You Only Love Twice (London Steampunk: The Blue Blood Conspiracy Book 3)

by Bec McMaster

  "I don't know if it's safe to stop," she said, glancing up. Shouts echoed down through the tower. "I don't know what's going on—and I don't intend to find out."

  Blue bloods were dangerous, and it was the humans around them—like her and her sister—who often suffered when they were caught up in blue blood schemes.

  There was no knowing where her husband was, but he could take care of himself.

  Indeed, she'd be surprised if Malloryn even gave her a thought.

  It would probably be convenient if I died here today.

  Not if she could help it.

  "Oh, my goodness!" Hattie suddenly burst out. "Is that blood? There's a... a dead woman."

  Adele's head snapped sharply around.

  A trail of darkened blood smeared the red carpets just around the corner. A handprint of bluish red marred the perfect ivory walls, and a door leading into the room beyond swung eerily open.

  In the middle of the carpet lay a woman in bloodred skirts, her dark hair tumbled across the floor and a coat covering her face.

  "Is she—?"

  "Stay here." Adele's ears started ringing, as she swept toward the fallen stranger.

  There was no pulse in the woman's throat, and someone had clasped her hands across her breasts in a position of repose. Adele swallowed hard and lifted the coat to see who had—

  She let it fall the second she saw what remained. Gorge rising, Adele turned away swiftly. Oh, my goodness. Hattie stared at her in shock, her lovely blonde curls swept into an elegant chignon and her face paling when she saw the horror on Adele's.

  "Who is it?" Hattie whispered.

  Adele could barely speak. She pressed the back of her hand to her lips. Baroness Schröder. Her husband's mistress.

  That poor woman.

  And I hated her.

  "What's going on?" Hattie's voice grew small. "They're fighting upstairs, and there's a dead woman in the halls, and..." Her green gaze flickered to the bloody handprint on the wall and the door that lay ajar. "And someone's hurt."

  Adele recognized the darker color of the blood. Whoever was bleeding, they weren't human.

  And someone had killed the baroness.

  A blue blood?

  Adele swallowed hard. There was no time to give in to hysteria. "Stay here. I'll see if he's still breathing." There were so few female blue bloods it had to be a man who'd left that much blood on the floors.

  "Are you certain that's wise?"

  An excellent point. If they were injured, then they might be potentially dangerous. Who knew what the craving might do to a blue blood who was weakened—and hungry? "You hurry past. I'll try and latch the door so he can't come after us."

  "I don't want to be out here with her!"

  "She's not going to hurt you. She's dead. I'll shut the door so we can safely pass."

  Adele prepared the hemlock ring on her finger, flicking one of the fine silver thorns out. Hemlock beaded at the tip like a raindrop.

  One that could drop a blue blood where he stood.

  Creeping toward the door, she reached for the handle, a nervous flutter turning her insides to mush. If someone leapt out at her she was probably going to scream.

  Then hemlock him.

  Except there was nothing moving in the room inside.

  Adele's breath broke from her lips in relief, and she swiftly yanked the door toward her to close it and—

  That was when she saw the man's boots.

  Adele froze.

  A man lay on the floor inside, a bloody trail leading from the door to his body, as if he'd dragged himself as far as he could before he passed out. Buckskin trousers caressed a firm backside and the white silk of his waistcoat—court attire—was ruined.

  She took a cautious step inside, prepared to flee at any moment if he leapt up from the floor, but he didn't move.

  One hand was outflung, his fingers slackened as if he'd been trying to reach for something.

  There was a gun on the floor, barely three feet from his outstretched arm.

  And worse.

  Adele would recognize the gold signet ring on his finger anywhere.

  "Malloryn," she gasped, shoving the door open wide enough to allow her skirts.

  Her husband lay unmoving, a spreading pool of darkened blood puddling beneath his chest. For a second she thought him dead, but the faint wheeze of air through his chest revealed life—even if the sound of it seemed like a steam engine on its last gasps.

  Adele rushed to her fallen husband's side, rolling him onto his side.

  He wasn't moving.

  Was barely breathing at all. Blood ruined his trousers, both knees a sticky and wet mess. Bruises mottled the side of his face, and his chest—

  He'd been shot at least four or five times.

  Adele took stock. This hadn't been an altercation between a blue blood and his mistress. There was no way the baroness had managed to inflict this much damage upon him. Someone else had done this.

  "Is he dead?" Hattie whispered from her vantage point in the doorway.

  Adele found the flickering pulse in his throat. Blue bloods were insanely difficult to kill, but the blood.... Everywhere.

  "You've barely been married a handful of days, and you might already be a widow."

  Adele leaned over him. With his eyelashes closed over those dangerously piercing eyes, and his lips faintly parted, Malloryn looked almost peaceful. Nothing like the broodingly intense duke who'd told her the night of their wedding she'd be keeping a cold married bed for the rest of her life.

  "Do as you will, Adele. I don't give a damn. As long as you don't do it near me."

  "You'll inherit enough to live your own life, Adele," Hattie said in a wondering voice. "Mother and Father shall never be able to touch you again, and you won't have to deal with him ever again."

  "Hattie," she admonished.

  She didn't want her husband dead. She never had.

  He wasn't... cruel.

  Merely indifferent.

  He hates you, a little voice whispered.

  But he'd saved her from a life of penniless dependence upon her mother and father, who'd been pushing her to make an alliance with lords she hated—and couldn't trust. Malloryn didn't have to marry her, after all.

  She owed him.

  And he needed blood.

  Badly.

  "Shut the door," she said firmly as she flipped open Malloryn's waistcoat, searching in his pocket for the small bloodletting kit every blue blood lord carried about his person.

  Hattie gasped. "You're not going to bleed yourself! Adele, he's unconscious and injured! You know the rules."

  Every thrall worth her brass knew the rules.

  Blue bloods were dangerous in an unconscious or injured state. During their lessons in etiquette, pianoforte, flesh rights, blood rights, and dancing, their instructor had told both girls what to do in the event they gained a happy thrall contract.

  Don't ever approach an injured blue blood.

  Don't ever cut yourself in front of a hungry blue blood.

  Don't ever fight him if he grabs you, or cuts you. It only excites them more.

  Surrender. Surrender and you might just live.

  Well, she was done surrendering. She'd finally found a way to protect herself, and Malloryn wasn't going to bloody well thwart her now.

  "I cannot just leave him here! He needs blood." And like it or not, she was the only one who was available to offer it.

  It would barely hurt at all.

  She knew from experience, even as her heart gave a threatening lurch. Adele gritted her teeth as a flash of memory overtook her, leaving her momentarily struggling on a garden bench under the weight of Lord Abagnale as he shoved her down and slashed her throat and took what he wanted from her, regardless of how much she begged.

  She locked it all away, refusing to allow those vile creatures to drag her back into the shadows that haunted her. She was Adele Cavill. She wasn't about to let a bunch of pasty-faced vultures scare h
er.

  And Malloryn could tear at her all he liked. The hemlock ring on her finger wet her knuckles, ready to hand him a hefty dose of paralysis if he lost control of himself.

  It might almost be worth it to see the look of shock on his face if she had him on the ground at her feet, and at her mercy.

  We'll see who doesn't give a damn then.

  "Get out of here," Adele said firmly as she found his kit and removed the thin lancet he used.

  Setting it to her wrist, she paused. The wrist was less intimate, but she needed her hands free so she could paralyze him if she needed.

  It had to be the throat.

  Adele undid her ornate choker from where it hid her scars and dropped the pearls on the floor.

  Hattie's eyes widened in fright. "Adele!"

  "Go. He won't hurt me."

  And this was something she didn't want another to witness.

  She didn't want to scare her sister, for Hattie was still young enough to believe she'd make a happy arrangement and be loved and cherished by her future master.

  Adele couldn't bring herself to shatter Hattie's foolish dreams.

  Hattie slammed the door shut, leaving her in the dark with her husband.

  Adele cut herself swiftly, dragging her fingers across the small mark. Another scar to add to her collection, for she doubted Malloryn would have the wherewithal to use his saliva to heal her wounds at the end.

  "Malloryn?" she whispered, reaching out with bloodied fingers to waft them beneath his nose.

  His head turned as he drew in a sudden, sharp breath.

  Adele let her fingertips trace his mouth. It was the closest she'd ever been to him, and her heart was suddenly pounding.

  If one was being strictly honest with oneself, then one could concede one's husband was a physically fine specimen.

  And that was almost the outmost limit of "ones" she could allow in a single sentence.

  Perfect chiseled lips. The slant of a hawkish grace to his cheekbones. The allure of his broad shoulders, and those lean hips that cast an excellent cut to his coat and trousers.

  Malloryn was the epitome of dangerous, moving with all the fine instincts of a predator in broadcloth. She often watched him when he thought her eye elsewhere, for it wasn't as though she'd ever know him. Physically.

  But for one brief second, she was allowed to touch him....

  His tongue darted out, touching the sensitive pads of her fingertips and tasting the blood there. A drop of blood slid down over her collarbone and pooled between the hollow of her breasts.

  His lashes fluttered.

  Black pupils absorbed all the merciless color from his eyes, and her breath caught when she saw how deep in the darkness he was. He wouldn't even know her in this moment, and it was said that a blue blood in the grip of the craving was at the mercy of his basest, most primal instincts.

  Malloryn hated her for what she'd done to him.

  What if he tore her apart?

  The thin veneer of civility was gone. Obliterated. All that remained was hunger and need and sheer, furious desire. There was no sign of her ice-cold husband in his black eyes when he looked up at her. The craving had him in its thrall.

  He lifted his head, the air wheezing through his punctured lung. Adele swallowed hard and helped ease him to her throat.

  "You need a little blood, Your Grace," she whispered, for brash, calculating Adele was nowhere to be seen.

  Traitor.

  All that was left was her stammering pulse and the sudden tension in her lower abdomen, and a small blossoming seed of hope she'd thought she'd extinguished.

  Malloryn's breath exhaled across the upper slope of her breasts, his gaze locking on that trail of blood as she drew him higher. Something cool and wet met her skin, and she gasped in surprise as she realized it was His Grace's tongue. He licked the blood from between her breasts, his hand sliding up the slope of her ribs just beneath the curve of her breasts.

  Instantly, heat flushed through her. "Your Grace!"

  Well within his rights, of course, but she'd never been touched there. The experience was worlds away from the diagrams she'd been shown and the exotic painted pictures of how precisely a man would take a woman.

  And a part of her wanted him to move that hand higher, until it lay on her skin, cupping the soft weight of her breast....

  Not to be, of course.

  For that was when the predator awoke.

  Fingers curled around her throat, wrenching her head to the side, and Adele gasped as her husband rose above her with swift demonic hunger, his tongue tracing from her breasts to her throat.

  Hunting the source of it.

  The shock of his heavy weight slamming her down to the floor drove the breath from her lungs. Then his cool mouth was upon her throat, and he sucked. Hard. Adele cried out as a pulse of aching need lit through her body, ending right between her legs. It was the first time he'd willingly touched her, apart from the moment he slid the ring on her finger during their consort ceremony.

  "Malloryn!"

  Her legs were spread obscenely, Malloryn's narrow hips pressing insistently between them. This wasn't what she'd expected.

  Don't fight him.

  It was hard to disobey her instincts, her skirts crushed between them and her hand fisted in his hair.

  Adele lay back and surrendered, her heart pounding rashly through her veins and the ring resting innocuously against the back of his neck. A single twist of her hand and he'd be poisoned.

  But she needed to get some blood into him first.

  It took long moments to realize this was not the same as all the other times she'd been forcibly bled.

  Malloryn's cologne was so familiar, she couldn't mistake whom she was with. And she'd chosen to allow this, which made all the difference. His thumb began to stroke her throat as he drank, sliding down to her collarbone, then lower, as if tracing the pattern of her veins. Fingertips brushed the lace covering her breasts, and Adele died a small death as she squirmed beneath him.

  Oh, God.

  It felt... incredibly good.

  There was also, she suddenly realized, a rather insistent part of him pressing intimately against her thigh.

  "Malloryn?" she gasped as his hips thrust against her.

  She was no innocent. There'd been rather detailed lessons on a young lady's flesh rights and what to expect if she chose to give them to her new protector.

  The act of taking blood was a sensual one, with the chemicals in a blue blood's saliva inducing release. Indeed, though she'd never felt the merest hint of pleasure in all the times she'd been cut and bled, she could feel it curling through her now with insidious, stroking fingers.

  The situation changed.

  Adele's swollen breasts pressed into her stays, the flesh between her thighs growing damp as Malloryn rocked against her. His hand cupped her breast, squeezing faintly, and Adele's eyes went wide with shock, for she was fairly certain he was going to deflower her on the floor of the Ivory Tower in a pool of blood if she wasn't careful.

  "Malloryn! Stop!" She slammed an open palm to his shoulder.

  He drew back with a gasp.

  Rested his forehead on her shoulder for a long, drawn-out moment, his hand stilling on the curve of her breast.

  Adele lay equally still, her heart rabbiting in her chest as though a dozen hounds hunted it.

  Well. This was awkward.

  She cleared her throat. "Your Grace. Are you feeling better?"

  "Adele?" he rasped, as if her identity until that moment had been uncertain.

  For a brief second, Adele regretted not hemlocking him. "Of course it's me. Who did you damned well think you were... rolling about on the floor with?"

  Malloryn raised his head, his mouth dark with her blood, the move driving his hips between her thighs as he strained to lift himself.

  Adele squeaked.

  He looked utterly horrified and jerked his hand away from her breast. "What the devil are you doing?"


  "What does it look like?" she snapped.

  He stared at her, those black eyes still hungry, but a vague hint of uncertainty resting within them, as if he actually didn't know what she'd been doing.

  "Relax, Your Grace," she said in an acid voice, though her cheeks flamed. "I was hardly trying to force a consummation. I found you on the floor. You were barely breathing, and you needed blood. Ergo, I gave you blood. Our current predicament is due purely to your intentions."

  He pushed to a sitting position, tearing a handkerchief from his waistcoat pocket and blotting the blood from his lips as if he'd been poisoned. "You gave me blood?"

  Somehow Adele pushed to her feet, swaying a little as her head swam. Her skirts were all in disarray. Her body rampaged. She nearly tipped over, but Malloryn was suddenly tucked under her arm.

  "You've given too much," he accused, as if she'd had a choice in the matter.

  "Again, not by choice."

  He'd overwhelmed her. Not by force, but by sensation.

  Adele suffered the horrible feeling she'd been about to reach her pleasure beneath her husband.

  Malloryn caught her chin firmly, examining the gash on her throat. She thought he muttered "Rutting hell" under his breath before he leaned down swiftly and licked the wound to try and seal it.

  The small gesture almost made her eyes dampen.

  She had a dozen scars there. Small, white little slashes that marred the perfection of the throat. Used goods, in a blue blood world.

  There was no need to, but she appreciated the effort, for no one else had ever given a damn.

  "You need to sit," he snarled, towing her toward a nearby chair. "What the hell's going on? How did you get down here?" He looked around sharply as if a thought occurred. "The queen."

  "Haven't you heard all the ruckus?" she asked in a bemused voice, still feeling. "I'm fairly certain someone set off an explosion near the throne room. And there's a body in the hallway. Your mistress, I think."

  There went the last traces of his discomposure. Malloryn went shockingly still, reverting to his icy persona.

  "Are you all right?" he demanded.

  She nodded. "Hattie's out in the hall. I didn't want her to see."

  "Good. Stay here."

  Then he limped toward the door, his right leg dragging, as if he'd already forgotten her.