She looked up at Max, her eyes burning, her throat raw. “He sounds so sweet.”
He brushed a kiss against her temple. “Do you want me to read it?”
She shifted the paper to him and leaned into his warmth as he draped his arm around her shoulder. “‘I don’t regret serving my country in this way, my love. Know that I would do it again even had I been aware of the outcome. I fought to protect our future, now your future. But my greatest fulfilment in life has been being loved by you, dreaming with you. We did not have years of memories, nor decades to learn every intricate facet of each other’s personalities, and many might say that love cannot bloom within the confines of our limited time and correspondence, but we would prove them wrong. Something within me came alive when I met you, and there was no going back to what I was before.’”
Max stopped reading, his brow bunched into mastiff intensity.
“What?”
“That’s how I felt when…when I met you.”
A gasp slipped from Clara’s lips. She lost all sense of time in those golden eyes and the gentleness of his gaze. Paired with the moment, the beautiful words still brewing in the air around them, she touched his cheek, the scarred side. Is this what Oliver felt with Sadie? This connection that couldn’t be explained by time? This awareness choosing him was exactly what her heart had craved before she’d ever met him?
He eased forward, the rich scents of cardamom and soap and something tangy enveloped her, and he claimed her lips with his own. His hand slipped across her cheek and into her hair. Her fingers curled from his face to slide down to his collar. Nothing but staccato breaths shook the darkness.
Except…
A scratching noise from just beyond the door between the apartment and the bookshop.
Clara almost didn’t hear it, especially with Max’s expert distraction on full tantalizing display against her mouth, but it scraped again. Metal on metal. And then a click.
She wouldn’t have heard it a minute before with them reading the letter aloud or laughing over tea, but in the silence of the kiss, the noise annoyed enough to draw attention. A mismatched sound.
With a palm to Max’s chest, she pulled back, holding his gaze. “Do you hear that?”
He blinked, his gaze coming back into focus, and she almost grinned at the pleasure of knowing she’d happily distracted him too. His brow quirked, and she raised her palm to hold his response.
A very quiet squeak, barely audible, slipped beneath the door. She knew that sound. It was the door to the bookshop office. Max’s head jerked to the noise, watching her face. He’d heard it too.
Clara glanced at the clock over the mantel. Twelve thirty a.m.? “I don’t think that’s Robbie,” she whispered, placing the letter on the coffee table.
Max rose at the same time she did. Who would break into the bookshop and then go directly to the office? She didn’t have anything in the office except paperwork. Her gaze shot to Max. “The marriage certificate, Max. I put it in the office when we got back, along with some of Sadie’s other papers.”
“Why would someone want the marriage certificate?” His eyes widened. “Your uncle. Do you think he overheard us at the hospital?”
“I don’t know, but that’s the only thing that makes any sense. He’s sent someone to take my documentation so he can get the bookshop, and he’d know I keep everything in there.”
“Listen to me.” Max took hold of her shoulders. “Do you have a weapon?”
She nodded. Her father had taken her to get one years ago when he’d traveled and Clara and her mom were left in the apartment alone.
“Get it. Call the police and stay here.”
“Max.” She grabbed his shirt. “You should stay here too.”
“We don’t have time, Clara. If he’s in the office, he may already have it.” He tugged free of her and took her mom’s hardback copy of Middlemarch as he approached the door. His hand barely wrapped around the massive nine-hundred-page volume.
She stared, almost mesmerized, until he opened the adjoining door which led into a small hallway connecting the two buildings. A light flickered against the wall coming from the right—the direction of the office. Flickering?
Her throat closed around a scream. Fire!
She placed her phone to her ear and raced up the stairs to her room, retrieving the little pistol from the nightstand by her bed. Answering the dispatcher’s questions as she descended the stairs, she ran through the doorway to the sounds of a crash. Then a groan. All the while the flickering lights grew brighter.
As she turned the corner toward the office, air lodged in her lungs at the sight.
Fire snaked up one office wall while Max struggled with an assailant in black. Max’s size came as an advantage as he slammed the other man down against the desk. The man cried out, kicking back with enough force to knock free of Max’s hold. With a push up from the desk, the assailant limped toward the doorway, his mask no longer covering his face. The papers Clara had left scattered around the floor during her research quickly caught the flames, igniting other parts of the room.
Clara raised the gun as the thief ’s gaze rose to meet hers. “Why, Uncle Julian? Is this property that important to you?”
“This place should have been mine all along, and if I can’t get something from it, you won’t either.”
Her hand quivered holding the gun and he sneered, stepping forward, but Max caught him from behind and wrestled him to the floor, flames growing behind them through the office door. The dispatcher’s voice rang in Clara’s ear, asking a question she couldn’t interpret.
“Fire,” she managed to whisper. “Blackwell’s is on
