“I beg your pardon?”
Tamsin’s freckled face had taken on a distressingly piratical cast. “Locate him, tell him what we’ve discovered, and then threaten to reveal what you know to your father, unless...” Her mouth quirked. “Unless he agrees to keep our presence here a secret from House di Sangro.”
“Then he would know for certain we’re not supposed to be here,” Alice protested. “There is no way to blackmail him without revealing our own fraudulent purposes here.”
“Alice, darling, I have a strong inkling he already suspects.”
Ruby hesitated.
She thought of Archer’s face in the cove, the charged push-and-pull of their strange dance. The way honesty crept in like starlight around the fractures in his charm.
Astra inclinant, sed non obligant.
“I’m not going to blackmail him,” she said finally. “I have a better idea.”
Chapter 13
Archer had his hand in his pocket—where he kept her absurd little pearl-buttoned glove—when Ruby appeared at the mouth of the cove.
He’d known she was coming. Bloodyknownit. He’d spent the entire morning and afternoon peering over his shoulder whilst also receiving and then frantically hiding colorful French silks. Honestly, he’d suspected she’d come sooner—had been rehearsing various explanations and deceptions for when she invariably found him out.
He almost wanted her to catch him. Part of him—a stupid part, the part that had stuck her glove in his pocket each morning for three days running—wanted to tell her the truth.
But when she finally appeared, she was flushed and disheveled, her pretty beribboned frock sandy and windblown. Her hand was in a fist at her breastbone, and her eyes were huge and terrorized.
His whole body shot to alertness. “Ruby? What is it?”
“Captain Archer!” She barely got the words out past her uneven breaths. “Thank goodness I’ve found you.”
It didn’t seem wildly surprising, considering he was about forty feet from where she’d discovered him three days earlier. “What’s wrong?”
“The Scourge,” she gasped. “It’s here!”
Archer stared at her in frank astonishment. The Scourge? What in the bloody, bleeding—
“Thewhat?” he demanded. Surely he had misheard.
“The Scourge,” she said again. “It’s here—just past this cove. It was after me. Hunted me. I scarcely managed to get away!”
“What?”
He was typically more adept at talking, but then again, under typical circumstances, invented monsters did not come to life and stalk ladies-in-waiting on the beach.
She caught his hand and dragged him down the sand. “I’ll show you.”
He yanked at her hand to stop her. If there was something after her—not the Scourge, for God’s sake, because Lamentation had invented it, butsomething—surely she need not run directly at it.
Though, on the other hand, of course she would. She seemed to have a knack for hurling herself directly into trouble instead of fleeing it.
She freed her fingers from his grasp, then broke into a run. She tossed him a glance over her shoulder—a quick blue challenge. “Come on! Before it gets away.”
Shouldn’t shewantit to get away? Did she mean for him to subdue whatever it was with his bare hands?
“Wait,” he hissed. “Slow down.”
She ignored him and darted around an algae-covered cliff face, her slippers leaving hasty footprints as she ran. The tide was coming in again; Archer’s boots shifted in the damp sand.
He ducked around the corner and nearly knocked her over. She’d stopped to look out at the beach, and all of his body collided with all of hers: softness and heat and trailing, tangled ribbons.
