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His dark eyes crackled. “Don’t add fool to your list of crimes.”
Heat scalded her cheeks. Humiliation overriding her earlier sense of panic.
“Do you have a name?” His manner held a gruff kindness.
“Aye.”
A long pause followed, punctuated by a rumble of laughter. “And that name would be . . . ?”
She flushed again. Toyed with the idea of giving him a false name, but gave it up as being of little worth. “It’s Cat.” She skimmed her gaze over his stern profile. Heavy-lidded eyes. Long, narrow nose. Chiseled, stubborn jaw. The man couldn’t have looked more aristocratic if he’d been carved in marble on some Roman column. She bit her lip. Amended her answer. “Miss Catriona O’Connell.”
A preoccupied grunt met her response as his hands probed the cut, sending flashes of pain radiating down her arm until even her fingers hurt. “It’s not deep. A good cleaning and you should be thieving again in no time, Miss O’Connell.”
The cool amusement in his voice fired her like no harsh words could. How dare he? Who was he to hold her in contempt? Did he know what it was like to feel the press of desperation and futility always at your back? To spend every moment alert? On edge? Watchful for the one second when a dropped guard would spell disaster?
This second came to mind.
She lurched to her feet. Fury lending her courage. “What do you care whether I live or die?” she shot back. “What’s one less of my kind in the world to you?” Fear, embarrassment, and desperation passed like a knife through her stomach.
He unfolded from the floor to tower over her, barely ruffled by her manner. Exhaled on a deep sigh.
Cat noticed for the first time the shadows hovering beneath those impenetrable eyes and in the hollows of his cheeks, the stubble darkening his angular jaw, the ink stains purpling the fingers of his left hand.
He rubbed the back of his neck as if pondering a weighty decision and the glint of a smile lit his dark eyes. Or was that the flicker of their guttering candle?
“A fair reading of the situation thus far,” he said, “though if my hunch is right, your kind and mine might not be so different.”
Lazarus leaned against the packet ship’s rail. Spray needled his face while the wind off the sea raked him like a claw. Left his lungs frozen, his skin flayed raw. Yet he remained topside. Spurned the claustrophobic, overcrowded hold. The suspicious and half-terrified glances from the other passengers. They sensed the truth about him, even if they didn’t understand that truth. Who in their right mind would? It was beyond comprehension.
He flexed his hands. Curled them into fists.
Beyond evil.
A throat cleared behind him. “The cap’n says to tell ya if the winds keep up, we’ll be makin’ port with the dawn tide, sir.”
So quickly? Lazarus had hazy memories of counting the crossing from Wales to Ireland in days not hours. But that had been another life. A different existence. He nodded without turning around. Heard the man’s muttered oath. His scuttled retreat. He’d be in Dublin tomorrow, retrieve the book from Quigley as ordered, and return to Máelodor within a fortnight.
Scanning the horizon, a slice of midnight against the blood-water of the Irish Sea, he felt as if he could already see the tangled lanes and streets of the Irish capital, the curve of the Liffey. But it was a mirage. A memory. The Dublin he knew was long gone. Transformed through time from the hardscrabble fortress to a metropolis as grand and light-filled as any European city.
The men he knew were gone too. Wilim. Grifid. His brothers in arms. His comrades. All dead. Naught left of them but a few dusty bones. Scraps of cloth. Bits of moldy armor.
That had been all Máelodor needed.
The library held little more than the desk, a sofa, a few comfortable chairs, and an avalanche of books. The combined remnants of the collections from B
elfoyle and Kilronan House. Refugees from countless auctions and private sales. Those volumes too esoteric or too unimportant to entice the steady stream of buyers who’d passed through his doors since his father’s death. Selling them off had been painful, his father’s lifelong passion computed in pounds and pence. But it had been that very blinkered passion that had put the family’s finances in this predicament. There had been no choice. Anything unentailed became fair game.
Cat O’Connell’s intelligent gaze fell everywhere at once as she stepped lightly across the floor. Took in the blank walls where selected artwork had been sold off. The mantel cleared of its most expensive items, the spaces where prized family pieces once stood. The rest of Kilronan House was much the same. A sad witness to all that had been lost.
Aidan motioned to a chair near the fire. “Have a seat, Miss O’Connell.”
“Cat works well enough.”
She was right. It did. She walked with a feline, sinuous grace only intensified by those damn trousers. He shook his head. Thank the gods women wore gowns. Men would be reduced to blabbering idiots if they spent every day subjected to the spectacle of women’s legs. The male species wasn’t up to that kind of continuous temptation.
First thing on his to-do list. Something to cover those long legs and that sweet, round ass. A solution? Doubtful. She’d need a damn sack to completely disguise that lissome allure. But it would definitely help.
“You don’t speak like any thief I’ve ever heard.”
