Weather Witch

“That’s what I am counting on. This way. And no questions, you understand?”

She glimpsed just enough of his dark form in the shadows to see his head full of tight salt and pepper curls nod in agreement and once more she hiked up her cumbersome skirts and hurried back to Lady Astraea’s chambers.

* * *

Rowen stomped his way up the large stairs leading to his family’s main porch and would have thrown open the door in a dramatic fashion had not the servants stolen the opportunity by opening the doors quite politely in advance and even bowing to their young master.

It infuriated him even more—the fact he could not throw an appropriately sized tantrum on his family’s estate because they were too well taken care of by servants who bent and scraped to his mother’s every wish. He turned and watched her hurry up the stairs, her parasol bobbing as she took each step. Ridiculous to carry a parasol at night, but Mother wished not to muss her bonnet in the wet.

“Rowen, be a dear and—” She held out her parasol, its top damp from water still dripping from rooftops.

He took it from her without a word. And seethed a bit more at his automatic reaction.

She cleared her throat and a butler appeared to help her remove her jacket. “It is simply dreadful out,” she said with a disdainful sniffle.

“And the party, madam? How was it?” the butler, a young man only a half-dozen years older than Rowen, asked, glancing at Rowen although he addressed Lady Burchette.

Rowen puffed out a sigh and shook his head.

“Let us never speak of that event—or that family—ever again, Jonathan,” Lady Burchette said simply.

The butler’s eyebrows shot up, but Rowen turned away, unable to do anything, unwilling to say any more. Rowen stalked away.

“Master Rowen,” Jonathan called, “your coat and hat, young sir—”

“Oh, let him be. Poor thing,” his mother said. “He nearly ruined his entire life tonight. Over a girl. Can you imagine?”

Jonathan pressed his lips together in a firm line and shook his head no. A poor liar, he was not caught because Lady Burchette was uninterested in anything about servants’ lives. They lived to serve. How important or interesting could their existence possibly be?

Rowen threw his hat to Jonathan.

“Boy,” Rowen’s father called. “Join me in the study for a drink.”

Rowen blew out a sigh, shook his head, blond hair flying, and stomped away. Down the main hallway he went, past the portraits of his ancestors and the picture of his entire family standing together—the picture in which his mother tersely proclaimed Rowen showed too many teeth—men were meant to be stoic, not funny.

He paused before the picture, examining his face perfected in paint. It was not a bad likeness, though his jaw was a bit stronger in reality and the artist had somehow missed the too-obvious dimple in his chin. His upper lip looked oddly long because his mother had insisted the artist paint over his grin.

His father looked suitably stoic. Or cowed. Rowen was never sure which.

But the painter was rumored to be the finest in the city—and one of the best in the entire region. He had quite the reputation and that mattered far more than accuracy. Lady Burchette had even said once Rowen obtained Jordan’s promise she would arrange to have her included in a brand-new sitting.

His mother had promised Jordan would be as much a part of their family as Rowen felt he was a part of hers.

And now?

It was all ruined.

He growled out his frustration, his hands snapping forward to grab the picture by its frame and dash it onto the floor where he could better dance on his mother’s face. Once she had called Cynthia Astraea her “best of best friends.” And yet she had abandoned her—believed the Tester and accepted the worst of all rumors …

She had not defended her in her time of need.

His fingers tightened on the frame. Just a small move to lift it off the hook and …

“It is a fine portrait.”

He jumped, hands clamping down on the picture in surprise and pulling it free from the wall.

Catrina blinked in surprise.

Rowen swallowed a groan. “Would you”—leave me the hell alone for a while, for once? He stretched his lips into a smile—“like to see it closer?”

She tilted her head. Weighing the scene with glittering eyes. “Why yes,” she said, stepping over so that she stood tucked up into the curve of his side, her skirts pressing against his hip, her shoulder warm against him. “Oh. Wait,” she said, and she ducked under his arm to stand between him and the portrait in his hands.

The change in position was unsettling. Her skirts brushed the front of his trousers and her perfume filled the small space between them. Then she spun in the circle formed by his arms and the huge portrait and managed to press her bodice—was something that low cut truly the fashion of the day? he wondered—against his chest. “Remarkable,” she whispered, batting her eyelashes, her nose nearly at his chin as she looked up at him from beneath lacy lashes.

She leaned in, stretched up …

Rowen belched and she shrieked, engulfed in a scent that surely clashed with the bouquet of her perfume.

Straining his shoulder with the weight of the picture, Rowen’s right hand released it to allow Catrina some distance. He turned back to the wall and hung the portrait again. He belched again. “Yes. Nearly as remarkable as the cucumber sandwiches I had at the Astraea estate—they keep”—he belched once more and rapped on his chest with a fist as he turned back to face her—“talking to me.”

“Oh, Rowen,” Catrina said, pulling her fan free to move the offensive air away. “Whatever would your mother say?”

“She would say, ‘Dear heavens, Rowen, have you not yet managed to come to grips that your innards are not capable of appropriately processing cucumbers?’” He shrugged. “I will surely spend more than my fair amount of time in the water closet as a result.”

Catrina wrinkled her nose.

“And God help whoever attempts to use it after me—I can curl your hair without pins or presses,” he said, pressing his lips into a firm line and nodding with an expression frighteningly akin to pride.

Catrina fanned faster. “Rowen, that is highly inappropriate talk—offensive talk—to share with a lady.”

“Then perhaps you’d better go, because I do not feel a desire to be tremendously proper on this eve.”

“Oh. I see.”

Rowen turned to head down the hall. She had not moved farther, so he determined it was up to him to put greater distance between them. But only a few feet toward his next destination he heard the clatter of her heels as she raced to catch up.

“Perhaps just this once I might be a bit improper, too,” she suggested with a wink.

Inwardly he groaned and instead of turning left at the next intersection of hallways, he turned right, pausing at the top of a set of stairs.

“Excellent well,” he said, sounding far heartier than the shadows in his eyes proved him to be. “Let’s get drunk.”

Catrina startled at the suggestion, stepping back from the top of the stairs and eyeing Rowen in disbelief. “Get drunk? Imbibe?”

“Imbibe our asses off,” he clarified.

Her eyes shot wide open. “Why, Rowen … Such language.”

“I’m ranked Sixth of the Nine. We imbibe. We smoke. We curse. Jordan understood that.”

She opened and closed her fan again and again. “Well, Jordan had reason to understand such behaviors, considering the taint of her blood.”

“Do not.”

“Do not what?”