Devil’s Kiss

by Zoë Archer

  “They are convinced my home is haunted,” Whit said. In contrast to his predatory gaze, his words were light, almost casual. He came farther into the room and set the candlestick upon the card table, revealing the scattered cards and gaming tokens.

  Zora’s dazzled mind belatedly realized he was referring to the servants she had scared off.

  “You have the power to exorcise me,” she answered.

  He did not hear her, or pretended not to. Instead, he began to gather up the strewn cards with the practiced hands of a gamester. As he bent to collect cards from the floor, he caught sight of the bedding she had arranged beneath the table and frowned.

  “Is the bed uncomfortable?” he asked.

  “Too comfortable.”

  He understood at once. Had she lain in the bed he provided, she would surrender to its luxury, fall into too deep a sleep. She wanted to be alert, prepared for anything or anyone. Someone could approach her as she lay, vulnerable and unaware, in the bed. Beneath the table offered greater protection. She would not sleep as deeply, and one would either have to remove the large table, or else crawl to reach her.

  A look of unease passed across his face. He saw her for what she was: his prisoner, trapped in his home and bound to his will through dark magic. There was nothing existing between them to gain a woman’s trust.

  She had been missing from her family for nearly a day. Were they looking for her now? Did her parents, her cousins go to the ruin calling her name? She prayed that if they did go to that cursed place Wafodu guero had long deserted it.

  “I brought you something,” he said. He held out his free hand, revealing that he carried a book covered in fine embossed leather. “If you are in need of diversion.”

  She did not move to take the book, instead crossed her arms over her chest as she stood on the other side of the table.

  A wry smile tilted the corner of his mouth, far too charming for Zora’s comfort. “Don’t you care for Fielding? He’s much less of a didactic bore than Richardson. I’ve even marked some of the good parts. There is a scene at an inn... . Just a moment... .” He rifled through the pages, searching.

  “Bribing your own captive is an odd practice, my lord.” When he glanced up, she added, “Besides, it is useless to me, as I can’t read.”

  “You cannot read?” he repeated, almost blank with surprise.

  She shook her head.

  “Can you write?”

  “Only this.” She traced the form of a Z upon the tabletop, and even this was an awkward, unfamiliar motion.

  “But ... you tell fortunes using cards.”

  “I’m not blind, my lord. There are pictures on cards.”

  He set the book upon the table. For a brief moment, he appeared a little lost, as though he’d awakened to find himself on a boat in the middle of the ocean.

  The division between them was not just the span of the polished card table, but of worlds. This house, with its heavy walls and substantial furniture, its servants and staircases, it was everything she was not. He—in his dazzling finery, an aristocrat by blood and bearing—was a breed apart. Chance alone brought them together the other night.

  Chance, or fate?

  Zora did not believe in fate. Unlike some of her superstitious kin, she believed in choices, the deliberate and precise decisions a person made as he or she journeyed through life. These choices defined a person, not merely the where and when of the person, but the why and who. Whit had made his choice when he made a bargain with the Devil, and now both she and he must live with the consequences.

  He saw this, too, as he stared at the useless book upon the table. Doubt flickered across his face. Zora saw it, with a sudden, sharp clarity. Whatever, whoever, he truly was, this role of Devil’s agent did not suit him, not really. He could yet be salvaged. She had to believe that.

  Or else my heart is a liar.

  “Do you hunt, my lord?”

  Her question startled him. “Seldom.”

  “Deer or fox?”

  “Grouse.” He chuckled at some memory. “Edmund gathered us at his hunting box in Northumberland for the Glorious Twelfth, but due to circumstances from the night before, we slept right through the day.”

  She could only guess what those “circumstances” might have been. Every word from his mouth proved how unalike they were, yet something within him reached out to her—the questing, hungry self that demanded answers. She needed to find and hold tight to that part of him, for there lay the possibility of escape.

  “You’ve seen a fox hunt, though,” she said.

  “A few. Not to my taste.” He glanced at a painting hung upon the wall. She knew without looking which painting caught his interest, for she had stared at it throughout the day. It showed a nameless man on horseback riding through the countryside. The horse was a beautiful animal, as sleek and glossy as sunlight, and its long legs stretched in the glory of movement. How Zora envied that horse and its rider.

  “It was all rather ... brutal,” he murmured. “The hounds, the riders. Chasing a single, small animal with no means of defending itself. No gamble in it. The end result was a foregone conclusion. It could only end in the death of the fox.” He turned from the painting to fix her with his cornflower blue eyes. The intensity of his stare verged on frightening. “I swear to you, Zora, I will never hurt you.”

  His vowed words sent bright thrill through her. But they were only words. Her trade in telling fortunes reminded her that words one person thought meant everything were only pretty, empty trifles to another.

  “Yet you do. Every moment you keep me prisoner.” She edged closer, though she kept the table between them. “Worse, you hurt yourself. Can you not see that?”

  She watched him waver, standing upon a ledge. Her heart climbed into her throat as he waged a battle within himself. The sun had set, and with the fire unlit, the only source of illumination came from the lone candle, so he was a figure of light and dark, gold and shadow. She had never seen anything as beautiful and frightening.

  So much of her life had been spent reading not palms but faces, studying the tiny shifts and changes that altered a person’s expression. She saw plainly the struggle in Whit, even though his face was a handsome, stern mask, no doubt the same mask he wore when sitting at the gaming tables. Which way might he turn? Would his better self prevail?

  She ventured a risk, edging closer still, and reached out to lay her hand upon his sleeve. Only her fingertips contacted him, the barest presence on his arm, yet it was as if the velvet of his coat were the velvet of his skin, for it was warm. The air surrounding him also held heat and the scent of bay leaves, clove, and male flesh.

  He did not move, though she felt the whole of his body tense.

  His lips parted, as if he was about to speak, and hope rose up like a bird for she saw in the line of his jaw that he had made a decision. He was not lost. He would let her go.

  Before he spoke, a cold wind gusted through the window. It was a sickly wind, full of damp and rot, thick with river stink and human sadness. The candle gutted and went out. Cards flew everywhere, swirling around Whit and Zora like shades. She could not see but felt their edges against her face and her forearms, and she raised her hands to beat them away. Cold crept down her neck. She shivered. Beneath the fluttering sounds of flying cards, beneath the wind itself, she heard whispers. Words without form, yet as sinister as a knife against the spine.

  She stumbled through the darkness toward the window. With several hard tugs, she managed to shut it. The wind cut off, and the cards fell lifelessly to the ground.

  The room became very still. Whit was only a large, dark form amidst further darkness.

  “My lord?” she asked. Then, tremulous, “Whit?”

  A flare and hiss as he struck a flint. The candle lit. It took a moment for her vision to adjust, from light to dark and back again.

  Zora’s heart sank. The mask was back, and with it, his darker self. He was harder than the flint he now pocketed, his ey
es both burning and cold. He looked the same. He looked entirely different.

  “I’m not done with you, Zora.” He said this with a proprietary malevolence, as if not only she but her name as well belonged to him for his exclusive pleasure. When he made to cross to her, reaching for her, she shrank against the chilled window.

  “Only by force,” she reminded him.

  Despite his profound alteration, he stopped in his tracks. A muscle twitched in his jaw. After a moment, he pulled out a chair.

  “Sit,” he said.

  She sat.

  He took a chair for himself, spun it around, and straddled it to face her. His long legs stretched out so that she was forced to tuck her feet back to keep from touching him. Despite the chair having a high back, he was tall enough that he braced his arms easily upon it. The pose was indolent. The shadowed force radiating out from him was not.

  “Tell me how to read someone’s fortune,” he said.

  “You have coin in abundance, my lord.” He had requested this before, yet still his demand mystified her. “There is no need to dukker for money.”

  His smile, small though it was, softened the severe edges of his face. “Oh, I could just see myself, hoops in my ears, wrapped in scarves. Going from house to house. ‘Cross my palm with silver.’” He held out a hand, and the candlelight gleamed on the band of his signet ring. A talented Rom could easily slip the ring from his finger, but finding a buyer for a ring emblazoned with a nobleman’s crest would be difficult.

  Still, Zora fought her own smile, imagining this vigorously male gorgio dressed like a Romani woman and knocking on doors for the promise of a few shillings.

  “If not for coin,” she asked, “then why learn to dukker?”

  “Because you know how,” he answered, lowering his hand. “And I want every part of you.”

  The bold simplicity of this statement made her shiver. “I’m more than a teller of fortunes.”

  “I am well aware of that.” His gaze roamed over her, burning her. “Yet this is where I will begin, and then delve deeper.”

  She did not know if Wafodu guero had enchanted Whit’s voice, but that seemed likely, since each word from his mouth caused a deep current of heat to rise within her. Protecting herself remained key, however, so she moved on hurriedly.

  “There’s no magic in dukkering,” she said.

  He raised a brow. “That is not what your fellow Gypsies say.”

  “The greater the hokibens—nonsense—the greater the profit.”

  “Like gambling. Sometimes it is better to bluff for a higher take.”

  She nodded. “The true skill lies in the reading of faces, not the lines on someone’s hand nor the lay of the cards.”

  “I know that well from the gaming tables,” he said. “To study every aspect of a player’s face, the discourse of their body. It’s called the ‘tell.’ I thought after years of experience and training I had no tells, but that is how you were able to cut me so deeply back at the Gypsy camp.” His mouth flattened, and she remembered with wounding vividness how she had neatly, callously described his character.

  “I was truthful, but not kind.” She glanced down at her hands in her lap. “That’s the surest way to earn no money.”

  “No profit in truth.” He considered this, and she looked up to see him enmeshed in thought, turning ideas over in his head as one might examine polished gems. “Yet you spoke the truth to me. Why?”

  She was tempted to lie, or make some evasion, but the subtle pressure of his magic bore down on her will. It felt like a ghostly hand drawing truth from a locked compartment. Frightening, and unpleasant. An answer leapt from her. “Because I liked you too well to treat you as just another source of coin. You deserved better than that.”

  His smile was slow and wicked, and more heat kindled inside her. “I liked you, too, Zora. Very much. I still do.” The low, carnal promise of his words left no doubt as to his interest.

  “The best way to gain what you want is to tell someone what they want to hear.” She tipped her chin up. “Shall I do the same with you?”

  He rose up quickly, a sleek, agile movement that showed how well his body moved. Zora instinctively recoiled, but he only paced the room, alive with barely contained energy.

  “Is deceit all you practice?” he clipped.

  Again, she had to respond with truth, which she found ironic, given his question. “Almost always. There are certain routine fortunes I tell, depending on the circumstance. Though people like to believe themselves unique, the truth is that the more I see of the world, the more I understand how very alike everyone is. It would be a little sad, were it not so profitable.”

  “Are people so easily gulled?”

  “You know as well as I that they are.” She raised her hands to her temples as though going into a mystical trance. “Three times you have been in great danger of dying.”

  He stopped his pacing to stand near the fire. “Surely no one falls for such tripe.”

  Professional pride had her spine stiffening. “I assure you, they do. Everyone likes to think they’ve encountered danger. Everyone likes to believe they escaped by either wiles or fate.”

  “Men, especially,” he said with a self-deprecating smile. “Plays to the romantic hero in us. Give me another.” He gestured for more.

  Zora lowered her voice, as she did when customers thought themselves too intelligent for dukkering. “At one time, you had great trouble with your family. They treated you poorly.”

  He nodded, approving. “Clever. Almost everyone has difficulty with their family.” Softer, reflective, he added, “Most of mine had the gall to die from fever, leaving me an earldom at the age of sixteen. And my surviving sister has never been particularly shy about her dislike of my fondness for gaming. We have not spoken or exchanged letters in nearly a year.”

  She wondered if he heard the sadness in his voice, the hints of a boy who too early assumed too great a responsibility. Little surprise that, having suffered loss, he turned to the controlled chaos of gambling, the small deaths and resurrections that came from a roll of the dice or lay of the cards.

  “My own family can drive me mad with their nearness,” she said. She stared at the heavy walls of the room enclosing her. “I didn’t think I would miss them, but I do.” It struck her with a surprising ferocity, the keen edge of longing for their familiar faces gathered around the campfire, as they told the same stories and badgered her with the same nagging complaints. Why can’t you be like Doro? She’s a good girl, never talks back, never asks too many questions. She’s not impulsive. Doro kept her husband.

  Maybe she didn’t miss them, after all. Or, at least, she shouldn’t.

  The shade of regret crossed Whit’s face briefly, but it slipped away. “And what of reading palms? Is it the same ... what’s the word ... hokibens?”

  His pronunciation of the Romani word was terrible, and she fought a smile. “There are many things that can be learned from a person’s hand.”

  In two strides, he crossed the room and stood before her, palm outstretched. “Show me.”

  Sitting made her all the more aware of his size and strength, and her own relative fragility. She was also level with his hips, and of their own will, her eyes moved from the broad, large hand he offered her to his groin. Did the size of his hands reflect the size of his ... ?

  Her face heated when he saw her speculative gaze. There’s only one way to find out, his eyes said.

  Zora cleared her throat and focused on his hand, taking it between her own. It was much bigger than hers, and she cradled it between her two palms. The sensation of his hot skin against hers felt like a cascade of sparks from a stirred fire. It made no sense. She touched the hands of men many times, impersonally, professionally, and not once did any of them affect her as Whit’s did. Who would give a man hands such as his, for what purpose, if not to entice a woman or make her think of what his hands might feel like on her body? Perhaps his mother or father had also been in le
ague with the Devil, asking for a child who would one day grow to be a man of darkest temptation.

  Through her lashes, she saw color rise on the high bones of his cheeks, a fever-stain of awareness that she shared. In the tendons of his wrist, his pulse beat hard and fast, just as her own raced. It was as if some unseen threads stretched between them, tying them to one another, possessors not only of their own bodies, but each other’s.

  “Hands are covered with lines,” she said, her voice embarrassingly short of breath. With the very tip of her finger, she traced the lines on his palm. His skin was free from calluses save for one upon his index finger where he rested his quill when writing. “Life line, head line, heart line.”

  “Love?” The word, spoken lowly, held a powerful, seductive resonance. “In the shape of one’s hand?”

  She looked up at him, but the intensity of his gaze was too much, too demanding. Quickly, she returned to her study of his hand. “Some might tell you that in the course of the line, you would see the person you are destined to love, if that love will be a happy one or full of sorrow. If you cleave to those you love, or whether you play them false.”

  A question whispered in her mind: Would he be faithful to his woman, or inconstant? Good God, she didn’t even know if he did have a woman. It was entirely possible. Clearly, he wasn’t married, but wealthy gorgios had lengthy engagements, and the men kept mistresses.

  It did not matter if he was betrothed to a simpering gorgie or if he kept dozens of women for his personal pleasure. It did not matter, for he was a wicked man. So she told herself.

  “Some say,” he repeated. “But not you.”

  “A hand can reveal many things. Age and sex, of course. Whether you’re wealthy, or whether you are a laborer. Does ink stain your fingers? Is there dirt beneath your nails? Does your hand smell of perfume or gravy?” She shrugged. “A story is contained in someone’s hand, but it doesn’t provide prophecy.”

  “The tell is not only in someone’s face,” he said, meditative, “but their hands. I see that at the gaming tables, as well. If a man clutches his cards, or holds them loosely. Does he continually shuffle and rearrange them? Is he feeling the cards for marks, or trying to mark them himself?” His chuckle felt like a stroke of velvet along her neck. “Never thought there might be so many parallels between Gypsy fortune-telling and a gentleman’s game of chance.”