Gran’s smile was sharp and knowing. “Give him time. Alaric Ward is like tea steeped in molasses. Slow to sweeten, but once it does…”
*
Metropolitan Police Station, Whitehall Place
Later that samenight, 11:48 p.m.
It had been, by any measure, avery long day.First the rain. Then the proposal. Then the part where she’d accidentally broken into a crypt.
Again.
Now Thea was sitting in a Metropolitan Police holding room with mud on her hem, salt in her boots, and a haunted thigh bone in her satchel that might actually be cursed.
She inhaled sharply through her nose and tugged the shawl tighter around her shoulders. The wooden bench beneath herwas unyielding. The walls were grim and dark. The lighting was gaslit and offensive. And the man storming through the door was her maybe-fiancé. Possibly. Technically?
He looked like wrath incarnate.
Oh dear.
Alaric Ward wasnotthe awkward man from her grandmother’s parlor anymore. Gone was the damp cravat and hat brim strangled like a cry for help. Now he wore his authority like a second skin, coat fitted to a chest that clearly hadn’t skipped arm day since 1834, shoulders so broad she could’ve camped under them, and that dark hair now shoved back in delicious frustration with one gloved hand.
The room felt smaller instantly. So did her lungs.
“Theodosia Blackwood,” he said grimly, striding toward her like she was a problem he was absolutely going to marry anyway.
“You say my full name like it’s a sin,” she murmured.
He stopped three feet in front of her. His jaw twitched. “You broke into the old Whitcombe plot.”
“It wasopen.Technically, I fell in.” She tilted her head. “It’s next to the Blackwoods’. Things happen.” She shrugged daintily.
“You were seen climbing the gate.”
“Allegedly.”
“You were carrying a shovel.”
She crossed her ankles. “That is conjecture. And also rude.”
His nostrils flared.
And dear God, now that she was really looking—which, admittedly, was a questionable life choice—he had definitely grown into his scowl. That coat hugged his waist like a dream, and she was uncomfortably aware of how tall he was. How broad. How all that rainy awkwardness had melted away under gaslight and justice and—
“Are you listening to me?” he snapped.
“No,” she said honestly, blinking up at him. “But then, I am trying very hard not to.”
He closed the space between them in one step. “You’re under arrest,” he said, low and gravelly.
She blinked. “Wait, are you actually—?”
His gaze dropped briefly to her mouth, and when it rose again, and there was something else there. Something that made her heart trip and stumble like it had on the staircase at age fourteen, when he caught her looking at him shirtless in the mews and smirked.
Ohhell.
He leaned in. Bent close. Voice like thunder wrapped in silk. “If you ever drag me out of bed at almost midnight again over your outrageous antics, Iwilllet them charge you.”
Goosebumps rose on her arms. He was close enough now that she could see the flecks of gray in his blue eyes, smell the faint trace of rain and soap and man on his skin. One of his hands braced on the bench beside her hip. The other hovered near her wrist, fingers twitching like he didn’t trust himself to touch her.
