Page 119 of The Scandal You Started
It was tiring, honestly, yet the joy of it was still somehow exponential.
The lunches spent eating from takeout boxes with Dominic, Cassie, Hania, and Matt as they cursed the men who’d written the letters. Walking back into the farmhouse exhausted, but standing in the kitchen with Dominic, chatting about nonsense while they munched on whatever was in the fruit bowl. Before collapsing into bed at night with his arms around her and the AC on full to fend off the hot July air.
Dominic kept up his routine of swimming in the mornings, and a few days, Rayna woke with him to exercise in the basement gym. Other days, they worked on his report withinthe comfort of their bed. And when they were done, they found enough energy for a lazy fuck or a hard quickie before they cooked a meal together.
She even let him convince her to waltz around the kitchen a few times. She’d never admit it aloud, but she enjoyed it, dancing and stumbling and laughing without a care in the world.
It was new.Spending so much time with someone she was having sex with and liking every second of it. Even when it took him forever to chop ingredients, or type on his phone, or select a movie to watch, the sweet concentration on his face always melted her frustration.
She was making memories with him she was never going to forget. She was experiencing things she didn’t even realise were altering her soul and feelings things she couldn’t name.
The only uncomfortable part was remembering that it wasn’t going to last. But it was fine, she told herself. That was how it was meant to be. She might have blurred the lines of Study and Guardian with him, but at the end of the day, that was all they were.
That was all they could be. That was all she wanted them to be.
Right?
Obviously. Yeah. Of course. Duh.
They made good historian colleagues as well, she supposed.
Which was why Rayna backed his idea when, two weeks into their hours of trial and error with the coded letters, Dominic said, “The only way to know for sure is by lighting a small flame under one of the letters.”
Cassie choked on a sound of shock and rapidly shook her head from her stool around the white table she was sitting at with Matt. “Absolutely not! We can’t light flames under one of the letters. It’ll burn instantly, and we’ll get into trouble for being reckless with the artefacts.”
“But if Dominic is right…” Matt muttered hesitantly but lifted his gloved hands from his laptop in surrender when Cassie glared at him.
“I just mean that his theory is credible,” he added quickly. “We’ve tried every cipher style on the database and tried so many different alphabet combinations too, but nothing has made sense yet. What if the coded letters are designed to be a distraction from what’s hidden in the actual correspondence Lord Ian wrote and received?”
Cassie waved her hands around. “That doesn’t mean we light them on fire.”
“I don’t think Dominic meant we light them on fire,” said Rayna. “But if we use heat from a hairdryer or something, any alcohol or traces of lemon juice will colour, and we’ll be able to see if any of the letters or words are marked.”
She glanced between Cassie and Dominic. “Honestly, now that I think about it, the method was used by government officials and spies duringThe Great Rebellion of Zorro.” She gestured to the open, leather diaries placed in the middle of the letters. “And if Lord Ian was as obsessed with the rebellion as we can assume he was, then he was probably aware of the practice.”
Consideration buzzed around the silent research room.
“As the head of the team, Cassie, it’s your call,” Rayna then said. “But I think Dominic’s idea is credible. It’s worth a shot, at least.”
“I agree,” Hania said with a nod.
“Me too,” Matt added.
“Oh, gosh,” Cassie groaned with a hand pressed over her mouth. A thousand thoughts ran through her distant gaze before she sighed heavily. “Okay. Fine. Someone find a hairdryer.”
A hairdryer was found in one of the staff shower rooms, but it took someone from the museum’s Facilities team to unscrew the counter it was attached to and get it unplugged.
Then, Rayna and Dominic gathered on one side of Cassie, while Matt and Hania huddled on the other, all of them looking over the letter they were testing their method on.
Cassie exhaled stiffly. “Okay.” She fortified her shoulders. “I’m ready.”
Rayna stared just as hard as the others when Cassie turned the hairdryer on over the paper pinned under her fingers.
It took a while, each second dragging on for ten, but brown dots began appearing under some of the individual words on Mr Farringdon’s correspondence to Lord Ian.
Hania gasped. “It worked.”
Cassie turned the hairdryer off and let out a hearty, excited laugh. Hania joined in with a little clap, Matt was absolutely gobsmacked, and Rayna gleamed up at Dominic as his irises shone with wonder.
