AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“What’s that?”
/>
“Bed her and get her out of your system. Always works with my infatuations. I mean they’re all the same in the dark, aren’t they? Soft flesh, a few maidenly whimpers, and boom, the itch is scratched.”
Aidan sighed. Why had he even bothered having this conversation? He should have bundled his cousin out as soon as he’d shown signs of nesting. Exhaustion and his own laudanum hangover had loosened Aidan’s tongue more than he’d expected. He sought to repair the dam. “Thank you for that lovely image, but I think I’ll stick to my own plans. And Cat’s bed does not figure in any of them.” He’d said it. He meant it.
Jack made his way toward the door, only the cautious way he carried himself a hint at how drunk he was. “No Miss Osborne. No Cat.” He sighed dramatically. “Just remember, all work and no play . . .”
This time Aidan gave in to the temptation. The boot hit the wall where Jack’s head had been only moments before.
Lazarus straightened, slamming his dagger into its sheath. Breathed slowly to calm the shaky jags trembling his hands.
Already the battle madness ebbed, that endless, impossible abyss of hate and evil seeking to pull him into its fiery vortex. Claim him as it had so many others before him.
If he thought it would end the pain, he’d give in. But he knew it for the chimera it was. There would be no end. Not as long as he remained trapped in this living hell of slavish bondage. For one of the mage-born Domnuathi, not even death came as a relief. After all, death had been the origin of his creation.
He tried remembering that other self, the warrior who’d found honor in battle, pride in a skill few challenged. But the memories came as through a dream, fragile as smoke, dissolving before he could capture the illusion for truth. Instead, his eye fell upon the carnage before him, the bodies strewn across the room. Quigley with a sword thrust through the heart, the bookseller’s final expression almost defiant as he called for aid that had never come. Smith and his cronies had fallen only seconds apart, their criminal cunning no match for Lazarus’s dual lifetimes spent on the attack.
No trail, Máelodor had ordered. No way to trace Quigley back to Lazarus and thus back to Máelodor.
Even if he’d not been compelled to follow his master’s commands, these less-than men deserved the death they’d received. They’d failed him. The whole lot of them. The diary was no closer to his hand than it had ever been. Máelodor would be angry. Máelodor would blame him.
Lazarus closed a fist over his sword’s pommel. Felt his fingers fall into the well-worn grooves of a weapon that had become an extension of his very self. His whole self, for wasn’t that what he’d become—a living, breathing weapon?
He studied the cooling broken corpses with envy. Wished with whatever tattered remnants of soul left to him that he lay among them.
Spring found its way even into the neglected garden. Sunlight poured through branches heavy with green, and huge, blowsy peonies nodded in the warm breeze. Here, removed from the suffocating pages of the diary, Cat could imagine away the worst moments of the last days. Pretend Geordie waited for her with a bottle of claret and a good laugh. Pretend she wasn’t being hunted by a gang of cutthroats. Pretend she hadn’t almost kissed a man who made her feel hot and cold and nervous and eager all in the same instant.
As she strolled the paths, the soupy mental fog accompanying every reading of the diary slowly faded so that the landscape’s graceful unfolding stood out in richly defined clarity.
Something every other part of her life at this moment lacked.
Pushing through overgrown shrubbery, she discovered a secluded grotto. A sheltering stand of laburnum surrounding an abandoned and unappreciated statue of Leda and her swan. Sinking onto an iron bench, Cat took in and quickly dismissed the passionate coupling of the woman and her avian lover. Closed her eyes, lifting her face to the healing sun.
A rustle of boxwood, a muttered, “Ouch! Blasted branch,” and she found herself face-to-back-of-the-head with the man she’d come out here to escape. He looked up from untangling his coat. Started with another muttered oath.
He couldn’t have found his own secluded piece of garden? He had to invade hers? She rose from the bench, smoothing her skirts.
“I’ll leave,” she said before he could do more than blink his astonishment at being in her company.
He recovered with fluid ease. “It’s all right. I’m just not used to encountering anyone out here. Jack’s not much on communing with nature, so I tend to have the garden to myself.”
His gaze flicked to the statue. Back to her. And what had been mere pleasing artistry suddenly took on looming significance. The swan’s magnificent wingspan combined with Leda’s arched back radiated eroticism with the blunt force of a hammer. Cat clenched her jaw until her teeth ached. It couldn’t have been a rendering of some spear thrusting warrior exterminating a lion. Oh no, she had to be trapped with Aidan amid seduction on a mythic scale.
“My father had it commissioned for my mother as a wedding gift,” he offered, strain running through his voice.
“It’s beautiful,” she replied, knowing she sounded insipid.
“He always teased that his love for my mother rivaled the passion of the gods.”
A feeling she thought long past tightened her throat. “Now, that’s beautiful.”
His gaze traveled over Leda’s very evident charms—wide, rounded hips, long legs spread in tantalizing invitation, head thrown back in obvious desire—before he lifted his eyes to hers. The mesmerizing intensity in them pushing past her formidable inner defenses. “Yes, isn’t she?”
A queer fluttery feeling beat against her insides. Sent unwanted heat pooling deep in her center. She felt his long, slow scrutiny of the sculpture as hands upon her own body. The sure yet gentle touch of a new lover. His increasing arousal. His growing boldness. She welcomed his reckless longing with a spreading fire of her own. Her skin beneath the sturdy gown flushed in anticipation. Her lungs working frantically to keep pace with her heart.
The outside world shrank down to the space of the secluded grotto, the powerful, stern-faced man in front of her, the measureless depths of his stare. His hands flexed at his sides. His breathing as jagged as her own. The bronze light in his eyes darkening with every passing second they remained locked together in this neverending, crystalline moment.
