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“You can’t allow it.”

“I don’t allow Roarke. No one does.”

“You have influence, use it. She’s a blind spot for him, and always was.”

“All I can do is ask him straight out. I can’t fight with innuendoes and wiles.” The headache was grinding in her skull, and pain was twisting her gut. “The first are insulting to both parties, and I don’t have any of the second. Not on her level, that’s for fucking sure. In the end, it’s his choice. It always was. I’ve got work.”

She started out, stepped, and made herself turn around, meet Summerset’s eyes. “She’s a manipulator. I get that. She’s also beautiful, polished, sophisticated, smart. Smart enough, I’d bet your skinny ass, to settle happily with what Roarke’s got at his fingertips now. Basically, she’s just the type I’d think you’d do a happy dance if he flipped me for.”

She had to take a breath so her voice would stay steady. “She wouldn’t track blood into the house, she’d know just what dress to wear to the next dinner party. And she wouldn’t forget there was a goddamn dinner party because she was standing over a dead body. So, why tell me all this?”

“She would be a sparkling accent on his arm. She speaks flawless French and Italian, and has a limitless supply of charm when she wishes to dispense it. And she’ll use him. She’ll take, take more. If it was necessary, or if she simply had the whim, she’d toss him to the wolves to see who’d win.”

He finished the whiskey. “You, Lieutenant, are often crude, you are certainly rude, and have very little sense of how to be the wife—in public—of a man in Roarke’s position. And you would do anything, no matter what the personal risk, to keep him from harm. She will never love him. You will never do anything but.”

No, she thought as she walked away, she’d never do anything but. And wasn’t it strange she’d forgotten just how much fear and misery love could carry with it?

She’d never felt any of this before she’d met him. Never felt this twisting, this aching, the shaky fear of losing.

And never felt the thrill or the comfort, the stunning happiness that laid so thickly over everything else.

She went straight to her office, programmed a full pot of coffee. Before Roarke, she’d often—most often—bury herself in work. No reason she couldn’t do the same now.

More, she had a duty to honor.

A man was dead. A man, by all current evidence, who’d been a nice guy, an ordinary sort of guy who had actually had something to give to society.

She had no evidence, no reason to believe he’d hurt anyone, had wished harm on anyone. Hadn’t performed salacious acts, used or trafficked in illegal substances.

Hadn’t stolen anything, extorted anyone. Hadn’t cheated on his wife.

Having lunch wasn’t cheating, she thought as she carted her coffee to her desk. Banging another woman like a steel drum a dozen years before marriage wasn’t cheating.

Roarke wouldn’t cheat on her. She could rest easy on that point.

But would he want to? That was the sticker.

And that had nothing to do with Craig Foster.

She sat, braced her elbows on the table, and rested her head in her hands. She just had to clear her mind, that was all. Clear it out. Should probably take a blocker for the goddamn stupid headache pounding inside her skull.

Annoyed, she yanked open the top drawer, knowing Roarke had left a case in there with the little blue pills inside. She hated taking pills, but she’d never be able to think unless she popped one.

She swallowed the blocker, chased it with coffee as Galahad jogged in to get a running start for the leap to her desk. He plopped his ass down and stared at her.

“I’ve got to work.” But it was an odd comfort to run her hand over his head and have him stretch under the stroke. “I’ve got to be able to work or I’ll go crazy.”

Shifting, she inserted the data discs she wanted to run first.

“Computer, cross-reference both employee and client list, disc A with student guardians, administration, faculty, and support staff lists, disc B. Report any matches.”

Acknowledged. Working