by Minda Webber
"I assure you, I'm not," Clair rebuffed, looking into his eyes. Suddenly, she felt as if she were rappeling down the face of a glacier into the deep unknown. She blinked.
"Hmm," he said. "We'll see about that. It would seem that you know personal things: when I get up, go to bed, what I like to dine on…" He hesitated, building the suspense. "My illustrious techniques in the bedchamber. Indeed, tonight it seems you got a personal view of my seduction skills, with the Lady Montcrief playing a rather key role."
Clair gasped at his indiscretion. "You, my lord, are no gentleman."
Asher laughed, the sound chilling her to the very core.
"And you my dear, are no lady, in spite of the impeccable packaging." Pulling out his quizzing glass, he looked her up and down. Then he smiled lasciviously.
Clair's eyes flashed. Ha! The old wolf wasn't nearly as smart as he thought. She would soon see him howling at the moon. Haughtily she remarked, "And you, my lord, are a wolf in sheep's clothing. One with too fine of an opinion of yourself. In fact, you're so top-lofty, it's a wonder you don't tip over."
A flash of surprise crossed his features. Asher narrowed his chilly blue eyes. "Pardon?"
In spite of his irritation, Asher found that she fascinated him. He was used to being adored and feared, or having others fear him. This Miss Frankenstein was a different flavor altogether.
Clair wanted to pinch herself for stupidity. She needed to befriend the earl, not vex him. "Please excuse my ill manners," she apologized.
The earl continued to study her, his gaze leering. "I could excuse a pretty little morsel like you many things."
Good intentions forgotten, she snapped. "How nice. But I'm afraid I can't excuse you any."
"Ouch," he said, though he looked unmoved. "What sharp little claws you have. Perhaps you would like to try them out on me sometime—preferably soon," he suggested.
Clair ground her teeth, wanting to slap the fur from out beneath his skin. Years of her aunt's training, however, came to her rescue. "I must politely decline," was all she said.
Slyly, she dropped her silver charm bracelet on the floor by the earl's shiny boots. "How clumsy of me. Would you mind picking that up for me?"
Asher chuckled. "It appears closer to you than me. I must politely decline."
Just as she had surmised, he wouldn't touch the silver. Another piece of wolfish evidence. "Aha!" Clair retrieved the bracelet herself, hiding her smug smile. "If your august personage won't mind, I really will be taking my leave."
Asher grabbed her arm in a lightning-quick move. "My, my, you are a surprise. You have me all aquake with desire to see what you'll do next."
Clair looked pointedly at her arm. Slowly the earl released it, haughtily tilted his chin, and held his hands up in the air in a placating gesture, silently commanding her to stay. It didn't work.
"I think, my lord, you indulge your desires overmuch. It reminds me of a pig feeding at a trough," she retorted.
He laughed in spite of the insult. "You do me injury. But I must reply that desire is what separates us from lower beings."
Clair's early desire to flee fled. The earl had presented too good an opening to let her temper get the better of her. He was talking about being a werewolf, she felt certain. "Please, do go on."
"I am a something of a scientist myself. I believe in survival of the fittest. Those who lead in the world are born to do so. Those who are less superior and can't keep up are useless and disposable. After all, they are of no account in the grand scheme. This is a brutal world, where the elite are masters as they should be."
Of course! Clair reasoned that a werewolf would consider itself at the top of any food chain. That the earl was so open with his malevolent remarks surprised her. She wondered if he'd had too much to drink. Then she pondered if werewolves could get drunk. She contemplated: if a werewolf ate a human who was drunk, could that werewolf end up foxed?
"And you, being a noble, are part of this elite membership?"
Asher flicked a piece of lint from the cuff of his midnight blue jacket. "But of course, my child. I'm an earl. Centuries of good breeding—superlative breeding—are in my blood."
His tone was matter-of-fact, which was so much more than Clair Frankenstein had dreamed. In this man's heart lay a great darkness, where killing was no more immoral than eating an apple. Civilization and the centuries had reduced him to only feeding until his thirst was lessened, but it was never quenched. It didn't seem fair for a creature such as himself, a creature of unbridled passions and hunger, a species so savage few would knowingly dare cross him, and none of those would live to tell the tale. But this new century was very modern, and he was obviously too much the gentleman to kill for sport or for dinner. Otherwise she would know something of his crimes.
"How fortunate to be so far above us all," Clair remarked coolly.
After giving her a thoroughly dressing down with his eyes, Asher glanced around at the other members of society. He chuckled. "Without qualification."
Motioning to all the members of the ton, he added, "Look around you. These are cattle, existing merely for the sake of their own existence. They eat, drink, and seek their guilty pleasures, living and dying fast and furious. At the moment of their deaths they cry out for forgiveness, though the only regret most have is when they are caught raiding the cookie jar. I'll make no bloody bones about it. They're freaks in the circus of the damned."
"And you, my lord, are different? Don't you seek these same guilty pleasures for yourself?"
"Definitely," he professed, sending a heated glance at her breasts. "Would you care to help me obtain them?"
She cocked her chin and gave him an icy stare. His forwardness was not to be believed. "Again, I must decline. You are out of my league," she demurred frostily, feeling very much the fly to his spider.
"But Huntsley isn't," he said, an odd look in his eye.
"I fear you are too perceptive." She turned away, wondering what web he was spinning and how intricate the design.
"My pretty, don't play the blushing miss with me! You and Huntsley have become grist for the gossip mill."
She raised a dramatic hand to her breast and looked back. "I can't believe you would condescend to listen. You with your earldom and superior mind."
"Tsk, tsk. Such a sharp tongue. I wonder if your baron will be able to dull it. Well, he is an enterprising man, especially when he is on the hunt."
Clair smiled coolly. "You make me sound like a fox to be run to ground."
"And torn apart, depending on who catches you. Take my advice, my dear: Huntsley is a law unto himself. He's devoured more elusive prey than you before, and will most undoubtedly do so again." Asher wanted to toy with her, subtly coax her, wanted to poison her good thoughts of the baron.
"He has been all that is gentlemanly," she retorted, her eyes flashing. This puffed-up earl had no right to decry her Ian!
"Huntsley will do or say whatever to whomever in order to gain whatever his heart desires," Asher went on.
"And you know this how? He's never named you friend in my hearing."
"Nor would he. We are mere acquaintances who met by chance—competitors, if you will, at cards or in conquests of a more, shall I say, carnal nature?"
"Then you know him little."
Asher chuckled, shaking his head. "I know the type. Too well, I know what Huntsley is capable of to gain his ends. Right now he's playing a waiting game, cat to your mouse. In fact, he is playing the oldest game in the book."
"And what, pray tell, is that?" Her scorn was obvious. Clair didn't like what the earl was saying about Ian. She didn't like the earl's snobbish philosophy. Mainly, she didn't like the earl.
Although, in all fairness, before she met him, she had been prepared to give the earl the benefit of the doubt, since he was a werewolf. In her logical manner, Clair had diagnosed that it must be a difficult life as a wolf-man: never eating apricot tarts; always having to watch out for steel traps: always having to ke
ep wolfhounds rather than her personal favorite, the spaniel. And then there was being genetically disposed to such big teeth, which would cause a person to bite their tongue a great deal whenever they shape-shifted. Or having to bear the indignity of ending up naked as the day they were born after shifting, and having to constantly hide clothes all over God-knew-where to prevent any tricky nude situations from occurring.
However, now that she had met the toplofty earl, she decided he was a dog of a different color.
"The oldest game besides 'hunt or be hunted' is much the same—the game between man and woman. Woman and man. The same game I'm playing now. I want you," Asher stated boldly, his chilly blue eyes appraising Clair hungrily.
"Then you're a muttonhead, even if you are an earl and one of your supercilious few. I know you're quite accustomed to getting everything your heart desires, but this time you're off the mark."
Asher shook his head, a lazy grin on his face. "Nothing is beyond my grasp, nothing in this whole bloody world." Amusement was clear on his cold but magnificent visage. He knew he had scored a hit or two with his poisoned-dart comments on Hunstley He had also enraged Clair Frankenstein enough to make sure the fiery lady would remember and think of him.
"I am," she remarked adamantly. Then she strode off regally, leaving him to his own company.
Clair Frankenstein was much more complex than he had first thought, Asher realized. She was also a stunningly beautiful woman with a voluptuous body and a spirit to match. A female who was indifferent to his regard, which set Asher's predatory instincts into overload. And to make matters even more interesting, Huntsley owed him a lover, for stealing that opera singer out from underneath his nose. Yes, Huntsley owed him that dark debt.
Asher cursed under his breath. He would have Clair Frankenstein come hell or high water. And Huntsley be damned, if he wasn't already.
The Scientist Who Knew Too Much
Clair was in a brown study. Despite her great expectations of her tale of two vampires in the city, she had ended up with an expected twist. It was a dickens of a dilemma. It seemed, she mused, that for a scientist who knew so much, as of late she often knew too little. She needed to reassess and reevaluate her work in order to learn how to proceed, although she knew she was right about the Earl of Wolverton being a werewolf.
Brooks's announcement of Baron Huntsley interrupted her thoughts. Clair hid her smile as she saw him walk into the room. He made her heart do a funny little pitter-patter. He looked as if he had gotten little to no sleep last night. Good, he could join the club.
Clair was still angry with him for abruptly dragging her out of the garden the night before, and for his quick departure from the ball without a word to her. He needed to get into the spirit of things—which spirits were vampires and werewolves. She wouldn't bend an inch. She would show Ian a thing or two—mainly that Frankensteins couldn't be intimidated or dragged willy-nilly from gardens.
As Ian entered the room, he noted Clair's posture and expression. Yes, she was still most definitely angry at him. The thought was irritating. She had no right to be peeved because he cared enough to try and stop her from getting Asher's back up. But she was a female, and their reasoning wasn't always reasonable, no matter how a man tried to interact with one.
Ian had come prepared to do penance. Seeing Clair sitting in the library, framed in bright sunlight from the huge bay window behind her, he caught his step, standing and staring at her. She was so very lovely and so very much alive, obviously enjoying life in all its complexity.
He smiled. Clair was a vision of everything that was spring, in a morning gown of mint green silk. She sat in a gilt-wood chair in front of her massive teak desk, across which books and yellowed papers were haphazardly piled. Ian hid a grin at the total chaos of her workspace, presuming there was somehow a method to her madness.
After several minutes of heavy persuasion, he finally got her to admit to having an encounter with the earl. His ugly suspicions of the night before were now unfortunately confirmed.
Ian sought damage control. "Don't invite him into your house or your life."
Clair stared in disbelief. Ian had done everything but draw her a picture on how the Earl of Wolverton could not be a werewolf or a vampire. If she hadn't known better, she would have thought Ian had been trying to pull the proverbial wool over her eyes. "You stated last night—and most emphatically, I might add—that the earl wasn't a werewolf or a vampire!"
Ian could almost see the steam coming from her ears. Defending himself, he cajoled, "I am almost positive that he's not either. However, just to be on the safe side please do as I ask. Don't let Asher enter here, and stay far away from him on the full moon. Even better, stay home all the time."
Clair fumed. She had been up most of the night worrying about the earl's mysterious comments warning her away from Ian. She knew Ian had the reputation as a rake of renown, yet since he had been wooing her, she was seeing a different side of his roguish tendencies, a side quite special. She had noted it recently, whenever Ian looked at her. Dare she call it love?
After hiding a yawn, Clair couldn't help but return Ian's smile. But what was she doing smiling? Her night had been filled with confusion. She had worried about how the earl found out about her interest in him as a werewolf. And how much exception would he take to the fact? If the earl was dangerous, just how much of a deep ditch had she dug for Ian and herself? At this rate of worry, she was going to have gray hair before she was thirty.
She began to worry that Ian was going to be killed because of her, and then she worried that if Ian was, would he ever forgive her? Then she worried if she could ever forgive him for dying. "It would appear that I have opened a Pandora's box," she said aloud to herself.
Ian crossed his arms, commenting gravely, "Clair, my love, you have no idea."
Clair stood, traversing the room to where Ian stood, placing her hands in his. Imploring him with her smoky gray eyes, she begged, "Please, Ian, tell me truthfully. Is the Earl of Wolverton the Wolf man of London?"
"No." He answered without a twinge of remorse. Lives hung in the balance. Bending, he bestowed a tender kiss upon Clair's brow, then slowly moved away to the shelter of the bookshelves—away from her fresh, clean scent and luscious body, away from temptation.
Clair scrutinized him thoroughly, her analytic brain observing every nuance. "I would hate to call you a liar. However, going back to our earlier conversation, you did warn me not to invite him in. Why is that?"
Ian shrugged, schooling his expression. "I'm jealous."
"In a pig's eye," she retorted.
"You told me you thought he was a handsome," Ian reminded her, closing the distance back to her side, unable to help himself. He loved being near her, her smell, her laughter, the way the shadows of the room highlighted her heart-shaped cheeks.
"Handsome is as handsome does. Asher scares me a little, reminds me of a lofty king spider casting out his web and spinning it in little melodramas."
Ian nodded gravely. "An apt description," he remarked, knowing he would have to go to Plan B, since Plan A had been sent down in flames. Plan B was of a crafty sort, a Machiavellian plan. Brilliant, even if he did say so himself. It was a plan designed to keep Clair tilting at windmills. It was sure to guarantee that she would be kept safely away from the supposed Big Bad Wolf, the earl. He would call it the McGuffin, in honor of his friend Sir Albert Hitchcock, who had devised it for the war ministry. It was a plan where the real object of interest was replaced by another object in order to distract and confuse.
Ian tenderly squeezed Clair's hands. "Clair, I have been thinking long and hard over your research. I know how important you think this project of yours is to your Frankensteinian destiny…"
Releasing his hands, she went to stand by the window, staring out at the vibrant landscape. "It isn't just my destiny or my dreams, it's every man's or every woman's. It seems to me that a man's work will live beyond him, while his dreams, without substance, are only dust i
n the wind. Does that make sense to you?"
Ian nodded solemnly. "Yes. And that's one of the reasons I stopped by today."
"Yes?"
"Well, the other day I was remembering what you told me about the warlock or warlocks in a vampire nest. So I decided to do a little research on my own. I think I know who your warlock is."
Her eyes shining brightly, Clair almost skipped back to where he stood. In spite of all of Ian's dubious feelings on her work, he had decided to help her! He was interested enough in her to be interested enough in what she cared about. He had actually spent time and effort in searching out the warlock of the London nest, a feat she had tried at and failed.
She grinned, her eyes sparkling with happiness. Ian was her unsung hero. Although, she wasn't dim enough not to know the reason behind Ian's picking out a warlock to research instead of encouraging her hunt of the werewolf. Where werewolves were long and sharp of tooth, warlocks weren't. One was danger with fangs, the other's danger lay only in ancient spells. It was as simple and as complex as he thought her in less peril from magic. Yes, Ian cared more for her than he admitted. "Who?"
"The Duke of Ghent."
"The Duke?" Clair repeated, surprised. "Are you sure? He seems like such a jolly old man. Aunt Mary knows him. And he's a duke."
"You believe Wolverton is a werewolf and he's an earl," Ian accused.
"True. I guess supernaturalism is an equal-opportunity employment."
Ian studied her, a reluctant grin on his face. He knew she was going away again into that dizzy maze of her mind. Patiently he waited, wanting to kiss her silly.
"Okay, why this particular duke?" she asked.
His grin grew. The trap was sprung. He would now lead Clair off in a different direction. And though he regretted his false directions, at least this path wouldn't plunge her to her death if she took a right turn.
