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“Could you—?” I knew I shouldn’t ask the question forming in my head. It was straying dangerously close to the feelings conversation I’d worked so hard to deviate from. Curiosity got the better of me, though. “Could you feel everything? I suppose it was like wearing a human-sized condom.” I shook my head. “Don’t answer that. I know you have no frame of comparison. You came, so it must have felt good.”

“It did feel good. Both times.”

Right. He’d also gotten himself off between my thighs. My gaze unwittingly dropped to the place between his legs where no cock currently existed. “So you just make one when you need one?”

“Would you like me to do that now?” His voice had changed, its permanently smooth tones taking on a seductive edge.

Would I? My fingers tightened around the coffee cup. If he did, then the implication was that it would lead to something, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for that in the harsh light of day.

I stood abruptly, coffee splashing onto my thigh. “It’s quick-dry paint. It should be ready for another coat now. I should get it done.”

I’d thought it might be awkward having Caligo around permanently. After all, the rehab facility had been full of people, and now there was only me. That would be a boring transition for anyone. But it turned out that Caligo was quite happy to spend hours in front of the TV, devouring everything from game shows to documentaries.

It freed me to sketch, read, and catch up on the investments that made me feel better about essentially living off my father’s money. Admittedly, that was a misnomer when the starting capital had come from him, but if you couldn’t lie to yourself, then who could you lie to?

Surprisingly, Caligo hadn’t pressured me for anything. He’d stayed out of my bed, and there’d been no more talk of feelings. In fact, he hadn’t made any sort of move at all. Given that three days had passed since Tyler had been ousted from the house, it was starting to rankle. What kind of love allowed someone to happily endure a sexless existence without pushing for more? It was the perfect example of being careful what you wished for, because you might get it and still not be satisfied.

I was currently sitting in an armchair with my laptop on my knees, while Caligo sprawled across the sofa. In a bid to think about something other than why he no longer seemed interested in me, I typed a name into the search bar and then stared at it without pressing return.

“Your heart rate has increased,” Caligo said without taking his eyes off the television. “Do you have indigestion?”

“No. And what do you know about indigestion? You don’t eat.”

“I watched a medical program.”

“Right. I should switch the TV off before you turn into a walking encyclopedia.” I went back to staring at the name. It was interesting that my father had only said it once, yet I’d squirreled it away in the back of my mind. I supposed that, even then, I’d known that temptation would get the better of me. The police had let Donald Wentworth go without charging him, so it was unlikely that I’d find anything suspicious they’d missed. It probably wasn’t even worth pressing return.

“If you don’t have indigestion, why is your heart racing?” Caligo asked.

“It’s not racing.”

“It’s currently at ninety-five beats per minute. Your normal resting heart rate is sixty-three. That’s a difference of thirty-two beats.”

“Sometimes you sound like an android.”

Caligo said nothing.

I sighed. “They brought someone in for questioning while I was at rehab for…” The words were still so hard to say. I cleared my throat. “For my mother’s murder. He claimed that he once dated her, yet I’ve never heard of him. It’s suspicious. I want to look into him and see what I can find. Maybe discover whether the police missed anything obvious.”

“You should.”

I laughed. The good thing about Caligo was that he would never set himself up as the morality police. I pressed return, and the page loaded. It brought up numerous Donald Wentworths, the first of whom was a chartered surveyor. I added art dealer to the search terms and tried again. This time, it brought up the right one. I went to images first, staring at the handsome man in his fifties. “He’s my mother’s type,” I mused aloud. “But I just don’t understand why she wouldn’t have mentioned him. She told me about other men she dated. Why would she keep him a secret?”

“Does he look like a murderer?”

It was nice to know that despite Caligo’s focus on the TV, he was listening. “You can’t tell whether someone is a murderer just by looking at them.”

“You could ask him.”

“Funnily enough, people tend to lie about that sort of thing. Something to do with not wanting to spend the rest of their lives in prison.”

I spent the next thirty minutes digging through every single piece of information I could find on him. Unfortunately, everything pointed to a normal, everyday man bordering on boring, rather than a murderer. He’d never been married, and he didn’t have children. He’d been an art dealer since his mid-twenties. He was well-respected in his field; there were even a few local newspaper articles about him. If there were any skeletons in his cupboard, they weren’t the sort you could find on the internet. I needed to look in his actual cupboards. What a shame doing that wasn’t so easy.

Except…

My gaze slid over to Caligo, my mind whirring.

Sensing my scrutiny, he turned to meet my gaze.