beneath him.
Dimitri closed his eyes momentarily. The last thing he needed to think about was a heaving, writhing woman beneath him, since he’d had just that this morning. Only with clothing between them, thank the Fates.
He lifted his hand to pinch the bridge of his nose in frustration, and Maia’s scent came with it. This after he’d washed his hands thrice.
Was he now branded with her?
And he simply must
When he next looked out the window again, he noted that Tren had taken the opportunity to drive along Fleet and east toward Ludgate. The dome of the new St. Paul’s Cathedral rose over the tightly packed houses clustering around it, visible even through London’s constant filter of fog. At least, to Dimitri the church was new. To everyone else in London, it was the same cathedral that had always been there since its completion a hundred years ago.
But Dimitri clearly recalled the previous structure, whose spire had been destroyed by lightning in 1561, and then almost exactly a hundred years later, the rest of the cathedral had gone up in flames with eighty-eight other churches and thirteen thousand houses in London. The Great Fire of 1666 had melted St. Paul’s lead roof, sending the molten metal pouring onto the streets, making rivers of glowing red heat.
He would never forget the sounds of houses collapsing and towers falling, combined with the shrieks of women and men shouting. The streets were so hot that neither man nor horse could bear to walk on them. He and Meg had earlier taken a room at one of the public houses on Cheapside and were awakened in the dead of night by the shouts and bells clanging. By then the fire already turned the sky golden-red, and smoke filled the air, enveloping the citizens in soot and choking them with smoke.
They stumbled out of the public house as the fire danced on the rooftop next to it, flames leaping like curling devils. Dimitri heard a cry behind him and saw a woman screaming at the small, flaming house, and realized her husband was trapped inside. He didn’t hesitate but dashed around, trying to find an opening in the lashing tongues of fire. Only the front was burning, and Dimitri tore the door from the rear of the building and ducked into a dark, smoky hell.
It was his good fortune that the man was collapsed near the door, and Dimitri was able to pull him free. But by the time he reemerged, Meg had gone missing.
Even now, Dimitri remembered the terror of losing her. The paralysis, empty and cold amid all the hot chaos.
She’d become everything to him, to the man of thirty who’d spent most of his life buried with books and studies and had had little time or experience with the feminine gender. His Romanian mother, in adopting her new homeland of England, had embraced the Puritan tenet that affection toward children led them away from godliness. Thus she’d been remote and cool throughout all of his youth.
His father the earl, a Royalist who’d remained in England during the Cromwell years, took care to stay below the notice of the new government and taught his five sons to do the same by also seeming to adopt the simple, rigid Cromwellian ways. They had little social engagement and spent much of the time during the Lord Protector’s reign away from London.
Thus, the sensual, earthy Meg—who was several years older than he—had changed Dimitri’s world, bringing in a breath of life to an otherwise staid and bland one. She told him about her exciting, dangerous life as an actress in Southwark’s stealth theaters during the time when the public stages were shuttered under Cromwell. Filled with enthusiasm and smiles, she was a bold woman who exuded sensual promise.
Meg had become his life. She lured him, the proper and staid fifth son of an earl, into her bed, and in doing so, wholly snared his heart and mind.
In retrospect, Dimitri had come to realize that she wasn’t nearly as in love with him as he had been with her. Meg was enamoured by the thought of him being a peer and of a wealthy family, and what that might mean if they were attached, but she was not of his class, nor, more importantly, of his moral makeup. She lived for the moment and was scandalously loose while the genteel Dimitri lived only for the future.
Yet, that hot, red night when he emerged from saving the man from a house afire and found Meg missing, Dimitri’s life stopped. He simply couldn’t imagine his world without the sloe-eyed, coy-smiling, curvy redhead and he stood in the burning street, frantic.
Then, somehow, above all of the chaos around them, he heard her voice.
There, up in the window of the room they’d let at the small inn, next to the flaming house. He saw her leaning out the window, screaming for him. She’d gone back inside? Why? Then he saw the ruby necklace dangling from her fingers.
She’d gone back in to retrieve the most recent gift he’d given her.
His mind blank and terrified, Dimitri thought of nothing but saving her. He bolted through the door of the inn, which had just begun to catch fire. Inside it was already filled with choking ash and the heat radiated from the buildings around it.
But he could save her. There was time.
He ran up the stairs, already narrow and steep, but now darker and clogged with hot smoke. Stumbling, staggering, he went two flights until he found the room they’d used, blind and hot, barely able to breathe. The roar of fire filled his ears, the sounds of timber shuddering and heaving as it crackled into debris, the walls warm and rough beneath his fingers.
Somehow, he found her, his hands filled with the soft, familiar warmth of Meg, who’d collapsed on the floor near the door. He gathered her up and fell more than ran down the stairs, his eyes stinging with smoke, gritty and blind. The roof above was now ablaze, and falling pieces from the rafters scattered in front of him, tumbling down the steps and catching against his legs and trousers.
Down, down, down he went, staggering against the walls, at last reaching the bottom. Just then, a loud rumble filled his ears, followed by a horrible crash.
The next thing he knew, there was pain and heat bearing him to the ground, and everything was light…tinged with red and orange leaping everywhere. He coughed, tasted smoke, choking out her name and tried to crawl toward what he thought was the door.
Dimitri dragged them to the opening, his body weak and burning, his lover boneless and unmoving, the ruby still clutched in her hand, the chain wound around her wrist.
The thoughts ran over and over in his mind as he crawled with superhuman strength, over rubble and coals, burying his face in the ground to keep from breathing the smoke.
It was a miracle that he made it from the smoking, blazing building, and even more of a miracle that he was able to pick Meg up and carry her down the burning streets, staggering west and away from the rage of fire.
At last, he collapsed, coughing, his eyes gritty, his hair and back singed and his body screaming with pain. He couldn’t catch his breath. All he could smell was smoke. Her body was warm and comforting next to him.
And Dimitri collapsed there, curling with his lover under a bridge as the fire raged in the distance. The sun had begun to rise in the distance, but the sky was already an arc of red over London.
He closed his eyes, feeling the strength sap from him. Meg hadn’t moved, even when he shook her, tried to listen to her breathing. But his ears were deafened from the great noise, and he couldn’t tell if her chest moved with breath.
He fell into sleep, or a faint, or something…and that was when the dark, fallen angel Lucifer visited him. Offered him precisely what he wanted.
Even now, Dimitri felt the rush of cold over him when he remembered that moment. The clear blue eyes and the handsome face of the visage in his dreams.
Lucifer smiled.
Dimitri remembered the vague feeling of evil, the cold skittering deep inside him. He opened his mouth—or perhaps only the mouth in his dream—to say no, to ask more, to question, perhaps even to pray…but Luce
