Chapter Twelve #4
Not the kind of smile she had grown used to coaxing out of him, either—quick, fleeting, half-imagined things, gone as soon as they’d arrived.
This was a proper smile, spreading slowly across his face, causing crinkles to form at the edges of his eyes.
It was hypnotic; Vesper felt as though she were caught by a powerful magnetic force. She couldn’t look away.
And then he slid his hand to her hip, squeezed, and leaned just close enough to give the impression of great intimacy. “Of course it is, teacake.”
Vesper was gripped by a wild desire to laugh, but suppressed it, instead meeting his smile with a sultry one of her own. She leaned in closer.
At that moment, Grenoble made rather a show of dramatically clearing his throat, and Vesper blinked, then glanced up at him, as if she’d forgotten his presence.
“I was with Zelda McCourt,” he said through a clenched jaw. His eyes were narrowed, taking in the scene of Vesper and Ashbridge. Ashbridge’s thumb stroked a slow circle on her hip; the heat of it, even through the fabric of her dress, made it hard to think.
Vesper frowned, as if she’d forgotten what they were discussing entirely.
“At your club the other night,” Grenoble said, looking even more annoyed. “We left… quite early.” A bit of smugness had returned to his voice, though he was still viewing Ashbridge with considerable hostility. “As you two might consider,” he added, a bit spitefully.
Ashbridge smiled at him, a thin, dangerous thing. “We’ll take that under advisement.”
“However…” Here, Grenoble leaned down, bracing one hand on the table so that he could loom over Vesper.
She didn’t gratify him by leaning back even a centimeter.
“Vesper, if you’re still feeling a bit shaken up about what happened, well, I’d love to help an old friend out, you know. Offer comfort in whatever way I can.”
Vesper managed a sickly-sweet smile. “That’s so kind of you.”
“I do what I can.” He reached out, chucked her under the chin, and gave her what he clearly considered to be an extremely seductive, nigh-impossible-to-resist smile.
“You know where to find me.” This was uttered in a low, intimate tone.
Vesper resisted the urge to gag, but it was a near thing.
Grenoble directed one last glare at Ashbridge, and a moment later had vanished into the crowd.
Vesper took a deep, fortifying breath—and then a deep, fortifying sip of her Warm and Fuzzy—before turning back to Ashbridge, whose hand had slipped from her hip the second Grenoble turned away.
His expression was a bizarre combination of thunderous and amused, two emotions that Vesper had never considered natural bedfellows.
“You cannot be serious.”
“I was twenty-one,” she said. “No one makes intelligent decisions when they’re twenty-one.”
“That was my first year at Cambridge. Shall I let you take a look at my exam results?”
“If that’s your idea of how to attract women, I imagine your bed must be a very cold and lonely one, Ashbridge.”
“You really are astonishingly irritating when you set your mind to it, aren’t you?” he asked conversationally.
Vesper could not help but be flattered; she didn’t know why she wanted to be irritating to Ashbridge, except for some vague, ill-defined sense that she’d rather be annoying to him than nothing at all.
This, she thought darkly, was likely how she’d ended up flinging herself at him in the first place, all those years ago.
A fact that she had not failed to notice had yet to be brought up.
At least now she had a more recent memory of kissing him to replace her memories of that mortifying evening, she thought, trying to be philosophical about the whole thing.
It was difficult to be entirely philosophical, however, when the memory of Ashbridge’s kiss—the warmth of his mouth, the taste of him, the strength of his hands on her body—was so fresh in her mind.
It was distracting, and she couldn’t really afford that at the moment.
“You know,” she began, really settling into things and looking forward to a continued exchange of warm regards with Ashbridge, but before she could continue their convivial conversation, she was interrupted without warning by the rather unusual sight of a man directly opposite their table standing up and beginning to strip naked.
“Is this normal?” Ashbridge asked in an undertone, his eyes fixed on the man, who was behaving as though he were possessed, his movements frenzied, jerky, uncontrolled. “I know you said the potions lower inhibitions—”
“No,” Vesper said, pressing her lips together.
The man’s companions were protesting—a couple even reached for his arms, as if to physically restrain him, but he shook them off with ease, as if possessed of supernatural strength.
His chest was now bare, and he started on his trousers.
Half the club was watching the spectacle by this point, a sort of embarrassed, fascinated horror having gripped the room.
Edward Grenoble was at the man’s side now, speaking to him in an undertone, but the man paid no more mind to him than he had to his friends, and within another half a minute, he was entirely nude.
And then, a second later, he slumped to the floor.