Of course, absolutely no posting of images or statuses regarding our private relationship to our personal social media accounts. Pretty much anything going on between Ivan and me (professionally or privately) was not to be shared with anyone anywhere. I had no problem with the NDA. In fact, I appreciated every secretive word of it. Ivan was keeping his promise to me that nobody had to know about us. He was a man of his word and I liked that about him, among other things.

I sat back in the chair and looked up to study the room again. This beautiful, elegant suite in an old neo-Gothic manor house set in the remote coastal landscape of Northern Ireland was a literal jewel box.

And the paintings inside it were the jewels.

I was starting to feel sleepy after signing both agreements and leaving them on the desk for Mr. Finnegan to retrieve whenever he reappeared at some point. I think I was just mentally exhausted from all I’d had to take in over the past twenty-four hours. As I leaned back from the desk and yawned, rubbing the top of my head through my hair to soothe my tired, tired brain, I noticed some fancy leather books on a shelf inside the glass cabinet beside the desk. My mind started buzzing because they looked an awful lot like diaries—the sort a lady from the 1800s would use for writing.

I wonder if they belonged to a certain lady who lived here a long time ago. A certain Lady Rothvale perhaps…

My hand was visibly shaking as I opened the door to the cabinet and took a closer look. There were five books, all bound the same in red leather. I pulled out the first and held it under the light of the desk lamp to read the gold embossed lettering on the front.

Journal of Lady Imogene Rothvale

The remaining volumes were embossed with the same lettering through to the year 1816. Five years of Lady Rothvale nine’s journals were here for me to read?

No effing way.

I opened the book and turned through random pages carefully since it was over two hundred years old and saw that each page was literally filled from top to bottom. No wasted space at all. There were a lot of words on these precious pages.

I couldn’t read it now though—not without my glasses. I was too tired and too overwhelmed to start in on this discovery tonight, but it was exactly the kind of proof of provenance that would be invaluable if Lady Imogene had written down anything about Tristan Mallerton and the paintings her husband had commissioned in her journals. Almost as valuable as the art itself because her journals would validate the creation of the work in the absence of other recorded documentation of its existence.

I returned the volume carefully to its shelf, switched off the lamp and other lights in the sitting room, and headed into the bedroom to prepare myself for bed and some well-earned sleep.