What sidetracked me was doing a bit of side research on something that had been intriguing me since I learned of it.
I was in the middle of that when Battle ended our companionable silence.
“Christ,” he said. “This woman is tedious.” He rested the book on his thigh with his thumb in the page and looked at me. “Did you get through this whole thing?”
I nodded.
“Bloody hell. How?”
I smiled at him. “It’s my job.”
“I actually feel foul this woman’s blood runs through my veins. She was vapid to extremes, and a revoltingly slipshod mother.”
I grimaced, because I got him as well as agreed with him.
His eyes dropped to the laptop and came back to my face. “What are you doing?”
“Researching the disappearance of Lord Arthur Hughes-Davies, the viscount from Northumberland who went missing in 1946.”
His brows inched together. “Why are you doing that?”
I shrugged. “Because it’s a mystery.” Then I got into it. “Get this, the dude was not a good dude. He got three deferrals, all medical, all suspected to have happened because he paid people off so he didn’t have to serve during the war.”
“If he had that kind of pull, he could have done the same thing and found himself a safe officer’s commission where he didn’t leave English soil and not taken that kind of hit to his reputation,” Battle noted.
“He could. Another reason people thought he was an asshole. If you didn’t do your bit for the war effort back then, whatever that bit might be, you were persona non grata. And as far as I could tell, he didn’t do anything. It was like the war didn’t happen for him, and he worked hard to make it that way. But there were also rumors he cheated at cards, left his companions with bar and dinner tabs, maybe had fascist tendencies and was inappropriate with the ladies.”
“So did anyone give a shit he was gone?”
“The dowager countess, his mother, kicked up quite a fuss.”
“And no one ever found him?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Not hide nor hair. Nothing. He vanished. One day there, one day gone and never heard from again.”
His tone had changed, taken an edge, when he queried, “How was he inappropriate with the ladies?”
“The articles and entries paint him as a bit of a cad, he was single, however reading between the lines of such things being reported in 1946, it could be a lot worse than that.”
“Then I hope someone got sick of his fuckwittery and put an end to him.”
“Now who’s bloodthirsty?” I teased as something caught the corner of my eye.
I looked out the windows.
Then I blinked and stared out the windows.
Prue, in a dove-gray tunic-length top that looked like two squares stitched together with openings for armholes, and matching gray leggings with equally matching gray flats on her feet with pointed toes that curled up, making her look like she was wearing tiny boats on her tiny feet, was lurking behind a shrub.
She was also wearing her octopus beanie.
How Atlas Talyn didn’t recognize his third child had strong artistic tendencies was beyond me.
What a moron.
But I couldn’t think on that.
Because she was furtively glancing around the shrub at something.
