He shot her a quick glance before he latched the clockwork around the dummy’s waist. “While it’s true that nothing stays in motion forever and does, in fact, need an outward impetus to keep going, the mere beat of your heart and the flow of blood through your veins is enough kinetic energy to keep your timepiece going for seven days, while at the same time accumulating an electrical charge within its battery casing. Where did you get your education?”
“I thought you claimed a guttersnipe like me didn’t have one. Whatever are you doing?”
“Demonstrating what will happen to you if you don’t agree to steal back what you took from me and mine.”
Her quick intake was audible, but she couldn’t help it. In a night full of surprises, that was a lulu. “You want me to steal something for you?”
“Steal something back,” he stressed, his tone so cold it would have made the North Pole seem balmy. “An egg, to be precise. A very special, very rare egg. Now do you remember?”
Of course she did. It wasn’t every day she came across a magnificent Fabergé egg with a surprise of a solid gold cherub hidden inside. It had been so heart-stoppingly beautiful she had almost kept it for herself.
He made a sound of impatience. “No need to answer, I can see you do. Which means we’re making progress.” With brisk efficiency he did something with the clockwork, then turned to pull her back. “Now that you know what I want, you need to understand what will happen to you if I don’t have the egg back by midnight, Christmas morning.”
Before she could ask what he meant, a sickening odor of ozone and smoke billowed out along with a harsh electric buzzing that made her eardrums quiver in protest. Right before her horrified eyes, the dressmaker’s dummy shuddered and jived while sparks flew in every direction. It toppled over even as it burst into flame before the buzzing slowly growled to a sullen end. Roderick was there in an instant with a pail of water, dousing it with motions both unsurprised and repetitive, and in the part of her brain that still worked Cornelia now grasped why the dummy was so scorched. Before locking his timepiece on her wrist, the ever-meticulous Roderick Coddington had tested his electrocution device over and over, just to make sure it worked. Just to make sure it could kill.
Just to make sure it could kill her.
“So there you have it.” Roderick turned to her with a vicious simile of a smile while smoke hung about them in a poisonous haze. “Tick-tock goes the clock, Peabody. You have seven days to right a terrible wrong. Or barring that, seven days to live. Either way I’ll be satisfied.”
Chapter Three
Under normal circumstances, Cornelia was an ardent fan of Peter Carl Fabergé, the Russian Czar’s world-renowned jeweler. Like her, Fabergé had proven himself to be an obsessive tinkerer, and coupled with his artistic genius he created magical, bejeweled treasures the likes of which the world had never seen. What wasn’t there to love?
But considering the hot water she’d landed herself in, Cornelia couldn’t help but curse the day the man had been born.
The morning had proven to be one exercise of futility after another. After receiving assurances from Roderick that getting the timepiece wet would result in her untimely demise, she had discovered that washing her hair with one hand was harder than it looked. In the end, she was left with limp tresses that were weighed down with soap and gummy to the touch. She then tried to track down the fence who handled all her “second-hand” merchandise, but word on the street was that even fences had families to visit during the holidays. She thought of running him to ground no matter how far she had to travel, but her brain couldn’t seem to figure out which way to go. She knew why, of course. The feel of Roderick’s killer timepiece ticking away each second of her life distracted her no end. Its weight on her wrist felt obscene, her skin crawling beneath it to the point where she could focus on little else while the memory of that horrible buzz of doom rang in her ears.
Whether through electrocution or worry, this damned timepiece was going to be the death of her.
She gave the gleaming shackle a dirty look. Yet another one of Roderick’s petty torments was how easy the shackle’s locking mechanism appeared to be. But he had been far too chipper in explaining that should she tamper with it in any way, the electric shock would be released. Die now or die later, he was only too happy to assure her he didn’t care which way she chose to go.
The thought of her brilliant tormentor brought Cornelia’s brows together as she exited a taxi in front of the Coddington house. Roderick hated her with a fiery passion, that much was certain. Not that she expected to leave starry-eyed fans in her wake, but his level of vengeance-filled animosity made her blink. The determination he had shown in tracking her down and creating such a diabolical trap in which to ensnare her showed not just anger, or hatred.
Despite Roderick Coddington being a mere steward of the university’s property she had stolen, there was no doubt he had taken the theft personally.
Cornelia was surprised when a dour-faced servant answered the doorbell’s summons and led her into the foyer. Since she had promised to meet with Roderick at noon, she had assumed he would be the one to greet her himself in order to keep her exposure to the household down to a minimum. That was why her jaw almost unhinged when a wizened white-haired dowager tottered in moments later.
“Ella tells me you’re the young lady here to call on my son?” With a kind smile that crinkled the crepe-thin flesh about her eyes, the woman held out a tremulous hand. “My goodness, how times have changed. In my day a lovely thing like you had the men calling on her, not the other way around.”
It was rare when Cornelia was left speechless, but with Roderick’s timepiece of doom strapped to her wrist, her brain wasn’t what it used to be. “Erm…”
“Oh dear, I’ve embarrassed you. Don’t tell on me or Roddy will be cross.” The elderly woman chuckled, her smile inviting Cornelia to join in. “I’m sorry to say he’s not here at the moment, he’s been held up at the university. I’m his mother, Margaret Coddington, by the way.”
“Cornelia Peabody.” You know, the one who broke into the house six months ago and robbed it blind. Charmed, I’m sure. “Did the professor offer a time when he might be in?”
“No, but I don’t expect for him to be too late, my dear. Would you like to wait for him?”
Cornelia nearly snorted. She wouldn’t have to worry about Roderick’s shackle taking her life. If she lingered in the company of his mother he would kill her with his bare hands. “No thank you, Mrs. Coddington. Forgive the intrusion, I’ll just be on my way…”
“Oh.” The kind smile wavered, and a flash of distress shadowed the tiny lady’s eyes. Aquamarine eyes, just like her son’s. “I do wish you would stay a few minutes longer, Miss Peabody. It’s been so long since there was another face around to light up this old shack. Longer still when there was such a lovely lady here to see my handsome son.”
Damn and blast. “My association with your son is a business one, Mrs. Coddington.”
“There’s business, and then there’s business. Roddy’s been burying himself in his work ever since Beth’s death, but I think it would be wonderful if the kind of business he had with a nice young lady like you pulled him back into the swing of things.”
Cornelia’s brows quirked. “Beth?”
Margaret Coddington’s fragile vitality dimmed like a guttering candle. “He hasn’t mentioned Beth to you? At all? But that doesn’t make sense, why would he do that? To bury her so completely is wrong. I know her passing is a daily agony for him to bear, but to pretend she didn’t exist does Beth a terrible injustice.”
When Margaret’s liver-spotted hand fluttered to her chest, Cornelia stepped forward in alarm. “Mrs. Coddington, I’m sure that’s not the case. Your son and I barely know each other.”
“It’s just that Roddy feels things so deeply, he always has. My intense professor,” she said with a tremulous smile that didn’t erase her alarming fragility. “I…I want him to find a way
to be happy again—” She swayed, and in a panic Cornelia caught her by the arms.
The front door opened behind them. “I’m home—”
Startled, Cornelia looked over her shoulder and straight into the eyes of Roderick. For only a moment surprise bloomed there, before a wave of unmitigated fury exploded in their depths.
Perfect.
“There you are, Professor Coddington. When your mother said you were still at work, I had begun to think you’d forgotten our appointment this afternoon.” In for a penny, in for a pound, she decided on the spot. If she was going to be annihilated she might as well get the ball rolling. “Your mother was kind enough to let me know you’d been delayed, but I’m afraid my presence has upset her.”
A muscle ticked in his jaw as he gritted his teeth on what she suspected was a flood of words so harsh they could have peeled the velvet paper off the walls. “I see. If you’ll excuse us, Mother. I’ll be with you in just a moment.”
“Of course.” Margaret seemed to collect herself enough to offer a shaky smile before heading out of the foyer. “Please invite Miss Peabody to join us for lunch, Roddy. She didn’t upset me in the least, but I fear I’ve upset her.”
“If you think I’m going to invite you anywhere other than the lowest ring of hell, you’re not half as smart as I give you credit for,” Roderick growled the moment they were alone. “Don’t ever speak to her again.”
The unfairness of it made Cornelia want to storm out, but the shackle on her wrist might as well have been chained to the wall. “I wouldn’t have spoken to her now if you’d had the common courtesy to be on time.”
“I had to tie things up before Christmas break, which starts tomorrow. What did you talk about?”
“Nothing but pleasantries were exchanged before you showed up.” The echo of Beth’s name whispered in her ear, and with a stubborn lift of her chin Cornelia slammed the door on it. To wonder about any aspect of Roderick’s life was to bring her closer to him, and she wanted no part of that. How dotty would she have to be to wonder over a lost love of the man who wanted her dead?
Dotty, indeed. And dotty she was not.
“Pleasantries?” The look Roderick bestowed on her would have withered plant life. “I daresay pleasantries wouldn’t have upset her.”
“No, but my determination to leave before you deigned to appear tripped the poor dear right up. She’s one of the good ones, your mother,” she added when he looked perplexed. “She not only worries about whether or not you’re able to meet an appointment, she’s the type of mother who lives for her child’s happiness. When you feel joy, she feels it, just as she suffers when you do.”
“Most mothers are like that.”
She couldn’t have stopped the angry scoff if her life depended on it. “And there it is, Coddington, proof you’re a self-centered brat who believes his princely backside is owed the worshipful devotion given to him by his mother.”
His face flushed with ill-disguised fury. “A brat, am I?”
“That and more, I’ll wager. The earliest memory of my mother is of a switch slicing across the backs of my knees when I was three, after muffing the pick of an old man’s pocket. Then there was the unforgettable beating I received thanks to her erroneous belief that I had been careless enough to lead coppers to one of our hideouts. And of course there was that final time when she horse-whipped me until she could no longer lift her arm then left me for dead in a stinking alley, all because I returned property to a pigeon who never should have been targeted in the first place. Now,” she growled, hands balled with the oh-so tempting desire to cork him right in the kisser, “are we going to have our meeting or not? I’m tired of looking at your cosseted face, and as you very well know my time is too precious to be wasted on the prissy, pampered likes of you.”
His eyes narrowed dangerously. “If that was a bid for sympathy, it was pathetic. Even if such a sob story were close to being true, you don’t think I would be soft-headed enough to fall for it, do you?”
“Clever man that you are, isn’t it grand that you can see right through me? Foiled again, I am.” And she was glad he didn’t believe her, she fumed, so furious she had to hold her breath to keep from exploding. Gladder still he wasn’t about to give the kind of person she was a second bloody thought. She didn’t want him to know who she really was, by God. To have him know anything about her was to bring him closer, and that went against her absolute rule of survival—never let anyone close. “Now that we’ve established how impossible it is to pull the wool over your sharp eyes, Coddington, I’d like to get this done. The clock is ticking, after all.” With that, she headed up the stairs to leave him statue-still in a cloud of ominous silence.
The greenhouse was flooded with winter sunshine when Roderick entered, his mood at direct odds with the cheery brightness. There wasn’t a more poisonous viper on the planet than Cornelia Peabody; watching her as he had for weeks had convinced him of that. But her words, whether they were true or not, made him think of her not as the embodiment of evil itself, but as a human being.
He didn’t like it one bit.
“You’ve been invited to lunch,” he announced when he spotted Cornelia by the telescope. “I made your excuses for you. When we meet from this point on, we’ll do it at your place.”
“That would be preferable.”
At her absent tone, he frowned a moment before he realized the telescope was angled downward rather than toward the sky. “For God’s sake, have you no shame?”
“Apparently not.” But she turned away from both the device and him with a face that was flushed with more color than he had ever witnessed in her. “Let’s, ah…get on with it, shall we?” She cleared her throat and plucked at her high collar, as though the lace at her neck was somehow choking her. “I’ll locate the egg as soon as I can find the gentleman who was kind enough to handle its resale. Hopefully I’ll have more answers in twenty-four hours and can put together a plan from there.”
“Hm.” Curious, he watched her fidget with her collar once more, looking almost feverish in the chilled greenhouse. On a hunch, he moved over to the telescope.
She jumped forward. “No, don’t!”
Ignoring her, Roderick peered into the eyepiece and took a moment to adjust the focus. When the picture crystallized, shock blazed through him at the erotic sight of his neighbors through a second story window across the way. Since the man and woman were on the second floor they clearly hadn’t felt the need to cover the window of what appeared to be some sort of office or study. Or perhaps they simply hadn’t cared as a wave of passion swept them away. That certainly looked to be the case as the woman, naked save for a pair of thigh-high stockings, lay atop a desk, mouth open and dark hair tumbling while her lover plunged into her hard enough to make the desk lamp topple over.
A delicious flush of heat washed over Roderick as he watched, his nethers growing heavy and his pulse setting up an urgent tattoo that shook his entire body. It had been a long damned time since he had wallowed in such abandon; he hadn’t even had the itch, he’d been so consumed with thoughts of how to corner his thief.
Without warning blackness eclipsed the delightful view of passion. He blinked and raised his head to find Cornelia’s gloved hand clamped over the telescope’s lens, a thundercloud of a scowl darkening her face.
“Don’t give me that look,” he chided, and in the bright light of day he noted her eyes, which he had always assumed were as black as her soul, were in fact a depthless sapphire blue. “You were watching them first.”
“I was not! I was merely looking at potential entry and exit points as a mental exercise when I…when they…it’s daylight, for heaven’s sake. Have they no sense of decorum?”
Roderick burst out laughing. He couldn’t help it. Of all the things he knew her to be, the one thing he had never expected from Cornelia Peabody was prudery.
“You know, Peabody, it has been rumored that sharing intimacies can, in fact, be done at any time of the day.”<
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The vivid color staining her cheeks seemed to be seeping down her neck. “I’m aware of that. It’s just…”
“Yes?”
“Well, it’s…they can see each other.”
He laughed again and stooped over the eyepiece for another peek. “Hell’s bells, can they ever. And they seem quite happy about it, too.”
“Will you stop that? You’re supposed to be a professor!”
“I am a professor.” He sighed with regret when she once again blocked his view. “What does that have to do with my appreciation of a healthy sex drive?”
Her gasp was so sharp she looked as though he had stabbed her with a hat pin. “Y-you can’t say that word in mixed company, you pervert.”
“Pervert?” It was just too much fun, seeing her in such an extraordinary state. The coldly calculating, ever-unflappable Cornelia Peabody was well and thoroughly flapped. “What word could you possibly mean, Peabody?”
“You know! That word.”
“Healthy?” He took a step closer, just to see what would happen. He was, after all, a scientist at heart; studying reactions and making sense of them was what got him up in the morning. And her reactions were definitely getting him up. “Is that the word to which you are referring, my little thief?”
She moved back and had a graceless, un-Cornelia-like moment when she banged into the greenhouse’s glass and iron-framed wall. “No.”
He inched closer. Crowding her. Exciting himself. “Drive?”
Her midnight eyes fluttered to his, then away. “No.”
“Oh. Well, then.” By now her cheeks were a furious scarlet, so much so he wouldn’t have been surprised if she glowed in the dark. Curious, and telling himself he only wanted to see if she felt as feverish as she looked, he brushed a finger over the baby-soft curve of her cheek. “I suppose you’re talking about sex, then.”
She flinched, whether from the word or the touch, he couldn’t be sure. “You were talking about… it. Not I.”
A Clockwork Christmas Page 3
