After, Mika buried her face in his damp neck, breathing in sweat, pine needles, and the ocean. Jamie pressed a kiss to her hair. She yawned, stretching like a cat. He pulled his jeans back on, watching her with such awe and tenderness that she had to look away or else be knocked down by a wave of emotion too powerful to hold at bay.

“Stay.”

He climbed back into the bed with her, smiling crookedly, one hand fitted to the curve of her waist. “I’m not going anywhere.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Edward Foxhaven was an ordinary man. From his ordinary height to his ordinary grey hair to the ordinary crows’ feet clustered around his ordinary blue eyes, there was nothing at all about Edward that would catch the eye of a passer-by. His suit, tie, and shoes, all expensive and neat and in sensible dark colours, were always worn with a precision that he extended to every other part of his life. He paid as much attention to the position of his cuffs as he did to the small print on a contract.

His one extraordinary quality (the adjective was his, nobody else’s) was his meticulous attention to detail. Where some solicitors (and he was not naming names, but one did not need to look further than two of the more undeserving partners of the firm) might simply glance over a brief or pass on some of the more tedious legwork to a subordinate, Edward took pride in the fact that nothing escaped his eye. Some people might complain that his patience and diligence was an excuse to charge his clients more money, but they were mistaken. His clients wanted him to be thorough. They wanted to pay him a great deal of money. (Apart from, of course, those few impoverished clients he was obliged to work with to fill a firm quota. Irksome, but Edward would dispense with that quota when he was made partner. Which he would, as soon as someone bothered to take notice of the excellence of his work.)

Take Lillian Nowhere, for example. Lillian was a charming, wealthy client who trusted him to look after her affairs and paid him handsomely to do so. Edward had no intention of failing to live up to that trust, especially considering poor Lillian had decided to open her home to a number of highly questionable persons.

When pressed, he had found he couldn’t articulate exactly what it was about these people that he questioned. He knew, of course, but there were just so many things one wasn’t allowed to say these days. It was extremely inconvenient.

But while he might not be able to say certain things, he could certainly act on a very real concern. A wealthy, elderly English woman had fallen mysteriously out of touch and he had no doubt who was to blame. He was, therefore, determined to root out whatever sketchy goings-on were going on at Nowhere House.