Celeste crossed her arms and didn’t even look sorry. “They were dry-humping beside a mausoleum, Alice.”
“They were in love!” Gran cried. “They were tangled up like ivy vines! Did youseehow he palmed her bosom?”
“I saw,” Celeste said through her teeth. “It’s burned into my corneas.”
“You’ll thank me one day. When they’re married and scandalous and deliriously happy.”
“I’ll be thanking myself,” she snapped, “if they wait to consummate until there’s a roof over their heads!”
Gran tsked. “You were such a prude in life. You’re a bigger one in death.”
“Give me a break. Ijust died of cholera!”
Gran waved her hand. “So dramatic.”
Celeste stood with her arms crossed over her ghostly chest, eyes narrowed like twin musket barrels.
“Oh dear,” Gran said fondly, watching Thea and Alaric from afar as they both tried (and failed) to look unaffected. “You’ll come around. Those two are destiny wrapped in sarcasm and suppressed longing.”
Chapter Five
Highgate Cemetery
The present…
Alaric buttoned hiswaistcoat with the sort of military precision one might use to hold back a goddamn flood.
One. Two. Three.
Thea stood several feet away, mouth kiss-bruised and fingers pressed against the lip of a cracked headstone like she hadn’t just brought him to his knees. He shouldn’t have touched her. Heabsolutelyshouldn’t have kissed her. He most definitely should not have rucked up her skirts and palmed her arse like a starving man at a feast.
And yet here they were.
Highgate Cemetery. Six in the bloody morning. Her photograph trunk half open. His hands still shaking. And the overwhelming, undeniable fact that he wanted her. Still.
“Pick up your things,” he said sharply.
Thea blinked at him. “Excuse me?”
“Your trunk, Miss Blackwood. Your photograph plates. The charcoal rubbings. The bag you dropped when I backed you against a crypt and nearly lost my soul.”
Her lips twitched. “Well. Someone’s in a mood.”
He ground his teeth and swept up the last of her pencils. “I warned you.”
She adjusted her cloak, wet from the mist and torn slightly at the hem. “You kissed me.”
“You mouthed off,” he snapped. “Repeatedly.”
“Youcuffed me.”
“And you enjoyed it.”
She grinned, the minx. “You’ve no proof.”
He stalked toward her and loomed like a storm. Her eyes lifted. Chin too. God, she was stunning when she was defiant. “I am trying,” he gritted out, “to do my job. To uphold the law. Tonotlet the fact that you taste like sins and cinnamon talk me into dereliction of duty.”
She blinked. “Cinnamon?”
