Chapter 6 #2
She dropped into the chair across from his desk. The slit in her dress revealed a distracting amount of thigh that his gaze kept latching on.
Malachy recognized the dress as the one he had gifted for her first night playing piano at the Emerald Club.
An ill-fated winter night that had begun with them torturing a nefarious Frenchman and ended with their dreams entangled by a voyeuristic dream demon.
When he had bought that dress months ago—a lifetime ago, before Ghose killed him, before Cora brought him back to life—he’d thought the dress would look fetching on her. He’d been wrong; she was ravishing.
She had worn his dress to go out with another man to someone else’s jazz club.
A new and deeply uncomfortable sensation writhed in his stomach. Jealousy. Tim Tambo and every other bloke in London hadn’t earned those peeks of her slender calves, those glimpses of her thighs, where his hands longed to be, caressing smooth skin until she was moaning his name, his name.
Blood, inconveniently, rushed from his brain to his bollocks. He shifted, catching another glimpse of her mile-long legs. Creamy soft skin and—
He forced his gaze away and willed a neutral expression. An indifferent mask that would crumble under any scrutiny.
“Well,” he said.
“Well.”
Silence lengthened.
“Well?” he prompted.
“Well, I communed with that dead copper. Didn’t get much out of him.”
“Explain.”
“Bloke seemed like a low-ranking copper. Not in the inner circle. Just a strongarm Potts recently hired.”
“Did he know,” Malachy said in a tight voice, “why Potts is tailing us everywhere now?”
“About that. I, er, forgot to ask. Oh, don’t look at me like that, Bane. Don’t give me that eyebrow—don’t you give me that eyebrow.”
His eyebrow arched higher. “That was the first fuckin’ question in my note.”
“I forgot, all right? I can’t bring notes with me into the Death Realm. It’s incorporeal. Find me some Death Parchment, and I could have the full interrogation questions and bring back the written answers.”
“Why didn’t you just check my note and commune with him again?”
“I may have had to leave the morgue rather quickly. Anyways, it’s not like I can commune with him again. They already buried the chap. We can kill another copper to interrogate.”
He raked a hand through his hair. “We can’t risk killing another or staying on the backfoot. Wait for it to calm down, then dig up the dead copper and commune with him again. Might glean something.”
“An exhume and commune is rather a lot of work.”
“If you had done what I asked the first time, it wouldn’t be necessary. What is going on with you, Cora? You’re not even trying.”
She bristled. “I am trying.”
“Are you?”
“Given the circumstances, this is the best I could do.”
“Is it? We need to know what Potts is up to because he certainly knows what we’re up to. He saw your communing marks on that copper before the burial.”
“Bugger.” She paled. “I was careful to hide them, but I was nearly caught red-handed on that job. Or black-handed, rather. Made it out just in time.”
“Who else was on the job with you?” Her evasive look made his eyes narrow. “Was anyone else on that job with you?”
“Er, well…”
The fraying threads of his temper snapped. “Jesus, what were you thinking? Were you thinking? No one in the gang goes on a job alone, Cora. No one. How can you be this reckless? What if something happened to you?”
“Since when has anyone cared what happened to me?” she scoffed.
“I fuckin’ care!” Their eyes widened in mutual astonishment at the words tumbling from his lips. How right they felt, drawn from a deep well into the light. Then, softer, he said, “I fuckin’ care.”
Searching his face, she found only sincerity. Her brows drew together. “Why?”
Before he could answer, before he could close all the distances between them, the door opened. Yvonne Archambeau strode inside.
Unlike Cora, the French Phytomancer was delighted to see him.
Laugh lines crinkled as her mouth curved into a wide smile.
She tossed her head, the swish of her sable bob catching the gas lamp’s warm glow.
No one was more aware of how captivating Yvonne was than Yvonne herself.
She orchestrated the casual sophistication of her dancing hands, modulating the tinkling bell of her laughter for full effect.
Yvonne’s smile frosted when she noticed Cora, standing too close to Malachy in a suspended moment of intimacy. Her brows rose in gentle arches as her green eyes flicked between them.
Cora leapt back. He dropped his hand.
“Is it not time for our tête-à-tête, Mal?” Yvonne’s lyrical voice was as slow and rich as honey.
Malachy inwardly cursed. Of course, O’Leary had scheduled a meeting with his ex-lover right after the meeting with his not-quite-lover.
“It has been too long, mon chéri, since we have laid eyes upon each other.” Mistaking his hesitation for invitation, Yvonne sauntered past Cora and threw her arms around Malachy, planting kisses on his cheeks and branding him with rose-stained lipstick. “Far too long.”
Painfully aware of Cora’s eyes narrowing on them, he offered Yvonne a tentative pat on the back while he extricated himself.
Unlike Cora, Yvonne always told him what he wanted to hear.
How quickly that had grown tiresome. He’d ended their brief affair when it was clear Yvonne was catching feelings.
While they had parted on good terms, he was careful never to imbibe one of the plant mage’s enchanted concoctions, lest he find himself dosed with a love potion.
He understood the unspoken invitation in each lingering touch.
Malachy had known countless women like Yvonne over the years. Women who were not interested in him but status. To them, Malachy Bane was a blank canvas upon which to project their delusions of criminal grandeur. Unlike Cora, who saw him for who he was without flinching.
Cora, who made him flinch now with the eviscerating intensity of her scrutiny. While Yvonne’s flirtation had been a minor irritation before, now it was actively hindering him.
“I was so worried, Mal, that you would not be back in time for my Rosemarie’s wedding.
I wrote the happy news to you while you were in Rome, no?
My darling daughter Rosemarie is engaged to Laurence Bellamy,” Yvonne explained to Cora, waiting for her recognition of the name that didn’t come.
“The world famous Lumomancer? The Hollywood film star?”
“I’ve never seen one of those—how do you call them? —motion pictures.”
Yvonne’s lips pursed at Cora's failure to appreciate the gravity of her daughter’s engagement. “Well. It will be the wedding of the season. I hope you have not forgotten your promise, Mal.”
He did not like the sound of that. Nor, by the look of it, did Cora. “Promise?” he said.
“To be my date, of course.”
“Yvonne, the only thing I promised about the wedding was to pay for it.”
Her pout was a feat of engineering, the jut of her full bottom lip a precise balance of petulant and sensual. A pout that had never worked on him.
“Well, if you insist on paying… Here are the itemized expenses for the wedding preparations.” Yvonne withdrew a thick stack of papers from her bag and set them on his desk, leaning over at the exact angle to maximize cleavage spillage.
“You must help me organize everything, Mal. How I envy your head for numbers.”
His gaze remained on Cora, whose hand was poised on the door handle. “I want an update on that copper soon.”
Cora shot a pointed look at Yvonne’s chest. “I’ll keep you abreast of any developments.” She shut the door after herself.
“Laurence, my future son-in-law, is in town for his newest film. You must come to dinner with us tonight, Mal. Laurence is such a treat. His close friend, Monsieur Barrymore, just accepted the wedding invitation, and we are waiting to hear back from Monsieur Chaplin and Monsieur Valentino. Though Laurence still insists on inviting Julian Morro to the wedding. That American.” Yvonne spoke the word like a venereal disease.
While Malachy found Laurence Bellamy tedious in every way, his connection to Julian Morro had his head perking up. “What’s the relationship between the Lumomancers?”
With a long-suffering sigh, Yvonne lowered herself onto the chair across from his desk, its leather still holding the shape of Cora’s thighs.
“I love Laurence, I do. But his friendship with that American is troubling. I suppose Laurence feels he owes Julian for helping him secure his first acting job. But why remain friends with Julian after he got what he needed out of him?”
Anything beyond a transactional relationship would be difficult for Yvonne to contemplate, Malachy thought.
“Why, Julian had the nerve to ask me, the mother of the bride, if he should bring a shotgun to the wedding!” She uttered a stream of French invectives like bitter poetry.
“Laurence would not even revoke Julian’s invitation after that American insulted his bride-to-be.
Julian had the audacity to recommend a tailor to take out Rosemarie’s wedding dress before the ceremony. Can you believe that?”
He could. Twenty-year-old Rosemarie Archambeau had inherited her mother’s beauty and cunning. Trapping a famous actor with a baby was a play straight out of Yvonne’s seduction handbook, and had been Rosemarie’s own origin story, if Malachy remembered correctly.
Filing away this tidbit about the entangled Lumomancers, he redirected Yvonne’s wedding zealotry to something he actually cared about. “Update me on the booze shipments into Prohibition States.”