Twice Tempted (21 page)

Fiona fought a rush of impatience. “Night will come no faster by your looking for it, Mae. Get some rest now.”

Mae’s smile was halfhearted. “I’m not certain I can.”

Fiona kissed her cheek. “Work on your word puzzle in your head.”

Mae shook her head. “I am stumped. I will work on Mr. Gauss’s geometric equations instead.”

“In your head. While you’re horizontal.”

With a shy bob of the head to Alex, Mae spun around, trotted into the bedroom, and closed the door. Fiona turned around to see the bemused frown on Alex’s face.

“Do you mind my asking?” he said. “The pillow seems important.”

Fiona took one last look back, as if she could see it, and then faced Alex.

He returned her gaze and she hesitated, the easy words lost in the expression in his eyes. Pity? No. Sympathy? Not really. What, then?

“It’s quite simple, really,” she said. “Our mother stitched it. A thistle to remind us of our heritage. It is the only memory of her we have been able to hold on to.” She shrugged. “A bit of a talisman, really.”

He looked back toward the door, then to her. “Nothing else?”

“Our red hair.” She grinned. “And our height. Drove grandfather mad.”

He was nodding absently, as if it all made sense when she knew it couldn’t.

As long as he didn’t pity them.

“We came away from Edinburgh with a lot more than most,” she insisted.

That, finally, ignited a smile. “Yes, you did. Now, the only thing you have to do is rest. There is the telescope and a fully stocked library if you have need of occupation.”

“And you?”

He scrubbed at his hair. “I will have to go out,” he said. “I have some business to attend to. And I’ll be taking Lennie.”

Fiona frowned. “You will ensure her safety?”

“As well as I can. Chuffy will stay, and Finney is supplying armed guards. You will be perfectly safe here.”

All she could do was nod. She still felt so stiff and uncomfortable, suddenly, knowing he was about to walk away. Her hands were clenched again at her sides to keep them out of trouble, her breathing measured so that she didn’t inhale his scent. He was nothing special. Just a man. Taller than she, good-looking, but so were many men. So he had eyes the color of bitter chocolate. So he had a dimple in his left cheek and a scar on his forehead. So he could move like a fencer and kiss like a rogue. It shouldn’t be enough to make her dumb and nervous. But she felt dumb and nervous. She felt as if she were watching him deliberately walk away. And after last evening, it seemed a betrayal.

“Are you all right, Fiona? Do you need anything before I go?”

She looked up at him in astonishment. Her body all but seized with sudden longing. Did she
need
anything? She needed to be back in his arms, where it was safe. Where she felt free and alive. She needed the heat of his mouth, the sure balance of his hands. She needed…

“Nothing. I’m fine. Will we see you tomorrow?”

She could see a flush creep up his neck, as if she were disconcerting him. Selfishly, she hoped so. At least a little bit.

“I might be back tonight. I’ll be sure to check at the telescope for you.”

Again silence fell, thick and elastic. Fiona wanted him gone now, before she humiliated herself again. She went as far as to take hold of the doorknob, when she swore she heard growling. She looked around. She looked back. There was something different about Alex’s eyes. Something…fierce. She froze.

“Oh, damn it!” he snapped and grabbed her.

She got out no more than a squeak of surprise before she was in his arms being kissed. Being ravished, his hands roaming, his arms surrounding her. And his mouth. Oh, his mouth, soft, strong, ferocious, easing hers open and invading with his tongue. She couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think, only feel, as showers of chills raced through her and sapped the strength from her knees. She lifted her own hands and wove them through his lovely thick hair. She met his tongue with hers in a sinuous dance, relishing the sleek texture, the bold invasion, the tastes that lingered between them. She was gasping, holding on for dear life, struggling to breathe when she was crushed up against his chest, her breasts fairly flattened.

She had just really settled into a rhythm, just felt as if she could easily sink into oblivion on his kiss, her heart slamming against her ribs and her belly on fire, when she heard it. Faint, thin, fretful.

“Fee!”

This time Fiona was the one to pull away. Her body screamed in denial. Her chest felt as if it were bound. She fought to find her feet again and then her knees.

And then she saw his eyes. Shocked again. Regretful, even when they were still nearly black with desire.

“Fiona.”

“Do not even think it,” she snapped. Then, with a shove at his chest that unbalanced him just enough, she slammed the door.

She went in to see about Mairead. But before she did, she paused a moment, just for herself. And she smiled. And for the first time in a long while, she meant it.

*  *  *

She could smell onions. Onions and cabbage and sewers. It was dark. It was always dark. Dark and damp, the walls constantly dripping. She was so tired, her feet aching and her back worse. She had been bent over a desk all day and up on Calton Hill the night before watching stars. It was a silly thing to do, really, especially considering how hard they worked during the day, but not two weeks earlier Mr. Playfair had revealed the most marvelous surprise. Like a conjurer, using a telescope for a wand, he had pulled away the black velvet of night to show her a mystery. A miracle. What he called a nebula—right there dangling off of Orion’s belt, a boiling, light-studded cloud limned in starlight. A remnant, maybe, of blasted stars or the embryo of a new planet. Creation soup, bubbling away out there in the endless dark.

She had fallen hopelessly in love. With the telescope, with the sky, so silent, so sure. So pristine and precise when the world around her was anything but. She carried the images back down the hill with her and along the cobbles of Holyrood Road as she and Mae trudged back to the vaults under South Bridge, where they were living, pausing only to collect the lumps of coal that had fallen from passing carts.

Mr. McMurray, for whom they worked in the oculist shop, would have tried to house them if he’d known. But Mr. McMurray had no room and less money, what with his sick wife and their half-dozen bairns. So Fiona let him believe that she and Mae still lived in their midlevel apartment on Borthwick’s Close. And he let Fiona do his books and Mae learn to grind lenses. Even at her age, he said she had a talent for it.

As for Mae, she had found heaven. Now that she knew what filled the dark sky, she could think of nothing else. Her lessons, her work, her dreams all revolved around the day she would grind lenses for her own telescopes. She would be so good William Herschel himself would ask her to help him build telescopes.

But that was no more than a dream. For tonight they had to eke out a dinner from root vegetables and stale bread. Fiona retrieved the candle stub she left in a crack between stones and pulled out her tinderbox. The sound of the scrape was loud in the gloom. She hoped Mae was tucked back in their vault with her candle and the mathematics book Mr. Playfair had lent her. Fiona hated to leave Mae here, where she only had Mrs. Gordon in the next vault to watch out for her. But Fiona refused to take Mae to her second job. Mae would never understand; it would frighten her.

Lifting her candle, Fiona began to weave her way through the darkness. She didn’t call out to Mae as she crept through the rooms. If Mae had her nose in a book, she would never hear her, hopefully long lost in the galaxies.

“No…don’t…Fee…Fee, please…” Fiona stopped. Mairead sounded wrong.

Then she heard a sound that chilled her to her soul. “Fee isn’t here now.”

The voice was low and raspy, a bit breathless. Fiona’s mouth went dry. Her heart started hammering against her ribs. Where was Mrs. Gordon? How could no one hear this?

Blowing out her candle, she bent to drop her pitiful pile of coal and food on the ground. Then, her eyes acclimating to the dark, she crept forward, praying she wouldn’t alert him.

There was the sound of a rip, then a slap. Mae cried out. The time for stealth was past. Frantic, furious, Fiona let loose a wild, echoing Highlander’s cry and charged into the dark.

He turned around.

Fiona lurched upright in her bed, gasping for air. It was light out, not dark. It was warm and soft and comfortable. She hadn’t slept on cobbles in a long time. Still she couldn’t stop shaking, suddenly cold again, swamped in despair. It seemed that soft beds and full bellies weren’t protection against old nightmares.

Bending up her knees, she rested her forehead on them, willing her heart to ease, the panic to recede back down her throat.

“Fee?”

Fiona jumped, the hesitant sound so like her dream that for just an instant, she wasn’t sure.

“Yes, Mae?”

Mairead pushed open the bedroom door and stepped in. She was still in her nightclothes, her braid coming loose, her face soft with sleep. She was so beautiful, even mussed and rumpled and half-awake, the pillow wrapped in her arm. Fiona knew better than anyone how lovely Mae was, and yet every so often, it startled her all over again.

“Are you all right?” Mairead asked, looking afraid.

Fee held out her arms, and Mairead came to sit on the bed for a hug. “Everything’s fine. I just had an old dream.”

She knew perfectly well why, too. She had taken too large a step, started to believe that with Alex she could be different. She could be more. That she deserved the comfort of his arms, his smile, his strength.

He had tempted her with the possibility of life. Of hope. Of that most seductive of concepts, a normal life. And for a moment, she had believed.

“We’re safe now, though, Fee,” Mairead insisted, peering at Fiona as if she could see the truth. “Aren’t we?”

Fiona didn’t think so. Not really. But she couldn’t tell Mae that. “We are,” she assured her sister. “The nightmares are over, sweetings.”

Oh, God
, she prayed as she gave her sister another hug.
Let that be true.

Chapter 13

T
he address was unimpressive, a town house on Half Moon Street that contained a rising gambling hell on the ground floor and rented rooms above. Alex stood in the street a moment, assessing egress and exit, possible escape routes and dark corners. Half Moon Street passed directly from Curzon to bustling Piccadilly, without any alleys to separate the houses. Weams’s building was only three houses from Piccadilly and Green Park beyond, where there would be room to run.

“All right, then,” he said and turned to where Lennie stood in that odd, rumpled top hat of hers. “I want you to stay right here.”

“Stay here?” the girl echoed in tones of high dudgeon. “What f’r?”

“Because I know Weams, and I told Lady Fiona I would not put you in danger.”

The girl snorted in derision. “Then why’d ya bring me at all?”

Alex fought hard not to grin. “I brought you to recognize people you might have seen with Weams. Other compatriots, victims. You see any, you whistle. When I’m finished, we’ll go on to the Blue Goose and try again.”

Still the girl wasn’t appeased. “How ya gonna dub the jigger, then?”

Alex did smile then, understanding the cant. “Get inside? Easy. I brought the locksmith’s daughter.”

He brought a set of picks he could use in his sleep after his time with the Rakes.

Alex was sure the child wasn’t appeased, but she did at least resign herself to pacing the walk as if waiting for horses to hold. Giving her a nod, Alex went inside. He had letters and identities to retrieve. Since Weams didn’t have the intellect or cunning to pull off blackmail like this, someone had set him loose. History suggested the Lions.

The first two flights of stairs were fairly elegant, with runners and wall lanterns lighting the way. The third set, though, showed the diminishment of rank and fortune. The walls were dingier, the wood bare and narrow. Old servants’ quarters, Alex guessed. Running up on almost-silent feet, he reached Weams’s door without any alarms and pulled out the picks.

He did knock first, just in case. When he got no answer, he made quick work of the door and slipped inside.

They were typical bachelor’s rooms, heavy on hunting prints and strewn in the detritus of a careless life: wine bottles, racing forms, toppled boots, and a snowfall of yanked-off cravats littering the furniture. Whoever cleaned up after Weams should be sacked immediately.

Something about the place sent the hair up on the back of Alex’s neck. A sense of disquiet, as if he had just barely missed something or someone, their movement still unsettling the air. There was no place to hide in the sitting room. Hand poised to retrieve the knife in his sleeve, Alex pushed the bedroom door gently open.

The first thing he saw was that the window was wide open. So he’d been right. The room wasn’t cold yet, so it couldn’t have been open long. Scanning the empty room for surprises, he strode past the bed to look out, but there was nothing to see. Three stories of brick wall down to an untidy garden that opened onto the next street. A brave escape, if that was how the previous tenant had gone. There was nothing to grab on that wall but corner bricks and window casements.

Pulling his head back into the bedroom, he made a more careful assessment. The space bore a striking resemblance to the sitting room, tossed in apparel and generally rumpled. Stale and sad, with no more than the bed, a night table, and a worn wardrobe occupying the floor.

Then Alex saw the open portmanteau on the bed and felt that chill of prescience grow. The case was only half-filled, shirt and shaving kit untidily shoved in, as if the man was anxious to pack up and get away.

Now, why would someone stop packing when it seemed a matter of urgency? Alex was about to search the room for any clues when he heard a high, shrill whistle. Spinning around, he ran for the hall door.