Page 72 of Rules for Ruin

Or perhaps seize her and do something else.

Effie’s breath stopped as apprehension was overpowered by a wild, and wholly nonsensical, rush of anticipation.

“Mind how you go, Miss Flite,” Lord Mannering called back. “It’s a bit of a crush up ahead.”

Effie tore her gaze from Gabriel’s. The giddy rush she’d felt only seconds before was snuffed out as swiftly as a candle flame doused with cold water.

Good heavens. She’d very nearly forgotten they were in company with other people. Not only Lord Mannering and his party, but the countless strangers who, like them, were making their way to the exhibition grounds.

It was precisely the problem. Effie’s fascination with Gabriel Royce was clouding her judgment. So long as her head and her heart were caught up with him, she would never be able to think clearly enough for the task at hand. And Effie’s future—and Franc’s—depended on her thinking clearly.

She removed her hand from Gabriel’s arm. “I shall stay close to you, my lord,” she called back to Lord Mannering. “Have no fear.”

Gabriel dropped a brooding look to his sleeve, where her gloved fingers had rested only seconds before. After a taut moment, he returned his attention to the gathering crowd ahead.

Hundreds of people had already congregated on the lawn in anticipation of Mr. Galezzo’s performance. Gasps emerged from Miss Compton and several of the others walking nearby as the high wire came into view. Startlingly thin, the wire cable twinkled silver in the torchlit sky, stretching from a stand of old elm trees, beneath which a wooden platform had been erected, all the way to the top of the building opposite. Six hundred feet altogether, or so Lord Mannering had claimed.

Effie’s stomach jolted on an expected roil of trepidation. She didn’t see how it was possible for anyone to traverse a wire so fine, even a celebrated Italian ascensionist. Not unless the man weighed less than a sparrow.

“Most everyone else will be standing,” Lord Mannering told them as they approached the front. “It will be better if we do as well, else we risk the chance of being unable to see.”

“Mr. Galezzo will be fifty feet above us,” Ruth pointed out. “We can hardly miss him.”

People pressed in on them on every side as new arrivals joined the crowd on the lawn.

“It’s so loud.” Miss Compton wrinkled her nose at a humbly dressed party of ladies and gentlemen on their left. “And what is that appalling odor?”

Lord Mannering patted her hand in reflexive consolation. “I’ve procured a table for us at the restaurant afterward. You’ll feel brighter when you’ve had some lobster salad and champagne. We can dine at our leisure until the fireworks begin at eleven.”

Gabriel drew closer to Effie, wordlessly staking out his place amid the chaos.

Effie felt his presence beside her, less reassuring than simmering with unspoken promise. She chanced a fleeting look at him in the colored light. He wasn’t interested in the high wire, nor in the prospect of lobster salad and champagne. His attention was entirely fixed on her.

“I’m not finished with you,” he informed her darkly.

Effie’s heart pounded an erratic rhythm. “Nor I with you,” she retorted, sounding braver than she felt.

There were indeed going to be fireworks this evening, she thought grimly. And not only the kind in the sky.

• • •

Gabriel had no liking for dangerous acts performed for entertainment’s sake. Where he came from, life and death were serious matters. That very seriousness was doubtless the reason such displays drew enormous crowds. People thrilled to see wire dancers and aeronauts putting their lives in peril. The prospect of death was a heady liqueur. To cheat the devil even headier. It made the viewing public feel as if they, too, possessed some measure of immortality.

For Gabriel, it only made him impatient.

He’d come here tonight for Effie. To confront her, he’d thought. To show her that he was a force to be reckoned with. And yet, when he’d seen her in the drawing room in Brook Street, standing among her newfound friends of the fashionable elite, violet eyed and mysterious, with her glass dragonflies twinkling in her hair…

He’d been lost.

The realization brought him no pleasure.

It was, along with the increasingly tangled plans to reform the Rookery, yet another example of an improbable future. A glittering possibility that lingered just out of his reach. It was affecting his sleep. Making him restless. Making him weak. Gabriel’s only hope was to rid himself of this frustrating attraction to Euphemia Flite completely. He was resolved to do it tonight.

There was but one way to go about the business. He would force her to admit her true intentions. To reveal herself as a mercenary jade who was using him, just as she was using Mannering and Compton’s daughter, and God knows who else.

Gabriel’s blood boiled to think of how easily she’d baited him. She’d practically called him her lapdog, by heaven! He wasn’t stupid. He knew she’d only said it to provoke him. The infuriating point was how admirably she’d succeeded. And to what end? They were all of them nothing more than interchangeable pieces on her infernal board, necessary in her game to ruin Compton.

Gabriel had no intention of letting her succeed. Despite his attraction to her. Despite his heart (or any less noble organs he’d lately been thinking with). Nothing could be allowed to jeopardize his plans for saving the Rookery. And Compton’s reputational well-being was an essential component of those plans. Too much depended on his support. Without it, everything else would crumble. Haverford and his influential friends would fall away. So, too, would the protections Gabriel enjoyed for his betting shop. There would be nothing left. Compton would see to that. And it would all be because Effie couldn’t leave it alone.