Free The Wedding Night by Linda Needham Page B

with two drawers stacked together. "He heard about it somewhere and liked the idea of finding a vast treasure of silver."
    Knowing with complete certainty that her father would approve of her defaming his character in this instance, Mairey shoved the drawer into its place on the right side of the desk and noticed that the lock had been pried open with the point of a knife. Her life and her destiny had been exposed without her permission. Would the man search her laundry, as well?
    Rushford stood up from his muttering at the ill-fitting drawer full of pens and clips. Mairey backed up as he rose, but he was still as tall as the sky when he looked down his long, slightly crooked nose at her.
    Cedar and citrus, she thought absurdly. "Your father heard about the Willowmoon somewhere? From his own father, perhaps?"
    How could he know that? "Possibly." What else could she say? The man was a mind reader! Mairey slid out from beneath his heady scent and returned to the open crate before Rushford could dig around in it. She hurried back to the desk with another drawer, careful to hide its cache of pocket notebooks that her father used in the field. He hadn't been the neatest record-keeper, and she often found a stray note about the Knot in them.
    Rushford was waiting for her, and snagged one of the books as she was shoving in the drawer.
    "What are all these little books?" he asked, fanning the pages hard enough to ruffle the hair off his forehead. "You had one at the mill."
    Mairey knew better than to grab it from him, though she dearly wanted to. "Field notes," she said.
    He walked toward the lamp, blessedly distracted. "Yours?" he asked, frowning as he turned the pages. The book looked like a toy in his hands.
    "Mostly." Mairey used his distraction to carry another drawer to its rightful place in this oh-so-wrong library.
    "What the devil is a 'can-wall gorif '?" A harmless enough question. It would be good practice to answer him, if she was going to learn to dodge the man's curiosity without him noticing.
    " Canwyll gorif ," she said. "A corpse candle."
    Rushford raised a brow at her in reply.
    "A sourceless light that foretells a death. It's a Welsh term. Also called a fetch-candle in Scotland ."
    "And Nekha lights by the people of the
Mekong
River
."
    Mairey couldn't have been more surprised. "Truly?"
    He nodded lightly, looking vastly proud of himself. "Truly."
    The ends of Mairey's fingers began to itch to write it down. Nekha lights.
Mekong
River
. She found a pencil and scribbled Rushford's definition onto a stray shred of packing paper, folded it, and stuffed the piece into her bodice.
    She looked up and into Rushford's stark curiosity.
    "What's that you've written?" He came toward her, his gaze as warm as ladled honey on the place she'd just stuffed the note.
    Mairey covered her bodice and the gathering heat with her hand. "I wrote down your Nekha lights for my folk studies."
    "Show me." He seemed immovable.
    Mairey plucked the note from her bodice and unrolled it for him to read. "As I told you—it's what I do when I'm not hunting treasure."
    He took the note, read it twice, looked on the back, then drew the piece beneath his nose as though he were tasting her scent. "Most glad to be of service to your science, Miss Faelyn."
    "Thank you." Mairey took the note back, her ears surely flaming. But instead of replacing the paper in her bodice—a habit she'd have to break immediately—she stuffed it willy-nilly into the nearest notebox .
    When she turned back to her unpacking Rushford was leaning an elbow on a crate, chewing on a smile, all the drawers in place and Mairey feeling rifled from bodice to stockings.
    "Now, my dear, why don't you enlighten me about the Willowmoon . Tell me all you know."
    No , she thought, her heart thundering high in her chest. "Well—" She would inundate the man with historical accuracies, bore him senseless with an austere lecture. "The item of antiquity known as the Willowmoon Knot was first