A Study in Seduction

by Eva Chase

  “I do business with the man,” I said evenly. “We’re hardly best buddies. If that threat is supposed to have me shaking in my boots, I apologize.” I pushed myself to my feet. “Feel free to stop by if you come up with something better. I have to go get some breakfast.”

  I pulled a sweater on over my workout tee, not wanting to change in front of the shrouded one, and walked out the door without a backward glance.

  The truth was my stomach was too full of that acrid mix of fear and rage for there to be any room for hunger. In an ideal world, I’d have found a punching bag on which to let out a lethal amount of force ten times over. But the hotel fitness center was a yuppie paradise of treadmills and exercise bikes in gleaming rows, and I’d probably burn through a few breakfast pastries’ worth of calories just fuming on my way down.

  If that fiend touched one particle of Bash’s being—if it so much as whispered a word in my accomplice’s ear—I’d find some way to tear it to shreds while I was going down its gullet. Just let it try me.

  I hadn’t slept all that well. The morning was still early, so not many of the conference goers had drifted into the hotel dining room yet. The pastry table waited for me, fully stocked with a fresh assortment—and Sherlock stood farther down the buffet line, decisively dropping a slab of French toast onto his plate.

  He didn’t look any worse for wear after our entertainment-turned-awkwardness last night. Well, perhaps a little. He held his shoulders a tad stiffly as he turned toward the tables, and I caught a nick from shaving on his jaw just beneath his ear. He’d never had anything but a steady hand with his razor before, from what I’d seen.

  John hadn’t arrived yet, or Garret either. That might be another sign in itself. Sherlock would know his roommate’s usual morning habits. Was this the detective’s usual breakfast time and he’d only delayed before for John’s sake, or had his sleep been disturbed like mine?

  I headed over to join him at the table he picked, keeping my expression blasé as I watched him. He gave me a mild smile and a nod as if it were a perfectly normal morning. Well, John had said Sherlock would simply erase the uncomfortable moment from his version of history.

  “I see your tastes remain the same,” he said, raising his eyebrows at my plate.

  I might have gone slightly overboard with conveyances of sugar glaze. I considered my plate as I sat down. “I realize now my eyes may have been bigger than my stomach.”

  “I suppose the conference organizers would prefer we took too much rather than go the slightest bit unsatisfied. Have you had trouble this morning?”

  I was starting to feel exhausted from how much emotion I’d had to squash down in the last half hour. Damn him and his perceptive eyes. I could already guess what he’d tell me if I asked how he knew—I’d normally have brushed my hair and dressed with more care before coming down for breakfast. He could tell I’d left the room in a hurry, driven out of my usual habits.

  No point in denying it. I’d just have to give him an excuse he’d believe. He certainly wouldn’t have been able to wrap his head around the truth. Let’s see if I couldn’t spin this slip in my favor.

  “Not really trouble,” I said. “I got woken up by a call from the front desk that a package had been delivered for me, and with everything that’s been buzzing in my head and being half asleep, I thought it might be something to do with the case and rushed right down.”

  I shook my head at myself and tugged at the sleeve of my sweater. “It was just this—my mom sent one of my old sweaters express because I mentioned how chilly it was here. Sweet, but I’d rather have a bunch of crime scene photos.”

  “A sentiment I can respect,” Sherlock said. His gaze lingered on my face, and I’d have been surprised if he couldn’t read signs there that I hadn’t slept well even before the supposed phone call, but he didn’t say anything about that. Because mentioning sleep, I guessed, would bring us too close to the other nighttime activities we’d been engaged in.

  “Once I was down here, I figured I might as well eat.” I tugged my hands inside the woolen sleeves as I hugged myself. “I’d just like the whole thing with Richter to be over. Have you seen Garrett—or John? We have so much more planning to do.”

  Sherlock held himself with admirable composure, but his eyes twitched at John’s name. “I’d imagine they’re still in bed,” he said, his voice impassive. “I prefer to rise early, myself.”

  He gripped his fork and knife and sawed off a piece of French toast with a fair bit more force than it really required. Oh, yes, he was working very hard at willing last night away.

  I didn’t have much of a conscience left, if I’d ever had one. The upbringing I’d had wasn’t structured to teach anything like empathy. Still, my stomach prickled with a faint sensation that might have been guilt. I appreciated Sherlock’s unwavering intellect, and it appeared I’d shaken it. At the very least, that effect hadn’t been my intention.

  But it was what I had, so I might as well use it. Feeling unsettled, a man like him would commit twice as fast with twice as much determination to any task that would allow him to train all his focus on something concrete and separate from his emotions.

  He wanted distractions. I’d point him toward one that would benefit me too.

  “It seems like the most important factor we haven’t really touched on is the motion sensors,” I said, keeping my voice low in awareness of the other conference attendees breakfasting around us. “I’ve considered every angle, keeping in mind the elements we’ve already worked out and the layout of the place, and I can’t see any way we could contrive to meddle with them before the security team turns them on at closing time.”

  “We’ll have to let them go on and then interrupt their power supply before blocking them,” Sherlock agreed.

  “We can’t turn them off directly from inside the gallery, right? You said you’d determined they’re controlled from the security company’s external site. I suppose we could cut off all the power to the building to give us time… but I have to think the police surveillance would immediately become suspicious. Can even you figure a way around that problem?”

  Sherlock’s posture straightened at the subtle dig at his ego. “There will be a way,” he said. “I’ll need to refresh my memory of the electrical layout around the gallery. Talk to me again later today and see if I don’t have an answer for you.”

  He smiled, his pale blue eyes bright with the prospect of a challenge and his demeanor instantly more relaxed. I’d done him some good too.

  If we pulled off this heist, it’d save Bash from the shrouded one as much as it would me. As soon as I could slip clear of Bog, it wouldn’t know where to look for Bash either.

  Invigorated by the work ahead, Sherlock polished off the rest of his breakfast in the time it took me to chew through one chocolate-filled croissant. The moment he’d left the dining room, I pulled out the phone I used for Bash.

  He picked up after one ring, sounding ready for action. “What’s the word, Majesty?”

  The playful nickname made my lips twist. He had no idea how great a threat now hung over his head as well as mine. Not just one life but two might hang on this scheme’s success—and on it succeeding soon.

  I could cut him loose, couldn’t I? Tell him I didn’t need his services right now after all, transfer him the funds for a lovely, distant vacation, and order him to leave. Remove him from Bog’s line of sight.

  Only, if I was honest with myself, I wasn’t entirely sure Bash would leave. He’d find the abrupt change odd—he’d suspect something else was wrong. Every instinct told me that he’d stick around surreptitiously, checking up on me.

  The shrouded one would still find him. And taking on this challenge without him, I’d be so much more likely to fail, screwing over us both.

  No, the only way through that I could tolerate was forward.

  “Slight change in plan,” I said. “The wiring gambit we talked about? I’ll need you in place within the hour.”

/>   Chapter Twenty

  John

  Driving made it easy to avoid uncomfortable subjects. I could completely occupy myself with navigating traffic while Sherlock flipped through textbooks about electrical systems on his phone. If we weren’t talking about anything at all, of course we weren’t talking about the fact that I’d been about ten seconds shy of slipping him tongue last night, even if at moments it felt as if I was thinking about it so loudly he should have been able to hear every word.

  It probably would have been easier if Sherlock had gone off on this quest alone or with Garrett—or, hell, the Scarlet Pimpernel, as long as it wasn’t me—but then he would have been admitting failure. Admitting that our kiss last night had mattered, somehow or other. The only way he knew how to make everything fine was to act as if everything were fine and assume all the things would sort themselves out in accordance with his will.

  To be fair, I’d seen that strategy work several times in the past. He’d just never been erasing something that had happened with me.

  The biggest trouble was, I was pretty sure the kiss did matter, at least to me. But I had the feeling trying to discuss that possibility with him might cause a meltdown of reality that wouldn’t end well for either of us. Which was probably why I’d buried all hint of my apparent desire under several layers of plausible deniability until Jemma had yanked it blazing to the surface a little more than twelve hours ago.

  If only those emotions had come with a manual on what the hell to do with them now that I’d admitted they existed.

  “Park behind the blue sedan,” Sherlock said, still so absorbed in his phone I didn’t know how he’d managed to identify the open spot. “We’ll walk the rest of the way.”

  I pulled in where he’d requested and checked my false beard. We hadn’t gone for heavy disguises, just enough that the police wouldn’t mark us as Holmes and Watson from a distance and that any internal security who noticed us passing by wouldn’t connect us to recent visitors, one particularly clumsy.

  Sherlock borrowed my walking stick and started tapping it ahead of him as though he were blind. My hand itched for the familiar surface as I ambled along beside him.

  I could steady out my gait completely if I walked slowly enough, and the effort only provoked a slight prickling in my hip, but the walking stick had become about more than just balance. It was a weapon and sometimes a disguise in itself. No one expected much threat from a man who couldn’t even walk without help.

  While I was this close to him, Sherlock’s pale eyes showed through the dim panes of his sunglasses. He used those to hide the darting of his gaze up the utility poles we passed and along the thick black wires that ran between them. Now and then, he murmured verbal notations into his phone.

  I tugged my own gaze away from the furtive movements of his lips. I definitely shouldn’t be looking at them.

  “We’ll circle the place,” he said as we came up on the corner past the gallery. “If there’s a trick we can employ, we’re not likely to manage it in full view of the police. We just need to be sure we take into account the proper connections. Ah, there’s the line directly into the building.”

  The cable ran by above our heads, just a few feet around the corner. “No chance we’re messing with that unnoticed,” I remarked.

  “Indeed.”

  We rambled past the back of the gallery along the alley and then looped around to take in the adjacent road. Sherlock hummed to himself thoughtfully but didn’t bother to mention any of his thoughts to me.

  He stopped at the far end of the road, gazing up at the utility pole next to him and then frowning at the sidewalk.

  “John,” he said abruptly. “As a doctor, you’d have a reasonably accurate idea of the chances of pregnancy from a single unprotected encounter?”

  Of all the personal questions he could have asked me, that was what he was going with? It wasn’t a surprise that he’d deduced that something had happened between Jemma and me, but I’d have expected him to give me some credit for common sense. Did he have a reason for trying to imply I was careless, or was he just being irritatingly obtuse? If he’d made some observation that had worried him, he’d obviously been mistaken.

  “Approximately zero, considering it was actually protected twice over,” I said tersely. “We used a condom, and she has an IUD. I won’t be procreating any time soon.”

  Sherlock’s frown faded. “She told you about the IUD?”

  Of all the ridiculous— He didn’t know when to stop dogging a subject, did he?

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “No. There are simply ways of noticing when one is intimate with a partner in particular ways. You’d think, considering that I am a doctor, and you…”

  My agitation dwindled at the clear relief that washed over his expression. The phrasing of the questions and certain moments last night clicked together in my head.

  God help me, was he asking for himself?

  Watching the way Jemma had touched him last night, I’d assumed she’d been riffing off her general experience of what men responded to. It could actually had been the specific experience of having touched him before. It just hadn’t occurred to me—for fuck’s sake, the man sneered at the faintest whiff of romance or passions of the heart. He treated his body like a machine built for the sole purpose of carrying his brain around. When had that happened? How had that happened?

  The idea that Sherlock might have had sex with Jemma was actually more boggling in itself than the possibility that he’d forgotten to take precautions. He could be rather… oblivious when it came to topics that didn’t generally affect him. I’d once commented to him about whether we might ever see another man travel to the moon, and he’d expressed surprise at hearing any had gone there before.

  It’d be pretty difficult to develop certain practical habits if you weren’t practicing the act that went with them.

  The image flashed through my mind of Jemma pressed up against Sherlock’s tall frame, her lips on his, the sugared sweetness of her mouth and the bitter tartness his had held mingling together—and just like that, I was half hard.

  Conveniently, Sherlock appeared to be just as thrown by the conversation as I’d been. He switched subjects at top speed with a jerk of the walking stick.

  “It was rather strange, that vision we all had at the park yesterday, wasn’t it?”

  I blinked at him, needing a second to catch up. “The figure that seemed to appear over Jemma? Yes, I’d say so. I’ve never seen an effect of the light like that before.”

  “Two days before that, quite a few people in the dining room noticed other odd light effects,” he said. “Which also appeared near her. And Garrett had an odd reaction Saturday morning while we were talking with her—he looked startled and said he’d thought he’d seen something in the doorway, ‘a trick of the light’.”

  “Where are you going with this?” I asked. “Do you think she created those effects somehow?” I guessed it would be possible with a small but powerful projector that Jemma could have carried on her without us seeing it, but… “Why on Earth would she do that?”

  “I don’t know.” Sherlock flexed his hand on the head of the walking stick as his gaze strayed into the distance. “In fact, every indication I’ve seen from her behavior would lead me to conclude that she wasn’t at all pleased by the fact that they occurred. I started thinking about the repeated occurrences while I was doing my electrical research, and recalling each event, she’s always been in quite a hurry to dismiss the strangeness and move on to other subjects.”

  Thinking back, I had to agree. “And it wouldn’t make much sense for her to produce an effect she didn’t want anyone to see.”

  “Precisely. Yet I can’t shake the feeling that there’s some connection between her and them.” He paused. “I’d never seen light behave as it did in the dining room the other day either. Had you?”

  I shook my head. “There was something unnerving about it, in a way I can’t put into words. I’d rem
ember if I’d experienced that before.”

  “Agreed. It seems too great a coincidence for us to have witnessed two such unique events—perhaps three, in Garrett’s case—all within a week of meeting her and always in her presence. But, as you said, what could be the purpose? And why would she want to divert our attention from the very place she’d drawn it to?”

  “Could it be someone else targeting her?” I said. “A strange intimidation tactic?”

  He rubbed his mouth. “I considered that. It might have been the case with the instances in the hotel. But for an impression so precise and bright to appear directly over her the way it did in the park—the source would have to be quite close. We were in the middle of the broad courtyard around the fountain. I haven’t been able to conceive of how it could have been done from farther afield.”

  “It must have been generated somehow or other,” I said. “Unless you’re going to tell me you think she’s being haunted by a literal ghost, in which case I’ll have to ask who you are and what you’ve done with my good friend Sherlock.”

  Sherlock’s grim expression relaxed a little with a dry chuckle. “No, I’m not quite that far gone yet. I simply feel there’s more to this matter than I can pin down, and that is not an ideal position to be in when we’re planning a move this bold.”

  My mind leapt to last night, to Jemma’s pained expression as she’d apologized for the dared kiss and the gentle humor with which she’d encouraged me to acknowledge my desire. She’d deciphered more about me than I’d realized about myself in the space of a week. Had she gotten to know all three of us that well that quickly? I hadn’t seen any hint of maliciousness in her interest. If anything, she’d tried to rein us in from our riskier ideas in pursuing her case.

  “Whatever’s going on, I’d have trouble believing she wants to hurt us,” I said.

  “But harm can come as a secondary consequence as easily as the main goal.” Sherlock tapped the walking stick against the sidewalk. “I’ll speak with her and see what I can draw out before we see this plan through. We need to be sure of exactly what’s at stake.”