“Miss Casper here is a healer,” he provided, drawing the attention of the room. “She may also have some insight that will benefit any ongoing investigations you have afoot. I thought bringing her along might be useful.”
“Did you indeed?” said Mr. Richards, looking impressed. “Actually, Miss Casper, I do have one case that has stumped us all right down to our core. It appears that this woman died of a bruise to the thigh! Will you have a look?”
“Of course!” Mae breathed, already floating forward, her fingers flexing like they were itching to investigate. “Clotting in the legs can sometimes stopper the chest, you know. Lungs or heart.”
“I’ll wait outside,” he said to them, giving a quick bow and turning to flee back out into the embrace of London and all the air that it provided.
Truth be told, his heart was still hammering from everything that had come before. He wasn’t certain if he was still reeling from the shock of seeing that particular woman on his father’s doorstep or if his body was still demanding to know why he’d stopped at just kissing Mae Casper.
He’d kissed her as thoroughly as he could, at least. He’d not wasted the snap decision to finally do the thing.
But he’d had to stop if he didn’t want to make another desk into a versatile piece of furniture. Kissing her for the first time in his father’s house was already less than the ideal setting. Anything further would’ve been wholly unacceptable.
Then again … the kiss had been punishment for crossing a line into his private life.
What would he be entitled to if she ever saw his flat? That one place he’d never shared with anyone else?
He groaned and dropped his head back against the bricks outside the morgue, scratching at the scar on his forearm.
He could still feel the curves of her body under his hands.
He could still taste her.
For all he had waxed poetic about crossing lines, he had apparently forgotten that the entire point of that metaphor was that once crossed, the line vanishes. The line ceases to exist.
He’d kissed her now.
So did that mean he could do it again?
And if so, how often? And when? And where?
He shut his eyes and gave himself a shake. He knew very damn well that he couldn’t take flagrant liberties with the likes of that woman.
He had always known that.
It was a lovely fantasy, though. A vivid one, easy to conjure in his mind’s eye. Easy to recall on the tip of his tongue and the pads of his fingers and nudge past memory and into possibility.
And though whatever came next couldn’t be flagrant, and it likely couldn’t be permanent, perhaps it could still be more than just that once.
It needed to be.
He couldn’t survive on that one, single taste.
It’s why he hadn’t taken it for so long. He had known that once he had it, he would want more. There would be no finding a substitute or waiting out the burn or attempting to purge the desire from his system.
There was only one answer to this kind of want, and Roland knew it.
He wondered if Mae knew it too.
When the women emerged from the morgue, they were chattering excitedly to each other about deep veins and autopsies and an appointment they’d both evidently made to meet back here tomorrow to perform some sort of gruesome procedure together.
“Do you ever heal animals, or just humans?” Sybil asked. “I got invited to a vivisection once to remove a tumor from a prizerace horse’s rump. It was fascinating. Horse seemed completely unbothered. They got him dead drunk first, I think.”
He resisted the urge to say her name again in his most exhausted voice. It wouldn’t work anyway, and Sybil did love to chatter. She likely thought she was distracting him from the fact that she was following them back to the clinic.
He didn’t care anymore. All that mattered just now was doing his level best not to imagine a live horse having its arse muscles opened up for a rapt audience while a pocket of pus was dug out. He failed, obviously.
He would probably dream about it, at this stage.
