Page 33

I pick up the glass. “You keep this in the library?”

“My father does.”

“This bottle is older than I am.”

“Considerably.”

I look at him over the rim. “Was that necessary?”

A small smile appears. “You brought it up.”

I take a sip before I can answer. The whisky is smooth at first, then warm enough to spread slowly through my chest. I glance at the glass again, reconsidering my earlier agreement to only one.

Ross settles into the chair opposite mine, his jacket still hanging behind him and his tie loosened enough to make him look less formal than I’m used to seeing him.

Outside, thunder rolls across the darkened grounds. Inside, there’s no one left to interrupt us.

Ross pours a second measure into his own glass and leaves the bottle on the small table between us.

I close my laptop without reopening the report.

“That’s dangerous,” I say.

Ross looks at the computer. “The whisky?”

“The fact that I’ve stopped pretending I’m still working.”

“You lasted longer than I expected,” he says.

I pick up my glass and move toward the shelves. The library feels different after hours, less like a workspace and more like the private room it was built to be. The lamps cast warm pools of light across the wood, and beyond the windows, rain blurs the gardens into darkness.

I trail my fingers along a row of old spines.

“Your family has an absurd number of first editions.”

Ross joins me a few feet away.

“My grandfather collected them.”

“Actually read them?”

“Some.”

“Generous answer.”

He smiles. “He liked owning things with history.”

“That part I believe.”

I stop in front of a volume on Viennese Secession artists and pull it free. Ross glances at the title.

“I saw a Klimt retrospective in Vienna years ago,” he says.

“Smaller than I expected.”

I look at him. “You went voluntarily?”

“Is that surprising?”