lover had been rumpled and dark, his hair the color of honey, or so she’d thought on a moonless night. He’d emanated sex and menace. Hard hunger and brutal masculinity.
The Chief Inspector was all starch and serenity. A dapper, terse, and proper gentleman clad in a fine cut jacket with an infinite supply of decorum.
But that strong jaw. The sinfully handsome features cut sharp as crystal and then blunted with the whisper of ruthlessness. All of this slashed clean through with a sardonic mouth.
It was him.
She was sure of it… wasn’t she? No one else had eyes so light, so incredibly elemental. Like the color of lightning over the Baltic Sea.
Those eyes bored into her now. Flat, merciless, and unsympathetic. He regarded her as if she were the last person alive he wanted to see.
As if she were lower than the earth upon which they’d sinned.
If she’d any hope that this man would be her ally, it was dashed upon the rocky shards of his glare.
“What happened here?” he asked her evenly.
Pru felt her face crumple with confusion. He didn’t sound like himself. Where was the accent from before? Rough and low-born.
She’d have recognized that accent anywhere.
This man spoke like his betters. Was she going mad, perhaps? Was her desperation and shock so prescient that she’d summoned a memory and layered it over reality?
“Prudence, you answer him,” her father barked.
“I-I was waiting for Father to gather me for the ceremony,” she recounted, wanting to appease him. Needing to explain. It was so important he didn’t think she had anything to do with this. No one would really believe that she would commit murder, would they? “There was a knock on my door and a note pushed under,” she continued. “The note was from George.” She pointed at the dead man at her feet and immediately wished she hadn’t looked down.
Oh God. She’d thought the wedding was the worst thing that would happen to her today. She’d never been so wrong in her life.
How did so much blood belong in one body? How would she ever forget the sight of it? She doubted she could even look at her own veins the same way.
“Look at me,” the inspector ordered. “What did the note say?”
“That he had to see me. That he had to apologize.”
“Apologize,” he echoed. “Had you reason to be angry with the Earl of Sutherland?”
Her brow furrowed and she cast an accusatory look at him. “You know I did.”
“How would he know?” her father demanded. “You’ve never been introduced.”
A glint of warning frosted the inspector’s eyes impossibly colder. Don’t. It warned. Don’t ruin us both.
“I meant…” Pru turned to her father. “Y-you did. I told you George was unfaithful, and you insisted I marry him regardless.”
Her father, a powerful man with the build of a baker who enjoyed his own work, put up his hands against Morley’s attention. Such large hands for such fine white gloves. “It was little more than wild oats,” he defended George. “And Prudence has always been a romantic, fanciful creature. I wasn’t about to see her future ruined by rumor.”
“It wasn’t rumor,” she argued, even though everything inside of herself told her not to. “Everyone knows George had bastards. He conducted a very public affair with Lady Jessica Morton. And yet you insisted I invite her to the wedding.”
Why was she having this discussion covered in blood? When all she wanted to do was flee. Or fling herself into the inspector’s arms.
She knew how strong they were. How capable they’d be of carrying the weight threatening to drag her beneath the surface of an ocean of despair and desperation.
She had to tell him—
“And so, you came to meet him before the ceremony,” the Chief Inspector prompted very gently, as if he were talking to a child. “You came to receive his apology. Then what? What did he say to make you angry?”
She shook her head with such vehemence her eyes couldn’t keep up. The beautiful Chief Inspector became a golden blur. “Nothing! He said nothing. I opened the door and he was… like this.” She gestured to George’s body, unable to look down again. “Blood poured everywhere, the knife was already in his neck. He was rolling on the floor trying to pull it out, so I ran to him and tried to help. I was thinking if he took it out, it would bleed that much more. That maybe he should keep it in. I was trying to hold it.”