Chapter 16 #2
Rubey, who was half-reclining on the opposite end of that furnishing, made a fetching picture.
She had strawberry-blond hair that curled around her face when not restrained, and where one could occasionally find a thread of gray.
Tonight she wore it in a loose tail gathered at the nape of her neck, little curls flirting with her temples and ears.
Her lushly curved but slender body reminded one of a peach in color as well as in taste, and Giordan fancied she even had a permanent hint of peach brandy in her essence.
It was, after all, her favorite libation, and he kept her supplied with an excellent selection of it.
Her face was more striking than classically beautiful—with wise green-gray eyes that tipped up at the sides and very high, sculpted cheekbones.
He’d never seen her in anything but the most expensive, fashionable clothing, and this was no exception.
Tonight she wore silky pale green with darker green and yellow ribbons that gathered up the bodice of her dressing gown.
Thanks to him, said bodice was loosened, exposing a vast expanse of breast and one marred shoulder, where slender trickles of blood gathered in the hollow of her collarbone.
“Why, and how long would it take me to count the ways,” she replied with a woeful shake of the head and the lilt of the Irish. Her eyes sparkled with wit and intelligence.
Giordan gave a brief smile and thought about loosening those ribbons at her bodice even more, but realized he wasn’t all that interested in pursuing that avenue tonight.
“Perhaps I could trouble you to name just one way,” he replied mildly, his thoughts slipping from the conversation to…other areas.
He rose from the divan, clad only in shirtsleeves and the current male fashion of pantaloons, and went to the cabinet. But of course they were in her private apartments, in a separate building from the pleasure house and the rest of her staff—most of whom were otherwise privately engaged as well.
“Very well,” she replied, and he felt her eyes on him as he poured a glass of whisky.
There were two small decanters of ruby-fresh blood from which he could add to the drink, but he wasn’t certain where they’d originated, and he dared not take the chance.
Ever since what he’d come to think of as the After Hell, he’d had to be very careful about where and on whom he fed.
“You changed the mouse traps,” Rubey mused as he poured her a small glass of the peach brandy.
“And that makes me unusual? The poor creatures were being crushed in the neck by the springs of the traps,” he replied, handing her the drink.
“Aye, and why should it matter to you? The mice don’t belong in my place, and I’m going to see that if they trespass, they pay the price,” she replied tartly.
“A bit bloodthirsty, are we?” he asked, aware of a niggling discomfort with her choice of topic. He was different now, and even Dimitri didn’t know about it all.
He just thought Giordan’s feeding preferences had changed…but it was so much more than that.
“But now the new traps, they let the little bastards just get captured until they’re set loose,” Rubey said. “To weasel their way into someone else’s house.”
“Better that than yours,” Giordan replied, and considered that it might be a good diversion to loosen those ribbons at her bodice after all. He settled back down on the divan much closer to her this time, his thigh lined up along where her skirts angled off the sofa.
“And then there’s the way you feed,” she said, eyeing him closely. “Sure as the day’s long, you’re not like any other vampire I’ve ever met. Excepting Dimitri, of course, but he don’t feed on anyone any way.”
“I am discriminating in my choice of libation,” Giordan agreed, sliding his fingers up to the ribbons and filtering his fingers through the loose knots. “Aren’t you?” he asked with a smile.
But of course, Rubey didn’t cast up her accounts if she partook of a piece of steak or a chicken leg….
He could still remember those black, bleak days when he hadn’t realized what was happening, and he hadn’t understood why he’d feed and then no sooner had he finished than it all came furiously, violently back up again. A vampire who couldn’t drink blood?
Thank the Fates for Drishni and Kritanu, helping him understand. If it hadn’t been for them, he’d have gone mad.
More mad than he’d already been, after Narcise.
Rubey made a moue of distaste. “Sure and it’s ironic, the way I run a house of pleasure for them who drink blood when the very thought of a bloody steak or the leg of a hen makes me ill. My pappa couldn’t ever understand why I was happy with only potatoes and greens.”
Giordan might have replied but his shift toward the ever-expanding exposure of her bodice was interrupted by a knock at the door.
“Blast it,” Rubey said, disappointment clearly in her tones. “What is it?” she called.
The door eased open and one of her servants—a large brute of a mortal man named Eduardo, whom Giordan didn’t wholly trust—stepped in holding a small silver tray. “A message has just arrived for Mr. Cale,” he said.
Giordan took the note, which was marked with Corvindale’s seal, and broke into it. “Meeting here tonight with Woodmore. Voss still in city. Come.”
He closed it up, a myriad of emotions running through him—the foremost and strongest being raging fury. Darkness. But Giordan drew in a deep, steadying breath and after a moment, his red vision and the pounding, trammeling need eased. His fingers relaxed.
There was a time when he’d have had no qualms, no hesitation about snapping the neck of someone like Woodmore—particularly since, several months back, he found the man in the rooms Giordan had let in London, preparing to hang his heart on a stake.
Some sort of gray-black smoke was trickling from the fireplace and Woodmore was caught off-guard by Giordan’s wakefulness during the day—and, he learned later, a misfunction of some sort of smoke explosion.
But those days of quick, efficient violence had gone, and when Giordan learned that his would-be attacker was none other than Chas Woodmore, associate and friend of Dimitri, he’d allowed it to end as a misunderstanding.
He’d even helped prepare the bastard for his mission to assassinate Cezar Moldavi.
But his easy assistance was before he’d responded to Woodmore’s request to meet him in Reither’s Closewell…and smelled Narcise. Everywhere. Everywhere on Chas Woodmore.
Even the information Woodmore had wished to share—that Cezar Moldavi had not, in the past decade, forgotten his obsession with Giordan—didn’t concern him.
After all, it had been a decade for Giordan as well. The ten years had been both interminable and all too brief, too close. Too raw.
Despite the change that had happened to him in that sunlit alley, Giordan still struggled and fought that bare, terrible need.
Now, he stood and made himself walk casually over to the chair where he’d removed his shoes, sit, and pull them on.
He’d known they were together, of course; that Woodmore had helped her to escape from Paris—or had abducted her. No one was clear on the details. But to smell her thus…so lush and rich and feminine. Narcise.
The moment was as if he’d slammed into a stone wall: he lost his breath, he felt the shock of pain reverberating through him, he turned numb.
After, Giordan wasn’t certain how he’d managed to make it through that meeting in the inn, once he’d caught her scent. It was the way it rolled off Woodmore, the way it seemed to permeate him and mix with his own essence…mocking and familiar and horribly insidious.
Disgust turned his vision dark and red even now.
He didn’t know whom to thank that Narcise had decided to go with Woodmore to London instead of having Giordan take her to Wales. He doubted he would have survived that trip with his sanity intact.
“Is everything all right?” Rubey asked.
Giordan wasn’t certain how long he’d been silent—he’d finished dressing and was starting toward the chamber door before she spoke. “A summons from Dimitri,” he said with an ironic tone. “When the earl beckons, one must answer.”
She was watching him with those shrewd eyes. “When will I see you again?” she asked. Not with petulance, not even with invitation—but as a businesswoman, scheduling an engagement. Rubey was no man’s woman through her own volition, and not for lack of being wooed.
“When next I need to feed,” he told her smoothly, then moved quickly back to her side. Pressing a farewell kiss to her temple, he said, “With your permission, madame.”
“Of course,” she replied haughtily. But he felt the weight of her curious gaze following him out the door.
The trip to Blackmont Hall, the residence of the Earl of Corvindale, was hampered by a carriage accident on Bond. Giordan didn’t begrudge the delay, for it gave him more time to mull, to consider, to settle. To decide if he even meant to go.
The streets were relatively quiet, for the shops were closed this late at night, but the thoroughfares were by no means deserted.
Carriages and hacks trundled by, many pedestrians skirted the shadows—some of them up to no good, some of them simply walking from one pub, club, theater, or party to another.
Giordan sat quietly in his richly-appointed carriage and considered how far the bounds of friendship reached. If it were anyone other than Dimitri, he would ignore the summons. When Woodmore sent him the secret message to meet in Reither’s Close, Giordan had gone—not realizing what awaited him.
But he did now. And he wasn’t certain he’d be able to handle being in the same chamber as Woodmore and not want to peel the man’s flesh from his body. Despite who he’d become.
Instead of dwelling on that, Giordan forced himself to review what he knew, wondering why Dimitri felt it necessary to have him present tonight.