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.
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.