by Alexa Egan
“I certainly hope so or I’ll have to postpone our orgy,” Bianca snapped.
He sniffed his disdain even as he accepted her coins, but she’d already dismissed him and his small-minded contempt. Leaving his departure to Molly, she ascended the stairs to the guest chamber and tapped once before entering.
Molly had yet to clear away the remnants of the doctor’s visit. A shallow basin of bloody water still sat on the floor by the bed, rags in a heap beside it. On the table, a half-empty brandy decanter and a glass stood amid a clutter of medicines.
She’d expected Captain Flannery to be asleep or, at least, in bed. Instead, he clutched the bedpost, wearing nothing but his bloodstained breeches and a sickly gray pallor. Spots of blood seeped through the layers of bandage wound tight across his ribs while sweat glistened on his powerful chest and shoulders and his eyes swam with pain.
A few inches in any direction. A few seconds slower in reaction time.
Bianca swallowed around the fear rising in her throat. “You claimed it was just a scratch. Look at you: barely able to stand.”
“I can stand.” He straightened. Immediately the color drained from his face, his mouth taut in a grimace. He slumped, letting out his held breath, hand resting against his side. “It’s standing straight I have a problem with.”
What was it about men and their stubborn need to appear invincible? They’d rather die than accept that they might be in pain or ill or, worse than worse, need a woman’s assistance.
“How foolish can you be? That was no scratch to be fixed with sticking-plaster and basilicum powder. Ah, but I forgot: you’re a soldier, impervious to pain.”
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘impervious.’ ” The ghastly pallor of sickness left his face, and he laughed. Or at least, that was what it sounded like. It came harsh and creaky. As if it had been a long time since he’d indulged. “Perhaps ‘thick-skinned’ would be more precise.”
“ ‘Thickheaded’ would be more precise.”
“Just when I think I have you figured out, Bianca Parrino, you surprise me.” He reached out, his hand enfolding her own. His clean, wintry outdoor scent so different from the pomaded and perfumed men of her acquaintance. “I expect a tongue-lashing, and instead you’re worrying over me.”
“This is a tongue-lashing, and I am not worrying.” She snatched her hand from his before he took her concern for more. “Merely stating the obvious, Captain. Denials aside, it’s clear you’re unwell.”
“Say my name.”
“Pardon?”
“Say my name, Bianca.”
“Captain Flannery, I—”
Hunching his shoulders, he gave a snort of disgust.
“Cormac Cúchulainn Flannery,” she said, enunciating each syllable with painful precision.
“Ouch. Low blow.” His gaze seemed to shimmer like foxfire as a headache thumped behind her eyes.
“Mac,” she said quietly.
A smile stole like a thief across his face. “Knew you had it in you.”
She retreated from his unnerving warmth, looking for space to breathe and time to calm the uncomfortable buzz tingling her insides.
He dropped his hand to his side with something like regret in his eyes. “I have to go, Bianca.”
“Go? You’re in no condition to walk out of here. You have to rest.”
Settling onto the edge of the bed, he fumbled with his boots, wincing as he bent to pull the first one on. “I can’t stay. There are things I must do. People I must speak with.”
“Then you’ll come back and tell me who those men were, what’s going on?”
He paused, second boot in hand, his stare seeming to pierce her to her core. “I don’t want you mixed up in this. It’s too dangerous.”
“And your leaving is going to keep me safe? What happened to the man who complained about my lack of protection? My mousy maid? This concerns me as much as anyone. While the stories linking me to Adam’s death are running rampant, I’m without a job. I don’t even want to think about what will happen if the stories grow to actual suspicions. Weren’t you the one who offered to be an ally if things got sticky?”
“I was.”
“Well, Captain, we’re up to our necks in sticky, wouldn’t you agree?”
He plowed a hand through his hair, exhaustion dogging his posture, sapping his words of their strength. “How is my spending the night here with you alone going to do anything but throw raw meat to the gossips?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they’ll be so distracted by my shameless behavior in taking a new bedmate, they’ll stop dwelling on Adam’s murder.”
“More likely, they’ll decide we’re both guilty of conspiring to rid you of an unwanted lover. Lord Braemer thought as much, and with less cause than my sleeping in your bed.”
“You’ll be sleeping in my guest room.”
“Semantics.”
Mac had a definite point about the potential for disaster, but he spoiled it by rising from bed, stoop-shouldered and spine bowed as if it pained him to straighten. A stiff wind would blow the man over, and he wanted to charge back into the fray? He’d not stand a chance if those men returned. And she’d go from one very reluctant ally to no defender at all.
“Most red-blooded males in your shoes would be panting at the chance to spend a night with me.” Explaining away her deception as necessary and for his own good, she furtively moved to shield the table with her body, unstoppering a bottle of laudanum to slosh an enormous dose into a glass of brandy.
“I’m not like most men.”
Turning back with a smile, she held out the glass. “Oh, so you don’t want to spend the night with me?” she teased, in a bid to distract him from her purpose.
“Is that a trick question?”
She offered him a practiced look of coy seduction. “Just a question.”
He accepted the drink, tossing it back in one swallow. “Good-bye, Bianca.”
She smiled in triumph. “Good night, Mac.”
* * *
“If you outstay the time, upon mine honour, And in the greatness of my word, you die.”
“O my poor Rosalind, whither wilt thou go? . . .”
“Alas, what danger will it be to us, Maids as we are, to travel forth so far! Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold . . . Now go we in content, To liberty, and not to banishment.”
Tonight Shakespeare’s words carried more of truth than Bianca would have liked. A woman fleeing for her life in the face of dangerous men. At least poor Rosalind had a sympathetic Celia as companion. Bianca’s narrow escape had been in company with a grim-faced soldier whose roughened edges, beneath his pristine uniform, threw her into a tongue-tied frazzle. Something she wasn’t used to—not in recent years.
She played the game, but it never touched her personally. She’d become an actress on and off the stage.
But not with Mac.
With every encounter, he managed to sneak beneath her props and costumes to the woman she was—or, rather, the woman she might have been had her life taken a different course.
And that was a complication she didn’t need.
A jab to the ribs by the woman playing Celia refocused Bianca on the stage, the audience, the theater—a world that meant security and encouragement and admiration. A world where playing a role was all they ever asked of her, and the fantasy was everything. But all that might be lost now.
She took what might be her final bows to a drumming rain of applause and cheers, though scattered among the adoration were hints of darker emotions. A few hisses and catcalls from the lower benches. A spearing of hard-eyed disapproval from the upper boxes that chilled her bones like a cold wind. And just as the curtain closed, a half-eaten apple landed on the stage at her feet.
Was Mr. Harris right? Were her admirers so fickle that just the hint of a lurid story was enough to make them turn on her?
As she made her way backstage, fear and doubt and a lingering sour taste of panic left by this afternoon’s
attack pressed once more against a heart already weighted with grief. Not even her dresser’s usual chatter was enough to soothe Bianca’s nerves as she changed out of costume and wiped clean her face for the last time until who knew when. Even as she closed the lid on her cosmetics box, slid the last bit of costume jewelry away in a drawer, and tidied away the ribbons and combs and pins scattered across the top of her dressing table, the knowledge that this could be her last performance wasn’t enough to erase the waxy gray of Mac’s face. Instead, the memory of his fingers, sticky and red with blood, burned hot against the backs of her eyelids, and the vision of his ruthless, feral excitement as he fought still squirmed the pit of her stomach.
Normally she’d push aside the horrid events of the day with seven covers at table and non-stop champagne. Inoculate herself against the deafening quiet of the night with laughter and sparkle and conversation. Those ploys had always worked when memories of Lawrence’s rage-filled violence surfaced and nightmares of the pain and humiliation suffered under his domination clustered close within the shadows.
But not tonight. Not when the rumors flew like barbs and she was uncertain of her welcome. Not when the only man who seemed to believe in her innocence lay recovering from a bullet wound in her house. Captain Mac Flannery had burst into her life like a rabbit from a conjurer’s hat, but what role would he take on now that he’d arrived?
Ally? Maybe.
Enigma? Definitely.
* * *
Mac woke to darkness leavened only by the smoldering of a low-banked fire. For a moment, he had no idea where he was or what had happened. Then memories flooded back, and he clawed himself free of the entangling covers, paws skidding on the polished wood floor. Tail lashing the air like a flag.
He’d fucking shifted!
Mac’s heart pounded. His skin going hot, then cold, then hot all over again. The blasted interfering woman must have slipped him a triple dose of laudanum when he wasn’t looking. Clamping down on the terror igniting his blood, he listened for telltale screams or shouts or the pounding of boots up the stairs. Nothing. The house slept. The neighborhood remained silent. None had seen. None knew. Yet.
He stalked the room as he sought a way out of the trap closing around him. The mantel clock read three. If none in the household had looked in on him yet, it was doubtful whether they’d check on him now. Just a few more hours until dawn, and he’d be out of danger. One hundred and eighty minutes. Ten thousand eight hundred seconds.
He started counting. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .
A stirring of the air. A shush of a slipper against carpet. The orange spice of familiar perfume.
Bianca.
Events spun from bad to worse to infinitely horrible in the space of seconds. Drawing back into the darkest corner of the room, he curled into the shadows, his unblinking stare focused on the door, claws nervously extending and retracting, breath stilled in his chest.
The door opened, the light from her candle like a flickering spear across the floor, pointing to his hiding place. Her hair hung like a rippling silver wave on either side of her face, her robe loose to reveal the translucent linen of her nightgown.
She hovered within the doorway for what seemed an eternity. Mac’s entire body crackled with unbearable tension. Every ache and pain was magnified to an agony. Then, as silently as she’d come, she pulled the door closed, leaving him once more alone in the dark with naught but bitter regrets and lonely hours for company.
Five . . . six . . . seven . . . eight . . .
* * *
Alonzo was there to hand Renata out of the carriage.
Stepping onto the flagway, she placed her gloved hand in his, pulling her shawl close around her shoulders against the pervasive dampness in the air. The flambeaux placed on either side of the entryway flickered low, and already a smear of gray across the sky signaled the coming dawn, but Renata’s fatigue lifted as she shook off the hours spent flitting between Society entertainments on Froissart’s arm.
“I have news,” Alonzo said quietly.
A footman hovering over him with an umbrella, Froissart pulled his bulk free of the carriage, grumbling over the pains in his head, his heavy losses at cards, the poor state of the London streets, and the foul English weather.
“Come inside and have your man fix you a cup of milk with a dose of laudanum to help you sleep,” Renata instructed over her shoulder to her husband before hissing under her breath, “Where have you been, Alonzo? It’s been days without word.”
Froissart spotted Alonzo, his face sharpening like a ferret’s. “What’s your cousin doing here? I don’t like him skulking around.”
Renata offered her husband a pouty frown, sliding close against him, reaching with just the lightest of mental touches to guide his mind where she wanted it. “He’s not my cousin, ma puce, but he is the only family I have left. The only connection to my lost home. You wouldn’t send him away.”
“Hmph,” he snorted. “Let him stay if he amuses you. Surprised he’s here in the first place. Did that opera dancer in Soho toss him out on his ear? An expensive piece, that one.”
“I neither know nor care about his living arrangements or his . . . sexual appetites.”
“No? Maybe that was Monsieur Gerrard who told me. I can’t remember. Too much to drink, and my head hurts,” he complained, Alonzo already dismissed from his thoughts.
Successful in turning Froissart’s attentions aside, Renata eased free of his mind as they climbed the steps to the door, a servant waiting to swing it open before them. Another to take her wrap and muff. A third to hurry forward and assist Émile.
“Stop your badgering,” Froissart shouted. “Renata! Tell these fools to stop gabbling about me like a pack of old women.”
Froissart’s valet hurried in from the kitchen with a glass upon a tray, handing it over with a small bow. Froissart, loosening his cravat, tossed back the spiked milk with a heavy sigh and a belch.
In the confusion, she drew near enough to Alonzo to whisper, “Come to me in one hour.”
“I’m tired, and my head aches. Help me upstairs,” Froissart whined. “No, not you”—he waved his valet away with a halfhearted swing of his meaty hand—“I want my wife to assist me. Renata!”
She pulled away from Alonzo, hatred barely concealed beneath a silky smile. “Coming, husband.”
Excitement tremored along her limbs, her mind alive with possibilities and plans. The diversion helped as Froissart growled and bullied his way into her bedchamber, his manner coarse, his prick hard. Fortunately, the brief encounter left him spent and snoring even without the laudanum. By the time Alonzo knocked quietly at her dressing room door, she’d changed into a quilted robe and brushed out her hair while her husband slept off his aching head and sour stomach in the room beyond.
Alonzo answered her summons, pausing only briefly to adjust to the fragmented candlelight and his many-reflected shape within the mirrored walls. “The pig sleeps?”
“Like the dead.” She placed her brush upon the table. “I hope you’ve more to show for the last few days than a case of the pox caught from that French opera dancer. If it’s the one I’m thinking of, she’s serviced every man in the embassy, including Émile. They call her the nun, she spends so much time on her knees.”
His gaze grew shuttered, almost pained, and she smiled to herself. Women must use what weapons came to hand.
He drew farther into the room, taking up position in the shadows by the fire, light dancing over his devilish features. “One of the men from the cemetery has been seen in Madame Parrino’s company and again at Mr. Kinloch’s home. It’s no coincidence. He’s one of those who murdered the chevalier. I’m sure of it.”
The words slid as painfully into her heart as they had the first time she’d heard the news. She’d vowed then and there: these creatures would suffer. She would make them bleed, listen to their pleas for mercy, watch their eyes slowly glaze over in death, and enjoy it. It was justice. “And where
is he now?”
Alonzo clenched and unclenched the hand at his side. “He eluded me.”
“You or those worthless gin-soaked thugs you paid to trail the Parrino woman? I told you not to trust in these English sons of dogs.”
Alonzo dismissed her crudity and her complaints with a jerk of his head. “It does not matter. What’s done is done, but come the new moon, he’ll be yours. Unable to shift. Vulnerable, just like the last one. It will be easy to capture him then.”
“No!” She spun around, her eyes darting toward the closed door behind which her husband snored in her bed, her bile rising with the memory of his hands upon her body, the swift, violent pounding as he took her. “I will not wait.” She forced herself to relax, rising in a slow, graceful movement to caress Alonzo’s cheek. “Once these Imnada demons are dead at my feet, I can lay my father to rest. I can move on. We can move on.” Her gaze flicked once more to the door. “Together.”
“What do you suggest?” he asked.
She returned to her seat, opening the collar of her robe to reveal an elaborate necklace of interlacing silver strands studded with rubies. A web of spun moonlight upon her pale skin, the stones like drops of blood. “Assist me with my necklace.”
He stepped behind her, close enough that his breath tingled against her neck. His desire lighting the deep ocean blue of his gaze. Her own passion flared, and she leaned her head back for a moment against him, closing her eyes as his hand took up the silver necklace, his fingers on her skin sending shivers down her spine to pool wet and hot between her legs.
Their eyes met in the glass as he lowered the necklace into her open palm, understanding passing with a physical shock between them. With a smile cold as a blade, she closed her fingers around the silver links as if they might burn her, but only coolness met her fingers. “Silver. Who knew such a beautiful weapon could bring down such mighty beasts?”
6
“Is our guest awake yet, Molly?” Bianca asked, eyeing the laden tray the young woman juggled as she tapped the bedroom door behind her closed with her foot. “Don’t tell me he’s sulking. That laudanum was for his own good.”
