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vacuum cleaner outside her bedroom door woke Eshe at about mid-afternoon. The annoying sound was one she found impossible to ignore, and she glared at the door of the guest room where she’d spent a very restless day and silently cursed Lucian for assigning her this job. So far, she hadn’t made a stellar impression on the job. After seeing Lucian Argeneau off the night before, she’d spent several minutes girding her courage for what lay ahead, then had marched back into the house determined to start at once.
    However, before she could ask any questions of the man who might be either her life mate, a murderer, or both, he’d greeted her with a quiet “My room is the master bedroom at the back of the house upstairs, but there are four guest rooms upstairs as well. Take whichever one you want. I need to go check on Bessy and her calf and attend to a few chores. I’ll see you when you get up tomorrow. Good night.”
    Armand had then slipped past her and out of the house before she could even murmur a quiet thank-you. Eshe had stared after him with amazement, finding the situation rather anticlimactic after her moments of worry, but then had heaved her breath out on a sigh, collected her bag, and gone above stairs to check out the guest rooms. Each of them was nice, but Eshe’s favorite had been the rose-colored room next to the master bedroom. She’d dropped her bag on the bed and then gone to poke through Armand’s room while she had the chance.
    Her poking hadn’t turned up anything of use. There hadn’t been any handy-dandy little diary with a written confession of terrible deeds, or bloody weapons that might have been used to behead past wives. In fact, there hadn’t even been pictures or portraits of his wives or from the past. The room had held a bed, a chair by the fire, a bookshelf full of books both old and new, and a closet full of clothes. The en suite bathroom hadn’t been any more helpful. She’d left the master bedroom knowing no more about the man than what brand of aftershave and toothpaste he used.
    Eshe had wandered the house after that, noting the absence of knickknacks and memorabilia. It seemed Armand wasn’t the sentimental sort. There was nothing of his past life or wives in the house. Only the office held anything that told her the man had family. It hadn’t been anything out in the open. As with the rest of the rooms in the house, this one had no visible photos or portraits that suggested there was anyone in the world he cared for, but after picking the lock on the large bottom drawer of his desk, she’d found a collection of photo albums and a box that held miniature portraits. The portraits had been older, from before the invention of photography. They had been paintings of three women she presumed were his life mate and wives, and then of his children. She recognized both Nicholas and Thomas, whom she’d met through her position as hunter, and guessed that the daughter was Jeanne Louise, his daughter by his last wife, Rosamund.
    The albums themselves had held much more recent images, one had held pictures of his eldest son, Nicholas, and his wife, Annie, both looking happy at various functions, their wedding, on picnics, and so on. Then there had been an album dedicated to Thomas with newer photos of his wedding to Inez in Portugal. The last album had been of Jeanne Louise, following her from her knobby-kneed youth, through her graduation from the university, and then at various family functions.
    Eshe had found that discovery somewhat reassuring. She had been told that Armand had cut all ties with his children and the rest of the family after his last wife’s death a century ago and had never even seen his daughter, Jeanne Louise, since dropping her on his sister-in-law Marguerite’s doorstep after the death of the girl’s mother, Rosamund. Those albums suggested, however, that while he hadn’t seen her in person, he’d been keeping up with her life and what she was doing, and