My Lady Quicksilver ls-3

by Bec McMaster

  She wouldn’t have expected it, but she was honestly grateful. “That is good news. And the rest of your morning? I thought you gone for the day.”

  “Evidently. You’ve written those letters?”

  Rosalind rested her hands against the back of the settee and glanced over her shoulder. “On my desk.”

  “Excellent. There are some files there too. Can you bring them to me? I need you to take some notes.”

  When she turned, she found him bent over his desk, rifling through the stacks of papers as if to see what she’d done. The weak sunlight fell across his pale skin and the roughened stubble of his jaw. Dark shadows smudged his eyes, making the gray almost crystalline. He’d been out all night, she’d bet. Searching for her. Or for Mercury.

  The thought should have made her smile, but instead she frowned. “Have you slept at all?”

  A quirk of those dark brows. He didn’t bother to look up. “Are you still interviewing for the role of wife?”

  Rosalind bit back her initial retort. “I was concerned, sir. You look like hell, but I’ll refrain from acknowledging such in the future. My apologies.” Sweeping past him, she headed into her own smaller study and immediately saw the files on her desk. He must have sat them there when he realized she was in his own study.

  When she returned, Lynch eased back in his chair and looked at her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’ve caught me at a bad time. I’m out of sorts and exhausted.”

  Rosalind sat the files on his desk. She’d not have expected an apology. The force of his control, his exquisite manners, and his cool politeness were all things she’d not expected. He was an enigma and she enjoyed trying to understand him.

  Far too much.

  “That’s quite all right,” she found herself saying. “You’ve made no progress with the case?”

  “Either of them.” He closed his eyes and leaned back in the chair, raking tired hands through his hair. For a second his expression was unguarded; frustration warred with exhaustion, and she found herself almost tempted to reach out and touch him. To cup his cheek in her palm and turn his face to hers.

  The moment shook her. To forsake it, she asked tartly, “Either of them? Lord Haversham, do you mean?”

  At that his eyes opened. The light struck them, rendering them almost blue-gray and something tightened in her chest. An ache. A longing. She turned away, fussing with her skirts.

  “Not Haversham, no,” he replied quietly. “Have you heard of the humanists?”

  Rosalind schooled her features. “It seems to be all anyone speaks of these days. People are concerned about what the Echelon intend to do about them and whether it will spill over into their world.”

  “I have to find them first,” he said bleakly. “Before anything can be done.”

  “I have no doubt you will,” she said, though she meant not a word of it—not if she had anything to do about it.

  “You’re right, of course. It just takes time and that is something I don’t have.” Lips thinning, Lynch pushed to his feet. “Here. Sit. I need you to take dictation. My own writing is appalling.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  He circled her as she crossed to the chair, his head turning as she passed. That prickling awareness between them shivered over her skin and Rosalind took refuge in the chair, picking up the spring pen. Lynch crossed to the hearth and stared into the cold fireplace, his hands clasped behind his back. The pose drew attention to the long, smooth muscles of his spine and the way his trousers caressed the taut curve of his buttocks. Rosalind nibbled on the end of the pen and looked her fill. There was no point in not admiring him after all. Searching for weaknesses, she told herself with a self-deprecating smile.

  And finding none.

  “Annie Burke. Serial number 1097638,” he said briskly. “Missing her entire left arm. The arm has been replaced with a hydraulic bio-mech piece manufactured by Craven’s. The hand is standard issue—”

  There was more, but her pen paused and Rosalind stared down at the piece of paper, her mind going blank as his words droned on.

  Clever man. Looking for a mech, was he? In all the wrong places, of course, but still, the tenacity of the man bothered her.

  “Rosa?”

  She looked up and found him watching her over his shoulder. He’d evidently heard the pen trail off.

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured, hastily scrawling down the last of his words. “I wondered how you can remember all of this.”

  “I remember nearly everything,” he replied. “I trained myself to do so years ago after a fire swept through the first building and took all of my notes. Now I rarely put anything important to paper.”

  The pen nib pressed hard on the paper, leaving an ink blot she silently cursed. Damn him. She’d spent days hunting through his files for naught. She’d wondered where he kept the important information. Now she knew. It was in that head of his. And she had no way of getting at it.

  Unless… He would have to tell her of it. And if she played her game well, he might just take Rosa Marberry into his confidence.

  “Why now?” she asked boldly.

  “I’ve examined the files of all of the mech women in the enclaves and after viewing them, found that none of them match the one I seek. Which means she must be elsewhere.” The hard note in his voice took her aback. “Once you’ve taken down my thoughts, I’ll compile them into a description of the woman and what I know of her bio-mech hand. Then I’ll send Byrnes through the enclaves to question all of the blacksmiths.”

  “Woman?” she asked lightly.

  That steady gaze flickered to hers, as if he’d just realized she was still in the room. “The humanist leader, Mercury.”

  “You sound quite…enamored of her.” She idly traced several letters on the paper, concentrating hard.

  “She made a fool of me. I won’t suffer to be made a fool of. That is all.”

  It wasn’t all. Not by a long shot. Rosalind looked up beneath her lashes and saw the intensity of his gaze drift past her, out the window. He was thinking of Mercury. She could see it in the sudden tension of his hands and shoulders.

  A faint smile touched the edges of her lips and she dropped her gaze again. “Shall we continue?”

  * * *

  Candlelight flickered in the night, lighting up the ceiling of his room. Lynch stretched his arms back and pillowed his head in his hands, staring up at the dancing shadows. He needed sleep desperately, but it wouldn’t come. Instead, all he could think about was the taste of his revolutionary’s mouth and the way she’d writhed against him, her legs locked around his hips.

  His cock swelled, the end of his nightshirt riding over the sensitive flesh tormentingly. Fuck it. He bared his teeth, jerking his hand out from under his head. He’d never get to sleep if he didn’t take care of this. It was bad enough during the day, the encounter with Mercury whipping him into a lather of frustration and desire and now Mrs. Marberry flirting with him. If he didn’t control this, he’d break apart, torn by hunger and need, when he most needed his senses in place.

  His hand wrapped around his cock in a brutal grip and he hissed as pleasure tightened his balls. Closing his eyes, he threw back his head and thought of that moment in the alley when Mercury had kissed him. Driving her lithe little body against him, her tongue darting into his mouth. And then, once the shock of it had left him, how she’d rubbed her body against his as he shoved her against the wall and possessed her with his mouth.

  He came with a gasp, all too quickly. Collapsing back on the sheets, he groaned as his body trembled, his need barely sated. Witch. Licking his lips, he cursed her name. His body was half-hard again, desire a raging inferno that couldn’t be quenched. No woman had ever left him so undone before, not even Annabelle.

  Slowly, he touched himself again, stroking his sex-slick skin. He would rid himself of this hunger, this need. No matter what it took.

  Then he would hunt her down and do what needed to be done.

  Eigh
t

  “You’re certain the woman wasn’t in the archives?” Caleb Byrnes asked, his arms folded across his chest as he leaned back against the laboratory bench. Sunlight from the high windows bleached the tips of his brown hair and sparked off his very blue eyes. A cold bastard. And dangerous too. But at least Lynch knew he could trust him to do his job; Byrnes was a force of nature when it came to tracking his prey. Intense and furiously focused. Indeed, he liked it a little too much.

  “Certain,” Lynch replied absently, slowly turning the page on one of Fitz’s books. A History of Biomechanics. Horrendously dull reading, but the diagrams were what he was interested in.

  There was a distinct smoky flavor to the air, no doubt a previous experiment of Fitz’s that had gone awry. Scars and frequent little burn marks covered the battered workbench he leaned against. The rest of the men referred to this as the dungeon, and it was the frequent epicenter of explosions and small fires.

  “You ever known ’is lordship to be wrong?” Doyle snorted.

  Lynch flipped a page and then paused. He lifted the book and turned. “I only glimpsed her hand, but she had something like this designed into the mechanics.” He showed it to Fitz.

  “A Carillion blade? That will help to narrow it down. There’s only a handful of craftsmen in the city who know how to forge one correctly.” Fitz’s thick eyebrows shot into his hairline and he smiled in rare anticipation. Burn marks turned the center of his left brow into a stubbly mess and the tweed suit he wore was acid-stained at the cuffs. A young rogue blue blood who had found his calling here, working with strange devices and inventions.

  A fluttering started in Lynch’s gut. He was getting closer to finding Mercury. He knew it. “I want their names.”

  “The problem is…” Fitz murmured, taking the book and peering at the diagram. “They belong to the Council.”

  “How the devil does a revolutionary get work created by one of the master smiths?” Byrnes asked.

  How indeed? Lynch’s mind raced. “What makes a woman hate a blue blood so much that she wants to destroy them all?” This was his forte, his genius, predicting his adversary’s moves and motives. “She’s come into contact with the Echelon, I’m certain of it. Perhaps the loss of her hand itself is key?” He frowned. He could have his men question the members of the Echelon about a young human woman who’d lost her hand, but that would start people asking questions he didn’t want them to. He needed to find her, not deliver her straight into someone else’s hands.

  “You think one of ’em took her ’and?” Doyle frowned. “That don’t seem a strong enough motive to want to destroy ’em.”

  “Who knows how people perceive such things? To some, such a loss might be reason indeed,” he retorted, pacing the small laboratory.

  “If one of the Echelon cost her the hand, then someone helped her get a mech replacement,” Byrnes said. “I’m thinking a blue blood again. Master smiths don’t come cheaply and the only merchant’s who might be able to afford one wouldn’t have contact with them.”

  “Maybe they weren’t asked to create it,” Lynch suggested.

  “Again, that brings me back to a blue blood,” Byrnes frowned. “And it would have had to be done quietly or some rumor of it would have reached our ears. The master smiths don’t create mech parts, not for mere humans anyway.”

  “No missing or kidnapped master smiths in the past twenty years?”

  “I’ll look,” Byrnes promised.

  A knock started at the door. All four of them turned.

  Perry bumped the door open with her hip and dragged a wheeled chair into the room. Garrett slumped in the seat, looking completely indignant with the contraption.

  “Here we are, sir. It took me a little longer than anticipated to fetch him,” Perry said.

  “She practically wrestled me into it,” Garrett snapped. “I can walk.”

  “Not until Doc says you can,” Doyle replied bluntly. “How’s your breathin’ been?”

  “I’m fine.” Black heat swam through Garrett’s eyes. After such a grievous injury, his craving virus levels had increased dramatically, as if his body hadn’t been able to fight the virus off while it tried to heal.

  Lynch exchanged a glance with Doyle. He’d have to keep a close eye on his second. Garrett’s CV levels were now around the sixty percent margin, but such an increase in a short amount of time might lead to brief losses of control. Garrett wasn’t used to fighting off such increased hungers.

  “And your stitches?” Doyle asked.

  “Itching like a sailor with the pox.”

  “I cut them out this morning,” Perry replied, ignoring his glare as she wheeled him into place beside Lynch. “Are you cold? Do you want a blanket?”

  “I’m going to bury you in the garden if you don’t leave off.” Garrett clapped a hand to his forehead in frustration, scraping his hair out of the way.

  Perry snorted. “As if you could. Even when you’re at your best, I can have you facedown in the dirt nine times out of ten.”

  “I only need once—”

  “That’s enough,” Lynch said quietly.

  Both of them fell silent.

  “I need you on your feet,” he told Garrett. “If that means suffering through Perry’s ministrations, then so be it.”

  “Besides…” A slow smile crept over Byrnes’s mouth. “She can’t help fussing, its part of her nature.”

  “Was that an oblique reference to my gender?” Perry asked, her eyes narrowing to thin slits.

  If he left them at this, they’d be at each other’s throats within a minute. Lynch held up a hand, staring them all down. “Concentrate,” he said, stabbing a finger toward the book. “Fitz, what’s the difference between enclave work and the master smiths?”

  “Enclave work doesn’t have synthetic flesh,” the young scientist frowned. “It tends to tear in their line of employment.”

  “She didn’t bother with it.”

  “However the addition of the Carillion blade argues for master smith work. We all know a blue blood’s saliva has chemical components in it that can heal a cut—or the slash of a blood-letting knife—without transmitting the virus,” Fitz said. “That’s what they use to create bio-mech limbs. They can meld steel tendons or muscle sheeting with flesh by using a blue blood’s saliva. The interior of the bio-mech limb is grafted to a man’s body as if it belongs, each contraction of muscle creating flex in the steel hand. It’s truly an extension of the body.”

  “And enclave work?” he asked.

  “Far rougher. They don’t have access to a blue blood’s saliva. A hand relies on clockwork pieces inside it to drive the mechanism and hydraulic hoses in the arm to lift it. Mech—not bio-mech. Far less accurate.”

  Lynch scratched at his mouth. “Its master smith work, I’m sure of it. She had full use of her fingers and hand.”

  “Looks like we’ve got some smiths to question,” Byrnes said with a heated smile.

  “You and Perry work together on that,” Lynch directed.

  Perry shot him a look. She and Garrett always worked as partners; Byrnes preferred to work alone.

  “You’re entering Echelon territory,” he said, though he rarely bothered to explain his orders. “You need someone to watch your backs. Keep it quiet—but I want to know if any master smith created something like this within…the last ten or fifteen years. The hand’s fully sized, so she had to be an adult by the time it was melded to her flesh.”

  And keeping Perry away from Garrett would stop them being at each other’s throats. His head was pounding as it was. Lynch nodded sharply. “Dismissed.”

  * * *

  Later that afternoon, Lynch stripped his coat off and tossed it on the armchair in his study, which was now free of debris. Pausing, he looked around the room. Evidence of Mrs. Marberry’s meddling existed everywhere. Ever since he’d found her in here two days prior, she’d been making her presence known in myriad, subtle ways.

  He’d been too busy to tak
e her to task for it, but now he paused, taking a good hard look around the room.

  The bookshelves were spotless and dust free, the orchid on the windowsill shifted to a warmer location. By the fireplace, all of the translations of an old Tibetan document he’d been making were gone and the desk was entirely clear of paperwork.

  He turned on his heel and strode back through the door into her cheery, sunlit study. Steam drifted off the teapot on her desk and her head was bent as she carefully wrote something. Sunlight gilded the burning copper of her hair, tracing the fine downy hairs at her nape.

  “Mrs. Marberry.” He leaned on the desk, looming over her.

  The pen stilled. Rosa looked up slowly, as if she’d heard the very controlled way in which he spoke. Those solemn brown eyes locked on his. “Sir Jasper,” she replied in that composed manner that drove him beyond endurance. “What may I do for you?”

  Shoving away from the desk—before he strangled her—he stabbed a finger toward his study. “Where is it?”

  “Where is what?”

  “Everything. My papers, my treatises, that bloody Tibetan document that is worth more than your life! All of it!”

  She put the pen down. “The filing cabinet behind you is empty. I put all of your papers in there. If you look, you’ll find them all in order. As for the Tibetan document, I have no idea what you speak of.”

  “The papers in front of the fireplace.”

  “That pile of chicken scratchings that was spread all over the settee, two armchairs and the rug?”

  “Yes.” The words came out between clenched teeth.

  Her eyes widened. “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t think it was important.”

  The blood pumped through his veins. He shut his eyes and pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, silently counting to ten. “That document was written in blood,” he said, “by an ancient Tibetan scholar. It is irreplaceable. They say the origins to the craving virus are hidden within its transcriptions. What did you do with it?”