Connections in Death (In Death 48)

“That’s why we have lights. A walk will clear your head.”

“I’m waiting for the warrant to—”

“Take your comm. Let’s walk out, see what they’ve done on the pond.”

She already had her comm—and her ’link, her badge, her weapon—but that didn’t explain going outside to walk around in the dark. “You want to walk outside, in the dark, to look at a hole in the ground?”

“I do, yes.” To get her away from the board and her thoughts for a few minutes, Roarke took her hand. “After all, it’s our hole in the ground.”

Because she had been, mostly, thinking in circles, she let him pull her out of the office and downstairs.

He got her coat out of the closet.

“Why does he hang this up when he’s just going to put it back where I left it for the morning?”

“He has a tidy soul.”

“Summerset has a soul?”

Roarke flicked a finger down the dent in her chin, then got his own coat. “We’ll go out the side.”

The house had a zillion rooms and easily three zillion doors. She let him navigate back toward the kitchen, then a left through what she knew he called the morning room with its glass wall and cushy sofas and little indoor garden.

She stopped, pointed. “Are those limes?”

“I believe they’re lemons, with some ripening to do yet.”

“You have lemons growing on a tree in the house.”

“I doubt they’d take well to New York winters.”

He opened the glass door in the glass wall where, outside, the grounds were already lit in all their glory.

“You can probably see this place from Mars.”

He just took her hand again. “I’d hoped to check it out before dinner, but there will be criminals.”

Okay, it wasn’t bad. Cool, but not cold, and the lights beaming through all the still-bare trees threw everything into a kind of fascinating relief. Overhead, thin clouds whisked over the half slice of moon, and the sounds of the city, just a murmur really, assured her she wasn’t walking in some weird-ass country woods.

“What was the first place you bought? Real estate.”

“A small, seedy hotel in

Dublin. A rattrap, really, and one my mates said I’d be better burning to the ground. But I wanted it. I could see the bones of it,” he added as they walked. “And what it might be with some care and thought, and considerable investment.”

“How’d you afford it?”

“Well now.” He kissed her hair. “I stole a pearl necklace—three strands with a small ruby clasp. Then I took the ferry to Liverpool, to someone I knew, and hocked them. It was enough for the buy, but not for the rehab.”

“Pearls.”

“And quite nice ones,” he recalled. “I took Summerset to see the property, told him what I wanted to do. He took a loan out for the rest. And in eight months, we opened the Green, a small, elegant hotel we marketed to tourists looking for personal service.”

“How old were you?”

“About sixteen, more or less. I had enough from it in a couple years to pay him back the loan, but he wouldn’t have it. So we own it together.”

“Still?”