“I don’t believe I’ve ever ruined anyone before.”

“Best make it good, because I don’t want you ruining anyone else ever again.”

She arched into him, smiling a delightfully silly smile that he promptly kissed away. And just when he was warming up, she broke the kiss and wound her fingers through his. “We can hear Mr. Hill’s car in the antiquities wing. And there’s something there I want you to see.”

Feeling a little less anxious and a lot more motivated, he followed her past the ticketing windows and an army of silent statues lining the walls. The high ceilings and tiled marble floor seemed to simultaneously magnify and swallow their footfalls as they strolled by framed paintings worth more than any one of the Magnusson’s luxury cars.

Past the Pacific Art collection, an arched entrance was marked with a hand-painted sign that read: TREASURES OF ANCIENT EGYPT—MUMMIFICATION, MAGIC, AND RITUAL. He’d seen this exhibit many times over the years, even when most of it was housed in the old Midwinter building. As a boy, it held enormous fascination for him and was one of the main catalysts that spurred him into pursing an archaeology degree. Strange to think that the objects his ten-year-old self gazed upon with delight would later be placed under Hadley’s stewardship.

He stopped in front of a case that held a female mummy. Sprigs of hair were still attached to her preserved skin. Most of her teeth were still intact, but she was missing a leg; half the museum’s mummies were damaged or crushed to shards in the earthquake. But the thing that made her such a crowd-pleaser sat in the adjoining case: a tightly wrapped mummified cat, which was found in the same tomb.

“The best feline specimen on the West Coast,” Hadley bragged. “Excellent example of geometric patterned wrapping from the Ptolemaic Period.”

“Is this what you’ll do for Number Four when the time comes?”

She clasped her hands behind her back and gazed at the case with a satisfied smile, head tilted. “I think he’d like that. A tiny sarcophagus might be nice, too. Who knows—perhaps one day we’ll both end up on display. People will study our preserved corpses and call me the Cat Lady.”

“You’re a morbid woman, min kära.”

A mischievous smile hoisted her cheeks. “I do love the way you flirt, Mr. Magnusson.” Gaze locked with his, hands still clasped behind her back, she took a couple of backward steps. Lowe might as well have been mummified himself, for it felt like she could tug on his wrappings and wind him toward her with a single look.

If she wanted her preserved body to be on display, he wanted to be the one lying beside her.

“Over here,” she said, beckoning him with excited eyes. “This is what I wanted you to see.”

TWENTY-SIX

LOWE WATCHED HADLEY AS she turned on a heel and led him to a waist-high glass case that sat against a square pillar in the middle of the hall. Inside was a small collection of personal items found in the Cat Lady’s tomb: perfume jars, a comb, jewelry. And in the middle of the case sat three canopic jars; the fourth one had been lost in the earthquake.

She leaned over the case to peer down into it. “My parents found this tomb at the necropolis near Thebes in 1895. Only three years before I was born. I wondered if my mother used these as inspiration when she decided to hide the crossbars.”

“Different era design than the ones she had made,” he noted.

“Yes. Still, I imagine her walking in here, angry with my father for wanting to kill Noel. Desperate to keep the peace between the two of them so that she could selfishly hang on to both husband and lover. And she sees these.” Hadley tapped on the glass with one nail.

“The solution to her problem,” Lowe agreed, stepping behind her to peer over her shoulder as he gingerly wrapped one arm around her waist, testing. “Hide them in something that people would keep safe and treasure.”

“Exactly.” She snaked a hand around the arm that held her, quietly voicing her approval. “And I thought if we looked at them in the right way, maybe we’d see something that would help us decipher the last two pictograms.”

How he hated those unsolvable pictograms. Both them and her mother be damned. He inhaled the clean scent of her skin, smelling soap and the bright note of her shampoo and beneath it all, Hadley. Intoxicating. He felt powerless to stop himself from nuzzling below the sharp line of her bob to kiss the fine hairs that veed at the nape of her neck.

She shuddered ever so slightly, but continued with her train of thought, albeit in a breathier voice. “You know, I think Father’s decision to gift the Cat Lady to the museum was tied to the caveat that he be appointed director of this department.”

“Mmm.” Lowe trailed two more kisses down her spine, stopping where the top button of her oh-so-serious black dress prevented him from going further. “Maybe that’s why he thought I’d be champing at the bit for a chance to be his successor.”

Two slim fingers slid beneath the cuff of his shirtsleeve, stroking the skin over his wrist. The barest of touches, but the shiver it coaxed jumped straight to his cock.

“You haven’t changed your mind, have you?” she murmured. “Because you should be warned, if you break our agreement, I will bury you under ten chandeliers.”

“I love it when you’re romantic,” he said, holding her tighter as he nudged himself into the cleft of her ass.

She jumped and made a little noise. “Oh, dear.”

“Oh, yes.” He opened his mouth to nip the skin below her ear.