No Proper Lady (10 page)

Simon didn’t kiss like Joan had thought he would. She’d imagined it a lot over a week of hot evenings, sliding her hand between her legs and thinking that she was just scratching an itch only to have it come back over and over again. In all of those fantasies, he’d been graceful like he’d been when he danced and rode. Careless, even.

Not now. He held back for a second, surprised, shocked, or maybe trying to resist as Joan had done for all those long nights. But it was only a second.

Then Simon’s lips were hot against hers and his open mouth was urgent. Desperate, even. Hard enough to bruise, but hell, Joan wasn’t complaining. Not at all. Simon’s grace and control had been exciting because they were new. Violence wasn’t. Neither was hunger. Joan knew them both very well, and neither was less exciting because of it. The ache between her legs bore
that
out.

She pressed up against Simon, crushing her breasts against his chest. If she had been less turned on, the pressure might have hurt but now it only made her groan into his mouth. He made his own muffled, incoherent noise, low in his throat. Even that little, intangible thing sent heat running through Joan’s body. When he twined one hand in her hair, pulling her mouth up to his, there was only heat. She cried out sharply.

And Simon stopped for just a second.
He thinks something’s wrong
, Joan realized, a dim thought half buried in the red haze of lust.
Better convince him otherwise.

Before Simon could disentangle his hand from her hair or raise his head to ask a question, Joan slid her tongue into his mouth. Simon groaned again. His hand clenched in her hair once more, and his other hand, at the base of Joan’s spine, tightened as well, pressing her against him. She went willingly, parting her legs a little so his hard-on could rub between them.

Bright Powers, it was so good that he was tall. And big in other ways as well, Joan noticed. She circled her hips, rubbing against him, and moisture soaked the ludicrous things they wore for underwear in that time.

Simon cried out this time. His hand slid lower, cupping her buttocks and then squeezing hard. Joan arched into him in response. Her fingers were probably digging divots in his shoulders, but he didn’t seem to care, any more than she cared about the bruises she’d have on her ass tomorrow.

When Simon lifted his mouth from hers, Joan almost protested, but then his lips were on her neck. He kissed her hard and then bit, and she was writhing against him, hips pumping, oblivious to anything but the desperate hunger of her body.
Want
.

Joan sought his neck with her mouth, trying to return the favor—or just desperate to taste him—and found only cloth. They wore too damn many clothes in this time. She couldn’t even wrap a leg around him properly; the damn nightgown was in the way. Joan snarled in frustration.

When Simon slid his hand down out of her hair to cup one of her breasts, she snarled again. Not in frustration, though. At least not entirely. The world was made of white heat, of warm hands and a warmer mouth, and if she didn’t feel more of both soon, she would scream.

Somewhere around here was a desk. That would work. She just had to remember where it was.

Simon flicked his thumb over her stiff nipple. Once, then again—then he took it between finger and thumb and pinched lightly.

To hell with the desk. There was a floor. There was a wall. Either would do fine.

Joan dropped her hands. One went to Simon’s chest, pushing him away just a little. She hated to do it, but she needed the space. Her other hand went downward, brushing past Simon’s waistband and over the hard bulge of his cock. Unable to resist temptation, Joan closed her hand for a moment, very gently.

“Ah,
God
.” Simon sounded like he was as close to howling as she was. Felt like it too. His cock had fairly leapt in her hand.

Good. Very good. Now—buttons. Joan tugged at the first of them with clumsy fingers and then yanked.

Simon closed his hand over hers. “Wait. Stop.”

The teachings of her childhood rose up through her arousal.
Do you know how much those things
cost
? You have been here too long if you’ve stopped noticing.
Joan shook her head. “Sorry. You do it, then.”

When Simon shook his head, it was like a sign in an alien language, a gesture that might have meant anything from “I come in peace” to “I spit on your mother.” Because it couldn’t mean what it usually meant. Not the way he’d just been touching her.

Simon took both her hands in his and stepped back. He was panting and flushed, and his eyes were dark with passion, but he shook his head again. “I’m sorry. I fear I’m no gentleman at all—but I’ll do what I can, at least.”

“Huh?” She stared at him openmouthed, looking more than a little stupid. Feeling more than a little stupid, like she’d just been hit over the head. Her sex was still hot, still pulsing; her breasts ached for his hands. “Wait—what?”

“I won’t take advantage of you,” he said roughly. “I’ve done too much of that already, I think.”

“
I
kissed
you
.”

“Because you were tired and upset.”

“Yeah—wait, no. I mean, yeah, I was, but so what?” She shrugged. “There are worse ways to take the edge off, and I wanted you anyhow. Still do.”

Simon flushed again, and his hands tightened on hers. “Don’t tempt me.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not right. You’re my guest. You aren’t thinking clearly.”

“If you’re thinking clearly during sex,” Joan said, and this time she couldn’t keep the edge from her voice, “you’re doing it wrong.”

Simon laughed. His laugh was short and breathless, but he was definitely amused. “There’s that. But”—and his face grew more serious—“there are consequences, you know.”

“I won’t get knocked up. We took care of all that long ago.” She remembered the ceremony, the sharp smell of herbs, the heat just above her pelvis.

“Not just that,” he said slowly. “We have to work together. Getting involved with each other—”

Dammit. He had to bring up the objection she’d spent the last couple weeks trying to keep in mind. Hearing it was like a bucket of cold water over her head. “Yeah,” she said, shoving her hair out of her face. “Okay. I’d better get to bed, then.”

The good thing about arousal was that it was easy to deal with, at least for a little while. A few quick strokes of her fingers under the covers and the stupid nightgown sent Joan over the edge. She bit her lip hard as she came, since noise would attract the servants. She tried, and failed utterly, to think of anyone but Simon. It was his face that she saw in her mind’s eye as her orgasm hit, his muffled groans that she heard.

What the hell
, she thought sleepily, turning her face into the cool pillow.
There are plenty of men to distract me in London.

***

In the morning, though, the memory of kissing Simon was still with Joan. It heated her blood and set up a familiar sweet ache between her legs. She groaned and pulled the pillow over her head for a second, but she couldn’t deny what she felt. The only option left was to fight it.

The physical came first. That morning, Joan threw herself into the practice with even more energy than usual. Then she splashed her face with cold water and scrubbed it as roughly as if the rose-scented soap were the eye-stinging stuff she was used to.

It helped. A little.

When Rose came in, Joan picked out the plainest and most severe of her new dresses. It was dark gray, like the sky just before a storm, with just a trace of navy-blue ribbon for ornament. The neckline was high, and the sleeves were long. She hadn’t worn it much before. It had been too confining. Now a little confinement seemed like just what she needed.

There was a note on the breakfast tray from Simon, recommending that she spend the day reading some books he’d left on the library table, saying that he’d spend most of the day in the private study, and requesting her company at dinner. Clearly, Joan wasn’t the only one taking protective measures here. She wouldn’t have expected anything less. It was very sensible.

She wasn’t disappointed at all. Really.

“Might I speak with you?” Eleanor asked.

It was after dinner, with the last red beams of the summer twilight still coming in through the long windows. To Simon’s mind, the meal had been rather stilted. He was very much aware of what had happened in the library the night before, and though Joan was fairly adept at subterfuge, he thought that she was as well. When Eleanor spoke from behind him, his first thought was that she’d noticed.

He cringed inwardly but nodded. “Of course.”

“Would it be very much trouble for you to cast a spell?”

That was the last thing Simon had expected. “What sort?” he asked, wondering if she’d somehow fallen in love with one of the village boys or wanted her fortune read—but Eleanor had never been one for such feminine silliness.

“Something to see into…other places? Or perhaps things that are invisible here.” She drew a breath and then spoke in a rush. “I want to know if that thing is anywhere near me.”

“It’s not,” he said automatically. The wards would carry over into other worlds. If something was watching her from there, it did so impotently. “But there’s no harm in making sure, if you’d like.”

“I would,” she said firmly. “Please.”

By the time Eleanor knocked at the door of his private study, Simon had put most of the preparations in place. The smell of cloves was thick in the air, the paper and ink were out and waiting, and on the floor, in the middle of the paper, was a large mirror. He could already feel the power building. It wasn’t the sensual heat that had accompanied the protection spell, fortunately, but rather a coolness that never became
quite
cold enough to be uncomfortable.

Eleanor’s face, when she saw him, was a study in surprise and uncertainty. Understandable enough since Alex had made the “experiments” she had seen in evening dress, not high ceremonial garb. “Er,” she said, eyeing his tunic nervously, “must I—”

“Not at all. Even I don’t have to, strictly speaking. It’s just a good idea.” He smiled, trying to put her at her ease.

As he’d hoped, he saw curiosity overcome her fear. “Would this be less likely to work if you didn’t?”

“Harder for me to control, rather.”

“Oh. Is there anything I should do?”

“Stand here.” Simon gestured to a spot just north of the mirror. “And try not to move at all.”

She took her place and watched, wide eyed, as Simon knelt by the paper and began the spell proper. This time, the ink was blue and silver, and the characters far more familiar: Gabriel at the westernmost point, Apollo to the east, Neith to the south, and Freya to the north. He wrote the characters requesting sight into other worlds and then those, less familiar, asking to see all enemies and evil spirits around Eleanor.

As Simon completed the last stroke, he saw a flash of pale blue from the corner of his eye and heard Eleanor stifle a gasp. The double ring of characters floated in the mirror, glowing with blue fire—the same sort that had appeared between the stones when he’d met Joan. Around it, the mirror was black.

Slowly, a pale shape took form inside the ring: Eleanor’s face. The light was wrong and the angle impossible, but it was her staring back out of the mirror with what Simon knew to be the same half-alarmed, half-fascinated expression that he’d see if he looked over to where she stood. The light crawled over her, flickering its symbols across the pale expanse of her forehead and down her cheeks, moving like a living thing.

The darkness vanished, and the mirror reflected the room again—behind Eleanor now, not the view from its real position—before shifting to a clear, pearly gray. Strange shapes moved behind it. Simon couldn’t make out the whole of their outlines, and he rather thought he didn’t want to. They didn’t seem bad, not precisely, but neither were they shapes that the human mind was meant to take in. And yet the eye wanted to linger on them, to trace the impossible curves and the unlikely angles—

Bright light shone out from the mirror, banishing the gray. Bright green light with strands of gold shot through it somehow. Eleanor gave a cry of delight, and Simon felt much the same impulse. Whatever this place was, it was one of joy, strange though that joy might be, and peace, even if it was a peace foreign to humans. In a second, that too was gone. It went quicker than the others, as if the searching light had a mind and seemed to grasp that the Dark One was very unlikely to be in a place like that.

Next came a skyline where twisted rust-colored buildings raised strange heads to a murky violet sky and shapes as tall as they were moved ponderously among them. The backgrounds flickered faster: a snowscape under three golden moons, a bloody forest where the trees opened gaping mouths to greet them, a hillside that might have been autumn anywhere in England. Faster and faster, worlds spinning past behind Eleanor’s face—and finally, darkness.

At first, Simon thought that the journey was over, that the mirror had gone back to its starting point. But the ring of blue light hadn’t vanished, and the darkness, when he looked into it, wasn’t complete. Flecks of light swam in it, a dull, rot-green light that was utterly unlike the joyful radiance they’d seen so briefly. When he’d banished the Dark One from Eleanor, it had given off just such a glow.

This was its home.

Eleanor made no sound. In the mirror, her face was dead white and her teeth firmly set in her lower lip, but she didn’t whimper, and she didn’t move.

The flecks of light drifted past her image with a lazy, predatory grace. Their movement spoke of things that could have been from the bottom of the ocean, things that existed only to eat or be eaten, terrible enough in their mindless innocence. These were worse. Malice flowed off them like a scent.

Yet they passed Eleanor’s image without wavering. Not one of them stayed by her. Not one even seemed to linger.

Simon let out a slow breath. “Be done,” he said to the mirror.

It went blank. The power lingered, as it would until he cleaned the room, but Simon had no trace of the energy he’d felt after the protection spell. He was weary instead and chilled, and he very much wanted a bath. Somewhere in there was a dim species of relief, but it was a feeble thing indeed.

“You’re all right,” he said. Eleanor stood like a statue, watching him. “It’s like I thought. Nothing’s taken any particular interest in you.”

Now she closed her eyes and let her shoulders slump. “Thank God,” she said, and sounded almost like her old self. “And thank you, Simon. I don’t mean to be a bother, you know.”

“You’re nothing of the sort.”

“Hardly the classical younger sister, then.” She smiled faintly.

Laughter, even his brief harsh laughter, seemed to take a great deal of effort. “Perhaps the ancient masters were wrong on a few points.”

“One or two.” Eleanor opened her eyes and looked at him again. “Did I do all right?”

“Wonderfully, Ellie.”

“Good. It was interesting in its way, you know. Bits of it, at least. Do you—do you think I might learn more?”

Simon’s first impulse was to forbid it. His second was to ask how, after Alex, she could even think of such a thing. But her face held such tentative hope—and it was the only thing she’d really asked of him in the time since they’d left London.

“A little more,” he finally said. “Nothing dangerous, mind. I’ll send up a book you can begin with.” He still had one or two of the notebooks he’d used in his school days. Protective charms might actually help, and the bit of candle lighting and fortune-telling in the notebooks was far too minor to hurt her.

Eleanor had never, in all the time he’d known her, been demonstrative, and she was less so now. All the same, the sudden light in her eyes and the tone in her voice were unmistakable and slightly embarrassing. “Oh, thank you!”

“It’s probably for the best,” Simon said, clearing his throat. “After all, my business takes me to the city on a regular basis, and Miss MacArthur will quite probably come with me next time I go. If you feel up to it, of course, we’d like you to join us.”

“Even if I do,” Eleanor said thoughtfully, “I’d imagine she’ll have to spend a great deal of time away from me. It would be horribly inconvenient otherwise, wouldn’t it?”

She knew.

“What did Joan tell you?” Simon asked, managing by sheer force of will to keep his voice even.
By God, the woman had no right—

“Nothing at all important,” Eleanor said, and while she didn’t meet Simon’s eyes, her voice was unexpectedly firm. “Only that Mr. Reynell was an enemy of hers, and she only told me that because I asked. I’m sorry, Simon. I didn’t mean to pry, but I couldn’t stand not knowing.”

“You don’t need to apologize,” he said.

“I—I don’t think that she does either. You’ll forgive me for saying it, I hope, but I thought your business in town was something to do with him even before Joan said anything. I was worried.”

“A duel?” He’d thought of it and cursed the fact that he’d been born fifty years too late for such a measure to be anything short of ridiculous. But he hadn’t thought Eleanor had any idea.

She smiled a little, sadly. “You’re my brother, Simon. And you’re a good man. Yes, I thought something like that. I didn’t want to believe it—I prayed I was wrong—but when you left for London, I was almost certain.”

“You didn’t want me to go through with it?”

“No,” she said, her reticence falling away on that one intense syllable. “Not ever. They’d hang you for that. And if they didn’t, it would have haunted you.”

“Maybe I deserve to be haunted,” said Simon. “You—”

Eleanor shook her head. “I’m hurt. I’ll get better. People do. It’s not worth losing you.”

Simon stepped forward and put his arms around her. She was taller now than she’d been the last time he’d done that, but she leaned her head against his shoulder as she’d done then, and she didn’t pull away. “I’m sorry, Ellie,” he said.

“It’s not your fault.”

“It is, in a way.” Simon braced himself. “Reynell chose you because he hated me.”

“Not really. Or not entirely.”

“What do you mean?”

Eleanor closed her eyes again. “That night was the first time I’d done anything, really,” she said, “but not the first time he had. That thing—” She broke off, tense but not still. Rather, she trembled like a small animal before a predator. Simon stroked her hair and her back, but he didn’t speak.

“It knew him,” she said finally. “Knew him like I know you. I wasn’t the first girl to host it, Simon, and I don’t think I’ll be the last. And nobody,
nobody
ever mentioned the ones who came before.”

“Oh, God.” Simon sent a silent and hasty prayer of thanks to Lieutenant Carter, wherever his spirit might have gone.

“I think he gave himself to darkness long before you knew,” Eleanor said. Her voice shook. “I think the other girls were practice, and I hope—I pray—that he paid them to disappear afterward. I don’t know anything for sure, or I would have said.”

“I know you would,” Simon said. He tried to sound reassuring, but he didn’t think he succeeded. His mind was whirling, and a cold and certain fear had settled at the pit of his stomach. Girls went missing all the time. Not girls like Ellie or her friends—children of wealth and breeding, with protective brothers and worried parents—but in the slums of the East End, girls vanished every day, and there were spells that wouldn’t just use them as mediums.

“God,” Simon said again, and his arms clenched more tightly around Eleanor.

She looked up at him. “So, you see? If it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else. Some other poor girl. And would that have been better?” She swallowed hard. “I try not to think so. She might not have gotten away. I did. You saved me. And you—and Joan—are going to save the rest. Aren’t you?”

“Close enough,” he said, and heard his voice crack.