Chapter 6 Three Choices #2
As the carriage rambled toward Finsbury Square, Temple and Diana planned, and Apollo closed his eyes.
He must have fallen asleep because between one blink and the next, they’d arrived, and the carriage was shaking as Temple disembarked.
He held a hand up to Diana, but she ignored it, focused on Apollo.
“Thank you,” she said, “for rescuing Sybil last night. And for the journals. I have benefited much from them.”
He grunted and pushed past her to the leave the carriage.
She followed him down onto the street. “Our great-great grandfather was prolific in his writings.”
“Don’t get maudlin on me, Di.” He’d not given the journals to her to help. He’d done it because they weren’t his anymore. They belonged only to the inheritor of the talent.
“Not maudlin. Grateful. You could have kept them from me, and I’d know much less about transcendent talent than I do now. The queen, too, is grateful, and—”
“I must be off.” As Temple and Diana slipped into the potion shop, Apollo hunched deeper into his greatcoat and turned toward a street that took him who knew where.
He should return to the museum, begin his life as a double agent, but crept back toward the shop instead, his curiosity too potent to ignore.
He joined a throng of excited woman entering the shop, ducking low to match their heights.
The shop was busy, and the women soon dispersed across the room, joining potion mistresses with yellow gowns and crisp white aprons at large tables made of dark wood.
A chaos of bowls and spoons and pestles and herbs cluttered every table, and there were several rows of them spaced across the center of the room.
Blooming plants with bright buds and sinuous vines hung from dark beams that crossed below the high ceiling, semi-obscuring a balcony that ran around the entire room.
One side wall beneath the balcony was made up entirely of shelves housing glass bottles the deep colors of earth stones—amethyst and emerald, sapphire and ruby.
A set of double doors dominated the back wall, guarded by two hulking men.
The doors were open, and in their frame—a happy family reunion. Diana, Temple, and Miss Grant, reunited once more, a tangle of joyous arms around shoulders and—
Oh. Perhaps not so joyous. Miss Grant lurched away from her brother, and even across the crowded room, her scowl was clear as the sun on a cloudless day. Then she ran, away from her brother, up the stairs, and into a room off the balcony on the second floor.
“Sybil!” Temple boomed, slamming the shop into silence. The only sound the rustle of silk and ribbons as every customer turned his way.
He stepped toward the stairs, but Diana grasped his wrist, held him in place, shook her head. The customers looked away from the little tableau, returning to their chatter, and Apollo clung to the shadows as Temple and Diana left the shop.
Then he made his way up the stairs. No one noticed, thank God, and when he tried the door Miss Grant had disappeared behind, it wasn’t locked.
He slipped inside and barely had time for his eyes to grow used to dim orb light before he heard the gasp.
Turning around, he found who he was looking for. And he found her most displeased.
“You!” she snarled. “You dare to come here after telling Temple where I am?”
“You truly expected otherwise?” He stepped to the side and strolled the edges of the room.
It seemed to be a still room of some sort.
Drying plants hung by twine from the low ceiling and freshly cut blooms were piled high in baskets.
He picked a tulip up off the long table at the room’s center.
“Red, red, and more red. Camelias, peonies… roses. Am I getting a glimpse at the secret ingredients of Lady Guinevere’s famed love potion? ”
“What do you want?” Her golden brows were drawn tight together over scorching blue eyes. He’d learned during his apprenticeship that blue flames were some of the hottest. Her eyes seemed to prove that true.
He stepped right up to her and tapped the red bulb of the tulip against her nose. “I’m here for another lesson, professor.”
The fight drained out of her. “Lesson?”
Oh, she could be persuaded.
The day had given him two choices, neither of which quite suited him. But what if there was a third?
He hid a smile by turning back toward the room, to the flowers hanging and nestled. “I’ve been in my apprenticeship for almost a year, and I’ve never done anything like I did last night.”
She shook her head, settling at the table across from Apollo. “It was… unusual for me as well.”
He set the tulip on the table and outlined its sinuous form with his index finger dragging against the warm wood. “I tried all last night to do it again. Call the heat. I could not. I want you to help me.”
“We were in a distressing situation. Our energies were high. It was likely a fluke.” She pressed both palms into the table and leaned over it toward him. “I do not know if I can help you.”
He slapped his palms onto the table and leaned toward her. “Try.”
She gasped.
Because in the space of time it took her eyeball to roll from one side to the other, he’d inched his hands forward, set his fingers on top of hers.
Small hands, fingers curling, nails digging into wood.
He’d always thought the alchemist habit of leaving off gloves undignified, but now he knew the good of it.
At any time he could have a woman’s skin pressed against his own, hot and caged.
He slipped his hands farther up until he pinned her wrists to the table.
Her pulse fluttered like a panicked bird beneath his touch, and the delicate bones beneath her skin made him feel powerful.
“Do you feel my heat?” he asked.
She licked her lips.
“You roused it yesterday. You and only you have called it forth. And I need you to do it again.”
That tongue appeared again, sliding over her bottom lip. So much pink softness. She snatched her hands away. “Very well. I’ll try. But you leave as soon as I prove to you it can’t happen again.”
He nodded, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning a hip against the table.
“Excellent. Now… Do you have any metal on you?”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the key. “This.” He reached into his other pocket. “And this.” The lump of gold.
She stared at the lump. “You’ve been tested? And your metal is gold?” Her face looked fragile, as if it might break into a million pieces.
He nodded and rubbed at his chest where it felt a bit knotted.
“Let’s use the gold then. You’re more likely to have success with that.”
He pocketed the key and held the gold in his palm, closed his fingers over it and closed his eyes.
“As you seek the heat,” she said, “imagine what is hottest to you. Build that image and do not let it go. And do not force it. It is not something you beat into submission but something you befriend.”
“How do you know this if you’ve never trained?”
“Books. Listening to my father and brothers talk. Now concentrate.”
He did. In the dark behind his eyelids, two bodies converged.
Him and—why not use the inspiration currently under offer—an alchemist princess with yellow hair.
She’d be a hellcat in bed, demanding and passionate and—hell.
Even if he couldn’t conquer hard metals, he could make himself hard, couldn’t he?
Hard for a woman who would scratch with her nails then soothe with her palm, who would tug his hair and punish his mouth with soft lips and stroking tongue.
He needed a good fuck, was too poor to buy one.
“You’re strangling it!” Her hands came out of nowhere in the dark to cradle his. She tugged at his fist, loosening his fingers. “Be gentle. The gold is not part of you, but the heat that can shape it is. You need the metal’s acceptance, not its submission.”
That heat poured through his veins like honey, slow and coating every inch, pooling particularly in two places—his cock and the small strips of skin where her hands cradled his. He imagined the two places combined. Her hand. His cock.
“Yes!” The note of victory in her voice made him even harder. “You’re hot.”
“You have no idea, princess.”
“Imagine the gold melting.”
He’d paint her skin with it. He’d crush it into dust and shake it over her hair so each strand glittered like the gold it was. Would her hair look that way in sunlight? Golden and glittering? He’d never seen her in the sun. Wouldn’t that be a sight? Just the image—
She gasped and jerked away from him.
His eyes popped open.
She cradled her hands against her chest. “You… you were too hot. I-I… I couldn’t… Open your hand.”
He did. His gold lump was now a disk, smooth and wavy like a distorted coin.
Their gazes locked over it.
“You can survive a fire,” she said.
At the same time he said, “Let me see your hand.”
She refused, reaching for a candle and tinder at one corner of the table. Stubborn wench.
So he pocketed his gold and left the room.
“Where are you going?” she called after him.
But he was already down the stairs. Where was it? He’d seen it earlier. Ah—there. In shadowed corner of the shop, amidst an array of plants, was one with long sleek branches, cushiony, green. He snapped one branch off. “Sorry, darling, but I’ve need of you.” Then he trotted back to the still room.
She had a candle lit in the middle of the table, and she lowered her cupped palms over the steady flame, drawing her hands upward, coaxing the flame higher. “Come here. Shut the door first.”
He did and joined her, snatching her hands away and inspecting her palms. The skin was pink and irritated. “I thought you could withstand heat.”
“I can, but I can still burn. I was distracted. I won’t be next time.”
Next time. Good. He smashed the green branch between his fingers, releasing a thick, clear liquid, and he rubbed it on her palms.
“What is that?” she asked. “It smells like a salve my mother makes.”