Chapter 12 Persephone’s Tub （Not the Duke’s Tub）
PERSEPHONE’S TUB (NOT THE DUKE’S TUB)
Victor only had a fire to stare despondently into because his brother-in-law had visited.
He’d left forever coal, an alchemist invention that burned clean and warm and lasted much longer than the real stuff.
No flames, though. So it wasn’t a fire so much as it was…
warm blank space in his grate. Practical but rather underwhelming.
Alchemists possessed no sense of drama or aesthetics.
He should have stollen that old woman’s grave work. But he hadn’t.
And all he had now was the damned ring. Didn’t even have that anymore. The place in his pocket where it had resided on the trip home from Manchester seemed to still carry the ring’s weight and heat.
He stood, pushing back one of the few remaining pieces of furniture as he did so.
Brooding was bloody impossible without a real fire. It was time for him to go—
A knock on the door, loud and demanding.
“What the hell?” He made for the entry, and the knocking continued, a percussive companion to his irritated bootsteps. He threw the door open.
And was punched in the face.
“Oh! Oh no! I didn’t mean to do that.”
“Persephone?”
She was dressed in a man’s shirt and trousers and covered in mud. Her hands were over her mouth, her eyes wide. “I was knocking. You opened the door so quickly, I… I didn’t mean to.”
“What are you doing here?” Hell, he sounded enraged. He heard it. His voice contained the snap of a tiger. But his heart was leaping, growing, glowing. And his nose was throbbing.
She lowered her arms and lifted her chin. Then she shoved her way inside. “I want a bath.” She headed for the stairs, remembering well, apparently, the direction she’d taken only once about a week ago.
He followed her and paused at the top of the stairs when she did. She glared at every door in the corridor, as if trying to figure out what was behind them.
He’d show her. He stepped around her, irritation dissolving in an instant. “This way. Bathe as you like, only…”
“Everyone will think me your mistress. There were people in the street when I came in.”
“Perhaps.” He led her to his chamber.
She strode past him to enter. “I don’t give a damn. Do you?”
“No.” A little, yes.
She marched across the room and stopped in the middle, looking about, not disguising her curiosity.
Her eyes were red rimmed as if she’d been crying.
He wanted to… hug her? God, yes. And how humiliating was that?
He hadn’t wanted to hug anyone since childhood.
Yet… he did. Wanted to wrap his arms around her in the most chaste of embraces and hold her until dawn came. Longer.
But he didn’t dare move an inch.
“I am filthy.” She sniffled, moving into the bathing chamber.
“You are a bit.” He followed her.
“Not a bit. A lot. And that tub”—her eyes narrowed as she stabbed a finger toward the tub in question—“is mine. Do you understand?”
He nodded.
“I do not think you do. What I mean is that if you were ever to sell this house, you could not sell that tub. It does not belong to you. Not anymore.”
He nodded. “It’s yours.”
“Yes. Now turn the water on.”
He’d never thought to see her again, but here she was.
In his house. And she’d come to him. Well, she’d come to his tub, but what did that matter?
He’d never sell the damn thing, not if it conjured Persephone.
He felt light as a feather, less doom and gloom than he’d felt since that ill-fated night in Manchester.
He turned on the water, wishing for an alchemist to heat the pipes—maybe soon—and turned it off when the tub was full.
She still stood behind him in the doorway, and she moved farther into the room as he left it.
He went downstairs and gathered the eternal coals from the drawing room, moving them with a shovel into the fireplace of his bedchamber, the one shared by the tiled bathing room.
He stopped by his wardrobe before going to her.
He found her, finally, submerged in the tub.
She rested her head against the back of it, opening her slender neck.
Her breasts were submerged but flirted with the top of the water, offering tantalizing creamy glimpses.
She piled her sweaty, tangled hair high atop her head and anchored it with a quill pen she must have found somewhere in his belongings.
Her eyes were closed, but she must have sensed him.
“Go,” she said. “I don’t want an audience. And I’ll know if you’re watching from the other room.”
He draped the banyan he’d retrieved from the wardrobe across the back of a chair and moved to leave.
“Wait.” Her face had softened, and she peeped on eye open. “Conjure a fire?”
“There’re coals in the grate to warm you. Conjured flames would be of no use at all. They’re fake.”
“But they’re soothing.”
Without even a wave of his hand, flames leapt above the coals, around them, swallowing them.
She sighed as if real heat were caressing her skin and sank more deeply into the water.
His Persephone did like her luxuries. He glamoured the quill in her hair so it was a gold-and-amethyst hairpin.
She couldn’t see it, but he liked to know it was there.
He glamoured his ratty old banyan until it was a warm, velvet wrapper the same spring green as her eyes.
None of it real, but she never seemed to care.
“Victor.” His name a warning on her kissable lips.
“Going.” He left, but he didn’t go far, sitting on the edge of his bed that faced away from the fireplace. After a short period of time punctuated by splashes and scrubbing, he heard the water drain, then the tap turn on, filling the tub once more. After some time, it turned off.
“Victor?”
He closed his eyes. He was being so soft, so silent. Too much so for him. But… he was afraid he’d scare her off. “Yes?”
“Join me.”
He stripped in the amount of time it had taken her to say those two words.
He crossed the room, flung open the door to the tiled bathing room, and slipped into the chilly water behind her, cradling her between his legs and pulling her tight against his chest. Her head rolled onto his shoulder and her lips brushed the skin of his neck.
The water was cold, but they could make their own heat. If she wanted to. He did. Without a doubt. As his skin settled against hers, he slipped his hands up her thighs and rested them on her knees.
“Difficult night?” he ventured.
“Not at all.”
“Of course not. Apologies for presuming.”
“It is only I remembered that I have this tub.”
He squeezed her knees. “And you thought to make good use of it.”
“Precisely.” She sighed, and her warm breath tickled his neck.
His cock stirred. He’d not thought much with his southern organ since seeing her on his doorstep. He’d been too… worried. But now that he felt with his arms and chest and rusty heart that she was safe and unharmed, his cock was prepared to greet her properly.
“You made it home to London safely,” he said.
She nodded, her smooth, now clean cheek rubbing against him. “No one bothered me a bit.”
“I was worried.”
She swatted his thigh. “You were not. Tell me, how much loot did you cart home?”
“You’ve not forgiven me for that.”
“I’m still enraged. I’m here against my will. And only for the tub.”
“Naturally.” He traced the knuckles of one hand up and down her thigh. She shivered, and his knuckles became his palm, warm he hoped, and soothing—up her thigh, over her knee, down her shin, in the reverse, over and over again. “I didn’t take anything.”
“What?” She popped upright, and as she whipped around to look at him, water sloshed over the edge of the tub. He chuckled, and she cupped his face in both her hands. “What do you mean you didn’t take anything?”
“It’s not difficult to understand, Sephy.
I am still poor.” But there was a way, a means, and he’d been working—yes, damn it, working—to turn that means into reality.
But… he couldn’t tell her just yet. What if he failed?
He shivered and urged her back down against his chest, wrapping his arms around her.
“I left all the grave work right where it was. Didn’t even try to open a door. ”
She grunted and started patting his chest. He couldn’t help but notice that her mouth was curved upward the slightest bit. He’d pleased her.
God, that felt good.
“You probably couldn’t help it. You had no alchemist to open the tombs.”
“Oh, there was an old lady, and I considered cutting off her hand,” he grumbled, “but that was too much evil even for me.”
She kissed his chest. “I knew it.”
It was more than the kiss that did it. It was the absolute conviction in her voice. She didn’t say what she knew, but didn’t have to. It was something to do with whatever sliver of goodness resided in him. She knew about that. Even before he did.
He climbed out of the tub.
“No!” She turned and wrapped her hands around the back edge. “Come back.”
He’d never resisted come-hither eyes like that.
But he had to. Instead of kissing her, he lifted her from the tub and set her on the tile, her little squeaks of objection music to his ears.
He rubbed her dry with a linen and wrapped her in his glamoured banyan.
Then he picked her up, cradled her in his arms as he carried her into his bedchamber.
And he dumped her onto the bed where she landed with a gasp and a bounce.
She glared up at him from an escaped tangle of midnight hair.
“Stay the night.” He said it like a statement, a command, but in his heart, it was all question.
She nodded and scooted up the bed toward the headboard. He joined her, spreading out beside her atop the blankets. He slipped a curl behind her ear. She smiled. That made him happier than he’d been in a long time.
“I’d like to stay longer,” she said.
“Oh?” His palms were sweaty. What did she mean?
“Let me be your mistress? For a week… a fortnight, perhaps.”
“Persephone—”