Gossamer Wing 1

by Delphine Dryden

  PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF DELPHINE DRYDEN

  “Steampunk erotica at its best.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Something I couldn’t resist. Ms. Dryden delivered one hell of a great story!”

  —Risqué Reviews

  “Smokin’ hot.”

  —Two Lips Reviews

  “Only Delphine Dryden could pull off a beautiful, funny, sexy-as-sin story like this!”

  —Mari Carr, New York Times bestselling author

  “One of the coolest . . . books I have read.”

  —The Romance Man

  “Supersexy!”

  —Jennifer Probst, New York Times bestselling author

  “The plot is captivating, the intimate moments are scorching!”

  —Sinfully Delicious Reviews

  “Bravo!”

  —Seriously Reviewed

  “I really loved the story.”

  —Just Erotic Romance Reviews

  “A fun and exciting read that kept me entranced from beginning to end.”

  —Night Owl Reviews

  “Well-written, sexy . . . and intriguing . . . Highly recommend.”

  —Romancing the Book

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

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  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  GOSSAMER WING

  A Berkley Sensation Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 2013 by Delphine Dryden.

  Excerpt from Scarlet Devices by Delphine Dryden copyright © 2013 by Delphine Dryden.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Berkley Sensation Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group.

  BERKLEY SENSATION® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

  The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA),

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-61369-6

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley Sensation mass-market edition / November 2013

  Cover photos: Couple © Claude Marinesco; Vintage Image of Eiffel Tower, Paris,

  France © Javarman/Shutterstock.

  Cover design by Rita Frangie.

  Interior text design by Kelly Lipovich.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Special Excerpt from Scarlet Devices

  Prologue

  PARIS, FRANCE

  SNOW WOULD COMPLICATE everything.

  Jacques Martin kept an eye on the heavy clouds, but his primary focus remained on the hunt. The scrawny Dominion rat had left him with a knot the size of an egg on his head, and the sickest of headaches. He was keen to return the favor.

  And he has my freedom in his hands.

  The documents, all wrapped up and tidy in their leather pouch, that Martin had planned to present Dubois once he knew their agreement was at an end . . . the boy had them, and probably didn’t even know their importance. Didn’t know an agent—a brilliant agent, a beautiful woman, Martin’s friend—had died for the information on those sheets. He’d taken them because they were there, because they might be worth something to his employers.

  The cold raged through Martin’s arm and raised a scorching chill below his elbow where metal met skin. He’d forgotten to oil the spring-clamp hand again this morning, and he’d left off the compression sleeve because of the itch. Never again. Already he felt the thing seizing up, become less instead of more, defeating its own purpose.

  Martin ran through the streets of Paris, light and silent on his well-trained feet. Even with his enhanced ear he could barely make out his own footsteps, but he suspected the boy from the American colonies would not be so quiet or so fleet of foot. He’d looked like an analyst, a desk clerk, not a field agent. He could never have defeated Martin in a fair fight. He’d barely gotten away as it was, even with Martin’s head still reeling from the first crack it had received.

  Idiot, Martin chastised himself. His ears had been covered by a cap, again because the cold made the metal unbearable where it met skin. He hadn’t heard the boy sneaking around the corner, had been so certain of his own security that he’d literally plowed into the fool. Then, caught off guard, he’d careened into the sharp brick corner of Dubois’s building.

  There it was, the sound he sought. A patter of rapid footsteps on a parallel street, the rough breath of a man near the end of his endurance, trying to be quiet as he pushed past his limit. The rat was fitter than Martin had thought, he had to give him that. They were a block apart, Martin calculated, but he could catch up to the boy on the Boulevard des Italiens, which was only a few paces away.

  Martin paused at the intersection as the fool broke from the shadowed side street and darted across the broad boulevard, making straight down the block for the Opéra Garnier. Steam cars rattled by, not many of them at one in the morning but enough to make Martin proceed with more caution than the American had demonstrated.

  “Paul Girard,” the boy had introduced himself two days ago, in flawless unaccented French. He’d cornered Roland Dubois at the opera, as ambitious young men were wont to do on occasion. This young man had raised alarms in Jacques Martin’s mind. His French was too smooth, too perfect. The cut of his costly clothing was off, a few years out of fashion. Most of all, Martin had been struck with an impression that the boy was both smarter than he presented himself to be, and lacking in the particular type of puffed up, self-important false confidence that invariably filled these up-and-coming industrialists.

  With his enhanced ear covered by a prosthesis and his judgment still cloudy from the morphine he’d taken to manage the pain from his new implants, Martin had been far from alert. When Dubois dismissed his caution about the boy, he didn’t pursue it. Dubois had been late for a rendezvous with his new mistress. Martin had been late for his next dose of morphine.

  He felt vindicated now, in an ironic way, remembering the young man’s startled curse when they collided.

  “Bloody hell,” the rat had hissed, revealing his true accent in that moment as clearly as if he’d hung a sign around his neck. It was always those little things, those unguarded seconds, that tripped one up. The American boy was still a baby spy, evi
dently. Martin would not enjoy killing him. But the baby spy had made a mistake in not killing Martin when he had the chance, and Martin would not make the same mistake.

  Untimely traffic made crossing the boulevard impossible for several tens of seconds, and Martin cursed under his breath as the boy disappeared around the side of the Opéra. The brief rest refreshed him, however, and he sprinted after his quarry with new vigor once the street cleared.

  This time he swung wide around the corner of the building, half expecting the boy to jump out at him. Instead Martin drew to a slow halt, staring at an empty plaza and the street beyond. Nothing. No boy, no cars, no sound from so much as a cat to disturb the night.

  He’d lost him. He’d lost the documents.

  Horror as cold as the metal biting at Martin’s skin filled his mind as he contemplated what Dubois might do if he returned without those pages. Without proof of the device that could secure the martial future Dubois so fervently desired, a weapon of such breathtaking potential that it could change the course of this war . . . and all wars.

  “A little insurance,” Dubois had told him while he was still groggy from the anesthesia. “To make sure you do follow through on your promise to surrender the papers Simone stole from those English scientists, I had the good surgeon-engineer provide you with an additional implant.” His piggy eyes had squinted in delight as he told Martin of the vial of poison planted in Martin’s body, and the radiomagnetic trigger device that he, Roland Dubois, would carry with him until Martin had delivered on his end of their exchange.

  Martin had gambled with the devil and lost, it seemed. He’d persuaded the engineering giant to provide a pair of implants his own employers refused him, enhancements he thought would make him the greatest spy the world had ever known. Without the documents, however—or perhaps even with them, Martin acknowledged—he was now bound forever to Dubois unless he wanted to die.

  Martin did not want to die. He sent up a silent prayer to a God he wished he could still believe in, and like an answer to his prayer he heard a soft scuffle overhead.

  The Dominion rat was scrambling up and over the lip of the roof, high atop the Palais Garnier. How he’d scaled the wall Martin couldn’t begin to guess, unless the baby spy was an unparalleled second-story man.

  Martin didn’t linger to guess. He was no second-story man, because he didn’t need to be. He could pick any lock ever made and was as silent as death. Within seconds he was inside the building, darting up the stairs that led to the roof. The Opéra was dark that night, but warmer than the outside air, and Martin felt almost hot by the time he topped the final stair and leaned, listening, on the door leading to the roof.

  The scuffling sounds of feet on slate told him the boy was still up there and not close to the door. It was as good an opportunity as Martin would get. He swung the door open, silently praising the worker who must have recently oiled the hinges, and scanned the dark rooftop in front of the green glass dome. He saw nothing at first, then movement near the abutment on the opposite side from the wall the American had climbed.

  The boy had evidently planned to go up and over, escaping on the opposite side of the building once Martin had given up the search. A decent strategy, Martin supposed, if it hadn’t been for the implant that allowed Martin to hear him. That implant, and the metal throughout his forearm, were already chilling again as he crept across the roof toward his prey. Though it felt almost too cold for it now, snow started to fall, dusting all the surfaces. Martin slowed even further to minimize the risk of slipping. His head and arm started to throb all over in the bitter wind.

  What the hell is the fool doing?

  The boy’s back was to Martin, his hands busy at the lip of the abutment, and Martin was still a few steps away when the American stepped up to the railing, turned, and leaped off the side of the Opéra. Martin saw a split second of utter shock as the boy registered his presence, then only blackness and snow where his face had been.

  In the second it took for Martin to recover and spot the grappling hook and cord, the American had already made it to the top of the first tier of windows. Leaning over and shoving his coat sleeve up, Martin watched his enemy’s progress as he fumbled with his implant, trying to recall by feel exactly where the forearm panel released to reveal a blade. The boy looked up in terror, seeing his death, and whispered, “Charlotte.”

  But he kept skimming down the wall.

  Later Martin would blame the morphine, and perhaps the fear, for his stupidity. He was warned, after all. He had to snatch his fingers away from the icy metal once, because it was so cold it burned. Like a child, he popped one of those fingers into his mouth and sucked the end, warming it up. Then he reached down again and finally found the seam at the panel’s edge near his wrist, pressing there firmly with a surge of triumph.

  The triumph lasted only until he realized he couldn’t pull the finger away. It had frozen to the metal, like a tongue to a water pump handle. In his village, as a child, the boy who would later become Jacques Martin—Coeur de Fer, the notorious Iron Heart—had never been foolish enough to take that dare.

  A few seconds’ delay were all the false Paul Girard needed. Martin didn’t bother to yank his finger away from the metal, though the prospect of the blood and pain was hardly enough to deter him. He simply saw no point. The Dominion rat was already gone, escaping into the night with one last look over his shoulder.

  Martin didn’t have enhanced vision, but he didn’t need it to know what the boy’s face must have looked like. Utter astonishment, incredulous relief.

  That was exactly what Martin had felt when he’d first spied the pages of notes in his dead mentor’s office, and realized what they meant to him. What they could do for him. Simone’s parting gift, a piece of intelligence so valuable Martin could use it to strike a Faustian bargain.

  Now they were gone, and his hope along with them.

  One

  UPPER NEW YORK DOMINION

  (SEVEN YEARS LATER)

  DEXTER HADN’T MINDED the commissions at first. A gauntlet-mounted riding rifle here, a stealthy rooftop periscope there. A dog automaton once, for a terminally ill child with allergies to the real thing.

  But this . . . he looked at the leather harness in his hands, hefted the weight and swore at some length before his words regained a semblance of coherence.

  “And you say he wants more rivets? Does he have any idea how much this monstrosity weighs already? The fool won’t be able to walk half a mile before he buckles under the weight.”

  “Aye, sir. But the Marquis’s son claims that Lord Ravensward has one that—how did he put it—is armored with rivets like a million brass nipples, gleaming in the sun. I merely quote, sir. The imagery itself was lost on me.”

  Dexter’s sigh spoke nearly as many volumes as his curses had. “If only they didn’t travel in packs. They just incite each other to greater and greater excess.”

  The younger man snickered. Taking the harness back from his master, he slung it behind him and hooked his arms neatly through the shoulder straps. Then he broke into a curse of his own as the overdecorated strap continued its swing and caught his unsuspecting cheek a nasty blow.

  Dexter clamped down on a grin. “Speaking of buckling, that one could probably do with some revision, Matthew. Perhaps three smaller straps, at intervals down the chest, rather than just the one? It would more evenly distribute all that weight.”

  “I agree, sir. May I take it off and begin on the changes prior to mounting and testing the firearm again? My ears are still ringing from the last time.”

  “My boy, as long as it’s delivered on time and operational for the toff’s house party, I really don’t care what you do with it in the meantime. I trust you to get the job done.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Matthew sauntered off, the jangling buckles and creaking straps of the fowling harness making a merry din. Dexter shook his head, still baffled at the vagaries of fashion that so complicated his business at
times, before returning his attention to a more interesting project.

  An air helmet. He rarely touched the production of such a commonplace item these days, but he always handled Lady Moncrieffe’s requests personally.

  A monocular telescope was built into one eyepiece of the helmet, with controls that could be worked with the chin or mouth while leaving the hands free. Dexter had spent weeks of his own time on the thing, and frankly felt he had created a small masterpiece. The instrumentation was precise, the optical device providing clear views at a magnification of up to fifty times. All operable by the most subtle wags of the lady’s noble jaw or nips of her no doubt aristocratically white and even teeth.

  “In blue,” her initial commission had specified. “Fleece-lined for warmth at a minimum increase to weight or drag. Overall weight must remain below fifteen hundred grams.”

  He had made the device per these specifications, which had come to him as usual in the lady’s own elegant hand. It had been delivered to her just over a week ago.

  That same flawless penmanship graced the note accompanying the rejected helmet when it arrived back at his workshop a few days later.

  Dear Mr. Hardison,

  The helmet you provided is satisfactory in its technical particulars. However, when I say it must be “blue” I mean it must be the color of a cloudless sky.

  Sincerely,

  Charlotte, Lady Moncrieffe

  He looked at the helmet, which sat on a mesh-covered framework exactly matching the measurements of Lady Moncrieffe’s head. The helmet leather was a peacock blue that had been the first stare of fashion this season, and at the time of its crafting Dexter thought it was at least a refreshing change from last year’s craze for lilac and peony. It set off the brass nicely too. He’d heard the woman was very fair, and thought the bright blue might suit her.

  But sky blue? He couldn’t recall the last time he had received a custom order for anything in such a color. Dexter wondered if it was a particular favorite of the widow Moncrieffe, and it occurred to him that he had no real idea of her coloring other than “fair,” though he knew practically every dimension of her body from the sundry devices he’d custom-built for her. Perhaps she simply looked good in sky blue.