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your grace?”
    “You, Miss Sommers. I need the opinion of an expert to tell me exactly what my people have found on my land. Honestly”—he shrugged, a surprisingly boyish action for the stern taskmaster of the Sedgwick empire—“you are the reason I came to London. You were the first person I could think to come to who would not think me completely mad.”
    “Then you give me more credit than I deserve.” She paused and seemed to reverse her thoughts. “What is it you have found?”
    “In private.”
    She peered up and down the hall. “Very well. Upstairs. My office is on the left, you can’t miss it. We’ll have privacy. Wait there.” Her hand closing on the doorknob, she narrowed her eyes. “And don’t touch anything.”
    Before he could reply, she opened the door, then shut it in his face. Both his brows arched. Her scent lingered in the narrow space where she’d stood. Feeling momentarily bereft of thought, Erik stepped away. Then heturned and looked toward the staircase. He was restless and his restlessness disturbed him.
    He found Christine’s cramped second-floor office at the top of the stairs. The door was unlocked and he stepped inside only to snag his boot on the carpet. Pulling aside the faded chintz curtain to let light inside, he returned his attention to the dull room.
    Dusty old books spilled from overflowing bookcases and were piled high against the wall. Engraved plaques, diplomas, and etchings covered oaken-paneled walls, along with snippets of articles cut from newspapers and framed periodicals. There was not a hint of brightness on the floor or the walls or found on the shelves. He picked up a human skull sitting next to a stack of papers and a bound manuscript and turned it over in his hand. Some things did stay the same, he realized. Christine always did fancy the macabre.
    “I found that skull in a cave in France,” she said from the doorway, catching him like a child with his hand in the cookie tin after she’d told him not to touch anything. He replaced the skull where he’d found it. “I was eight at the time. Papa said it is probably thousands of years old.”
    She remained just outside the light filtering through the window behind him. “Everything in here is old,” he said.
    She twisted at the ring on her finger and seemed to hesitate as if debating the choices presented her. But obviously having no patience with coyness, she stepped into the room and shut the door. “I have a student watching the class, but I can’t remain here long.”
    She placed herself behind the desk. Not only behind the desk, but also behind the cracked leather chair. Her hair looked on the verge of slipping her chignon andhung loosely at her nape. He’d never known a woman who could walk into a room no matter the occasion and always appear as if she’d just been tumbled in a loft somewhere.
    “I don’t expect that we are children or should go about behaving as if we should be strangers,” she said. “Especially since we do know each other.”
    Intimately, her voice intoned and which he inferred even before he’d read the thought in her eyes.
    She brought her attention around to the boxes stacked against the walls and frowned. “Would you care for a drink before you sit down and tell me why you are here? I think there is a bottle of Scotch somewhere around here. I’m sure I could find it.”
    “You need not go to the trouble.”
    They stood across the desk from each other. “You said you needed my opinion about something found on your land?” she asked.
    With an impatient curse, he shoved his gloved hand inside his coat to remove the packet, the reason he’d made the trip to London—or one of them anyway. The other stood in front of him.
    “Surveyors working for me found most of this some weeks ago.” He set the palm-sized packet on the desk next to a taxidermied young caiman and unwrapped the contents for Christine to view. “An engineering crew for the railroad set off a