Chapter Five
Highgate Cemetery
The present…
Alaric buttoned his waistcoat with the sort of military precision one might use to hold back a goddamn flood.
One. Two. Three.
Thea stood several feet away, mouth kiss-bruised and fingers pressed against the lip of a cracked headstone like she hadn’t just brought him to his knees.
He shouldn’t have touched her. He absolutely shouldn’t have kissed her.
He most definitely should not have rucked up her skirts and palmed her arse like a starving man at a feast.
And yet here they were.
Highgate Cemetery. Six in the bloody morning. Her photograph trunk half open. His hands still shaking. And the overwhelming, undeniable fact that he wanted her. Still.
“Pick up your things,” he said sharply.
Thea blinked at him. “Excuse me?”
“Your trunk, Miss Blackwood. Your photograph plates. The charcoal rubbings. The bag you dropped when I backed you against a crypt and nearly lost my soul.”
Her lips twitched. “Well. Someone’s in a mood.”
He ground his teeth and swept up the last of her pencils. “I warned you.”
She adjusted her cloak, wet from the mist and torn slightly at the hem. “You kissed me.”
“You mouthed off,” he snapped. “Repeatedly.”
“You cuffed me.”
“And you enjoyed it.”
She grinned, the minx. “You’ve no proof.”
He stalked toward her and loomed like a storm. Her eyes lifted. Chin too. God, she was stunning when she was defiant. “I am trying,” he gritted out, “to do my job. To uphold the law. To not let the fact that you taste like sins and cinnamon talk me into dereliction of duty.”
She blinked. “Cinnamon?”
“Focus.”
“I am focused. You, on the other hand, look like you’re about to combust.”
“I am combusting!” His voice echoed through the tombstones.
She arched a brow. “Bit dramatic for a detective inspector.”
“I kissed my fiancée in a cemetery at six a.m. while technically in the process of arresting her,” he hissed. “That is not in the bloody Metropolitan Police manual.”
“Should be.” She gave a soft hum.
He turned away before he said something truly idiotic, like, Marry me now; I’ll carry your blasted camera to hell and back.
Instead, he ran a hand through his already-ruined hair, exhaled like it physically hurt, and bent to retrieve her blasted bonnet where it had fallen at some point during her trespassing.
When he turned back, she was looking at him with something softer in her gaze. Something dangerous.
“I made you a promise,” he said finally, voice low. “To protect you. Even from yourself. Especially from yourself.”
“And I,” she said, stepping closer, “never asked you to.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“It should.”
“It doesn’t.”
They stared at each other, fog curling between them like ghosts listening in. Then, quietly—too quietly—he said, “You’re not going to stop, are you?”
“No.”
“Bloody hell.” He reached for her elbow. Not unkindly, but firmly. Possessively. The gesture of a man clinging to professionalism by a single unraveling thread. “We’re leaving,” he said.
She didn’t move.
He stepped closer, voice a near growl now. “Now, Miss Blackwood.”
That earned him a glare.
“Fiancée or not,” he muttered, “I swear I will toss you over my shoulder and carry you out of here if you test me one more time.”
She tilted her head, lips curving. “Is that a threat or a promise?”
*
Above them, unseen in the misted veil between realms, two women looked down…
“Did he just threaten to carry her off like a sack of potatoes?” Celeste hissed, perched on the edge of a tomb.
Alice adjusted her ghostly shawl, delight written all over her translucent face. “I do hope so. He’s got good arms for it.”
“Your granddaughter is about to get ravished against a tombstone.”
Alice squinted. “Well, not anymore.”
Below, Alaric was officially out of patience. He stalked toward Thea with all the rigid fury of a man who had tried to be reasonable and was now done playing nice.
“Alaric,” Thea warned, backing up one step. “Alaric—don’t you dare—!”
Too late.
He scooped her up like she weighed nothing at all—one shoulder jammed into his chest, her boots flailing, skirts flouncing with offended drama—and hefted her over his shoulder in a single flex of repressed desire and primal frustration.
“Put me down!” she shrieked, pounding at his back.
“No.”
“You caveman! You arrogant, cravat-ruining, sanctimonious—”
“I said,” he snapped, gripping her more tightly, “we’re leaving.”
She kicked, graceless and furious. “You’ll regret this, you absolute donkey’s—”
“If I had a sovereign for every time you said that, I could retire to Bath.”
“You utter, unrelenting menace of a man!”
He didn’t even blink.
Above them, Alice clapped in delight. “Oh, he’s so in love.”
Celeste rolled her eyes hard enough to disturb the veil. “He’s a repressed peeler with a superiority complex and questionable impulse control.”
“And he adores her.”
“He’s going to get her arrested.”
Alice beamed. “Don’t you just love love?”
*
Thea wasn’t entirely sure how she got slung over his shoulder, but here she was, draped like a mildly stunned throw pillow against one very broad, very pissed-off man.
Alaric was stomping through Highgate like a man personally offended by fog. Early morning dew clung to the tips of ivy, the air pungent with turned earth, grave flowers, and expensive shaving soap she had no business noticing.
“You are manhandling me,” Thea huffed, wriggling against the iron clamp of his arm around her thighs.
He gave her a firm, scandalized squeeze in response. “That’s rich, coming from a woman who tried to lick my tonsils open behind a mausoleum.”
“You kissed me first!”
“And I’m clearly suffering the consequences,” he snapped, voice low and growly and so unfairly hot that she wanted to bite something. Maybe him.
He deposited her unceremoniously on her feet the moment they reached the main path, jaw locked and hair messed from where her fingers had tugged it—definitely not gently.
And yet he didn’t back away. In fact, he looked like he might just kiss her again, despite the very real risk of divine retribution and ghostly gargoyle assaults.
Thea adjusted her corset with as much dignity as she could muster, which was exactly none. “You don’t get to just throw me over your shoulder like I’m—”
“I absolutely do,” he growled, straightening his waistcoat with a force that suggested it had personally betrayed him. He kept walking, face tight, boots crunching over gravel as the sky bled peach above the trees.
She fell into step beside him, pulse still riotous, nerves jangled and fraying. She wanted to slap him. She wanted to climb him like a gothic ivy trellis. She needed tea. Whiskey. Tea with whiskey.
They turned past a winding path—and that was when she saw it.
Her family’s burial plot.
The Blackwood names were etched in timeworn stone: Alice. Celeste. A third space beneath, blank. Thea’s.
But there, just beside the curve of her grandmother’s headstone, was a newer plot. Unmarked. Fresh. Waiting.
She frowned. “Who’s that for?”
Alaric didn’t answer at first. He paused in the path, eyes hard on the moss-covered stones, something unreadable bracketing his jaw. “For me,” he said roughly. “Between Alice and your mother. That’s the one I bought.”
The world tilted.
Thea blinked. “You… bought a plot.”
He nodded once, curtly. “If I’m going to spend eternity surrounded by Blackwoods, I’d rather face the firing line than be left outside the fence. For you. With you. Always, Thea.”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Her entire brain was white noise.
He was standing beside her family’s plot, and he was telling her, with the same level of intensity one might use for confessions or crimes of passion, that he had purchased burial real estate next to her family.
Her family.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, the words catching on a laugh and a sob and an existential crisis. “You meant it. Last night—when you proposed—”
“Yes.”
Her knees nearly buckled. “So we’re… engaged.”
“Yes.”
“Like…really.”
He exhaled, stepping closer, the heat of him curling around her in the cool dawn air. “Thea Blackwood, I’ve never been more real about anything in my life.”
She stared up at him, heart thundering, lungs collapsing, and her soul halfway to the veil.
And still—still!—her only coherent thought was: Damn, where have those shoulders been hiding all these years?
*
Beyond the veil…
“Well,” said Alice with a satisfied sigh, perching primly atop the wrought-iron fence of the Blackwood family plot, her ghostly skirts swaying gently in the breeze. “He’s finally gotten his hand on her thighs. About damn time.”
Celeste groaned and pinched the bridge of her transparent nose. “I threw a gargoyle arm at them, Mother.”
“Yes, after they went at it against a tomb.” Alice grinned. “I was about to be a literal grave prop in their pre-coital theatrics.”
“You’re dead,” Celeste snapped. “They can’t see you.”
“Which is why I appreciated when you launched a very tasteful bit of stone architecture,” Alice said brightly. “For dramatic effect. And look how nicely it worked. A delicious, unresolved yearning now simmers between them. Spectacular tension, really.”
Celeste narrowed her eyes. “You’ve been reading those penny dreadful novels again, haven’t you?”
“Only the ones with the shirtless inspectors.” Alice preened, glancing toward the cemetery gates where Alaric’s retreating form had vanished. “And this one could crush a ribcage with his arms alone. I’m terribly proud of her taste.”
Celeste moaned into her ghostly hands. “He kissed her in a cemetery, Mother. In my cemetery. While she’s still wearing mourning lace.”
Alice floated off the fence and spun in midair, her glee so potent that the ivy seemed to twitch in response. “She’s alive, Celeste! Gloriously, radiantly alive—and she’s finally got someone who might actually keep up with her without losing his trousers or his temper.”
“He nearly arrested her.”
“Yes,” Alice cooed. “Twice. It’s practically foreplay.”
“I don’t want to know that,” Celeste spat. “I don’t want to haunt that.”
“You’re haunting it right now, darling.”
Celeste scowled and drifted toward her own headstone, arms crossed. “She should be safe. Settled. Married to someone reasonable, like that nice widower with the bakery—what was his name? He made excellent currant buns.”
“He thought the moon was watching him,” Alice said flatly. “Anyway, this one—this brooding inspector with a tragic childhood and barely suppressed desire? That’s her match.”
Celeste made a long-suffering sound and slumped onto her own grave. “You’re unhinged.”
“I’m invested,” said Alice cheerfully.