Page 60 of Her Inconvenient Groom (French Conquests 4)

He listened grimly as standard warnings were read, and answered distractedly when the same questions were posed to him again and again, sometimes phrased differently, sometimes verbatim.

All he could think of was Chantelle. Was she okay? Did she, like everyone else, think that he’d tried to kill her?

Was she even still alive? The possibility that she could be gone right before his eyes as he was dragged out of the room terrified him. His mind rebelled. Losing her was impossible. Not when he loved her, as he did. Not when she had claimed his soul the way she had.

“Monsieur Spencer, may I remind you that you are facing very serious charges?” the woman interrupted his thoughts impatiently. Apparently, she’d asked him a question that she hadn’t answered.

“I’m sorry. But as I keep saying over and over, I did nothing to harm my wife. She was carrying my baby. I would never have tried to harm either of them. And please, if someone would only tell me—”

The door was flung open, and another officer appeared. There was a rapid-fire conversation, and again, those looks fell upon him again. As if he was scum.

The officer, the lawyer and translator returned to the table, this time with the additional office in tow.

“You are a tattoo artist, correct?” the woman asked.

“As I have told you ten times—”

“Oui ou non?”The officer interrupted.

He sighed. “Yes.”

“And you own a blue metal tattoo kit? Full of tools?”

“Well, it doesn’t belong to the cat.”

“Monsieur Spencer!”

“Yes. The tattoo kit is mine.”

“The police have executed a search warrant on the property of Madame Moreau and found this kit.”

“So?”

“There was a small vial of a substance hidden at the bottom, under several tools.”

He was nonplused. “Vial?”

“Of poison. Poison that should be in the hands of military officials and not civilians. The exact same poison the doctors have determined was used on your wife.”

Chapter 33

“I wish someone would tell me something,” Chantelle fretted.

She was propped up in bed, still in this awful private room that had begun to feel like a prison, with its plain ugly walls and plain ugly lighting fixtures. The monotony of the hospital sameness was broken only by a series of machines arranged in a semi-circle around her bed. Some were connected to her in one way or another, while others waited patiently on standby in case she started to seize again.

“Hush,” Jacyn said, stroking her arm as if she was a nervous animal at the pound, who needed to be soothed. “Every time you start fussing, that machine,” she pointed, “goes haywire.”

The doctors had been doing their best, administering medicine to counteract the poison, and treatments to help manage or reverse the damage done to her, especially her liver and kidneys.

Chantelle could see much better now; her vision was improving every day, but from time to time it would surprise her by fading into a blur, as if the devil was trying to remind her not to discount the havoc he could wreak in her life. And at least she was strong enough to sit up and feed herself. Although she was rarely hungry.

But all of that was cold comfort. “To hell with the machine! I don’t care! All I know is I have been lying here for two seeks and still nobody will tell me anything about Dustin! What’s going on?”

“Babe,” Naisha came to stand beside her sister-in-law in a gesture of solidarity, “please don’t get yourself riled up. It’s not good for you.”

She scoffed. “Not good for me? I’ve been poisoned. I lost my baby. My hair is falling out. My eyeballs are yellow, I’m jaundiced all over, and my internal organs feel like soup. I’m dying, Naisha! Why would I care if those damn machines gobeep-beep-beeporhonk-honk-honk?”It was frustrating. Infuriating. Why would nobody just tell her the truth?

She turned to Sienna, who had flown back to France the moment she’d heard what had happened. “Don’t you have anything to say?”

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