Lace and Lies

All the women in your family do.

She had a worse crush on him than I did.

I found I missed him, and I definitely missed William’s cooking.

Really? I’d only noticed her with Rafe. Which showed where my interests lay.

The best alibi a man can have. He’s dead.

Rafe raised his eyebrows. “Perhaps you should spend more time here.”

I felt warm inside. I refused to call Rafe my boyfriend—you couldn’t have a boyfriend who was half a millennium old—but I had some sort of proprietary interest in him. Some things were probably better without a name.

I suppose it was that almost desperate-sounding appeal in his voice. As though there had been women in the past that he hadn’t been able to save. It annoyed me to give in, but I did at last. “Fine,” I said, letting him know how cross I was. “But I’m only staying tonight.

He held my shoulders even tighter. “I have to protect you. I must.”

I never wear perfume.
He looked at me in a rather disturbing way that made me wish I’d kept my mouth shut.
I had noticed.
His nostrils quivered again, and I knew that even now he could smell me. Awareness quivered down my spine and made me hold my gaze firmly to the papers in front of me.

Lucy, you can come to my home willingly, or I can throw you over my shoulder and carry you. The choice is yours.

He made a sound that I swear was more of the growl of a wild animal than a human sound. “You won’t be anywhere near the shop until this murder’s solved. You’re coming home with me.”

For while he was tame and civilized, there was always a hint of the animal. I wished it didn’t attract me so much, but it did.

His eyes scanned my face as though it would tell him more than my words would.

I got up to leave and realized we hadn’t talked about the murder at all. I turned back. “Don’t you want to grill me for details about the dead woman?”

“Later. I wanted to give you a break.”

Annoying or not, he could be very thoughtful. And he was right. I did feel better for a meal.

There was a thread of humor in his voice as he said, “Feed you. You haven’t eaten anything this morning, have you?”

How on earth could he know that? I’d drunk about two sips of my coffee and a cup of herbal tea.

He turned to me, and his eyes gleamed in the darkness. He kissed me and then said, “Lucy, what am I going to do with you?”

“I don’t know, but you can do that again.”

He was such a gentleman, he always did that when a woman entered the room. He came forward and brushed his lips against my cheek. “I was waiting for you to text me. I’d have escorted you here. How did it go this evening?”

My cheek tingled where he kissed me, but I tried to keep my thoughts on knitting. “Fine. In fact, it was fabulous.”

Teddy Lamont was an artist. He’d begun as a painter but then began to marry visual arts with crafts, such as quilting, needlepoint and knitting. He’d done more than anyone I could think of in the recent past to make these ancient crafts fashionable.

I needed to get my head around this. “But do you like her, like her?”

When he was teasing me, he had a way of looking very serious, but there was always a disturbing twinkle in his eye. He had it now. “Currently, my romantic interest lies elsewhere.”

Naturally, that made me blush and realize—not for the first time—that he had several hundred more years’ experience at flirtation, relationships and love than I did.