She and Randall had been married for eight years, but there’d been no children. With any luck, Christian would imagine that had been the subject of their discussion, the subject she’d so delicately refrained from mentioning.

His gaze on her face, Christian knew-just knew-that she was hoping to lead him up some garden path. Declining to follow, he made a mental note to return to the subject of her late night discussion with her husband at some later point. For now…“Discussion?” With a Vaux involved, “discussion” could encompass verbal warfare.

“We had a row.” Face darkening, she continued, “I don’t know how long it went for, but I eventually swept out”-a gesture indicated the force of her sweeping, something Christian could imagine with ease-“and left him here.”

“So you argued. Loudly.”

She nodded.

He let his gaze travel the room, then looked back at her. “No broken vases? Ornaments flung about?”

She folded her arms beneath her breasts, haughtily lifted her chin. “It wasn’t that sort of argument.”

A cold argument, then, one without heat or passion. For her, with her husband, that struck him as odd.

He looked away, again scanning the room. In reality looking away from her so he wouldn’t focus on her breasts. Breasts he knew-or had, at one time, known well. Hauling his mind from salacious images from the past-all the more potent for being memory rather than imagination-took more effort than he cared to contemplate. He shifted. “So you left Randall here, hale and whole, and then what? What next did you know of this?”

“Nothing at all until my dresser came rushing in this morning to tell me about the body.” She turned away from the bloodstain.

He moved with her, alongside her, as she glided to the window overlooking the street; she halted before it.

“By the time I dressed and got downstairs, the butler-he’s an officious little scourge by the name of Mellon-had taken it upon himself to summon the authorities, who assigned an investigator from Bow Street-a weasely, narrow-minded man whose only concern is to close the case as soon as possible regardless of the truth.”