She knew he paced when deep in thought. Fixing her gaze on the floor, she paced in more restrained fashion. “Presumably, ‘gunpowder here’ is the crux of the message Ennis intended to give Drake. If they—whoever they might be—have some gunpowder here—wherever ‘here’ is—what are they planning to do with it?”
“Blow something up.” Sebastian paced on. “But what?”
“But that’s a clue, isn’t it?” Antonia swung around and paced back. “Who would think to gather gunpowder and blow something up?”
“Given Ennis’s connections to the Young Irelanders, I can’t see the ‘who’ being any other group.”
“I thought the Young Irelanders—those left after the rebellion was put down—were more peaceable, these days.”
“Those remaining in the public eye are, but no doubt there are more militant elements still skulking in the shadows.”
“So if it is the Young Irelanders, what would they be likely to want to blow up?”
His gaze on the floor, he shook his head. “Most likely something in London, but it might be elsewhere—for instance, Windsor Castle.”
The edge of her skirts flicked into his field of vision. Abruptly, he halted—just in time.
With a suppressed squeak, she pulled up—less than an inch away. With a sliver of air—heated and heating—separating her breasts from his chest.
She swayed with the suddenness of her halting, even as her head jerked up, and her eyes met his.
Wide gray eyes, roiling with surging heat, with passion, with desire—with hunger. In that instant, he saw it all—and was seized with a powerful, nearly overwhelming urge to reach out and take—to raise his hands, close them about her waist, and jerk her the last inch to him.
And what then?
His mind reeled. He felt himself teetering at a metaphorical fork in his path. This way—or that?
But the decision was irreversible.
Antonia stared into pale green eyes—warlock’s eyes with the power to mesmerize. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. But she could feel temptation—rich, alluring, compelling—slide across her skin.
It whispered to her senses, stroked them beguilingly.
Enticed her…
Her lips felt fuller; the lower throbbed.
As if he knew, his gaze fell to fasten on her mouth.
For a second, they stood frozen.
Then he hauled in a breath and stepped back. Without meeting her eyes, he turned to the door. “We should sleep on our questions.”
The ones about you and me, or the ones about gunpowder? As he crossed to the door, she was tempted to ask. Once she was free of his immediate orbit, her wits functioned with their customary facility.
“No doubt we’ll see things in a clearer light come morning.” He paused at the door, his hand on the knob, and through the shadows looked back at her. Then he nodded somewhat curtly and went out.
She watched the door quietly close behind him, then heard his footsteps, muted by the runner, continue down the corridor to his room.
She discovered she could breathe again, although her lungs still felt constricted. Standing, staring at the space where he’d last been, she considered what her senses told her was the portent of that last dark look of his.
He’d been as tempted as she, but he’d set the personal aside and stepped back from taking the next obvious step in what seemed to be evolving between them in favor of dealing with the mission—the mission that was increasingly looking as if it involved a threat to the realm. Gunpowder suggested a fairly major event and a significant target.
She supposed she had to accept his decision as the sensible way forward.
She rang for Beccy and spent the next twenty minutes immersed in the commonplace, in the routine of preparing for bed.
But once Beccy had left, and she lay under the covers, shrouded in darkness, she finally allowed her mind to refocus on the evening’s events…
Sebastian had been right, but for her, clarity had already arrived.
And courtesy of that, concern was slowly welling inside her.
If Ennis had been killed in order to prevent him from speaking to Sebastian, then presumably the killer had guessed that Sebastian was Drake’s surrogate. But the killer had fled before Ennis had died.
What if the killer started to worry that, despite being at death’s door, before he’d died, Ennis had managed to pass his message on to Sebastian—not just two words but the whole message?
Wouldn’t the killer seek to kill Sebastian?
Sebastian, who was being accommodated by Sir Humphrey and already being treated differently than the other guests.
There was more than enough in the situation to make any killer nervous.