ribbons at her bodice after all. He settled back down on the divan much closer to her this time, his thigh lined up along where her skirts angled off the sofa.
“And then there’s the way you feed,” she said, eyeing him closely. “Sure as the day’s long, you’re not like any other vampire I’ve ever met. Excepting Dimitri, of course, but he don’t feed on anyone anyway.”
“I am discriminating in my choice of libation,” Giordan agreed, sliding his fingers up to the ribbons and filtering his fingers through the loose knots. “Aren’t you?” he asked with a smile.
But of course, Rubey didn’t cast up her accounts if she partook of a piece of steak or a chicken leg….
He could still remember those black, bleak days when he hadn’t realized what was happening, and he hadn’t understood why he’d feed and then no sooner had he finished than it all came furiously, violently back up again. His mouth and throat had been scorched dry, his belly sore and weak from the constant purging. The taste of bile-laden blood, rushing back up through his throat and burning into his mouth and nose, was a disgusting, degrading sensation he’d never forget.
Thank the Fates for Drishni and Kritanu, helping him understand how he’d changed. How he must have answered the voice that said in his head:
How he’d found light after all the darkness. Soothing, peaceful, warm…after so many years of darkness.
If it hadn’t been for them, he’d have gone mad.
More mad than he’d already been, after Narcise.
Rubey made a moue of distaste. “Sure and it’s ironic, the way I run a house of pleasure for them who drink blood when the very thought of a bloody steak or the leg of a hen makes me ill. My pappa couldn’t ever understand why I was happy with only potatoes and greens.”
Giordan might have replied but his shift toward the ever-expanding exposure of her bodice was interrupted by a knock at the door.
“Blast it,” Rubey said, disappointment clearly in her tones. “What is it?” she called.
The door eased open and one of her servants—a large brute of a mortal man named Eduardo, whom Giordan didn’t wholly trust—stepped in holding a small silver tray. “A message has just arrived for Mr. Cale,” he said.
Giordan took the note, which was marked with Corvindale’s seal, and broke into it.
He closed it up, a myriad of emotions running through him—the foremost and strongest being pain. Darkness. But Giordan drew in a deep, steadying breath and after a moment, his red vision and the pounding, trammeling feeling eased. His fingers relaxed.
There was a time when he’d have had no qualms, no hesitation about snapping the neck of someone like Woodmore—particularly since, several months back, he found the man in the rooms Giordan had let in London, preparing to hang his heart on a stake. Some sort of gray-black smoke was trickling from the fireplace and Woodmore was caught off guard by Giordan’s wakefulness during the day and, he learned later, a malfunction of some sort of smoke explosion.
But those days of quick, efficient violence had gone, and when Giordan learned that his would-be attacker was none other than Chas Woodmore, associate and friend of Dimitri, he’d allowed it to end as a misunderstanding. He’d even helped prepare the bastard for his mission to assassinate Cezar Moldavi.
But his easy assistance was before he’d responded to Woodmore’s request to meet him in Reither’s Closewell…and smelled Narcise. Everywhere. Everywhere on Chas Woodmore.
Even the information Woodmore had wished to share—that Cezar Moldavi had not, in the past decade, forgotten his obsession with Giordan—didn’t concern him.
After all, it had been a decade for Giordan as well. The ten years had been both interminable and all too brief, too close. Too raw.
Now, he stood and made himself walk casually over to the chair where he’d removed his shoes, sit and pull them on.
He’d known they were together, of course; that Wood-more had helped her to escape from Paris—or had abducted her. No one was clear on the details. But to smell her thus…so lush and rich and feminine.
The moment was as if he’d slammed into a stone wall: he lost his breath, he felt the shock of pain reverberating through him, he turned numb.
After, Giordan wasn’t certain how he’d managed to make it through that meeting at the inn, once he’d caught her scent. It was the way it
His vision turned dark and red even now. He couldn’t ignore the memory of the disgust in her face, the horror in her eyes.
As if anything she could think about him was as horrible as what he’d done.
He’d tried to explain, to make her understand…but she didn’t want to listen. She wasn’t
Either she’d never loved and trusted him at all, or she hadn’t loved and trusted him enough.
At it was, he didn’t know whom to thank that Narcise had decided to go with Woodmore to London instead of having Giordan take her to Wales. He doubted he would have survived that trip with his sanity intact.
“Is everything all right?” Rubey asked.
Giordan wasn’t certain how long he’d been silent—he’d finished dressing and was starting toward the chamber door before she spoke. “A summons from Dimitri,” he said with an ironic tone. “When the earl beckons, one must answer.”
She was watching him with those shrewd eyes. “When will I see you again?” she asked. Not with petulance, not even with invitation, but as a businesswoman, scheduling an engagement. Rubey was no man’s woman through her own volition, and not for lack of being wooed.
“When next I need to feed,” he told her smoothly, then moved quickly back to her side. Pressing a farewell kiss to her temple, he said, “With your permission, madame.”
“Of course,” she replied haughtily. But he felt the weight of her curious gaze following him out the door.
The trip to Blackmont Hall, the residence of the Earl of Corvindale, was hampered by a carriage accident on Bond. Giordan didn’t begrudge the delay, for it gave him more time to mull, to consider, to settle. To decide if he even meant to go.
The streets were relatively quiet, for the shops were closed this late at night, but the thoroughfares were by no means deserted. Carriages and hacks trundled by, many pedestrians skirted the shadows—some of them up to no good, some of them simply walking from one pub, club, theater, or party to another.
Giordan sat quietly in his richly appointed carriage and considered how far the bounds of friendship reached. If it were anyone other than Dimitri, he would ignore the summons. When Woodmore sent him the secret message to meet in Reither’s Close, Giordan had gone, not realizing what awaited him.
But he did now. And he wasn’t certain he’d be able to handle being in the same chamber as Woodmore and not think of peeling the man’s flesh from his body. Despite who he’d become.
He hadn’t laid a violent finger, hand, or fang on anyone since the After Hell.
Instead of dwelling on thoughts of Chas Woodmore, Giordan forced himself to review what he knew, wondering why Dimitri felt it necessary to have him present tonight.
Voss had run off with Angelica Woodmore. He claimed it was to keep her safe from Moldavi’s men, who’d, predictably, followed Woodmore and Narcise from Paris.
Giordan had been in London—although with Rubey and not in attendance—the night of the abduction, when Belial and three others had entered a masquerade ball and murdered three people. That night and the next day, he and Dimitri had had to work together to enthrall witnesses and change stories. Otherwise, the news might cause a mad panic in London such as there had been in Brussels some years back after a similar occurrence. Shortly after, Giordan left to meet Woodmore in Reither’s Close and break the news of Angelica’s kidnapping.
But by the time Giordan had returned to London, with, presumably, Woodmore on his heels, Angelica had been safely retrieved by Dimitri.
Still, the earl was furious with Voss for taking one of the Woodmore sisters while he was responsible for them during their brother’s disappearance, and by the tone of his message tonight, he intended to find Voss and square things with him. Which, in Dimitri’s mind, likely meant to kill the bastard.
