Simple, really. No one gets hurt; everyone’s happy. And Hadley would never have to know that he’d intended to cheat her father in the first place. But in order for everything to work, he needed to find the last two crossbars.

And in order to do that, he first needed a shave and another bath.

The hunt awaited him, along with his raven-haired hunting partner.

 • • •

The joy of seeing Hadley again didn’t disappoint. In the space of one night, everything had changed between them. Her boundaries were felled. She now greeted him with open arms. He scooped her up with a racing heart and no intention of ever letting her go. He’d never been so happy.

And yet, so anxious at the same time . . .

Because the easy luck they’d experienced tracking the first two crossbars seemed to have dissipated. They plowed through two addresses over the weekend, then two more at the beginning of the following week, sneaking out during Hadley’s lunch break and after she got off work. Each time they used Velma’s charmed bags to hide their trail. They posed as charity workers, door-to-door sales representatives, long-lost relatives, and their finest bit of acting: country preacher and demure wife.

A waste of choice vaudeville, as all names led to dead ends.

Utterly vexing.

Still, the week wasn’t without merit. Her father’s health improved, and even though he couldn’t confirm the existence of Noel/Oliver, they saw not hide nor hair of Oliver and no magical chimeras pecked at their heads.

But, best of all, they buried their failures in consolatory rounds of increasingly daring sexual athletics: in the passenger seat of the silver Packard, darkened hallways, a public restroom, and—during a particularly blasphemous afternoon—on the back steps of an empty church when they were investigating a crumbling graveyard.

Every time he saw her was a gift. Even so, a mounting frustration dogged him that had nothing to do with the crossbars. Winter’s words echoed in his head. You want to see a woman like that, you do it properly. Why did his brother have to be right? Because damned if Lowe didn’t spend half his time trying to keep their affair quiet: tiptoeing around her father and her coworkers; sneaking around her apartment building at odd hours, while he trudged up a million flights of stairs to avoid the elevator man; parking Lulu across the street at the Fairmont Hotel.

It was demeaning to both of them.

And almost a week after their first night together, here he was at ten in the evening, lurking around the cypress trees at the base of the museum’s front tower while he waited for Mr. Hill to take his break—the same guard who’d caught them in Dr. Bacall’s office when this whole thing started. When the man’s car sped around the side of the building, the museum door cracked open and Hadley’s face popped out.

“All clear!” she whispered cheerfully before ushering him inside the door and bolting it.

His eyes darted around the museum’s shadowed front lobby. Eerie to be in here alone. “Another guard is definitely not going to waltz in here, right?” he asked.

“The other two are stationed outside.”

“And Mr. Hill—”

“Won’t be back until after midnight.”

“If the wrong person knew this, you could be robbed blind.”

“We’ve only had two break-in attempts in ten years. And it’s not as if someone could pull up a truck to the front door and bust it down without someone hearing. Where’s your sense of adventure, Mr. Treasure Hunter?”

“Hmph. I think it got trampled beneath the wheels of our failure this week.” He bumped into a stanchion and gritted his teeth as the sound of grating metal bounced off the walls. “Jesus, Hadley. I feel like a misbehaving boy, sneaking into a building on a dare.”

“Well, hopefully the elevator in my apartment building will be repaired tomorrow. Then you can use your misbehaving ways to sneak up the stairwell without bumping into every tenant on the way up.”

“Oh, joy.”

She placed flattened palms on his chest and tilted her face up to his. “Grumpy.”

“Frustrated.” But now that he caught the scent of her hair, a part of him relaxed. He dipped his head to press his forehead against hers for a moment, and then kissed the tip of her nose.

“I’m so happy you’re here,” she whispered. “I had trouble sleeping without you last night.”

“I hate being away from you. It makes me physically ill,” he whispered back. “I want this hunt to be over, so we can stop hiding and lying.”

“I thought you lived for lying,” she teased.

“You’re ruining me, Miss Bacall,” he said against her lips.

“I don’t believe I’ve ever ruined anyone before.”

“Best make it good, because I don’t want you ruining anyone else ever again.”

She arched into him, smiling a delightfully silly smile that he promptly kissed away. And just when he was warming up, she broke the kiss and wound her fingers through his. “We can hear Mr. Hill’s car in the antiquities wing. And there’s something there I want you to see.”

Feeling a little less anxious and a lot more motivated, he followed her past the ticketing windows and an army of silent statues lining the walls. The high ceilings and tiled marble floor seemed to simultaneously magnify and swallow their footfalls as they strolled by framed paintings worth more than any one of the Magnusson’s luxury cars.

Past the Pacific Art collection, an arched entrance was marked with a hand-painted sign that read: TREASURES OF ANCIENT EGYPT—MUMMIFICATION, MAGIC, AND RITUAL. He’d seen this exhibit many times over the years, even when most of it was housed in the old Midwinter building. As a boy, it held enormous fascination for him and was one of the main catalysts that spurred him into pursing an archaeology degree. Strange to think that the objects his ten-year-old self gazed upon with delight would later be placed under Hadley’s stewardship.

He stopped in front of a case that held a female mummy. Sprigs of hair were still attached to her preserved skin. Most of her teeth were still intact, but she was missing a leg; half the museum’s mummies were damaged or crushed to shards in the earthquake. But the thing that made her such a crowd-pleaser sat in the adjoining case: a tightly wrapped mummified cat, which was found in the same tomb.

“The best feline specimen on the West Coast,” Hadley bragged. “Excellent example of geometric patterned wrapping from the Ptolemaic Period.”

“Is this what you’ll do for Number Four when the time comes?”

She clasped her hands behind her back and gazed at the case with a satisfied smile, head tilted. “I think he’d like that. A tiny sarcophagus might be nice, too. Who knows—perhaps one day we’ll both end up on display. People will study our preserved corpses and call me the Cat Lady.”

“You’re a morbid woman, min kära.”

A mischievous smile hoisted her cheeks. “I do love the way you flirt, Mr. Magnusson.” Gaze locked with his, hands still clasped behind her back, she took a couple of backward steps. Lowe might as well have been mummified himself, for it felt like she could tug on his wrappings and wind him toward her with a single look.

If she wanted her preserved body to be on display, he wanted to be the one lying beside her.

“Over here,” she said, beckoning him with excited eyes. “This is what I wanted you to see.”

TWENTY-SIX

LOWE WATCHED HADLEY AS she turned on a heel and led him to a waist-high glass case that sat against a square pillar in the middle of the hall. Inside was a small collection of personal items found in the Cat Lady’s tomb: perfume jars, a comb, jewelry. And in the middle of the case sat three canopic jars; the fourth one had been lost in the earthquake.

She leaned over the case to peer down into it. “My parents found this tomb at the necropolis near Thebes in 1895. Only three years before I was born. I wondered if my mother used these as inspiration when she decided to hide the crossbars.”

“Different era design than the ones she had made,” he noted.

“Yes. Still, I imagine her walking in here, angry with my father for wanting to kill Noel. Desperate to keep the peace between the two of them so that she could selfishly hang on to both husband and lover. And she sees these.” Hadley tapped on the glass with one nail.

“The solution to her problem,” Lowe agreed, stepping behind her to peer over her shoulder as he gingerly wrapped one arm around her waist, testing. “Hide them in something that people would keep safe and treasure.”

“Exactly.” She snaked a hand around the arm that held her, quietly voicing her approval. “And I thought if we looked at them in the right way, maybe we’d see something that would help us decipher the last two pictograms.”

How he hated those unsolvable pictograms. Both them and her mother be damned. He inhaled the clean scent of her skin, smelling soap and the bright note of her shampoo and beneath it all, Hadley. Intoxicating. He felt powerless to stop himself from nuzzling below the sharp line of her bob to kiss the fine hairs that veed at the nape of her neck.

She shuddered ever so slightly, but continued with her train of thought, albeit in a breathier voice. “You know, I think Father’s decision to gift the Cat Lady to the museum was tied to the caveat that he be appointed director of this department.”

“Mmm.” Lowe trailed two more kisses down her spine, stopping where the top button of her oh-so-serious black dress prevented him from going further. “Maybe that’s why he thought I’d be champing at the bit for a chance to be his successor.”