Chapter 5 #2
Persephone woke the next morning to an empty bed.
And an empty room—all their luggage gone but for her clothes and a note telling her to meet him downstairs.
Thank God he’d gone before her. She could breathe fully.
And dress without being observed. The tingle of attraction had entirely dissipated.
She wouldn’t touch the damn rings until she had to put them back in the tomb. But which tomb?
And that question sent her looking, once dressed, for her traveling companion.
She found him in the dining room on the ground floor of the inn surrounded by a crowd.
He’d glamoured his face again, and he wore the same features he’d worn the day before as they’d traveled. He lifted both arms to the ceiling.
Which was no longer a ceiling. It was a view of London, the entire city skyline arched over their heads.
“No need to travel south,” the duke was saying, “when I can show you the great capital’s beauty in the comfort of your own home.” A smattering of applause made him preen.
“Who is he?” a maid near Persephone asked.
“Dreamy,” another maid sighed.
The other tittered.
Persephone thought he looked better as himself, though.
“But he must have a title, or he couldn’t do that.” The first maid gestured to London on the ceiling.
“’Spose so.” The second maid screwed her mouth to the side. “Does it matter which one he is?”
“It does indeed matter,” the duke said, bowing low. He’d heard them, and he was coming their way. “I am the Earl of Givesly.”
“You’re a lying liar is what you are,” Persephone muttered. Of course he wouldn’t use his own name. But had he used another man’s name or had he made a name up? Likely the former. It wouldn’t bother him to start rumors like this about a peer.
As long as that peer was not him.
“I’m stuck far from home,” Morington said, “and I’ve lost my purse, but I’m willing to give you a show for a bit of a price. So I can get home without wearing my feet out entirely, you understand.” He caught the maids’ attention and winked.
Persephone crossed her arms over her chest and scowled.
He saw her and grinned, and—oh hell. Her attraction to him was not gone. It sizzled to life with ease, as if it were a spark in her gut, and one look from him was a breeze surging it into hot, leaping life.
Morington prowled toward her, and a flash of purple was the only thing that ripped her attention away from the dark intent boiling in his eyes. Her gown had once been a sad color between blue and gray. Now it was deepest purple, pressed and neat and new. He’d glamoured her gown.
And he’d reminded her that the attraction she felt for him was all too real. The rings had only made her act on an emotion that had already existed. An emotion, attraction, that coursed through her now.
“What the hell, Morington?” She tried not to appear shocked, though, because he was linking their arms and tugging her toward the middle of the crowd.
“My wife,” he said, voice raised, “the lovely Lady Givesly.”
“I’ll give you something—”
He kissed her, a thorough taming that kicked her knees in. Her fingers gladly clawed into the hair at his nape, and her arms gladly clung to his strong frame. She was a ninny. A lust-addled ninny.
But damn the man knew how to kiss.
“Good morning,” he drawled, ending the kiss. He dragged his lips across her cheek and whispered in her ear, “Play along, dear.” Where he held her hands pressed between his, he slipped a ring onto her finger.
Oh God, had he gotten into her bag? “No. Not again. I wo—”
“Don’t worry. I fixed it.” He turned to the crowd. “I would travel all the way home without any comfort whatsoever, but I refuse to ask my wife to suffer.” He laid a hand against his heart, and with the other, he lifted her hand and kissed her knuckles. “I bend my pride for you only, darling.”
Heaven and hell and all the demons between them.
This man was a menace. And she couldn’t control the raging fire burning across her face.
She tried to take back her hand, but he held fast and the chorus of delighted aws rippling across the room locked her into a charade he would pay dearly for later.
“Turn your vision to the heavens above!” he cried.
Everyone did.
She inspected the ring instead. What in the world did he mean he’d fixed it? It was indeed the same gold band she’d worn last night. But she no longer felt the hypnotic heat coursing through her.
All she felt was irritation as he whipped off his hat and set it on the ground at their feet.
“Give what you can for the spectacle, friends, and I will give it back times three. When you do make it to London, you must simply knock on my door—fourteen St. James Square, West London—and I’ll give you three times the amount you give me today to help me return my beloved to London safely.”
“Please tell me that is not a real address?” she whispered, knocking her elbow into his ribs.
“Givesly can afford it. Besides, he’s an arse.”
“Says the arse.”
As people began tossing coins into his hat, he hugged her more closely and bussed her temple, and her heart seemed to leap up to greet the kiss, to embrace it, to keep it.
She shook the nonsense away and looked at the ring again. He wore the matching one. They bothered her. They appeared duller than before.
“What’s that?” a newcomer standing in the doorway asked. He stretched out an arm and pointed toward a—
“A flying horse? Really, duke?” Persephone finally ripped her hand away from his. “Have you no shame?”
He shrugged. “Used to, but it didn’t do me much good.”
The stranger strode into the room. “What is this supposed to be? A story?”
“It’s London,” one of the maids from earlier said.
The stranger began shaking his head.
“Time to go. The brougham’s waiting out front.” The duke scooped up his hat, and the money, linked their arms and ran. She picked up her skirts to keep pace as he pulled her through the door. “Thank you, thank you! But the mail coach approaches, and I need my wife aboard before it leaves.”
“You are more full of shit than a chamber pot,” she hissed.
“That’s not London at all,” the stranger cried. They had enough distance from the crowd now that the man’s voice was muffled. “I mean, it is, but the flying horses and the gold houses? It’s like a child’s fantasy of London.”
“Run faster,” Morington urged from the corner of his mouth.
She had no choice but to run faster. He was dragging her.
But then she heard it—a discontented rabble rising behind them. The crowd was no doubt looking for pitchforks.
She clutched her skirts higher. “Run faster!”
Through the inn, out the door. The brougham right there. He pitched her up into it then vaulted up himself. The carriage lurched as he urged the horse forward, and they were jolting out of the coaching yard when the first yell went up.
“Will they follow?” she asked over the crash of the wheels against the pebbled road.
“I don’t think so. But just in case. There’s a pistol underneath your seat.”
“No!”
“Yes. Now be ready, dear.”
But she didn’t rummage beneath the seat. She turned and watched the inn disappear behind them. “I don’t think I’ll need it. No one’s coming. We’re safe.” She turned on him, smacked his arm. “What were you thinking?”
“That we needed more coin after I’d paid the innkeeper.”
“Couldn’t you have glamoured a single coin to appear to be more? Given the fake ones to the innkeeper?”
“Unfortunately not. You know how they’re shaped differently?”
“Of course.”
“And how glamours can’t reproduce textures or any other sensory detail?”
“Oh. I see. You can make the coins look one way, but the innkeeper would feel their true value.”
“Precisely.”
She smoothed her sumptuous skirts, still purple, fashionable, and with the look of silk. Though they felt like homespun cotton beneath her palms. “Why didn’t you glamour us invisible or something like that? Why make us run?”
“Quick escape was wisest, but also… I’m damned tired. Invisibility is quite challenging. Harder to make things go away than to make them disappear. And it’s not really making them go away. It’s more like painting them into the background. And if they move an inch, it’s all that work for nothing.”
She studied his profile. Sweat had broken out on his brow, and his cheeks were pale.
“The image of London on the ceiling was overdoing it,” he said.
“London was fine. The flying horses were overdoing it.”
The corner of his mouth hitched up, and he slowed their pace a bit.
“When I’m rested, I’ll put on a different visage and change the horse’s appearance and yours too a bit, but for now…
” His shoulders slumped and his jaw slackened, and her purple gown disappeared.
So did the profile of a man who likely looked like the Earl of Givesly.
Replaced by the sharp cheekbones, broken nose, and dirty yellow hair of her duke.
Not her duke.
If only she could hide her blushes as well as he hid everything else. Her hands fisted in her skirts.
Oh yes. The ring.
She held up her hand to remove it, but the slide of cool metal against her skin slid a memory into place—his mouth closing around her digit, his teeth tugging, freeing the ring. She shivered, left the ring. She’d take it off when she was too tired to relive that erotic moment.
“What did you do? To the rings?” She was no longer bewildered by his glamour show.
She was no longer under immediate threat of being tarred and feathered by an angry mob.
And free of those constraints, her brain could actually work.
“You said you fixed them, but that’s not possible.
Unless…” She couldn’t breathe. The air had become molasses.
“What did you do? The rings feel…” Dull.
Lifeless. Empty. “Dead.” Dread sat heavy in her belly, and she pulled the ring off her finger.
Not a trace of memory left in her. No… He couldn’t have.
“Oh, that. I visited a potions mistress this morning. She gave me a brew to wipe the metal clean. Now we can use them, and I can sell them, and—”
“You did what?” She almost knocked him over with the force of her scream.
He had the good sense to look a bit worried.
She grabbed his hand and ripped the matching ring from his finger. She cradled both in her hands, tears blurring the dusty road around them. “How could you?”
“Persephone—”
“You killed them. You killed their love.”
“That’s a bit—”
“Don’t talk to me,” she snarled.
And thank the heavens he listened to her. She didn’t want to hear his nonsense. She was too busy crying.