He meets my gaze once again, composed. The celestial knight, back in control. “I’ll ask Sir Quinn if we can gain access.”
I nod, and the movement draws his attention to the scarf I threw on this morning to cover my bandage.
“May I?”
I nod, and his fingertips brush my collarbone as he removes the patterned silk. A nanosecond of contact that crackles flames along my skin.
“Fully healed,” he declares, running the pad of his thumb across my jumping pulse.
A charged silence stretches between us, rooting me in place.
I am not some naïve ingénue. I know when men want me. Whenhumanmen want me, at least. But Lachlan is offering the same signals—looks that linger a moment too long, unnecessary (but welcome) touches, all that adorable blushing.
Old Charlotte would have slipped into his lap this very second, unbuttoned his jacket and started searching for more piercings.
But new Charlotte is going to play by the rules. Giving in to lust, confusing it for a deeper connection, well … That ended very poorly for me in the human realm. And I fear the consequences here could be even more dire. Besides, even if I wanted to?—
An irascible squawk bursts from my bedchamber.
Lachlan straightens, breaking from a daze. “You’d better go. The longer you make her wait, the more hair she’ll devour as punishment.”
I expel a breathy laugh, and his answering smile is warm sunshine in a bitter wind.
“Later then?”
His eyes trail me into my bedchamber.
“I am at your disposal, Miss Fitzroy.”
Chapter
Seventeen
“After you, ladies.”
Lachlan hauls open the heavy stone door for Vesper and me, the pommel of his sword winking over his shoulder like a guiding star.
Despite my candidacy and Aowen’s noble heritage, none of the courtiers she tried to introduce me to today paid us a lick of attention. Which means I have no more hint of where the next fragment may be than I did when I arrived yesterday. Which makes searching the Áine family crypt as good a place as any to start.
Lachlan hovers a hand at my lower back, ushering me through the crypt’s gaping maw. Before he enters, he pulls a drop of starlight into his palm to provide illumination in the tunnels.
The door booms shut, and Vesper’s trembling with so much excitement on my shoulder that her buzzing wings are knotting my curls. When she overheard me mention our destination toAowen, she insisted on joining. Couldn’t resist the temptation of being deep underground where the dead things are buried. I make a mental note to keep close watch on her, lest she steal a femur from an ancestral Áine and spark an inter-territorial incident.
“Well,” Lachlan says, the light at his waist pooling shadows in the hollows beneath his sharp cheekbones, “where should we start?”
We’re standing in a low-ceilinged foyer of sorts, from which branch four tunnels. Through their arched openings, I spy ghostly parts of statues, severed limbs floating in the darkness.
I shiver, tracing my thumb along the ring. It’s ice cold, none of that flaring warmth it sometimes offers.
Is it giving any hint of which way to go?Lachlan asks, using thediamrhánbecause … well, I’m not sure. Maybe he doesn’t want the dead to overhear us.
Nothing.I shiver again, which encourages Lachlan to stop hovering and actually place his hand on my lower back. When the heat of his palm warms my skin through my shirt, I’m shivering for a different reason.
“This way, then.” He nudges me toward the tunnel in front of us. “Might as well start at the beginning.”
As we pickour way through the crypt, I become certain of two things.
First, the duke’s Bannrhorn fragment is not here.
