Unraveled (Turner, #3)

THE NEXT DAY, SMITE did, in fact, send a gift.

It wasn’t emeralds. It wasn’t pearls. It wasn’t any sort of jewelry—just a few sheets of paper, folded, and his note scrawled across the bottom: I’m sorry.

After what that report indicated, sending jewelry would be a travesty.

When he entered her home a few hours after he’d sent that message, he didn’t know what to expect. But what he heard surprised him: voices drifted from the parlor in the back. Their murmur made a gentle, reverent noise. He walked back and peered into the room.

Miranda sat on the sofa next to another man. The fellow was handsome and young—close in age to Miranda, Smite would have guessed, although he looked youthful to Smite’s eye. Miranda was holding his hands.

If Smite had happened on her cuddling with another man on any other day, he might have reacted differently. But then, he knew what he’d sent her about George Patten, and it didn’t take much to tell that Miranda wasn’t flirting with another man. She was in need of comfort.

Nothing wrong with that. Still, his hand formed an involuntary fist at his side.

“I can’t believe it,” the man was saying. “I just can’t believe it. I can’t bring myself to believe that this is true.”

“Oh, Jeremy.” She rubbed his arm. “I know it’s hard to comprehend.”

“Impossible.” The other man—Jeremy—pulled his hands from hers and shook them out. “It’s impossible to comprehend, not hard. George is out there somewhere. And maybe we don’t know where he is, but I refuse to believe that he could have died in so senseless a fashion.” His gaze was trained inward; his eyes rested on some far-off point. “Miranda,” he said slowly, “am I a terrible person if I refuse to honor my mother’s dying wishes?”

Miranda did not seem to think this last question a complete non sequitur. “What, because you’re thinking of George instead of contemplating marriage?”

The other man folded his arms about himself. “What she wants me to do is utterly foreign to my character.” And then his voice did crack. “Oh, George. What am I going to do? It’s my fault. I did this to him.”

“It’s nobody’s fault. You can’t blame yourself. It could have happened to anyone.” She leaned toward him.

Jeremy made a rude noise. “The man who claimed to know what transpired said that George took a knife to the gut the night before his release. But no body was ever found, and the murder was not reported in any of the official proceedings.” Jeremy shook his head. “If you think that could happen to anyone, you are sorely mistaken.”

Smite had harbored similar doubts about the matter.

But Miranda reached out. “A fight in gaol. A gaoler who didn’t want to admit he’d been remiss in his duties, and so hid the matter. George was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Jeremy shook his head, and Miranda didn’t say anything in response. Instead, she looked up—and as she did so, she caught sight of Smite, standing in the doorway of the room. She didn’t startle. She didn’t let go of her friend.

Smite knew damned well that nothing untoward was happening.

He was an ass. Not because he believed she had been unfaithful; there was no hint of lust in their embrace. Besides, Miranda had been anything but casual about their lovemaking. No; he was jealous for the most petty of reasons. He envied their rapport, their intimacy. He wanted her to turn to him for support, not this other fellow.

He was being fist-clenchingly irrational.

“Jeremy,” Miranda said slowly. “I ought to introduce you to someone.”

Jeremy looked up. He took in Smite, and his eyes widened.

Beside him, Miranda was still speaking. “Jeremy Blasseur, this is Smite Turner. Turner, this is Jeremy—he’s one of my best friends.”

“Lord Justice,” Jeremy said dazedly, scrambling to his feet. “You’re Lord Justice. Miranda, you little devil, you never told me the man in question was Lord Justice.”

A small smile curled the corner of her lip. “Yes. I rather wanted to see your response the first time you met him.”

She’d wanted to introduce him to her friends?

“This was not the sort of person I expected you to—” Jeremy stopped abruptly.

“Do you know something about Mr. Patten’s death?” Smite heard himself ask. “Something not in those papers?”

Jeremy took a long moment to shake his head—perhaps too long a moment. One couldn’t enlarge on the length of a second, Smite told himself. And if this Jeremy didn’t seem overly upset, grief took different people in different ways. Jeremy didn’t hold Smite’s gaze. He looked at the floor instead. “I just heard this story half an hour ago,” he mumbled. “How would I know anything about it?”

“If you think of anything that might assist the authorities in finding out who killed him—any enemies he might have, any rumors that come to your ears—justice might be served.”