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.”
“And here I thought you might have a taste for the macabre.”
“Possibly,” she shot back, “but not for sensationalism at the expense of piety.”
“A very modern attitude,” he conceded, but then she was a modern woman. “As for the count: the Egyptians who wanted the pieces back said he had removed them without license. They approached me after all attempts at negotiation had failed; they knew that I had associated with his lordship over silk business. I returned to his house for another dinner, scouted the location of the pieces, and handed someone a precise map of the place. Perhaps I told them the time when the guards on his property were changed, too.”
He had shared far more with her than she needed to know, it felt like bludgeoning her with the truth. She processed it all with a blank expression but her shoulders were hunched, in the way a falcon tightly folded up its wings against a storm. It cooled the heat in his head. Wounding her was the last thing he had wanted. She was a woman he had kissed and wanted to kiss again, and his protective instincts seemed flagrantly unconcerned with the more adversarial parts of her position.
“What have you come to take from here?” she finally asked.
“Everything,” he said gently.
She sucked in a breath. “Leighton stole all of these pieces?”
He twisted his hand, like a shrug. “My sponsors say he didn’t have permission, and some of the pieces have been taken off their land. There are many more artifacts on these shelves than on my inventory list, though, and I don’t know their history.”
“My father would never permit work on stolen artifacts,” she said, and her nostrils flared in a sudden show of emotions. “He requires proof of license for everything.”
“I know. He has a reputation for being an honorable man, which is why I thought he was the right man to give me an introduction.”
She raised a hand to her face and rubbed her left temple. “You became acquainted with my father because you want him to preside over your negotiation with Leighton?”
“Yes. I require a patron and a meeting with Leighton.”
“The professor who recommended you to my father, did he know?”
“Professor Pappas,” he said. “No, he didn’t know the details of my cause.”
She again crossed her arms over her chest, but now it looked as though she was hugging herself. “Are you . . . a scholar at all?”
“I’m a man of business.”
“I see.” A lump was visibly moving down her throat. “And what if my father introduced you, and your negotiations turned out to be unsuccessful?”
“Inshallah, they will be successful,” he replied.
She smiled, a sad, knowing smile.
They took stock of each other. Officially, until last night, they had owed each other nothing. No words had given shape to whatever feelings they might have harbored. And yet, everything felt different now, as if the ground was splitting between them, and against all better judgment it made him want to grab her and hold on tight.
“I should like to continue this conversation over a cup of tea,” she said, her tone all business now. “Would you join me at the Eagle and Child in an hour?”
Her request caught him off guard, but it sounded like an honest invitation, not a trap. She wouldn’t await him at the pub with Scotland Yard, ready to remove him from British soil. On instinct, he said yes, he would meet her.