Free Deadly Inheritance: A Romantic Suspense by Amy Corwin Page B

drunk the vodka on an empty stomach, and now it burned like acid.
    “I’m hungry. And thirsty.” And whiney. The three grumpy bears of discomfort. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to regain control.
    Barely glancing at her, Gabe pulled out his cell phone. “Half hour until dinner. You’ll have to wait.”
    Cell phone. She stared at his with longing. Hers had drowned in the moat, and she missed it already. It would have been so nice to order a takeout pizza and look up the symptoms of giardiasis. Then she could call one of her staff and get them to bring her some drugs to take care of it.
    “Maybe I’ll go wait in the dining room. I saw iced tea on the table, and I can at least get a glass of that. We can explore later.”
    “No, we should go now.” He placed a hand on her arm.
    “Why?” She shook him off and gave him a black look. “I want something to drink.” And eat. Her stomach roiled, and she felt increasingly desperate to sit down and eat something.
    “I want to look at the drawbridge mechanism. I’m sure it was sabotaged, and we’ve already delayed too long. The evidence may already be gone. But there’s no point in giving whoever did it more time to clean up.”
    “Sarah Lennox thinks it was a ghost. So what do you hope to find? Ectoplasm?” she asked, driven by her uncontrollably ornery mood and the need to find a place to sit down. Her head throbbed again with tight thumps of pain.
    “We won’t know until we find it.”
    His mild reply only made her more irritable. “I need to sit down.”
    “You drank too much.” His voice was mild, but it stung anyway.
    “Fine. Come on, then. Let’s go chase after ghosts. At least it will waste the time until lunch.”
    What could he possibly find at this point? She was hungry, her skin felt dry and itchy, and although she didn’t want to think about it, she was still frightened. Someone had tried to kill her, someone who was probably related to her. Part of her wanted her to close her eyes and go curl up in a corner, hoping she’d be overlooked the next time he, or she, wanted a victim.
    But she wasn’t a coward, and her sense of justice wouldn’t allow her to just “let it go.” She swallowed.
    “If you need to sit down—”
    “No.” She held up a hand. “We’ll go look for ghosts. Far be it from me to prevent you from collecting whatever clues you can find.”
    “Are you sure?” He studied her, a faint crease between his dark brows. “You don’t look too good.”
    “I’m fine. Go on. I’m right behind you.”
    He shrugged and strode back to the staircase. She trailed after him as he went up the stairs with an abstracted look on his face, completely oblivious to her presence. She might as well have stayed in the dining room.
    On the second floor landing, he paused to glance around with a confidence that she envied. “The room we’re looking for will be directly above the drawbridge.” He pointed to a doorway on their right. “In there.”
    “Right.” How could he possibly know that? Nora resisted the impulse to roll her eyes and followed him.
    To her surprise, the door was unlocked—she would have thought the murderer would at least lock it to hide any evidence left behind—and it yielded to Gabe’s touch. He looked at the walls on either side of the door and flicked on an overhead light.
    Two long fixtures sporting fluorescent lights crackled to life.
    Gabe rubbed his hands together and grinned at her. “Easy enough, and no cobwebs or dripping ectoplasm.”
    In fact, the room was clean and utilitarian in the extreme. Plain white tiles covered the floor and even extended halfway up the walls, obviously intended to make it easy to clean off any grease or dirt flung around by the mammoth contraption standing against the outer wall. For some reason, she expected a medieval contraption of wooden gears and cranks, but the mechanism was all sleek modern steel run by an efficient little electric motor.
    One of the chains was