“Stephen!”
The door banged open. Stephen stood in the doorway, human, alert—and bare-chested. “Good God, Cerberus, what—”
“Burglars. In your bedroom.” Mina spoke as quickly as she could, gasping for breath between the words. “I think Ward sent them.”
A short Gaelic oath sprang from Stephen’s lips, and he turned his blazing eyes on her. “Are you all right?”
“Fine. They never even saw me.”
“Keep behind me, then,” he said and strode out into the hall.
Mina followed, though not too closely. Two people were better than one only as long as she didn’t end up a hostage. She’d be close enough to help but not to be in danger. She was also close enough to see the play of muscles in Stephen’s back as he walked. She hadn’t intended that, but it helped her morale.
Halfway up the stairs, they could hear loud, rhythmic thumping. When they reached the hall, Mina could see the door to Stephen’s bedroom shuddering under blows from the other side. The chair was still roughly where she’d left it, but the edge under the doorknob was beginning to slip.
Stephen turned his head and flashed her a smile: wide and white, and probably terrifying to anyone who’d come up against him on a battlefield. Then, in one quick and noisy motion, he hurled the chair away from the doorknob, yanked the door open, and burst through.
Caught in the process of striking the door, Fred and Bill stumbled back away. They recovered more quickly than Mina would have liked, finding their feet and realizing that they outnumbered the new arrival. After a quick glance, they rushed Stephen, one with a knife and one with a short club.
Stephen moved like a dancing flame, ducking away from the knife and letting the club glance harmlessly off his hip. With an elbow to the face, he sent the man with the club down to the floor. Then he spun around, and his fist smashed into the knife-wielder’s jaw just as his booted foot took out the thug’s legs.
It took maybe a minute. Mina wasn’t exactly a stranger to fights, having taken George home from the pub often enough before he’d left for the sea. Still, she was now left standing, opening and closing her mouth like a carp.
Stephen straightened himself up and rubbed absently at his side. “There’s one that could bruise a bit, I’m thinking,” he said. “Not too shocked, are you?”
“No!” Mina answered, pride putting force into the half-truth.
“Good. We’ll be needing to tie these up,” said Stephen, “and ask them a few questions before we bring in the police. Best make it quick—and it’ll go quicker with the two of us.”
Twelve
Once Stephen had a moment to look at the burglars without trying to hit one or the other, they proved to be unremarkable-looking enough. One was young enough to still be spotty; one was old enough to have lost most of his hair.
Bound with several of Stephen’s cravats—Baldwin was going to have a few things to say about this entire evening—the younger burglar shifted nervously, to the extent that he could, and looked between Stephen and Mina. “What’re you gonna do now?”
“That depends on you, I should think,” Mina said. Ice clinked in her voice. In her dark dress, with her hair loosened by her run through the house, she looked like the more attractive sort of avenging angel. “You got yourselves into this situation. I’d imagine you can get yourselves out, if you can be clever.”
The man looked from her to his still-unconscious companion, chewed on his lower lip, and then sighed. “What do you want,” he asked, “and what’ll you give me for it?”
“Who hired you and why and when and where.” Stephen crouched down beside the thief. “You tell us, and perhaps you won’t be seeing the inside of Newgate any time soon.”
The threat of the law had lost some of its power. Fifty years ago, he’d have mentioned hanging or transportation. Perhaps mortals’ fears adapted as easily to a changing world as everything else about them did, though, for the name of the prison made the thief’s face go pale beneath its spots.
“We never got a name, m’lord.”
“You must know what he looked like, though,” said Mina. “Hooded cloaks stand out a bit these days.”
“Tall and kind of fat. Dark ’air. ’Is collar was turned up, though, and it were dark where we met.”
“And where was that?” Stephen asked.
“Dog an’ Moon, m’lord. Cable Street.”
Mina’s eyes flickered for a second, but she didn’t volunteer anything. “When did you first enter into your arrangement?” Stephen went on.
“’Bout three weeks ago, or the like.”
“Then this wasn’t the first job you did for him,” said Mina. “What was that?”
The thief looked down. “Deliverin’ a package, ma’am. Through a letter slot, it was.”
“Ah,” said Stephen, not at all surprised. “How did you meet?”
“The barman there sometimes passes word on to us, word of jobs and that. ’E’s the one set up the meeting.”
Stephen nodded. “What was your job this time?”
“’E wanted us to look around. Tell him about anything odd we saw, take anything we thought was important, that sort of thing. Said nobody’d be about at this ’our. Never should’ve trusted ’im for that. Bloody toff.”
“Watch your language,” said Stephen, though Mina’s face hadn’t changed a bit at the words. Indeed, he’d heard her use similar terms, though rarely. Still, he felt a need to make the gesture. “Anything else?”
“Not for ’im, no.”
“When did he hire you for this job?” Mina asked.
“Two days back. Said we’d get money when we brought ’im the crown.” The young man sighed. “That’s all I know of it, m’lord, I promise.”
He was, as far as Stephen could tell, speaking the truth. Stephen sighed and got to his feet. “For what it’s worth,” he said absently, “I very much doubt that he would have followed through with the payment he promised you. And I suggest that you avoid his company in the future.”
“Yeah, o’course,” said the young man. Perhaps he meant it; perhaps he didn’t.
It probably didn’t matter either way. He and his companion hadn’t seen enough of the house—or of Stephen—to be a threat. The police couldn’t get any more useful information from them than Stephen already had and wouldn’t know how to follow up on it anyway. At least, Stephen’s prior experience with Scotland Yard had led him to expect no great feats there.
Stephen bent and picked up the knife from where it had fallen. It was cheap work. Even if its wielder had landed a blow, the blade might have broken before doing Stephen any real harm. The club had been more effective—he had a sore place just under his ribs now—but there was something visceral and intimidating about a knife, and he didn’t keep them lying about his bedroom these days.
“Would you be kind enough to untie our visitor?” he asked Mina.
She set to work, her slim fingers flying over the knots. The cravat fell away, leaving the young man rubbing his wrists.
“Get up,” said Stephen. He adjusted his grip on the knife—casual, but not too casual, just enough to make the thief aware of its presence. “Pick up your friend.”
That process involved some grunting. “’E’s heavy,” the young man said.
“That’s very unfortunate for you,” said Stephen. “Now walk.”
At knifepoint, the two thieves went out the door, through the hall, and down the dark staircase. Stephen followed closely behind, as did Mina, who had stopped briefly to re-arm herself.
At some point, Stephen thought, he’d just have to give her a poker, perhaps one with her initials on it. Certainly she looked as natural holding the thing as anyone could under the circumstances.
At last, after a dim and silent journey that was mercifully free of further incident, they reached the back door. Stephen stepped forward and jerked it open, then gestured to the small street beyond, where a gas lamp barely cut through the growing night. “You’d best be ge
tting on your way, hadn’t you?”
The young burglar started forward, moving slowly under the weight of his older companion. As they crossed the threshold, Mina spoke again.
“I’m going to send for the police now. I’ll tell them I saw someone lurking around the house. It’ll take them”—she looked off down the street and did a few mental calculations—“oh, about ten minutes to get here, I should think. If you move fast, I might just be a silly girl spooked by the fog.”
Then she shut the door.
“I don’t suppose,” she said, looking up at Stephen, “that this sort of thing happens often?”
“It’s the first time of it to my knowledge,” he said and then cleared his throat. “I’ve you to thank for making sure they didn’t do worse or see more. You had no reason to risk yourself the way you did.”
The flush on Mina’s cheeks deepened, and she shrugged. “A hundred pounds seems a fair reason to me. I don’t go back on a bargain.”
Being tactful, she didn’t add whatever you may have thought.
She was looking down again, Stephen noticed, and her hair fell across her face. Tired? Worried? He stopped at the foot of the stairs and put a hand gently on her shoulder. “Is anything wrong? Other than the obvious, I mean?”
“I—no. Not really. Um…” She took a breath and then gave a what-the-hell sort of shrug.
Oh, this was going to be good.
Thirteen
“What happened to your shirt?” Mina couldn’t believe she was even asking. “What I mean to say is, well, you were fully dressed last time I saw you. And you’d just transformed then. So I was wondering if everything was all right, or you’d had to turn back quicker than normal—”
But why would Stephen have speeded up his transformation now, if he hadn’t the first time they’d met? Mina’s mind caught up with her mouth and left her momentarily silent.
Of course, he’d already fought off the shadows when she’d first seen him transform. He must have known then that Mina wasn’t a threat. He hadn’t known anything earlier that night except that she was alarmed.
Not that Stephen would have rushed things for her sake. The thought made her feel slightly dizzy. No, there was no reason for him to take Mina into consideration, and if he had, it had only been out of obligation or chivalry.
Why was she even thinking about it?
Why wasn’t she finishing her sentence? Stephen was starting to look amused.
Mina grabbed for the dangling ends of her thoughts. “—or if there was something wrong. Besides housebreakers.”
She said a brief and silent prayer that it was too dark for Stephen to notice her blushing. Then she realized that it didn’t matter. Her voice had gone up substantially over the course of her question, and a broad grin was spreading itself over Stephen’s face.
He hadn’t taken his hand off her shoulder, either. It was resting there very lightly, probably the gentlest contact Stephen could manage, and yet a good half of Mina’s awareness was focused on its weight and its warmth, even through her clothes.
The other half was conscious of Stephen’s smile, the way his eyes turned up at the corners—and the bare expanse of his chest rising pale and firm from his dark trousers.
“A new shirt, I should think,” he said, looking down at himself for a second, as if only now considering the situation. “The problem with being a gentleman in this day and age, truly, is that you’ve got a fair bit of clothing, and most of it looks the same.”
The girl from Bethnal Green said we should all have those problems inside Mina’s head, but it was the professor’s secretary—and the woman looking for distraction—who spoke aloud. “What do new clothes have to do with it?”
“The law of contagion. No’ germs or anything—” he added, as Mina’s eyes widened. “The magical meaning’s older than that. It says if two things—or people—have much to do with each other, they start being part of each other. So if I wear something often enough, the magic thinks it’s a part of me, and it transforms back and forth. If I don’t, the transformation destroys it.”
“Oh.”
The explanation made sense. It was even interesting. But it didn’t do what Mina had intended. It didn’t take her mind off the facts at hand, namely the fact that Stephen wasn’t wearing a shirt and was standing rather close to her.
She took a long breath. The house was dim; they were alone; and every inch of her skin had suddenly become twice as sensitive as normal. This wasn’t the time to give in to any kind of impulse.
But she only had so much self-control, and surely intellectual impulses were better than the other sort, and information could always be useful, so she asked. “Two people?”
“Aye,” he said, and his accent was getting thicker again. He still hadn’t removed his hand. “’Tis harder to use the connection there. A man changes a great deal with the years, you see, and an object is often changeless, or nearly so. But we’re part of each other. People, that is. Someone threatened Carter and it brought you here, after all.”
“That’s not magic.”
Stephen shrugged, and the muscles in his shoulders flexed a little with the motion. “As above, so below. The rules arena’ that different, in the end.”
“So—” Mina caught her breath.
No, she wasn’t going to ask. Questions that began with “So you and I” would not lead anywhere remotely productive or good or wise. The phrase “you and I” was a very bad one, particularly when Stephen was looking down at her, only a few inches away, and he smelled rather like wood smoke, which she didn’t want to notice, either. It should have reminded her that he was a dragon and she should be afraid.
Instead, she wanted to step closer and rest her face against his neck.
Bad idea. Bad idea. The whole thing called for a lighter topic.
Unfortunately, she’d started speaking before she realized the only thing that came to mind: “Why were you wearing a new shirt, then? If you knew that.”
“The maids don’t know it,” Stephen said, “and Baldwin doesna’, exactly. It was never truly a problem. Not—”
“Not until I came along,” Mina said, quirking a smile.
“Something of the sort, aye. In this particular case, though, I’ve no objections to your presence. My awareness isn’t quite the same when I’m transformed, and they could easily have seen too much if you hadn’t been there.”
Now Stephen did move his hand, but he didn’t drop it. Rather, he slid it up her arm and along the line of her shoulder, then her neck. Finally he traced his fingertips down the side of her jaw before cupping her cheek in his hand.
She should move now, Mina thought, or push his hand away, or at least say something. There wasn’t an etiquette guide in the world that would say this situation was proper, especially not with what had come before. She felt frozen in place, though. The world seemed to have stopped; she definitely didn’t think she was breathing.
She didn’t particularly want to start again.
“Cerberus,” said Stephen, and this time Mina didn’t mind the name as much. Stephen’s voice mocked himself this time, and praised her. “Guarding my doorstep this time. I should ha’ known.”
“Oh,” she said, light and breathless and a long way away from her actual mind, “this is all a bit pleasant for the underworld, you know.”
“I’m no’ much judge of that,” he said, “but I’m glad to hear you say it.” His fingers moved slightly against her face, stroking the skin behind her ear. “You’re certainly a much less terrifying defender. And a much more appealing one.”
Stephen’s voice fell on the last sentence, and for a moment, the quiet, husky tone of it overcame the last of Mina’s restraint. She took one small step forward, put her own hands on his shoulders, and lifted her lips to his.
Even caught up in the moment, she was a little uncertain at first. It had been a long time since she’d kissed a man, and she usually hadn’t initiated the process back then. Besides that, Stephen was ta
ll enough to make Mina worry that she’d judge the angle wrong and end up kissing his chin or his nose. The first brush of her lips against his mouth was light, tentative.
The fire it ignited was enough to drive her past any uncertainty.
All the same, the kiss was gentle this time too. Mina heard Stephen catch his breath as she leaned against him. The hand that had cupped her face was at the back of her neck now, fingers stroking down her spine, but he let her take the lead, responding to the pressure of her lips and the light touch of her tongue.
Beneath her hands, the muscles in his arms were bunched and tense. There was as much power in him as there had been when he’d pulled her to him in the study. He was simply containing it now. Leashing it.
The realization was as heady as the feeling of his skin beneath her fingers.
She took a step forward. That brought her breasts against Stephen’s bare chest, sending a delightful sort of ache through them and turning her nipples instantly hard—and her knees weak. Stephen slipped his other arm around her waist then, so it was a very simple matter just to lean into him, to trust him to take her weight while she melted against his body.
Kissing a man, apparently, was one of those things that came back quickly. If the sensations were far stronger, the skills at least had stayed.
Realizing as much gave Mina more mental satisfaction. She wouldn’t come off as a complete novice in this area. A nice girl probably wouldn’t have been glad about that. A nice girl wouldn’t be standing in a deserted house and kissing a man she barely knew.
Nice girls missed a great deal.
She broke the kiss, but not to pull away. Rather, she indulged her impulse of a few moments before and turned her face to rest against Stephen’s neck. The wood-smoke smell was stronger there, mixed with a very human masculine aroma, and when she ran her tongue experimentally up to Stephen’s ear, he made a rough and inarticulate noise.
Also, the hand at her waist was now cupping her backside. Very nicely, too. Then there was pressure, so she followed it, letting Stephen draw her right up against him.
Legend Of The Highland Dragon Page 9