Page 52 of Forgery, Love, and Other Lies
Fiona hitched up her skirts and ran faster. “We’ll be sure to follow in her example if we keep having to run after her.”
He ran faster, too, but the dowager still beat them, and they found her stepping through the wardrobe and into the second townhouse before they could stop her or help her or ask her to slow down.
“My lady,” Zander called, “Please do slow down. Sit. You’ll hurt yourself.”
She did not listen, and they ran up the stairs after her, breathing hard. When they reached the top of the stairs, they saw the door to the painting room open, and they heard a low keening echo in the open space.
“Oh.” Fiona clutched her heart but slowed her feet, tiptoeing toward the dowager as if they did not wish to disturb her mourning.
Zander had heard such sounds of grief before from his mother’s lips after his father’s death. No matter his father’s sins, the man had loved his wife. And she him. He tried to remember that on the days he wanted to scrub his father’s name from the earth. But then those days he tended to remember that his father had not quite loved his children more than his art, and that stung too deep.
The dowager sat in a crumpled heap in the middle of the gallery, much as Fiona had the last time they’d been here, and Fiona joined the older woman, wrapped her in a hug, rocked her back and forth. Zander knelt near them, offering what strength and solace he could, but he could not quite find true empathy for her, not when she seemed to love her art and mourn its loss as if it were a husband, a child. His jaw was hard, his teeth grinding, and he took several voices to relax the angry muscles.
Finally, sobs subsided, and Lady Balantine rose on shaky legs, supported by both Fiona and Zander.
“Let’s take you back to the other house,” Fiona said, clutching the woman’s arm.
Lady Balantine nodded with watery eyes and dislodged curls, and they got her almost into the hallway when she turned to Fiona with wide eyes. “Your paintings. Your…”
“Forgeries.” Fiona’s mouth was a grim line. “Yes. They are gone.”
The dowager snapped her gaze to Zander. “And your Rubens…”
“Gone as well, my lady.”
“Oh.” Her already pale visage lost what was left of the blood in her cheeks, and with one final moan, her eyes rolled back in her head and she fainted.
Zander caught her with a grunt. “Devil take it! When did I start making women faint?” He swept her into his arms and picked his way carefully down the stairs and into the other house, where they found her bedchamber and laid her on the bed.
“Well”—Fiona collapsed with a sigh into a shadow-drenched chair in the corner of the room. “Technically I did not faint. I only pretended to. Have other women fainted around you recently?”
God, what an amusing woman. He should not laugh but he wanted to. He would not laugh, but he dropped to the floor beside her chair, breathing in her soft scent as he let his head fall back to rest on the cushion beside her leg.
Today was not amusing. Today the plot thickened and the shadows gathered. Today they’d found answers but also more questions. He closed his eyes.
And her fingers crept like tendrils into his hair, tugging gently, smoothing it away from his forehead, taming, stroking against his skull in a caress of comfort he’d not known since childhood.
Could dragons soothe as well as snort?
Seemed so.
Today had knocked him flat and not simply because they’d gotten everywhere and nowhere at once. More shockingly, today he’d realized he’d found a woman who could make him see the world’s brightness in the dead dark of midnight, and if he was not careful, he might never want to let her brightness go.
Seventeen
Men’s hair should not be so soft. Unfair, it was. Horribly so. She never, in fact, wanted to slip her fingers out of Zander’s hair, though she should not have dared to slip them in there to begin with. Not with the dowager fainted on the bed, not with her clear lack of knowledge of the paintings’ whereabouts. So much for her idea that she might be touring Europe with the paintings by her side. An unlikely scenario to begin with.
As unlikely as Fiona’s fingers stuck for eternity to a handsome man’s scalp.
But that might very well happen, too, because she simply could not concede the area she’d won with such casual boldness. He’d brought it on himself, really, seeking her out this morning to have her by his side, telling her he could not do without her observations, her knowledge, making her feel useful instead of disposable. He’d assured, really, with all that, her fingers would be eternally fussing in his hair.
“Zander,” she ventured.
“Hmm.” The sound rather like a purr as she stroked a lock of his hair behind his ear.
“What do we do now?”
He opened his eyes, those dark orbs staring straight into her, though muscle and bone to the ephemeral bit of Fiona that she’d never thought another person would see so well. “I wish I knew. I’m rather… at a loss.”
