A Clockwork Christmas

by JK Coi, PG Forte, Stacy Gail; Jenny Schwartz

Roderick wasn’t surprised at the arctic chill of Cornelia’s tone. Nor was he surprised to discover she had her tiny gun with her as she stood in the doorway, fully dressed in a high-necked dress that would have done a pious preacher’s wife proud, with a multi-buckled coat on top of that. She couldn’t have made it any plainer she felt she needed layers of armor to feel safe around him.

  Another dagger of hypocrisy sliced through him when all he could think of was tearing at those layers as if she were nothing more than a Christmas present he couldn’t wait to get his hands on.

  “I did leave.”

  “Your continued presence seems to be an unfortunate contradiction.”

  “I left your room. I thought that was what you meant.” It was difficult to turn his attention back to the chicken, but he managed. And while he knew he should be more worried about turning his back on a vexed woman with a loaded gun, the real reason he had trouble pulling his eyes from her was simple. Now that he had seen her naked, he couldn’t help but imagine her as anything else.

  Maybe he really was the pervert she thought him to be.

  “So.” He cleared his throat because the need to groan was overwhelming. “Are you hungry, Peabody?” He certainly was, though his hunger had nothing to do with food.

  There was an ominous beat of silence. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you where you stand.”

  “Besides the fact you’re not a killer, you wouldn’t dare.”

  “Oh, you’re so sure about that, are you?”

  “Of course.” He slid the chicken onto a platter that had been hiding in a cabinet by the sink, and set it on the kitchen table while watching her out of the corner of his eye. Since his casual air seemed to have her flummoxed, he fought a smile and turned his attention to tossing the vinaigrette in with some fresh spinach he’d found in the icebox. “I’m the only one who knows how to disarm the timepiece. If I die, so do you.”

  “Perhaps I’m angry enough to not care.”

  “Perhaps. But I doubt it.”

  “Your home was broken into and it inspired you to go to lethal lengths.” She shot a meaningful glance at the timepiece. “Am I not allowed the same deadly fury at your invasion into my private sanctuary?”

  “That’s not what I meant.” He looked up at her once more and kept his expression elaborately indifferent. If she had any inkling he was picturing her bountiful, rose-tipped breasts lifting with every breath, he might very well wind up a bullet-riddled corpse before the night was through. “I’m just certain you’re a survivor, and right now you need me to survive. Ergo, no matter how incensed you are, I’m as safe as houses with you.” He gestured to the table. “That doesn’t mean I expect to be given a free pass. Feeding you is the least I can do to make up for…” Seeing you naked. “The hullabaloo upstairs.”

  She stared at him with that unnerving stillness, but for the first time he noticed her midnight blue eyes were far from still. They raged with a silent storm of violence and fury and passion, and every last sizzling drop of it was focused on him.

  He had to have a loose wire somewhere to find that unbearably arousing.

  “Considering this was the dinner I’d planned to make for myself, I’m not spiteful enough to let it go to waste just because you made it.” With a whisper of fabric Cornelia allowed him to seat her at the table, then to his secret relief she set the Lady Derringer beside her plate. “But hell will be a happy winter wonderland before I’ll thank you for it.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to.” He set about filling their plates, then poured a sparkling white wine from a bottle that had been covered in dust before he sat next to her. “Do you like to cook?”

  “I cook so I don’t starve.” She stared at her plate with a lift of her brows. “This looks…good.”

  “No need to sound so shocked. The best chefs in the world are men.”

  “It’s not that.” As if somehow suspecting a trick, she sliced off a bit of chicken, sniffed at it, then took it tentatively into her mouth.

  By damn, he never knew it was possible to envy a fork.

  “It is good.” It sounded almost accusatory. “Your family has servants, Coddington. Why do you know your way around a kitchen?”

  “I’ve always enjoyed cooking. The science behind it relaxes me.” Absurdly pleased to see her tuck into the meal with gusto, Roderick picked up his own utensils. “Why don’t you have any household help?”

  “What makes you think I can afford it?”

  “I know the value of a Fabergé egg,” he drawled. “And that’s just one of many treasures which have passed through your talented hands. You can afford an entire staff, yet you have no one.”

  “That’s the way I like it. I never allow anyone inside. Which, of course, doesn’t seem to stop you,” she added with that bittersweet smile which never failed to get under his skin. “Here you sit, in all your glory.”

  “Here I am,” he agreed, but it was absent. Even as he had spent weeks keeping Cornelia under surveillance, it had never occurred to him in any substantial way that there was no one in her life. She worked alone, lived alone, slept alone. She defined the word solitary. “Doesn’t anyone notice you lead an unusual lifestyle?”

  “As a woman who lives a quiet surface-life, I’m all but invisible.”

  “Ah.” Roderick nodded and sipped at the pale wine. “That I understand. Someone very dear to me once said she wished she had been born a male, if only to be seen as a force to be reckoned with.”

  “Beth?” Then she abruptly shook her head, as if she had a bee in her ear. “No, don’t answer that. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to care. I will not care a damned whit about you, Coddington.”

  Stunned into momentary silence, Roderick waited for the anger to appear but instead all that whispered through him was a sorrow-tinged resignation. “I suppose you learned that name from my mother, who gave me quite the talking-to once she learned you were ignorant of Beth’s existence.”

  “I don’t know why. I tried to convey we barely know each other.”

  “Regardless, she is right. You should know who Beth is.”

  “I told you, I don’t care.”

  “You said you don’t want to care, and you should. Beth is the real reason behind this.” He hooked a finger beneath the timepiece and felt her start when his flesh met hers. The hungry desire stalking inside him growled and surged again, until both his collar and his pants felt much too tight for him to remain rational. How long was he supposed to just sit there and not do something about a woman who jumped at his touch? A woman, moreover, whose lush nudity seemed to be branded onto his eyes?

  How was he supposed to not go insane?

  Cornelia stared at his hand as though she couldn’t figure out how it had pierced her isolated sphere of existence. “I thought this had to do with a Fabergé egg.”

  “The egg belonged to Beth.”

  “Belonged?” Her midnight gaze jerked to his. He felt its impact all the way to his tightening gut. “I assumed that egg was somehow a part of the university, like the rest of the house, and you were merely a steward of all of it.”

  “It’s true a professor’s salary is nowhere near enough to buy such a treasure. The egg was a gift from a friend of the family to Beth, who adored it beyond measure. She died only a week after you stole it.” The pain of it had lessened, which was odd. A week ago he had been so filled with vengeful fury he could hardly think straight. “She was born sickly—always so fragile with a heart that never really worked right. But there was never a time when she wasn’t a cheerful ray of sunshine, bringing love and joy to everyone who knew her. She found contentment in her limited life by writing in her journals or devouring every book she could get her hands on. But most of all she loved the beauty of art, and that egg most of all.”

  Cornelia was still, her eyes downcast as he spoke, before she dislodged his hand by poking at the salad with her fork. “You should eat, your food is getting cold.”

  “Last winter Beth
took a turn for the worse—influenza, the doctor said. The sickness very nearly did her in, and I think she may have suffered a mild heart attack,” he went on with a dogged relentlessness he couldn’t explain even to himself, while Cornelia pushed the food around her plate with apparent disinterest. “But through it all, my Beth remained cheerful. And do you know when she smiled the most? Every time she opened the egg so the gold cherub hidden within would rotate on its pedestal. She once promised she would be just like that angel and watch over me when it was her time to go. Then the egg vanished, and along with it, Beth’s smile. And shortly thereafter, her life.”

  Cornelia sprang to her feet, her chair sliding with a wince-worthy screech across the floor. He surged to his feet as well, his hands clamping down on her shoulders before he was even conscious of moving.

  “What’s this? Trying to run from the truth?” A dangerous recklessness swelled in him so fast he couldn’t stop it, and it mingled with the unwanted hunger he had no hope of taming. Like a man hanging from the edge of a cliff he could feel himself slipping, slipping, and there was nothing he could do to save himself. “What’s the matter, don’t you like hearing about the consequences of your actions? Don’t you like knowing you broke the heart of a dying woman, someone who was my other half? Don’t you care?”

  “You’re daft to ask such a question of the likes of me,” Cornelia raged at him through gritted teeth. “I don’t give a damn about anything concerning you, or that blasted egg.”

  “You bitch.” For a terrifying moment when he didn’t recognize himself, Roderick actually feared he might do her harm. Then he saw the tears. In eyes she tried to hide from him in a mixture of desperation and shame, he saw the unmistakable glitter of tears.

  His little thief was weeping.

  “Get out of my house,” she all but shrieked, pushing against his chest. “Take your sob story to someone who has it in them to care, but make no mistake—that someone isn’t me. To care is to be weak, and I will never allow myself that weakness.”

  “That’s enough out of you,” he bit off, fisting his hand on her damp hair. “Stop using that mouth to spew lies at me.”

  “I’m a thief, right? How else am I supposed to use it?”

  “Like this.” At last slipping off his inner cliff of reason, Roderick covered her rebellious mouth with his own.

  There was a wound somewhere deep inside Cornelia, a slow, dragging anguish that made her want to curl up and die if she couldn’t find a way to shut it up. Shut it out. Bury it with all the other hurts that had amassed along with her infinite list of sins. But she couldn’t. No matter how hard she clung to the one absolute rule that caring was weak, Cornelia couldn’t manage to shut it all out. And she knew why. She hadn’t stolen from the faceless wealth of a prosperous university, as she had thought. She had stolen from a sick and dying woman. And in so doing, she’d stolen that woman’s last reason to smile.

  No wonder Roderick thought of her as a thing.

  The punishment of his plundering mouth was the least she deserved. That was what this kiss was—a punishment. Roderick’s need to make her pay was a seething, palpable thing. She could taste it in the unforgiving crush of lips, feel it in the hard hand gripping her hair so tightly it made her scalp tingle. There was no way she could fight against it even if she wanted to. And she didn’t. The punishment was just. She could endure this sensual retribution, as long as she remembered there was nothing more behind it than an enemy’s desire to bring her to her knees. Surely there could be no other reason for him to slide his hard lips over hers until their fit was hot and wet and so perfect it bordered on painful.

  Or for his tongue to fence with hers, coaxing her into a hungry jousting match that turned her legs to rubber and made her feminine core throb with a frantic need.

  Or for his hands to rake down her back to cup her backside, pushing her into the turgid thrust of his manhood to the point where she could feel every inch of him despite the layers of clothing between them.

  Punishment, all. And she wanted it to last forever.

  Feverish heat swept over her like a strange, invisible fire. Her bones melted with it until she thought she might be glowing. Her world rocked like her steam-powered dumbwaiter did when it blew a gasket, and it took her a moment to realize it was because her knees were on the verge of taking a holiday. Instinct had her wrapping her arms around his shoulders so she wouldn’t fall in a heap, but it was another instinct that had her fingers spearing through the cool silk of his golden brown hair. This new instinct was so powerful it demolished her rule of keeping her distance. In that moment, distance was the one thing she didn’t want.

  What she wanted was Roderick.

  “Cornelia.” She felt her name more than heard it, the merest disturbance of breath that nevertheless raged with a desire so fierce it would crush anything in its path. For a sweet moment stolen from the stream of time, she wallowed in the possibility he might be as overwhelmed by this seductive retribution as she. How wonderful it would be to explore this sensual fire Roderick ignited in her. He was such a driven, passionate man, and he knew her as well as she knew herself. She would never have to hide what she was from him; he already knew her every dirty little secret.

  And he hated her for it.

  “No.” Cornelia wrenched herself free from his embrace as something vital cracked inside her chest. Reality flooded in through that fissure, until it drowned the illusion Roderick’s seductive touch had woven. “I won’t allow this…this madness.”

  His breathing sounded as disturbed as she felt. “It’s not entirely up to you.”

  “Have you forgotten? We agreed we wouldn’t feign familiarity, didn’t we? I’m nothing more than Peabody to you, just as you are Coddington to me. Considering we’ll never see each other again after I retrieve your beloved Beth’s egg, I think that’s for the best. Don’t you?” Please say no. Please say no…

  By degrees, his expression hardened into the cold mask she now knew well. “Of course.”

  Damn.

  “Very well, then.” Terrified the disappointment would shine like a beacon in her eyes, Cornelia launched into the task of clearing the table. “Now that we’ve reestablished our roles, I’d like to know why you’re here. I doubt you merely had a yen to cook me dinner.” Or see me naked.

  No, indeed. It was quite clear that in Roderick Coddington’s eyes, she was some lesser thing just short of a murderess.

  “Where else would I be? It’s the end of the day, and I know you’re highly motivated to reacquire the egg. It makes sense I’d want to know if you’ve made any progress in digging up its location.”

  The well of gloom drowning her from the inside out sank deeper. “Thankfully its location is still in Boston. Not so thankfully, it now resides in Irish Paddy’s private residence.”

  “Irish Paddy?” Roderick’s brows drew together as he absently brushed a thumb across his lower lip, as if searching for one last trace of her kiss. Then she called herself all sorts of a fool for thinking such drivel. “Someone named Irish Paddy is now in possession of a virtually priceless Fabergé egg?”

  If Cornelia hadn’t felt like an exposed nerve, she might have laughed at his tone. “It’s not surprising you’re not familiar with that particular name, Professor. But I can assure you every shady character in Boston knows Irish Paddy runs this town, or at least its dark underbelly. He’s the one who bought the egg. All I have to do now is steal it back.”

  “I see.” And it appeared he did, if the grim line of his mouth was any indication. “I take it this isn’t going to be easy.”

  “Nothing like this ever is. But I have the beginnings of a plan, and I have you to thank for it, at least in part.”

  “Me?”

  “You’re the one who mentioned a certain Shakespearean work that went missing from a famous university around here,” she said with a vague shrug, stacking plates on the drain board to be washed. “And while I’m not saying I was the one responsible for that theft,
I will say this—special objects require special equipment, usually because those objects are exceedingly difficult to get to. Considering Irish Paddy’s digs are as well fortified as that manuscript’s former residence, I feel safe in saying I have a tried-and-true method of getting in without detection.”

  The look he gave her was dubious. “And that method would be?”

  “Why, Coddington, I would have thought it was obvious. I’m going to fly.”

  Chapter Six

  “This is the most foolhardy idea I’ve ever heard.”

  “And yet another reason why I’m a happy, happy girl when it comes to working alone,” Cornelia said to no one in particular. “I never have to listen to anyone’s opinion save my own.”

  The first day of winter had decided to put its best foot forward with a beautiful morning. The sky was a washed-out blue, the air was crisp and clean, and an added inch of new snow lay on the ground to dazzle the eye. As Cornelia walked beside Roderick through a nearly deserted Boston Common, she might have enjoyed the cheery brightness of the stark winter scene. Sadly, enjoyment didn’t seem to be on Roderick’s list of priorities.

  Being difficult was.

  She had been naïve to think she might be able to get away with seeing neither hide nor hair of Roderick until evening. That naiveté had hit her the moment she had stepped out onto the front stoop, only to find the good professor climbing out of his sleek Locomobile with the kind of determined expression one might wear when setting off to wrestle a bear —and win.

  Little did she know she was the bear he had in mind.

  “There are so many variables that could go wrong on this venture,” Roderick went on. As he had gone on for the past ten minutes, though pointing that out at this juncture seemed an exercise in futility. “There are other ways of getting Beth’s egg back than that hare-brained scheme you outlined last night.”

  “What do you suggest? Ringing the front bell and politely asking Irish Paddy to give it back?”