“Put me down!” she shrieked, pounding at his back.
“No.”
“You caveman! You arrogant, cravat-ruining, sanctimonious—”
“I said,” he snapped, gripping her more tightly, “we’re leaving.”
She kicked, graceless and furious. “You’ll regret this, you absolute donkey’s—”
“If I had a sovereign for every time you said that, I could retire to Bath.”
“You utter, unrelenting menace of a man!”
He didn’t even blink.
Above them, Alice clapped in delight. “Oh, he’ssoin love.”
Celeste rolled her eyes hard enough to disturb the veil. “He’s a repressed peeler with a superiority complex and questionable impulse control.”
“And he adores her.”
“He’s going to get her arrested.”
Alice beamed. “Don’t you justlovelove?”
*
Thea wasn’t entirelysure how she got slung over his shoulder, but here she was, draped like a mildly stunned throw pillow against one very broad, very pissed-off man.
Alaric was stomping through Highgate like a man personally offended by fog. Early morning dew clung to the tips of ivy, the air pungent with turned earth, grave flowers, and expensive shaving soap she had no business noticing.
“You are manhandling me,” Thea huffed, wriggling against the iron clamp of his arm around her thighs.
He gave her a firm, scandalized squeeze in response. “That’s rich, coming from a woman who tried to lick my tonsils open behind a mausoleum.”
“You kissed me first!”
“And I’m clearly suffering the consequences,” he snapped, voice low and growly and so unfairly hot that she wanted to bite something. Maybe him.
He deposited her unceremoniously on her feet the moment they reached the main path, jaw locked and hair messed from where her fingers had tugged it—definitely not gently. And yet he didn’t back away. In fact, he looked like he might just kiss her again, despite the very real risk of divine retribution and ghostly gargoyle assaults.
Thea adjusted her corset with as much dignity as she could muster, which was exactly none. “You don’t get to just throw me over your shoulder like I’m—”
“I absolutely do,” he growled, straightening his waistcoat with a force that suggested it had personally betrayed him. He kept walking, face tight, boots crunching over gravel as the sky bled peach above the trees.
She fell into step beside him, pulse still riotous, nerves jangled and fraying. She wanted to slap him. She wanted to climb him like a gothic ivy trellis. She needed tea. Whiskey. Teawithwhiskey.
They turned past a winding path—and that was when she saw it.
Her family’s burial plot.
The Blackwood names were etched in timeworn stone: Alice. Celeste. A third space beneath, blank. Thea’s.
But there, just beside the curve of her grandmother’s headstone, was a newer plot. Unmarked. Fresh. Waiting.
She frowned. “Who’s that for?”
Alaric didn’t answer at first. He paused in the path, eyes hard on the moss-covered stones, something unreadable bracketing his jaw. “For me,” he said roughly. “Between Alice and your mother. That’s the one I bought.”
