Lady Killer (18 page)

“Don’t worry about the clock,” he said amiably. “It was one of the first His Lordship made and hasn’t functioned right in years. Besides, we’ve more than enough around—” he made a wide gesture with his arm, and Clio saw that while there were no chairs in the room, there were indeed three other clocks “—and it will be good for His Lordship to have something to work on.” Noting the uncomprehending look on her face, and the fact that—despite the warnings Miles had given him about the tantrum she would throw when she awoke and the demands she would make to be taken to prison—she was not speaking, he rushed on. “I can have a bath ready in ten minutes if you like, and these gowns are for you.” Corin opened a hidden door in the wall behind which lay a built-in cupboard containing three dresses, each one ten-thousand-times lovelier than the one the woman at the fair had been wearing. “They are only temporary, of course, until Octavia can get your measurements.” When she still had not said anything, he asked, “Are you all right, Lady Thornton?”

Clio gazed at him. “I am still dreaming, aren’t I?”

But any doubts about whether she was awake or asleep were put to rest when she moved to take a step forward. The pain that shot up through her ankle brought back the events of the previous night with astonishing clarity, as did the appearance of Toast, who came dashing into the room with a clatter. If she were still dreaming, she would definitely have dreamed a better-behaved monkey.

He jumped up and down in front of her for a moment, then reached for her hand and tried to drag her through a partially open door. Clio looked at Corin. “Is there food through that door?”

“Yes. It just arrived. I did not know what he liked to eat, so I had the kitchen send up a bit of everything.”

“That is exactly what he likes to eat,” Clio told him, “as often as possible.” She addressed the monkey. “You go on, Toast. I am not hungry.”

Toast threw his chin up at her, a gesture of intense disdain, and crossed his arms.

“Really. I—” Anything further Clio would have wanted to say was drowned out by Toast chattering at her intensely. Deeming argument futile, she rolled her eyes and allowed herself to be led out of the bedroom.

Clio had been wrong. She was famished, and Toast lost no time in pointing this out to her. Corin had taken the liberty of dismantling one of the furniture towers to find a round, leather covered table and two chairs, and it was here, next to a window, that Clio and Toast dined. From this point Clio could see the rooftops of London in the growing twilight and below them, the small clusters of coachmen and grooms who had deposited their parties at Dearbourn Hall an hour earlier, and would wait outside all night until their services were needed. Over roasted capon stuffed with brown bread and parsley, Corin answered her questions about how she had arrived there (carried up by His Lordship), if the residents of Which House knew where she was (yes), whether any constables had gone there looking for her (no), what she had done all day (slept), if she had, um, been alone (Corin was afraid he did not know), and where His Lordship was at that moment (posing as a hunter in a recreation of a Titian painting in the Great Hall before a crowd of four hundred assembled guests).

“You must be joking,” Clio said. She felt remarkably better.

“No.” Corin confined himself to that one syllable because otherwise he might have been tempted to share with her the choice expressions Miles had used before departing, and he did not feel that was his place. “He asked me to extend to you his compliments and make myself available should you need anything. Is there anything you desire?”

Clio started to shake her head, then stopped. His words triggered her memory of the end of her dream, of the words Never Desire. Again she felt that they were almost, but not quite, right.

“I think I could use a library,” she answered finally. She always found being surrounded by books conducive to thinking, and perhaps looking over
A Compendium of Vampires
would help her sort her mind out and reveal to her the meaning hidden behind the spinning sign. It would certainly force her to stop thinking about the dresses she had glimpsed shimmering in the cupboard, especially the purple one. Because Clio Thornton of Which House did not think about clothes—about the pitifulness of her two dresses, about the fact that she had never had a new gown, about the sound that new silk would make as she walked, providing she did not trip, about what it would feel like next to her skin—ever, and definitely not during investigations in which she was the main suspect.

“A library,” Corin repeated. “It might take me some time to transfer the entire library here. Is there something in particular you were looking for?”

“Yes. Or rather, no. Sort of. If you would just show me to the library, I could find it myself.”

Corin mustered a tight smile. “No, no. Please. You must let me get it for you.”

Clio was about to protest his politeness when something about his words stopped her. “What do you mean, I
must
let you get it for me?”

Corin’s smile became fixed. “The viscount said you did not wish to be seen, and since the house is filled with people, it was his suggestion that you stay here.”

“Suggestion?”

Corin sighed and the smile disappeared. “Order. He said I was not to let you leave his apartment.” He watched her and was glad to see how calm she seemed. Miles had warned him that she might be upset to learn that she was, for a time anyway, a prisoner, and had especially told him to be on the look out for hiccups, but she showed no sign of them. Indeed, she did not seem to be bothered at all.

“I see,” Clio said, idly toying with one of the serving spoons as she mentally explored ways she could sneak out of the apartment. She was so preoccupied that she let the spoon slip from her fingers and onto the floor.

Clio was startled out of her thoughts by a loud thud, followed by a groan, both of which emanated from somewhere around her knees. She looked down and saw that Corin had bashed his head on the underside of the table when he went to pick up the serving spoon and was now lying unconscious at her feet.

She hesitated for almost two seconds. Then she checked to ensure he was breathing, rose from her chair, calmly moved past his inert body, and made her way to the door.

She was unhappy about having to leave Corin alone with his injury, but it was not really her fault. If Miles had not ordered her confined to his apartments, she probably would have had the manservant bring her the
Compendium
and would not have been so distracted by her own plans for escape that she failed to warn him before he hit his head. But she was certainly not going to sit quietly and be held prisoner.

It was Miles’s fault, therefore, that she left Corin slumped unconscious on the floor. His fault that she was forced to sneak out of the apartment and, clinging to the shadows, go in pursuit of the
Compendium.
His fault that in the interests of drawing minimal attention to herself she left Toast dozing on his chair next to the window and went alone. His fault that an hour later she was gulping for air in the small reading alcove off the side of the library, her heart racing, her lips pleading, in-desperate fear for her life.

Chapter Ten

Occasional bursts of applause from the Great Hall below filtered into the library as Clio combed its shelves. She had never seen so many volumes in one place. Even the finest libraries in England comprised only a hundred or so titles, but this one had to have at least four times that. She ran her fingers over the leather spines of the books with appreciative awe and a good measure of envy. As a child, books had been Clio’s refuge from her family. Every problem, every question, every irrational occurrence could be explained by a book—it was simply a question of finding the right one. What would it be like to have such a collection, she wondered to herself. To know you could read any book you wanted, at any time. To have all of human knowledge, everything you might ever want to know, stored away on shelves in a room in your own house—

Never desire,
her mind flashed, and she remembered what she was doing there. What she needed was merely
A Compendium of Vampires,
not all human knowledge. The Deerhound had said he owned a copy, and she had not seen it in his apartment, which meant it was most likely here. Somewhere among the hundreds of books.

She started on the shorter and more manageable walls of shelves in the reading alcove but found that every title was related to fighting or waging war. She had no idea that there were so many books on defense and keeping enemies at bay, but somehow it did not surprise her that Miles’s library would be filled with them. She counted fifteen books on the fortification of castles and the construction of unassailable walls, four on how to wield a sword, sixteen on the construction and use of cannons, one about fire and its many uses as a weapon, and another on water power. Every conceivable substance that could be used in combat had at least one volume dedicated to it. She found a copy of a book on gentlemanly comportment, which seemed slightly out of place, but nowhere did she spy a copy of the
Compendium.
She had just stepped into the main library to continue her search when she heard the sound of muffled laughter in the corridor outside. It grew louder and stopped in front of the double doors.

“We can be alone in here,” Clio heard a voice say and had barely enough time to duck back into the reading alcove and pull its door mostly closed before the couple entered the room. She blew out her candle, leaving her in total darkness, and peered through the crack between the door and the wall. If someone was coming her way, she wanted to know so she could be ready with an excuse, or at least try to pretend she was just casually taking a nap under the table. But it was immediately apparent that the two people standing at the far end of the library were not interested in her.

The tall, broad man was wearing a floppy peasant’s cap and not much else. The short toga of an ancient hunter did very little to conceal the rock hard planes of his thighs, and the boots that laced over his calves seemed only to highlight rather than disguise their solid power. His arms looked like they had been sculpted from tanned marble as they reached forward and lifted his companion, a woman in a slightly tattered gown that seemed to float around her, to his lips.

There was no question that the man was handsome, even almost as handsome as Miles. But although many women had been guilty of mistaking the two, Clio knew instinctively that it was not the viscount. Which allowed her to watch with shocked interest rather than envy as the woman slid to her knees and slipped the hunter’s toga up over the man’s stomach.

“You can see better from over here,” a voice whispered in Clio’s ear, and she felt a hand close on her arm.

As she turned around, she was immediately aware of two things: that there was a lamp burning in the alcove that had not been there before; and that she had been wrong in thinking the man in the other room was almost as handsome as Miles. Because the real Miles, who happened to be standing in front of her, was a hundred times more handsome, a hundred times more… more everything.

And her reaction to his presence was a hundred times more intense. His eyes smoldered in the lamplight, glowing with yellow flecks like hot, molten gold, and for a moment she entirely forgot about hating him for locking her up. And about breathing, swallowing, or blinking.

“Look,” he whispered, and gestured toward an opening in the wall just above her eye level. Still too stunned to say anything, Clio stood on her toes to glance through it. She could see the entire library now, in more detail, as if it, and the couple at the end of it, had moved closer.

“It is the other side of the mantle clock,” Miles explained without waiting for her to ask. “You are looking out between the sun and the moon. There is a circle of glass over the face of the clock that magnifies everything.”

But that was not what was magnifying the strange sensations inside of Clio. Swallowing hard, she turned around. “What are you doing here?” she whispered.

“I came to haul you back to my apartment, where you will stay until I say otherwise,” Miles explained succinctly. “I had not counted on finding Sebastian and Lady Starrat,” he gestured through the clock, “as well. That means we are trapped here.”

Sebastian Dolfin, Clio thought to herself. One of Miles’s cousins. No wonder the two men looked something alike. “What do you mean trapped?”

“They are setting up for the next painting downstairs and in the intermission the corridors are swarming with people. The only way to get back to my apartment unseen is through the service door behind the table that Sebastian is, ah, using.” Miles’s gaze flitted from the clock to Clio. “Perhaps we can pass the time with your explaining why you had to knock my manservant out and go roaming through my house without my leave.”

“I did not knock him out. He hit his head,” Clio replied defensively. Her eyes narrowed. “Perhaps you can explain what right you have to hold me hostage without my leave. I thought I was not your prisoner.”

“I thought you did not want to be seen.”

“I wasn’t seen. No one has seen me.”

“Not yet, but there are four hundred people out that door who might. Besides, as a host it is irresponsible of me to let a potential demon wander about free.”