She turned back to Carson. “Please stand guard at the landing. If you hear someone approach, fetch me.”
She had to be quick. On tiptoes, she slipped past Elias’s collection of food jars and through his open bedroom door. Again the room felt abandoned. However, his now all-too-familiar scent hung over the bed. Briefly, misery twisted in her belly, an irrational sense of loss. Nothing would have ever come from it anyway. She pulled out the drawers of his dresser. Neatly folded clothes. She shook out the book he kept on the nightstand—no hidden compartments. She would know what she was looking for when she found it. Nothing under his pillows. He could be returning up the stairs this moment, his long strides quickly eating up the length of the corridor . . . Under the bed was a valise. It scraped across the floorboards when she dragged it out, and her skin prickled with alarm. With trembling fingers, she unlatched the lid. A gasp escaped her as her eye caught the menacing sheen of metal—a powerful revolver, a knife, and a sheathed scimitar lay side by side on tartan blankets. Heart pounding, she shut the lid and made to push the valise back under the bed. She froze. A sound had come from the antechamber. She swallowed her scream when the door was yanked open and Elias loomed in the doorsill, his handsome face dark like a thundercloud.
She stared up at him, her right arm still stuck under the bed like a naughty paw in a jar of sweets. Recognition flashed in his eyes, then turned to bewilderment.
“What are you doing?” he demanded. His voice was cold, how disturbing that he could sound so icy.
Her own voice failed her.
He took a step toward her, and she shot to her feet.
Chapter 13
Lady Catriona scrambled upright, a hand stretched out toward him as if to ward off a wild creature. It briefly stopped him in his tracks.
“What are you doing here?” he repeated, his tone a little calmer. Her face was frozen, like a doll’s. She had been snooping, no doubt about it.
She backed away, into the reception room, and he followed, matching her step by step.
“I should like to ask you the same thing,” she said, her arm still up. “What are you doing here, Mr. Khoury?”
She placed an odd emphasis on his name, drew it out as if it were a question. The penny dropped then. He could practically hear the Scottish burr—Are ye based in France, by any chance? The room suddenly seemed very bright. The outline of her body in her gray dress was unnaturally clear, as if someone had cut her out from an illustration with sharp scissors. Damn your father, Blackstone; damn your entire history. He could deny everything. The trouble was, he had no idea what exactly she knew, and he hadn’t a habit of lying.
He stopped stalking her so that she’d stop running.
“It was careless of you to come here alone,” he said.
She hovered, warily. Her eyes were cool. “A protection officer is just outside in the corridor—a large, mean, ruthless one.”
Not quite so careless, then. He gave her a thin smile.
She crossed her arms over her chest. “You don’t deny that you’re guilty of something?”
“I’m guilty of a number of things, Lady Catriona; it doesn’t give you permission to search my chambers.”
Her chin tipped up in defiance. “Your name has been associated with . . . events in France,” she said. “If Khoury is indeed your name.”
Barely a week, and his mission was on the verge of turning to shit.
He took a deep breath. “It is my name, yes. Do you know how many Khourys exist?”
“I’m aware,” she replied quickly. “There’s circumstantial evidence, however, and your arsenal of weapons hardly helps your case.”
“An arsenal,” he said, taken aback. “Every gentleman owns a revolver and a sword—what is so particularly offensive about mine?”
“They . . . seem rather oversized.”
Incredible. He bit back an inappropriate comment about his oversized weapon. Under his indignant stare, her gaze dropped, and caught on his feet. Her expression turned slightly embarrassed, probably because he was only wearing socks.
“Forgive me,” he drawled. “I hadn’t expected visitors.”
He had been on the balcony, smoking and minding his own business, when he had heard something scrape across his bedroom floor.
She touched her glasses, the awkward way, not the about-to-say-something-clever way. “The situation is that a few years ago, a Mr. Khoury took some antique jewels from a French count,” she said with some reluctance.
The count. He knew immediately. She noticed the recognition in his eyes, and a mix of pain and anger chased across her face. Her lips compressed into a tight line. Last night, her mouth had been soft as a rose under his. Nymph and lady had been one, at last. His blood had burned with the urge to taste her, to lick her fine skin from throat to toe, to bury his fingers in her hair and to pull the lush strands free. They could have been anyone in the dark, just a man and a woman indulging in carnal pleasure. Did you like what you saw? It had been the whisky speaking. That was why he had stopped. He had considered it during the train ride back to Oxford this morning, why he had stopped when all he had wanted was to take more, to give more, and it had disturbed him that her intoxication had made him hold back rather than any of the other reasons why making love to her would be a foolish thing to do. Apparently, he hadn’t learned his lesson back in Beirut. Apparently, he’d still take stupid risks for an unsuitable woman.
He studied her, gauging her mood, which was so unnaturally well-contained in her rigid body.
“I could explain about the count,” he hedged. “But what if you decide you don’t like it? You would call your officer, and we would have a mess here.” He indicated a circle on the floor with his index finger.
“Please,” she said, softly now. “Please explain.”
“First, tell me,” he said. “Do you believe that stealing loot back from a looter is theft?”
Her brow creased. “I don’t think so, no.”
“Alors,” he said. “I didn’t take the jewels, but I assisted in their taking. And the count, he was a grave robber.”
“What?”
“Egyptian tombs.” He shrugged. “The French and the English have a competition over emptying tombs along the Nile. They have become better at it than the local robbers.”
Catriona had placed her fingers over her mouth.
“He also had two mummies,” he said. “They like those, too.” Something compelled him to add: “Not as much as the English, though. They hold mummy unwrapping parties here, don’t they?”
She dropped her hand. “I have heard of that, yes.” Her voice was flat.
He nodded slowly, his brows raised. “Is it true that people here are eating them, the mummy parts?”
She made a soft gagging sound. “Not in decades, to my knowledge.”
“Hm.”
“I don’t approve of such a thing,” she said, her cheeks flushing with color.
“You mean cannibalism?”
Her face looked drawn now, as though she hadn’t slept in a week. “You are displeased, understandably.”