Chapter 8 #2
Music was one more new element in a world full of them. Pleasant as it was, the tune brought his head up and his senses to full alert. Someone was nearby. Stephen hurried down the hall toward the sound, opened the drawing room door—
—and saw Miss Seymour.
She stood in front of the windows, the city lights casting a pattern of light and shadow over her coiled hair, with her hands cupped around something that gleamed bronze.
As Stephen entered, she lifted her head and turned, full lips parting in surprise before she spoke. “Good evening, Lord MacAlasdair.”
Over the past few days, he’d come to know that careful, polite tone as the sound of drawn steel: not striking out, but very prepared for an opponent’s blow and letting him know it. Even if that opponent hadn’t thought of himself as an opponent. Even if he was in his own house.
“Miss Seymour,” said Stephen, “I wasn’t expecting to find you here.”
“Oh? It looked like a public room,” she said. Very carefully and very visibly, she put the music box back on the mantel. “I thought I’d look around a bit. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” he said, as he more or less had to at that point. “Any room I care much about is locked.”
“And you won’t give me a ring of keys to test me?” Miss Seymour smiled thinly. “Probably just as well.”
“Yes,” said Stephen. “I wouldn’t be sure of you passing.”
“I’ll have you know I respect privacy quite well, once I know something is private.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” Stephen leaned against the mantel.
He could turn the lamps on, of course, sit down in one of the chairs, and wait for the staff to come back, but somehow he was disinclined toward any of those actions.
In the dim light, with him and Miss Seymour both standing, talking to her felt more natural, as if they were in some scheme together—which, in a way, he supposed they were.
It had been a long time since he’d had a partner in anything he did.
His siblings and his cousins had their own interests; few other people knew exactly what he was, and those were either servants or had different loyalties as well.
Miss Seymour wasn’t a real partner, of course, he reminded himself, but he’d take what moments he could.
“Any news?” she asked.
“A little. The Americans had a gentleman resembling Ward in custody a few years ago. In Boston, it was. There was a young man bringing accusations. Breaking and entering, he said, but it never came to anything, and they released the man. It might not have been Ward. Though it did take place in…esoteric circles. Spiritualism and that. Rather a troublesome sect, too, from what little I could find.”
“What happened to him then?”
“We’ll be trying to find that out. Among other things. If he’s in London now and still interested in magic, I’ve a few places I can go with that.”
Miss Seymour nodded slowly. At her side, her long, graceful fingers played with the plain material of her dress. “This might take a while, then,” she said.
“That it might,” said Stephen. Was the girl that impatient to be gone? Not that he wanted her as a visitor, but God knew he’d treated her well enough. “I told you as much.”
“You did,” she said almost absently, and then went on in a much firmer voice. “When do you go see Professor Carter?”
“Tomorrow, most likely.” The professor had probably been right about his danger, or lack thereof, now that he had the bracelet. All the same, Stephen wanted to keep checking since Carter wouldn’t be able to sense something like the mist.
“All right,” said Miss Seymour. “I’ll go with you.”
“You’ll be doing no such thing,” Stephen said immediately.
“And why not? I’ll be with you. Then I’ll be with the professor and you.
Then I’ll be with you again.” Miss Seymour snapped her hands outward, illustrating a void between them.
“There’s no time when I can say anything to anyone, is there?
Besides, I’ll have to give him letters to send to my family, won’t I?
Unless you want me receiving my mail here. ”
“You want to send letters,” said Stephen. He remembered and cursed the existence of the penny post.
“Of course I do. I can’t go home on Sundays now, can I? And I’m not likely to let my family think I’ve died or—been kidnapped.” Miss Seymour gave an ironic little chuckle. “Truth aside.”
“I didn’t kidnap you.” Stephen almost growled the words, though he hadn’t intended to. He could feel his control slipping: not of his shape, not precisely, but of this shape’s reactions and of the situation as a whole. “If you hadn’t noticed, we’re in a bit of danger—”
“And writing to my family, or seeing the professor, isn’t going to make Ward any more of a threat to you than he already is. People already know I’m here. What are you worried will happen?”
“I don’t know. I can’t know. And if you keep springing your own plans on me—”
“Oh, yes.” Miss Seymour tossed her head back, and Stephen followed the slim, proud arch of her neck with his eyes even as he heard her sneering at him. “God forbid your captive have plans. Or ties to other people. Or anything that doesn’t go your exact way.”
A few steps forward let Stephen glare down at her, a look that had gotten him through many a conversation in the past. “I’ve been very generous wi’ you so far, Miss Seymour.
I’m prepared to continue that course of action, up to a point, but I’m a man of limited patience. Must you always be arguing with me?”
Her eyes flashed cobalt fire. “When you’re being unreasonable, yes!”
“Unreasonable, is it?” The words came from deep within his chest, as deep as the impulses he stopped trying to resist. Reaching out, he wrapped an arm around Miss Seymour’s waist, then pulled her forward.
Now her slender form was a hair’s breadth away from him, and the anger on her face was rapidly changing to surprise.
“Lass, you don’t know what unreasonable is. ”
Miss Seymour’s mouth opened again. One hand grabbed at Stephen’s arm, while the other came up to his shoulder. Before she could push him away or make whatever snide comment had occurred to her, before she could say anything at all, Stephen bent and kissed her.
She froze against him for a second. Stephen almost let her go then, as the human part of him asserted itself. The feeling of Miss Seymour in his arms had his blood pounding almost at once, but he wasn’t in the habit of tormenting women. He began to relax his grip on her—
—and then her lips parted beneath his and the stiffness in her body became tension of another sort entirely. Her fingers curled into the fabric of his coat. Pressed against his chest, her breasts rose and fell rapidly; and she kissed him back with inexpert—and perhaps unconscious—hunger.
That was the end of thinking for Stephen just then.
With one arm, he drew Mina—he couldn’t keep thinking of her as Miss Seymour, not now—even closer, pinning her to his body, feeling the outline of her through far too many layers of cloth.
She could feel him, Stephen was sure. He was hard and aching, hungry as he’d almost never been for a woman, even in his youth.
She didn’t draw back from his arousal, though she did catch her breath.
Stephen wound his free hand in her hair and kissed her more deeply, stroking his tongue against hers and sliding his other hand down from her waist.
His palm was gliding over Mina’s hip when she pulled away. She shoved at him when she did it, the hands that had been clenched on his coat now flat and forceful. The gesture wasn’t quite as good as a bucket of cold water, but it sufficed. Stephen dropped his hands and took a step backwards.
Panting, Mina stared up at him. Her hair was disheveled now, light-brown strands tumbling down around her face. Her eyes were dark and her lips slightly swollen, but the face she turned on Stephen was full of cold anger.
“That didn’t prove a bloody thing,” she said, the East End as thick in her voice as Stephen had ever heard it. “Not one thing, my lord. An’ if you try winning an argument that way again, I’ll leave straight away, an’ you and your money can both go to Hell.”
She spun on her heel, her loosened hair almost hitting Stephen in the face, and stormed out.