Free The Wedding Night by Linda Needham

face. This wasn't going well. He'd best confess all.
    "The breakage must have happened in the course of shipment from Oxford . Look for yourself, in here." Jack pointed to the shards still tangled in the shavings, prepared to ride out her displeasure and then buy her another pot or two. "Shattered in two dozen pieces."
    She obliged him by peering into the box of rubble, then stared up at him as though he'd grown a second nose. An airy, indulgent smile bloomed in her eyes and made them twinkle like the evening star.
    " Which is exactly the state in which my father found it thirty years ago. "
    Inscrutable woman. She was testing him. There would be a lot of that between them; she hadn't come to him gently.
    "Your father found the pot shattered?" he asked, willingly walking into her trap to best learn how she set them, how they could be sprung.
    "Yes, shattered. Imbedded in clay, in a burial mound near Dundurn in Scotland ."
    A plausible trap, and utterly absorbing, this antiquarian of his. "Your father kept all these pieces of a broken bowl? Why?"
    "Not a bowl, actually. A bevel-rimmed cook pot. Papa kept and cataloged the pieces because he was a scholar of antiquities, just as I am." As thorough and forbearing as a mother lion, Miss Faelyn gathered up all the pieces that Jack had spread out on his desk and replaced them one by one in their nest inside the crate.
    "How, madam, do you know this cook pot was Pictish and not Wedgwood?" She smelled too much of the woods and his own roses, too fine to keep him from peering over her shoulder into all her nesting.
    "The pot is red slipware, imported by the Romans from the Mediterranean . But the painting is"—she held up the rounded end and drew her finger along a series of black slashes as though she were lecturing to a room full of twelve-year-old boys—"here, Rushford, this raven design is Pictish . Third century, A.D."
    Yes, a fine trap . An even finer fragrance. He sighted down her arm, up the curve of her wrist to her hand. "Ravens are Pictish then?"
    "One of their most common designs. The raven was thought by the Picts to give power through omens and sneezing."
    "Sneezing?" There were limits to his gullibility. He'd been willing to believe the Picts , the broken pot, the burial mound, and the omens. But sneezing ravens? "Not bloody likely, Miss Faelyn."
    "Think what you will, Rushford. But considering your inexperience in the preservation of antiquities, you'd best leave the unpacking to me."
    Mairey heard Rushford blow a curse from under his breath and fancied that she could feel it on her neck as she dug in the nearest crate and retrieved a bundle of eighteenth-century guides to county antiquities—one of the first purchases she'd ever made with her own money. She'd been twelve at the time, and proud as cinnamon pie.
    "I'm more concerned over the matter of security, Miss Faelyn." He reached into his coat pocket and dragged out a double length of bristly twine. A key dangled from its center.
    "Security for what? Hey!" He abruptly turned her away from him, then stepped in so close behind that his chest and all that heat met her back like a caress. Before she could protest he surrounded her completely with his arms, his broad hands holding the loop of twine out in front of her.
    "You'll wear this always, madam." The weight of the key and the twine fell into place over one of her breasts, a buoyant pressure that could have been his caress. But his hands were busy behind her, wrestling with her hair and the knot he was tying.
    "So you're trusting me with a key?" She centered the loop, trying to sound unperturbed, but the key matched the thrumming of her heart and echoed it in a pulsating swing.
    He took her by the shoulders and turned her, frowning down into her eyes.
    "This is not a game. Nor is it a scholarly grant where you can wile away the hours with your nose so deeply buried in a book that you can't tell
midday
from
midnight
. I've made an investment in you—"
    "As I