Catspell

by Colleen Shannon

  This time she didn’t struggle to pull away. A little smile tremored on her lips. “Are you implying I’m one of them?”

  “I’m implying nothing. I am stating you, and apparently Miss Fein, are both women of strength and character.” He dipped his head so low his breath tickled her ear. “Your heritage is in your face, Arielle, but it’s also in your bones, your heart, and your mind. Be proud, my young lioness. Be bold, and taste of life with me.” His words ended against her lips.

  Arielle took a last shaky breath, and that was a mistake, for she inhaled the heady taste of him. A bit of cigar smoke, a bit of brandy, a few peppermints--and all male. None of that exotic scent Luke favored made her light headed, but the weakness in her knees was so pronounced, she felt it even sitting down.

  His lips moved gently and sweetly on hers, and his hold was so light that she could have pulled away at any moment.

  She stayed still, feeling the quickening pace of his heartbeat against her breast bone, and the urgent answer of her own. That tingling began again in the vee of her legs, where no man had seen or touched. But when his kiss deepened, his mouth slanting sideways and opening as if he were famished for the taste of her too, the urge to pull his hand there to that shocking place, to raise her skirts so she could feel the forbidden luxury of skin against skin, grew to an ache.

  He didn’t taste of Egyptian spices like cloves and nutmeg, but he didn’t need to.

  He tasted of man. Man who honored her, respected her, and wanted her, which accounted for his over protectiveness. And everything feminine in her, including the strange powers that had been growing with every erotic dream, responded. It felt so right to be in his arms like this, as if here she belonged, and here she was meant to stay.

  Sweet murmurings pleased her ears as his touch pleased her back, soothing her with light strokes, and the tip of his tongue teased her lips from corner to indented center to opposite corner, and back. “Thou art honey to my lips.” And then he was speaking in that strange language, but the timbre of his voice told of the passion he uttered in the music of his mother’s tongue.

  Her hands cupped the back of his head, and his hat, already askew as he’d tilted his head, fell to the floor. His hair was so thick and shiny, but somehow not soft to the touch, more wiry. He reminded her so of those pictures of magnificent male lions, their manes black and bushy as their alert golden eyes watched over their pride. The image, so vivid against her closed eyes while he kissed her, aroused her further. She began kissing him back, using her own tongue and hands to good effect, or at least it seemed so based on his husky growls of pleasure.

  Was this what she’d been avoiding in her virginal bed, this satisfying exchange of breaths, and touches, and tastes? Was this what her father shielded her from? What nonsense. It was she who unbuttoned Seth’s jacket to pull urgently at his shirt so she could touch his bare, strong back, she who clasped his neck to pull him down atop her on the seat.

  She felt him hesitate, and pull slightly away.

  “Not here, Arielle. Not like this. You are too important to me.”

  “More.” She said it like a child, but the look in her eyes was all woman, with the blood of her ancestors thrilling through her veins and flaring in her nostrils. Her eyes, though she did not know it, slitted like a cat’s, and his own nostrils flared as if he scented her arousal.

  With a guttural growl that sounded torn from him, he pressed her back into the seat and lowered himself upon her. The panel above their heads shoved open wider and an inquisitive eye looked down. The panel was shoved open to its fullest extent as the dark, threatening clouds above broke in a torrent of rain.

  Arielle was lost to her surroundings, lost even to herself. She knew only this man, this being that so reminded her of the dark lion man of her dreams. His lips were surely human, yet he seemed, as he murmured strange love words, a being of another world where immortality was more than a legend, where good was more than a word, and evil only a bad dream.

  The crack of dawn came while he kissed her, and somehow that felt appropriate, too. Light split the darkened sky and the carriage shook. Her eyes fluttered open, and she saw a lightning fork above their heads just as cold moisture began to drip down upon them.

  Seth felt it too, pulling away enough to turn and look up. The cold splats clearing their sexual haze, they both saw the open panel at the same time. They scrambled back to their former positions and straightened their clothes, unable to exchange glances in the aftermath of passion.

  The coachman’s voice came above the storm. “It’s right disagreeable out here. Would ye haves me stop or go on? We almost be home.”

  “Go on,” Seth shouted back. “But close that blasted panel. We’re getting wet.”

  “Can’t. It’s stuck.” But the whip lashed and the carriage sped up. They managed to dodge the worst of the leak, and the boom of thunder precluded conversation until they finally drew up under the portico before the estate.

  Arielle had her bonnet primly tied and her dress, which had opened at her bosom, demurely buttoned before she could regain her composure enough to speak. “Thank you for accompanying me.”

  “It was my pleasure.” He lifted her hand and kissed it. “My honor.”

  Arielle stared down at his dark, wiry hair, feeling the strength and warmth of it against her fingertips like a tangible memory, wondering what she had begun.

  His kiss had been even more enticing than Luke’s. She felt his wish to give her pleasure, not just seduce her into his arms. But on a cool level, on the intellectual level that was a legacy of her father, she also knew that she did not trust either man.

  They were using her. For what, she did not know. But she must find out. And somehow, she sensed her mother’s effects were the key to the mystery. She had to find them…

  And being alone with Seth proved how vulnerable she was to him. She had only one choice–she’d refuse to see him any more until she was certain what was going on.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Seth had just taken his leave and Arielle was trudging up to her room when the earl came into the hall from his study, his finger between the pages of a book. “Arielle my dear. And how was our sweet Miss Fein?”

  Arielle froze on the stairs, her back to him. “Very poorly.” She climbed another step.

  The earl frowned, staring up at his daughter. “And? Did something untoward happen?” He looked around. “Where is Seth?”

  Ethan came into the foyer from the back of the house, shaking raindrops from his blond head. Shelly also entered from a side salon. They both paused, sensing the undercurrent of emotions between father and daughter as Arielle slowly turned.

  She removed her bonnet. Perhaps it was the gloom outside, perhaps it was exhaustion, but this Arielle seemed very different to the naive young girl who limped and expected her father to protect her. This Arielle stood soberly on the doorstep of womanhood, cooly appraising her options. She could perhaps still be guided, but she could not be coerced.

  “Your watch dog,” she said cooly. “Has departed. Pray do not ask him to chaperone me again without my blessing.”

  “Why? What did he do?”

  Wondering the same thing, Shelly looked at Ethan, but he was watching the confrontation.

  “Nothing but boss me about, as if he had the right. Have you given him the right, Father?”

  The poor earl, Shelly noted, looked as if he’d been set adrift on stormy seas without a compass or maps. “No, no, dash it, of course not, at least not in any meaningful way, that is--”

  “Good. From now on, I make my own decisions. And I have decided I do not wish to see him again.” Arielle continued on her journey upstairs.

  The book whammed against a hall table as her father climbed up after her to catch her arm. “What in blue blazes has your knickers in a twist?”

  It was a measure of his frustration that he would speak to his daughter so coarsely, Shelly realized. She also realized, abruptly, that Arielle had more of her father
in her than either of them knew.

  Arielle turned on him, her wan face suddenly filled with glorious color. “You promised me you left her a good pension. You promised me she was well. What other promises have you broken to me, and my mother before me? Is that why she really killed herself?”

  He stumbled back, hooking his heel on a step, almost falling.

  Ethan lunged forward but the earl waved him back, catching himself on the balustrade. He looked literally pained as he stayed half bent over, as if his only child had just dealt him a low blow. “So, this is what you really think of the father who has spoiled you from the moment you were born. Perhaps too much.”

  “Perhaps you are right. If you wish, I shall move out into a guest house on the grounds. But first, I want you to bring me the box of things that my mother left for me.” And she continued her martial march upstairs, no limp whatever in her gait, unaware or uncaring of the horrified look on her father’s face.

  Shelly noted Arielle’s feet scarcely made a sound on the steps, and this fact alarmed her more than anything else, including the girl’s rancor.

  The transformation was becoming more rapid. Arielle was reflecting not only the independence, curiosity and fastidiousness of a cat, but also a ruthless propensity not to care for the feelings of others.

  When her bedroom door closed behind her–quietly, indicating a measure of her new control--the earl’s rigid posture collapsed. He looked, for once, his age as he grasped the railing for support and trudged back down to the foyer. Ethan moved to help him and was brushed aside for his pains.

  “If you want to help me, assist Miss Holmes in solving these murders,” Rupert snapped. “I must know if Luke Simball is the killer. I can lay his pernicious influence on the poisoning of my daughter’s mind against me, I make no doubt. We must have proof to take to the authorities and convince my daughter she is attracted to the wrong man.” The earl moved toward the front door, but on the way he pointed at the book he’d left face down on the hall table.

  “Look at that book,” he said tiredly. “It was one of my wife’s favorites. I had the servants bring the last trunk of her belongings in from a hidden vault in the crypt, locked these many years since her death. Inside I found one of her outlandish costumes, a diary, and several books, the most ragged one of which is this one. Now that I recollect, her strange dreams and night wanderings began after she became obsessed with reading it daily. Review it if you please, the both of you, and see if you can find a clue to what is happening to Arielle. Please just no matter what, do not let her see the contents of that box. It is deposited with my housekeeper in the locked larder.”

  Somehow even the sound of his footsteps reminded Shelly of an old, old man as he went out the door. Just as the door closed on him, he said, “I’ll be at my club for some peace and quiet. No women allowed. Thank God.”

  When he was gone, they both scrambled, but Shelly picked up the tome ahead of Ethan and recited the title, “Ancient Egyptian Rites and Beliefs of the Afterworld: with excerpts from the Book of the Dead.” She stuck it in her pocket, ignoring Ethan’s glare, and walked up the stairs toward her rooms.

  “I say, you have no right to abscond with the evidence. I’m assisting with this case and Rupert gave me leave to--”

  Shelly rounded on him. “Indeed, you are assisting. Perhaps that’s why we’re getting nowhere.”

  A wounded look flashed in those green eyes before they went opaque. “Tell me Miss Holmes. Is it me you fear or yourself?”

  Shelly continued on upstairs, not dignifying his remark with a response. She forced herself to walk regally, head high, so he’d have no indication whatever that inside she was roiling with confused, ambivalent emotions. Half of her wanted, needed not only to trust him but to depend on him; the other half warned her that, like everyone else she’d met since arriving in this benighted household, Ethan Perot was not what he seemed. He might have his own agenda, but to the end of Christendom Shelly Holmes would not be on it.

  And neither, while she had breath to fight, would Arielle be…

  Inside her room behind a locked door, her windows barred again, oblivious to the battle brewing on her behalf, Arielle sat in near darkness, her eyes glowing. The visit with her old nanny had not only taxed her emotionally, it had opened her eyes to larger realities. She had heard the stories of women, even good women, in straitened circumstances forced into work houses or even on the streets, to do what those poor women in Whitefriars were dressed to do.

  The fact was, all her life Arielle had depended upon the largess of a man, as her mother had before her. Her mother had received a small inheritance from her father, but the title and estates had gone through primogeniture, and Isis’s Egyptian mother had been too scandalous to be accepted by the rigid social structure of the ton. She’d taken her daughter back to Egypt for a time, but returned when Isis was dewy beautiful and blooming into maturity, to try to find her a good husband who would not insist she wear robes or walk two steps behind. It was on that trip that Isis had met the Earl of Darby at a country party.

  From the little she could discover, it also seemed to Arielle that the match between her parents began with love and ended with hatred. Why? Had her mother also felt this nascent anger and frustration at being dependent on a man for the roof over her head and the food in her mouth?

  Arielle went to the daguerreotype and picked it up, staring down at the vibrant face so like her own. “Mother, show me what to do,” she whispered. Perhaps it was her imagination, but she thought she saw a wistful smile. But no answer came. Holding the picture to her bosom, she closed her eyes and tried again to walk in her mother’s golden slippers.

  Inchoate images flashed through her head, of strange vessels with pointy bows and prows and enormous sails plying crowded, muddy waters lined with palm trees. She saw a black haired little girl running and laughing under the most brilliant, burnished sun she’d ever imagined, and a huge white stone house with massive columns looming above the Nile on a steep hill.

  But when she waited, breath held, for that little girl to turn to face her, she disappeared into the bowels of a mountainside. Darkness filled the world. Then a huge stone portal closed on the girl, now a shapely woman garbed in garments of gold, and royal blue, and carnelian. The woman wasn’t laughing now, but she went to her destiny with her head high. The grating finality of that closing portal seemed to Arielle to be the loneliest sound she’d ever heard.

  Was this too to be her destiny? A half life, eternally alone, neither dead nor living because she made the wrong choices as a wife and mother?

  Arielle started awake from her half sleep, half vision, shivering, to find the amulet on her leg burning and the picture of her mother lying broken on the floor. Arielle reached down and picked out the glass, anguished to see the picture scratched, as if tangible proof of broken dreams.

  And yet she also knew that she owed her mother a deeper debt than anything she owed to her father. From her mother came not only her looks, but the strength and passion to face all life had to offer and demand her portion. Cleopatra had for decades held a crumbling empire together against the might of Rome by seducing the ancient world’s two most powerful men.

  And she died of a self inflicted asp wound when her empire crumbled, her father’s practical half whispered, but Arielle chose to ignore that niggling little voice. She was convinced her mother was watching her from the afterlife, trying to guide her to a better fate than her own. At this point Arielle trusted her mother’s love more than her father’s edicts.

  Setting the picture back in its place of prominence on the mantel, Arielle vowed it would be a reminder to her of the fate of every woman who depended for her entire existence upon a man. Nor did she wish to do what most young women of gentle birth did: switch one form of dependence for the even stronger eternal bond of matrimony, tying herself to an even more arrogant man for the rest of her life.

  Seth’s face flashed in her head, stern and authoritative as he escorte
d her through the crowded streets of Whitefriars, and then came Luke’s laughing face as he told her tales of the land of her mother’s birth and shared with her, a cripple, the joy of dance. Both of them came to her in her dreams, seducing her in their own fashion, but one of them was a predator in more than dress, killing women all over London. If she could figure out who was good, who was evil, then she’d have an ally in her quest to understand her mother’s fate and the afterlife that seemed to guide her existence.

  She knew of only two ways to learn more of her mother’s strange warnings of danger–Madame Aurora. She would hire her again, if need be in the privacy of the woman’s rooms. And her mother’s things. She knew her father had no intention of willingly sharing them with her, but before she raided the attics, she’d see if her mother had more guidance.

  Arielle went to her dresser and removed the last of her monthly allowance, along with some of her grandmother’s pearl jewelry. Then, folding her emerald cloak over her arm, she went to the door.

  As she went out into the hallway, she heard one footman, just around the corner dusting by the sounds of it, complaining to another, “Fair gave me the shivers, it did, hauling that old trunk in from the crypt where his lordship sent it after she died.”

  Arielle shrank back against the wall, listening.

  “What be in it?” asked the other, obviously younger footman. “Did ye see?”

  “I had to help open it. Had some sort of heathen costume with an odd headpiece centered by a vulture and a cobra just like them seen on those etchings the Times put in the paper from that ancient tomb. But then the earl sent me off, right and tight, and that’s all I saw.”

  “Ye think Miss Arielle knows more of her mother’s things survived than he tole her?”

  “I don’t know. But I do know that if she finds out he’s been hiding this stuff from her, there will be hell to pay.” They moved off down the hall, their voices fading.

  Tears gathered hotly behind Arielle’s eyes as she listened, but she refused to shed them. Even the servant’s knew of the precious legacy her father had hidden from her. Her steps so light they scarcely made a sound on the oak treads, Arielle went the opposite way down the hall toward the servants’ stairway and followed it down to the back of the house.