—
She woke the next morning in one of Blackstone’s guest rooms. The sunlight streaming through the chintz curtains was thick and golden, announcing noon. She sat on the edge of the mattress, her head drooping as if too heavy for the neck while she took stock of last night’s consequences. Belly: queasy. Head: achy. Sensibilities: deceased. At her core hovered a secret glow, a small ball of light where her soul kept his kiss. Oh God, they had kissed. She buried her face in her hands. It would be easy to blame the Scotch for the escapade, but the Scotch only peeled back the thin veneer of civility which normally concealed her darker side. I would have worshipped you, on my knees. Her body turned weak and pink and she sank back into the sheets. She kept touching her mouth. How did one return to normal after such a thing? To date, everyone she had kissed, she had never seen again soon after. But Elias was very much around. What was worse, seeing him again, or not seeing him again?
To her relief and great disappointment, Elias wasn’t among the guests milling around the late breakfast buffet.
“He left after we closed the drawing room,” Hattie told her while Catriona spooned scrambled eggs onto her plate. “He said he had taken a hotel room near Victoria Station to catch the first train back to Oxford.”
“Mr. Khoury is free to go where he pleases.”
“Indeed,” Hattie said, sounding . . . somewhat shifty.
Catriona lowered the spoon warily. “Is anything the matter?”
“Actually.” Hattie leaned closer. “There is something Mr. Blackstone should like to bring to your attention.”
Premonition fell over Catriona like a shadow and took all warmth from her body.
“Is it about Mr. Khoury?”
Hattie nodded.
Last night’s whisky churned in her stomach. She put down her plate. “Take me to Blackstone.”
“I meant to tell you after you had eaten,” Hattie said mournfully.
They should have told her last night before the intoxicating feel of Elias’s body had become irrevocably imprinted on hers.
Blackstone met them in a quaint, linden-green reading parlor. Impossibly, he looked more brooding than usual.
“Last night, I had a cable sent to an old acquaintance in France,” he told her. He pulled a yellow paper slip from his jacket pocket—a telegram. Catriona felt a curdle of fear. Blackstone’s “old acquaintances” were usually synonymous with his unsavory past.
“When Mr. Khoury introduced himself,” Blackstone went on, “I thought I had heard his name once before, in the context of an incident involving some artifacts. It’s unusual to my ears so it’s not a name I’d forget. I sent a note to see if there was anything to my suspicions. An hour ago, I received a reply.”
He held up the telegram.
“What has he done?” she asked quietly.
Hattie took her hand; her soft fingers felt hot against Catriona’s cold skin. “There is no concrete proof,” she said, “but several years ago, a Mr. Khoury was involved in the theft of some antique jewels.”
“Jewels?”
“From a French count’s private collection,” Blackstone added.
“You wrote to the count?”
Blackstone shook his head. “I’m not acquainted with him, and I doubt he’d make the connection between Mr. Khoury and the theft; it was rumors in the, erm, unofficial networks; people had caught wind that there might be a new mole in town, from the east. It was a hefty theft, so the news of it reached London.”
A mole. Someone who pretended to be one thing when he was quite another. Someone who inveigled himself skillfully with his target until he had what he wanted. Deep inside her chest, the bright glow sparked by their kiss went dark. The corners of her mouth had turned down as the pain stabbed through her, and she became aware of it. She turned her face away as she struggled to right her expression.
“It could have been another Khoury,” she said mechanically. “It’s a common name in his region.”
A memory flashed, of Elias looking not at all scholarly as he prowled along a narrow, smoky corridor in a Glasgow inn, priming to take on three men at once. Swallowing hurt. She had known something had been off about him.
“It wouldn’t have been proper to detain him without proof,” Blackstone said and gave an apologetic shrug, “and he had left before I received this reply.”
“Oh, detaining him would have been an inexcusable affront,” Catriona agreed. She turned to the door.
Hattie grabbed her arm. “What do you mean to do?”
Catriona looked from her to Blackstone. “He’s in Oxford right now. Alone. With access to . . . everything.” A cold energy rushed through her. “I must go at once.”
“Not on your own, you mustn’t,” Hattie said with an anxious frown, her grip tightening.
Blackstone quite agreed. “I’ll accompany you.”
“How kind, but you still have a house full of guests.”
In the end, it was agreed that Carson, Hattie’s personal protection officer, would accompany Catriona back to Oxford.
She barely registered the train ride. The whispers wouldn’t stop: this was why Elias had kissed her, to burrow closer, as a mole would. She literally held a key to the Ashmolean. It was why he had asked her to play chess. She remembered her breathless arousal when his thigh had been notched between hers and she wanted to crawl out of her skin. Did you like that I was watching . . . Cruel creature. Granted, a man was innocent until proven guilty. Accosting him with a protection officer would be irreparably insulting in case he was innocent. She must keep a cool head; she would, she always did when in a crisis.
At the Ashmolean, the artifact room looked untouched, but the clerk’s ledger showed that Elias had signed in from ten o’clock until noon. Was Elias Khoury even his true name? Or was it a lie, like his kiss?
She went to the St. John’s porter’s lodge, Carson in tow, keeping very calm. Porter Clive staffed the desk and gave out the spare key to Elias’s lodgings without hesitation when she requested it. The vein in her neck drummed while climbing the narrow stairs to his flat.
“In the utterly unlikely event that you hear a commotion, please be quick,” she instructed Carson when they reached the door. “For now, please stand down.”
Carson was not pleased with this.
Undeterred, she knocked. “Mr. Khoury?”
Silence.
She knocked again and when no one answered, she turned the doorknob and found it unlocked. The flat’s reception room was empty. However, the chessboard was on the table, and Elias’s hat and coat hung on the garderobe. At least he had not yet absconded back to Beirut with lord-knows-what in his luggage. Perhaps he had gone down to the kitchens.