Cara
The second Mystery Night had come together faster than the first one, which Lucy had called growth and which I was privately calling terrifying, and this time it had a theme.
I had decided this while eating toast at my kitchen table and had immediately made a list, which was how I made all my decisions, and the list had grown steadily until it occupied two pages of a legal pad, and Wentworth had sat on it, which I chose to interpret as approval.
The next few days since the cabin had settled into something I was still getting used to—not because it was unfamiliar, but because it was so easy. I had expected falling for someone to feel precarious, something to be managed carefully, but this didn’t feel like that at all. It felt like exhaling.
I was giddy again. The shop was ready, the evening was coming, and somewhere across town, Jasper was finishing his afternoon run and would be here in an hour, and just the thought of it made me smile at the clue envelopes like an absolute fool.
The tables and chairs were arranged into a horseshoe in front of the reading nook, the way they’d been for the first Mystery Night, but everything else was different.
I’d spent the afternoon transforming Pine & Pages into something that sat somewhere between a 1920s drawing room and a Halloween fever dream, and I was fairly pleased with the result.
Cobwebs were strung between the upper shelves, with small plastic spiders tucked in at intervals that I had positioned with more care than I would ever admit to anyone.
The flameless candles along the lower shelves had been joined by a row of tiny glass poison bottles with hand-lettered labels: Arsenic, Belladonna, Extract of Nightshade.
I’d found them at the antique market in Sweetbriar and bought every single one.
A vintage Ouija board sat at the center of the display table, purely decorative, surrounded by dried black roses and the scattered evidence cards for the evening’s case.
The suspect cards were written on aged paper I’d stained with cold tea and dried flat under a stack of hardcovers, which Lucy had called excessive and which had looked, when I’d set them out, exactly right.
Four suspects. Three rounds. Lady Margaret Holloway, found dead in the drawing room of Ashwood Manor on the morning of October the fourteenth, 1923.
A butler with a gambling problem. A niece who despised her aunt with impressive dedication.
A doctor with a missing case of morphine.
A chauffeur seen arguing with the victim two nights before the murder.
Lucy had told me Lady Margaret Holloway was a perfect dead-aunt name and that I was getting too good at this. I had chosen to take that as a compliment.
I had been thinking about the costume for two weeks, which probably said something about me, and the result was exactly what I’d hoped for.
Wide-leg black trousers, high-waisted, with a white blouse tucked in and dark suspenders I’d found in a vintage shop in Willowmist Falls.
Low-heeled boots. My hair was pinned back severely at the sides and left to curl at the nape of my neck.
Glasses on, a small magnifying glass on a chain around my neck that had been three dollars at the antique market, and which I had bought without a second thought.
Knightley watched from the bathroom doorway while I did my eyeliner, passing judgment the way he always did, quiet and thorough.
“It works,” I told him.
He blinked once, slowly.
I came back down the interior stairs at half past six and stopped dead on the bottom step.
Jasper was at the front door, visible through the glass, and he had gone full period detective in a way that made coherent thought briefly unavailable to me.
Dark fitted trousers. A white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, dark suspenders cutting across his chest, a pocket watch chain catching the light at his waist. He was holding his long charcoal coat over one arm, the other tucked under a bouquet of deep blood-red roses so dark they were nearly black, with stems of dried black berries twisted through them like something from a gothic novel.
His hair was pushed back, slightly disheveled, and he was looking through the glass at me with an expression that suggested he knew exactly what he was doing and had planned it that way.
He raised the hand holding the coat in a small wave.
I unlocked the door.
He stepped inside, and his eyes moved over me slowly—the trousers, the suspenders, the pinned hair, the magnifying glass on its chain—and the look on his face was so openly appreciative that I felt the warmth of it move through me before he’d said a single word.
“Cara.” His voice had dropped slightly. “You look stunning.”
Not incredible. Not great. Stunning, delivered quietly and with complete sincerity, like a fact he was simply reporting. I felt the heat move into my cheeks.
“Thank you,” I said. And then, because I was only human, “So do you.”
He smiled and held out the roses. I took them, and he didn’t step back, and the space between us was not very much space at all.
I looked up at him in the candlelit shop with the cobwebs and the poison bottles and the dark roses in my hands, and he looked down at me with that expression—warm and sure and entirely focused—and then his free hand came up to my jaw, tipping my face toward his.
He kissed me like we weren’t standing in a bookshop with guests about to arrive.
The press of his lips started firm and deliberate, then deepened with a hunger that stole the breath from my lungs.
His mouth moved against mine, slow at first, savoring, before his tongue traced the seam of my lips, and I opened for him on a soft, involuntary moan.
He tasted of mint and something darker, richer—pure Jasper—and the heat of it flooded through me, pooling low in my belly.
I clutched the roses tighter in one hand, the other sliding up his chest to fist in his white shirt, pulling him closer.
His body pressed into mine, solid and warm, backing me gently against the edge of the nearest shelf.
The wooden edge dug into my lower back, a sharp contrast to the hard heat of him everywhere else.
His free hand slid from my jaw into my hair, fingers threading through the pinned strands as he angled me exactly how he wanted, the kiss turning fierce and consuming.
Tongues tangled, breaths mingled hot and ragged.
A low growl rumbled in his chest as I nipped at his bottom lip, and the sound sent sparks racing down my spine.
His other hand dropped to my waist, palm scorching through the fabric of my trousers, then sliding lower to grip my hip and pull me flush against him.
The friction of our bodies, the way he ground subtly into me—it made my knees weak and my pulse thunder in my ears.
When he finally broke the kiss, it was only far enough to trail his mouth along my jaw and down the sensitive line of my throat, teeth grazing lightly before soothing with his tongue. “Cara,” he rasped against my skin, voice rough with want, “you in this outfit… damn. I don’t want to stop.”
I arched into him, breathless, my fingers tightening in his shirt.
“Don’t stop yet,” I whispered, already pulling his mouth back to mine for another searing kiss—deeper, hotter, more desperate.
The candlelight flickered around us, the scent of roses and old books mingling with the faint spice of his skin, and for those stolen moments, the entire world narrowed to just him, just us, and the fire building between us.
I forgot about the guests.
I forgot about everything, actually. I had a fistful of his shirt, the roses were pressed between us, and the magnifying glass on its chain was swinging somewhere, and none of it mattered even slightly.
When we finally broke apart, I was breathless, and his hair was considerably less deliberate than it had been a minute ago.
“You’re going to be the death of me,” I told him, which felt appropriate given the evening’s theme.
His mouth curved. “You started it.”
“I absolutely did not start it.”
“You came down those stairs looking like a 1920s bombshell.”
I had no response to that. I went to find the mason jar for the roses before the situation deteriorated further.
The guests arrived in clusters, like last time, but tonight they came in costume.
Some had committed fully. Paige had come as a 1920s bartender—high-waisted trousers, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up—and looked so entirely herself in it that I suspected she’d simply raided her own wardrobe.
Piper had gone full Agatha Christie, a tea-length dress, sensible shoes, and a look of mild suspicion she was maintaining with impressive consistency.
Eliza had worn a dark cape over her clothes and a brooch at her collar and somehow managed to look both elegant and slightly ominous without appearing to have tried at all.
Hannah arrived in a deep green dress with a feathered headband, already laughing at something before she’d fully cleared the door, and came straight to me. “This place looks incredible,” she said, taking in the cobwebs and the poison bottles and the roses. “Jasper helped you with this, didn’t he?”
“He brought those roses,” I said.
“Of course he did.” She grinned.
My grandparents came in just behind her, Grandpa in a flat cap and a tweed jacket he’d had for forty years that turned out to be accidentally perfect, and Grandma in a deep plum dress with a brooch at her collar and the air of a woman who had attended many country house parties in her time and survived all of them.
Jasper’s Aunt Nancy was with them, magnificent in a feathered hat she informed me she had owned since 1987 and had been waiting for exactly the right occasion to wear.
I told her this was unquestionably that occasion.
She patted my cheek and went straight for the cookie plate.