“Yes, well, men don’t just vanish into thin air. There must have been a witness—”
Alexandra leaned forward, her features solemn and troubled. “Witnesses can perjure themselves. Science does not. If you’re going to speculate about a murder, you must have proof.”
“Actually,” Julia argued, drawing her shoulders up in a huff. “You don’t have to have proof to speculate about anything, darling. That’s what speculation is. I don’t know why your dander is up, Alexandra, it’s not as though anyone accused you of murdering him.” She laughed giddily. “The very idea!”
That was his wife, a scientist before all things, staunch and passionate in regard to the truth.
Not at all a bad stance to hold, he thought proudly.
“If the headmaster was murdered, Lady Throckmorton, who would you hazard did it?” he asked idly, glad the dig site drew near.
“It’s obvious who did it.” Julia twisted her lips, blue eyes sparkling at Alexandra. “I’ve always known.”
The fingers on his jacket became talons as his wife leaned toward the smug woman opposite her. “Who?” she demanded.
Julia quirked her lip, gorging on the rapt attention. “Either his lover or…”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Or the groundskeeper.
Alexandra pried her clenched teeth apart and rubbed at her aching jaw. She glanced up from the crate of bones she’d classified and categorized in front of her to watch her husband dip a ladle into the water bucket.
Julia’s words had been running through her mind all afternoon.
De Marchand hadn’t been killed by a lover, but a victim. And buried by the groundskeeper.
Did Julia know? Or did her words exhume a whisper of truth Alexandra would rather remain buried?
That the groundskeeper wasn’t as trustworthy as they’d all suspected.
Jean-Yves had been among the workers at the tombs these past four days, watching her alertly and smiling when he caught her eye.
Just as he did now.
Alexandra did her best to smile back at him, though the attempt felt brittle and tense. It unnerved her to have the man touch elbows with her husband.
Could his expression of geniality hide a deeper greed or malevolence?
She would find out on the morrow.
With the tunnels and vaulted crypt completely secured, Redmayne and Forsythe hauled the crates she’d packed with various sundries, artifacts, armor, and, as soon as she could finish dusting and chipping away some remnants of the burial shroud, the bones of Ivar Redmayne.
She’d have worked a great deal faster if she’d not been plagued by infernal distractions all day, not the least of which had been her barbarian husband.
He’d been moving stones and earth all morning before aiding Forsythe and the engineers as they fortified the final tunnel into the Redmayne Crypt.
Sweat glistened at his hairline and painted his tawny neck with a lustrous gleam in the lanternlight. One more button of his smudged ivory shirt had come undone, revealing the dramatic swells of his pectorals.
Quite suddenly, she became aware of the dryness of her own mouth, now plagued with a powerful thirst. One the water might not quench.
She refused to watch. Refused to want.
There was simply too much to do. Too much at stake. Too much to ponder over and worry about beyond his diverting feats of unbridled masculine strength.
Besides, he’d been absolutely insufferable all afternoon, turning every burdened journey down the tunnel into a rivalry, insisting upon shouldering the heaviest load.
At one point he’d actually foisted upon Forsythe a crate of animal bones, with some snide remark about how bones were hollow and light. Then he’d promptly lifted a crate the size of a small horse packed with iron weapons and jogged—jogged!—down the tunnel.
Was it any wonder he nearly drank the entire bucket of spring water?
Alexandra couldn’t decide who she was more churlish toward. Him for acting like a self-important, teenaged ass, or her for being impressed by it.
On top of everything, Julia enjoyed the spectacle immensely. That is, when she wasn’t insisting upon wandering about the various rooms, touching everything, fiddling with mechanisms, and asking incessant, inane questions of both her and Forsythe.
And speaking of poor Dr. Forsythe, once his masculinity was called into question in front of his workers and two women, he’d done his best to match Redmayne lift for lift and load for load.
Between all of this, the responsibility for a delicate skeleton, and a blackmail letter scalding her through her skirt pockets, Alexandra thought she might expire from the rein she’d held on her temper. Tension coiled her muscles as tight as a springboard, and a headache had begun to crawl from her shoulders and into her neck, threatening to winch a vise around her temples.
Forsythe joined Redmayne at the water bucket, waiting his turn. At this late afternoon hour, he appeared nigh close to death, sweat-drenched and red-faced as she’d never seen him.
Taking pity on him, she offered a conciliatory smile, one he returned with a bit of his old winsome vigor before Julia distracted him.
Noticing their shared moment, Redmayne set his ladle down, stalking toward her with that loose-limbed, feral grace of his.
At the possessive heat in his gaze, Alexandra almost dropped the femur, so she returned her own gaze firmly to her work, refusing to mark his approach even as he leaned down to address her.
“You may offer him your pretty smiles, wife,” he growled low in her ear, “because your pretty moans and sighs are mine.”
Ignoring the burst of butterfly wings in her womb, Alexandra glanced up sharply to make certain Forsythe hadn’t heard his salacious comment on the other side of the cavern.
The doctor’s head was bent toward a cooing Julia, seemingly inured to them.
Alexandra whirled on her husband, shaking the femur at him like the finger of an impassioned politician.
And quite forgot what she was going to say.
Must he insist on smelling so appealing all the time? Even his sweat was alluring. Clean and sharp with hints of leather, earth, and a salty, masculine musk.
Instead of castigating him for tormenting her thus for four days, she whispered curtly, “You’re being unkind.”
His large shoulder lifted in ambivalence as he bent to press his lips to her aching jaw. “I’m being honest,” he rumbled.
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“Now who is unkind?” he teased, rooting into her hair to nuzzle at the downy skin behind her ear.
She swatted him away, not because she wanted to, but because she understood the dangers of his intoxicating touch.
“This is the last of it.” To distract him, she held out his umpteenth-great-grandfather’s impressive thigh bone to him. “I’ll admit, the men of the Redmayne line certainly share a remarkable physical structure. Down to their very bones. Ivar would have been mere inches shorter than you, but I’d wager he was equally thick and burly. Also, his teeth were healthy, as I’ve noted yours are.”
He ran his tongue over wolfish incisors, testing their health as his eyes twinkled the color of the Baltic Sea on a clear day. “A man might dine upon such poetic compliments from his lady wife.” He sighed dramatically.
She frowned, refusing to be charmed by his good humor. “I’ve found a few healed broken bones, likely suffered in battle,” she continued. “But for one on his tibia from when he was a child. Other than that, he was a robust man, even his knees were intact and his joints healthy. His cause of death would have had to have been something to do with his organs, because his bones show no signs of deterioration or disease. At least not upon initial inspection.”