Page 32 of Marked By Moonlight

The housekeeper entered with tea, an interruption welcomed — and possibly engineered — by Gordon. After she left, he stirred his tea for a long time, thinking.

“So, you were saying…” I asked against my better judgment.

Gordon studied his tea before responding.

“Complications…opportunities…” I cued.

Gordon inhaled so ponderously, his nose hairs produced a whistling sound.

“I was recently contacted by the widow of a longtime associate,” he finally said. “She asked for help evaluating a potentially valuable artwork.”

“You don’t say,” I murmured over the alarms clanging in my mind.

“Yes. And I thought…” He trailed off, shaking his head.

“What did you think?”

I felt like a character in a horror movie, reaching for a doorknob in a dark mansion despite an audience screaming in warning. But I couldn’t help myself.

“You know as well as I how rarely such cases turn out to involve genuine artworks,” Gordon said. “So I thought it prudentto conduct an informal check before calling in an expert to authenticate the painting and identifying potential buyers.”

I bit back the urge to ask,Why the hell are you getting involved in trading artworks off the open market?

“And my mind went to Gen, of course, since she has a good eye…” he continued.

Ha. More like Gen, who was too gullible to ask any questions.

“…and I know how much she loves London,” he went on, watching me.

My heart leaped. I loved London — and unlike Gen, I’d been toiling away in the boonies for weeks with a bunch of infuriating shifters. Including oneespeciallyinfuriating shifter, but I would deal with him later.

“But since Gen is unavailable…” Gordon looked at me over his teacup.

And since I’m the one who worked at an auction house and I have experience authenticating artworks…I nearly chimed in.

But, wait. Wasn’t I supposed to avoid getting sucked into another one of Gordon’s sketchy missions?

On the other hand, this didn’t sound anything like Mallorca, which had been downright dangerous. All it involved was looking at a painting in London. No “procurement,” no “infiltration.” The painting wasn’t likely to be anything important, but it could still be an interesting trip.

“Who’s the artist?” I couldn’t help asking.

Gordon held his palms toward the ceiling. “She refuses to say. Not over the phone, nor email. Only in person. The poor woman sees conspiracies everywhere.”

A little like me. But I’d been attacked by a vampire, abandoned by my dragon lover, and drawn into the dark underbelly of the supernatural world by my godfather. What was her excuse?

“All she will say is ‘an early twentieth-century artist of great repute,’” Gordon said.

My mind hopped from Kandinsky to Matisse and Klimt. Or maybe Gabriele Münter?

“Honestly, this is more of a courtesy call than anything else,” Gordon explained. “But I feel I owe it to her.” He leaned forward. “I really didn’t want to bother you, but perhaps you would enjoy a short trip to London. All expenses covered, of course.”

The alarms that had filled my mind earlier were strangely muted, replaced by images of double-decker buses, cozy tea rooms, and bridges over the Thames.

Try as I might, I just couldn’t see a downside. I’d been toiling at home for weeks and really needed to get out more. Preferably for things that didn’t involve criminal activities, so this would be perfect.

“You know, I would enjoy that,” I admitted.

Not that I would be mentioning any such thing to Marius. Otherwise, I risked a touchy dragon shifter torching half of London in a misplaced effort to protect me against imaginary dangers.