but there was something else there, too, something that smacked of self preservation, as though he were afraid to be alone with her.
She went up to her room right after dinner that night, pleading exhaustion, and after reading for an hour, put on her nightgown and got up to use the bathroom. But when she stepped out into the hallway, Ian was on his way in, wearing a bathrobe and carrying a leather toiletries case.
“I’m sorry. Did you want to . . .” He looked so completely un-sinister that she had trouble connecting him with the person she’d followed to her house only yesterday.
“No, that’s fine. You go first.” She ducked back into her room, her heart beating fast. The bathroom shared a wall with her room and she listened to the steady rush of the shower for a few minutes, then the sounds of him getting out, shutting the door of the shower stall and flushing the toilet. A few minutes later, she heard the door to the bathroom open, his footfall in the hall, and his own door shutting behind him.
She counted to one hundred, then went out into the hall and knocked on his door. When he answered, he was still in his robe.
“Can I talk to you?”
“Yes. Certainly.” He drew the robe more tightly around himself, gestured her into his room and shut the door.
“Sit down,” he told her politely, clearing some papers off the chair at the little desk. She sat and looked around the bedroom, which was an almost identical, though more masculine version of her own, its walls a clean white, the trim painted a dark blue that matched the bedding and curtains. The room was neat, the bed made, not a single piece of clothing on the floor. A black suit was draped over the blue and red patchwork quilt.
“What um . . . what did you want?” he asked. He sat down on the bed, clutching his robe around him. With his wet hair slicked down close to his head, he looked very young.
Suddenly, she was so embarrassed, she could barely speak. But she’d already started it and there wasn’t any turning back. “I saw you in Boston yesterday,” she announced. “And I know that you lied to us about when you arrived in Vermont. What I want to know is why.”
Ian stood up and went over to the window. For a couple of minutes he didn’t say anything. Then he turned back to her.
“I wondered if anyone knew about that. I’m afraid my explanation won’t make much sense to you, but I’ll give it all the same. I had come all the way here and I wanted some time on my own before arriving at Patch and Britta’s. I don’t know, I think it was the idea of Christmas and the children and all the people. Christmas is a bit odd for me, because I’m not with Eloise. I just wanted a few days here to explore, by myself. It’s one of my favorite things, getting to know a new place all on my own. So I stayed at a hotel in Suffolk, a few miles away. I’d heard from Patch and Britta that there were some great antiques in the area. I am, after all, here to buy antiques. So I looked around, went to an auction.”
“What would you have done if you’d run into them downtown?”
“Don’t know. I hadn’t thought that far ahead, I guess. I would have told them the truth, I suppose, or said I’d arrived early and didn’t want to trouble them.”
She stood up and went over to him, her eyes almost level with his, so close that she could smell the particular scent of him, his sharp English smell, of lemons and spice. “But why did you go to my house yesterday? Why did you follow me to Boston?”
On the wall above the bed was a portrait of an eighteenth-century gentleman, dressed in military garb and staring imperiously down at them. She imagined that he disapproved. “Look at you,” he seemed to say, “accusing a man when you’ve got no evidence to support your feeling that he’s guilty.” But she had evidence. He had followed her. She had seen him.
He stared at her for a minute, his face stricken, then turned away and slammed his open hand against the wall. “Damn, Sweeney.” The violent movement surprised her. “Bloody hell. I can’t . . . Close your eyes for a second. I can’t talk to