as his touch stilled her memories and his heart lit a new fire in hers, she knew without doubt that she would never get over this man. If he left, she would mourn him the rest of her days.
When he pulled away, she nearly begged him to hold her longer. But the memories crowded again, making her throat go tight.
Paper now. Begging and pleading later.
He must have read the mounting disquiet in her face. His eyes went dark, his mouth set in a firm line, and he pulled her quickly through the doors, locking them behind him. Then she led the way to the main stairs and up to her drawing room.
He pulled out her desk chair for her, and she opened the topmost drawer to take out paper. Then, with the key hidden in that drawer, she opened the bottom one and withdrew a quill.
“Let me know what I can do.” Slade leaned onto the edge of her desk, fiddling with the blotter. He must still be nervous, still scared for her, to indulge in idle movement like that.
Hoping her smile reassured him, she turned back to the paper and let her pen take the lead.
The lines forced their way forward first, perhaps because of their oddity. On the backs of papers, many of them, some barely visible in pencil, others strong and bold, but looking like random scratches…when looked at alone.
Puzzles. Slade couldn’t have known how right a word he had chosen. That was what each of the pages looked like as they marched through her mind, pieces of a puzzle. She copied a few of them down, but smaller in scale, and let the mental pictures shift and rearrange until she found the ones that matched.
“Maps.” Slade leaned over her when several of them were completed. “May I?”
“Please.” She needed the work space. Handing them to him, she took out fresh paper, pulled to mind fresh images.
Codes. Not one, like the Culpers used, but many. She had to sift and sort to figure out which key went with which message, and the effort brought a pounding to her head. But they settled, one by one. And one by one, she transcribed the messages.
Scarcely taking the time to read the letters and notes as she wrote them, she handed them off and moved on to the next. Eventually she took a moment to stretch, to loosen her neck.
To smile at Slade, who was poking through her bottom drawer. “Looking for something in particular, Detective?”
He angled an unrepentant grin her way. “A pen, at first. Then I thought I had better liberate my handkerchief. Then I had to wonder what it was wrapped around.” He had her vial of lilac water in hand and gave it a swirl.
She snatched the square of white linen back from his fingers and shoved it into her pocket with the links of silver. “Oh no, you don’t.”
Her nerve endings danced to his laughter. After uncorking the vial, he took a sniff. The smile he wore did strange things to her chest. “Smells like you.”
“That is the idea. For my correspondence.”
He put that one back and picked up the vial of invisible ink. Pulled out the cork and sniffed at it too. This time his brow furrowed. “This isn’t perfume.”
It was her turn to smile. “Your skills of observation never cease to amaze me. What was your first clue? Its total lack of odor?”
With an exaggerated glare, he recorked the vial. “What is it? Some serum to make your wit more biting?”
“As if I need the aid.” She flexed her cramping hand. To no one else outside the Ring would she ever give the truth about that bottle. But this was Slade. “It’s invisible ink.”
He froze with the bottle poised over its spot in her drawer. “Pardon?”
“One of Hez’s concoctions. The other is the counter liquor, to develop it.”
Though she didn’t look at him, she heard him switch the bottles out. “You seem to have used a great deal of it.”
There was a fine line between suspicion and curiosity, and she wasn’t sure which side his tone struck. She picked up her pen again and debated. She would be perfectly comfortable telling him about the Culpers, but that didn’t seem to be a decision she ought to make alone. For now, she smiled. “Wouldn’t you, if you had some?”
He snorted a laugh. “I guess I would.” More shuffling noises followed, though there was nothing else of interest in there. “Ah. Pen.”
She let him steal a piece of paper from her stack and kept at her work, pausing now and then to give her hand a rest. The clock in the hall chimed two in the afternoon when she finally set the quill down and stared at the sheet before her.