The Unexpected Wife - Jess Michaels Page 0,65

through the window. “If I go in, we will be in there for hours,” she said. “I know myself too well. And I want to talk to you.”

He didn’t understand why she felt this sudden drive to speak to him, but he wasn’t about to let it go. “You know,” he said, leaning a little closer so they wouldn’t be overheard. “You are very beautiful when you are happy. You shine.”

Pink suffused her cheeks and she ducked her head for a moment at the compliment. Then she lifted her gaze back to his. “Owen?”

He nodded.

“Do we have time to go back to your home and…finish what we started in the carriage?”

He blinked down into her upturned face. Oh yes, he was definitely in love with this woman. Desperately, completely and irretrievably in love. And he was not going to allow himself to fret over or regret it, just revel in it as long as he could spend time with her.

“Oh yes,” he said softly. “We most definitely do.”

Rather than his parlor, Owen had escorted Celeste to his bedchamber this time after they arrived at his home. He had stepped out for a moment, to talk to a servant about something, and so she was alone in his room.

It was not a giant chamber, but it was very much…him. With dark wall coloring, a few pretty landscapes on the walls and books stacked on every free surface. She smiled as she perused the titles. Novels and history books and information about everything in between. They spoke of a busy mind always collecting, collecting and then making that information work for him.

Of course there was a huge stack of books next to his bed, and that made her eyes travel there. It was certainly big enough for two, with a soft coverlet that looked like one could be comfortable there for hours.

She very much wanted to do just that. Lock out the real world, the worrying world, the uncertain world, and create a tiny little corner where only she and Owen existed.

She moved to touch the coverlet, drawing her hand over it slowly from the foot of the bed to the head. There were papers stacked on the bedside table, and she turned her head to look at the top one. A list, because of course it was a list. She would have smiled if not for the contents of it.

Abigail’s name—and a long string of reasons for her being the murderer.

Celeste’s heart sank and her stomach turned. She’d known he kept her friend on his suspect list, but this seemed far more serious a thing. He was narrowing down the people who could have killed Erasmus and his brilliant mind had begun to settle, it seemed.

There were voices in the hall and Celeste stepped away from the list so he wouldn’t know she was peeking at it. She very much wanted to bring it up, of course, but what would she say? She had already declared Pippa innocent due to a “feeling” and if she repeated that same mantra with Abigail, who he clearly suspected all the more, she doubted it would land as well.

No, what she needed was more evidence. Something to counter the points she had read in his neat, even hand. And that wasn’t something she would find tonight in his bedroom. She moved to the fire and tried to look as innocent as she could when he opened the door.

He stood in the doorway a moment, staring at her. All her thoughts fell away, all her fears vanished. Tonight wasn’t about investigations or discussions or anything but the way his gaze fluttered over her. The way his pupils dilated with desire. The way his hands flexed at his sides as if he was desperately fighting for control.

They had been in this place before. He had looked at her with such passion before, she had felt her body respond in kind before. And yet this time it felt different. It felt less fraught and more…impactful to have asked for this pleasure rather than surrendered to it.

“Oh, that will not do,” he said softly as he closed and locked the door behind himself.

“What will not do?” she asked, her voice breathy in the quiet.

“That frown,” he said. “I will have to find some way to make it go away.”

Already she felt herself smiling, even though the dark desire in his eyes made her entire body heavy and ready for what would come next. If he wanted to work at