Willing the uneasiness out of his voice, he made himself look bored.
“Do you really want to touch anything in here with your bare fingers?” He watched for a moment as she battled with her decision, weighing her immense dislike of him and any help he might offer with what he assumed was some small degree of pragmatism.
“Fine.” Riley snatched the gloves away, spinning on her heel to give him her back.
Which, honestly? Not a hardship, love. The woman possessed a heart-stopping bum. All of her was gorgeously curved. Clark had to run a hand over his face, cutting off the mouthwatering view.
How could he lust after her, knowing what he did about her despicable scheming?
No amount of moral superiority seemed to dampen his ardor. This wasn’t like him—he never allowed his emotions to ride this close to the surface. Ever since he was a child he’d been ruthlessly even-keeled, always monitoring, trying to make sure no one got upset—a consequence of growing up with a highly emotional parent. Somehow, Riley Rhodes shorted his fuse.
In hindsight, Clark supposed that with the way his luck had been running, he should have been less surprised when she wiped away a thick sheet of vines from the wall to reveal a dagger stuck between two wooden beams.
While she squealed in triumph, Clark’s mouth fell open.
How had she—Where did that— “What the fuck?”
Riley turned to smirk at him over her shoulder. “I told you I knew what I was doing.”
Clark stepped closer, half hoping the dagger would disappear like a mirage. But no, the metal glinted when a ray of sunshine struck it.
“I don’t understand.” He’d been through forty-seven of the castle’s ninety-three rooms in the last month and found nothing of value. This property had changed hands so many times in the last three hundred years, had suffered wars and looting and the destruction of countless, terrible Highland winters. And she had just . . . found an entire bloody dagger after fifteen minutes?
Had Riley somehow gotten so lucky that she’d randomly picked the one room hiding a highly valuable artifact? It defied the bounds of logic.
Unless she’d somehow known it was there. Perhaps a villager had given her a tip. It was a stretch, but no more outrageous than the alternative explanation—that she really could do what she claimed.
“Who told you that was there?”
“No one. Unlike you”—she gave him a searing glance—“I’m good enough at my job that I don’t need to rely on other people.”
Without an ounce of hesitation, Riley wrapped one gloved fist around the dagger’s handle, pressing the other hand to the vine-covered wood for purchase, and before Clark could stop her, she yanked.
The wood must have rotted through over the years because the dagger came free with so little resistance that Riley stumbled back a few steps, her warm back falling against his chest.
His hands caught her upper arms, moving instinctually to brace her. For a moment they breathed together, bodies flush.
“Let go of me,” Riley said, low and dangerous, as soon as she got her feet under her.
Clark released her at once. Next time, he’d simply let her fall on her perfect backside.
The dagger glinted as Riley lifted it, turning it this way and that.
“Wow.” She wiped at the layers of muck that obscured the intricate design of the handle. “It’s kinda gorgeous.”
For once today, they agreed on something.
Judging by the design, it might date back to the eighteenth century. A silver alloy, he’d guess. Extensive filigree marked it as a private weapon, rather than a military one.
Clark brimmed with wild hope. This was the first real clue to the castle’s history. A piece like this could be quite precisely carbon-dated, its makeup studied to reveal so much in each individual component. He eyeballed the length of the dagger, the delicate nature of the blade.
“It looks like it was made for a woman.” The craftsmanship was ornate enough, even without jewels inlaid, that it might have been a gift.
“Yeah?” Riley looked so pleased with herself, practically bouncing from foot to foot as she thrust and parried the dagger in some kind of strange celebration. “Well, amen to that.”
Clark had known from an early age that his path would be easier if he did anything other than follow in his father’s giant footsteps. Yet he’d spent his summers on dig sites. Scraped knees and sunburns and sleeping on the cold hard ground. Clark loved it, but he’d always lived for this—moments of discovery that helped unravel the mystery of people. Sad as it might sound, he found that distance let him understand the dead much easier than he’d ever understood the living.
That dagger had meant something to someone. They’d held it in their hand, in this room, the same way Riley did now, centuries later in the same spot. For a moment, Clark forgot himself and grinned.
He must have looked like a maniac, because Riley’s face changed, her own exuberance skipping like a record.
“See?” She dropped her gaze from his. “I told you I’d prove the curse is real.”
“What do you mean?” Clark couldn’t explain how she’d found that artifact, but it didn’t mean he was ready to attribute the discovery to some kind of magical abilities.
Clark refused to be made to look a fool again. Alfred Edgeware might have been knighted by the sodding Queen Mum for his contributions to English culture, but his family was still new money with blue-collar northern accents and a thousand breaches of etiquette stacking the deck against them.
Even before Cádiz, Clark had grown up on the receiving end of disdain. His dad had shipped him off to boarding school in the Swiss Alps as soon as the first big check from the book cleared, trying to make him fit in with the aristocracy. But Clark had always been an outlier among the peerage of gentleman academics. Had always cared more than the sons of earls and viscounts who got degrees with no intention of ever using them.
“It’s just a dagger,” he said, tone brooking no argument.
Riley’s face hardened. “Just a dagger, huh?” She flipped the weapon end over end in the air, catching it neatly by the handle.
Clark took an involuntary step backward. “Where did you learn that?”
Nothing about the glint in her eye made him comfortable. “You didn’t think curses went quietly, did you?”
He swallowed. “Well, don’t do anything rash.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it.” The smile she gave him sent a shiver down his spine, the sensation some terrifying combination of emotions he didn’t dare name. “But you see, there’s something about this dagger.” Riley looked contemplatively at the stone ceiling. “It’s like the longer I hold it, the more bloodthirsty I feel.”
Clark could see where this was going. He’d pissed her off royally earlier. Now that they were without witnesses, she wanted to make him squirm by pretending to be possessed by some kind of evil spirit or other nonsense.