Mina shrugged. “Like I said, it’s a grim bit of work, and I’m sure the details they don’t tell us are worse. I won’t deny it gave me a start—” She crossed the Turkish carpet in a few swift strides, keeping some distance between herself and Stephen but coming close enough to look into his face. “But you’re taking it rough, aren’t you?”

“I feel some responsibility for it, aye,” he said. “After all, the feud’s between Ward and myself, and the house is mine, and I’m the one who decided to question them. Had I called Scotland Yard, they’d likely—”

“They’d be just as dead,” said Mina and snorted. “You think a couple of cells would stop a bloke like Ward? We already know he’s got people in the underworld. My underworld, that is, as well as yours.”

Stephen had been expecting to see a stricken look in her cobalt eyes, dreading the look of pain and guilt on her fine-boned face, and most of all fearing to see anger at him for dragging her into the matter, for putting blood on her hands. He would have tried to explain how the thieves’ deaths were his fault, and not hers.

Faced with a creature of worldly certainty, who begged for no reassurance and demanded no explanation, Stephen could only stand and listen.

“And what were we supposed to do to keep them alive? Lie down and let Ward kill you, and then go after the Professor and whoever else got on the wrong side of him afterward?” Mina gestured in the general direction of the crown and made a revolted face. “Not hardly. You didn’t make him go out and hire those poor stupid blighters, and you didn’t make them take his money. You want to come over all noble and stricken, choose a cause worth your while. They’re not.”

She finished by glaring at him with such ferocity that Stephen had to laugh, despite everything. “Yes, miss.”

“Watch it,” Mina said, smiling herself. “I’m not as bad as that.”

“No. Not at all,” Stephen said. “Thank you.”

“Nothing to it,” she said. “I’m just surprised, a bit. You must’ve—”

“Killed men? Aye. Not so many as all that—I never went for a soldier—but it’s happened a time or two.” Stephen rubbed his forehead as if that would bring the right words to the front of his mind. “It’s different when they’re not trying to kill you. You haven’t done either, have you?”

“No. I just knew men like them. Not bad sorts, really, and they didn’t deserve what they got. Nobody does. But Ward’s not the only man with a temper, and you’re just as dead from a bullet. Even if they didn’t know what they were signing on for, they knew.” Mina frowned. “I can’t say it any plainer than that.”

“There’s nobody I know who could have,” said Stephen.

For some days to come, the men’s deaths would weigh on him. He knew himself too well to doubt it. The worst of the burden was gone, though, freeing him to think of other things.

Ink spots, for example. Mina was a tidy woman, but fountain pens were never to be trusted, and a smudge dotted her cheek, only a finger’s width from the corner of her mouth.

Then there was her mouth itself, sweetly curved and silently promising all sorts of things; the long slim line of her neck, with her hair curling against it; the swell of her breasts, not very well hidden even by her severely businesslike dress.

He could have gone on making observations for a long time, had he been more of a philosopher and less of a man. He took Mina in his arms instead.

As she’d done from the beginning, she fit there very neatly: firm and soft at the same time, tall enough that a man could kiss her thoroughly and heatedly without having to bend a great deal, and, this time, so eager for his touch that Stephen could have quite happily lost his mind then and there. After the first startled moment, after the first quick intake of breath, she wound her arms around his neck and kissed him back as if she’d been contemplating it as long as he had.

That thought did nothing for Stephen’s self-control.

Neither did the way Mina wriggled against him when he cupped one of her breasts, nor the swell of her backside in his other palm. As far as the noises she made, small and desperate and half-muffled by Stephen’s mouth, they went to his head faster than anything he’d ever drunk.

Under all that restraint, Mina was quite a passionate girl. Stephen had known that from the start, but never so deeply as now. After another whimper escaped her throat, he gave in to the need to find out more—and, perhaps, to satisfy both of their needs.

Fortunately, there was a desk at hand. Books thumped to the carpet as Stephen pressed Mina back into it. He was well beyond giving a damn, and though she stiffened for a moment, she didn’t pull away. Nor did she flinch when he began to pull up her skirt. Instead, as Stephen’s hand slid up her leg, she circled her hips, pressing her sex up against Stephen’s swollen cock.

Stephen thrust back against her, finding a rhythm even with their clothes in the way, trying to retain enough concentration to remedy that. Damned skirt. Thrice-damned underthings. Women these days wore far too much under their skirts. Back when he’d been younger—he froze. Beneath him, Mina made a disappointed, questioning noise. His body simply howled.

But, he’d thought, these days. He remembered taking women when a skirt and a chemise was the most a man had to navigate. Generations had come and gone since then.

There was almost no distance between his body and Mina’s. She lay beneath him, receptive and responsive, separated physically only by a few inches of clothing—and a great deal more in the abstract.

“Forgive me,” he said and pulled away.

Twenty-one

Words didn’t come easily just then. Thought didn’t come easily just then. One minute Mina was writhing below Stephen, all her consciousness reduced to the feeling of his body against hers, his mouth on her neck, his hand—and then all of that was gone and he was halfway across the room, saying things that had no meaning at first.

Forgive him? For what? Why?

Then the air was cool against her exposed skin, and rationality began at least to come within her grasp. All the same, the answer that she first thought was: For stopping? Never.

Mina thought of the multiplication tables. Around five, though she still desperately wanted to pick up where she and Stephen had left off, she was able to push those impulses aside and speak almost normally.

“There’s nothing to forgive,” she said. “It was my doing as much as yours.”

“It’s kind of you to say,” Stephen replied. He stood facing one of the bookshelves, his face turned away from her and his hands clasped behind his back.

Avoiding temptation, Mina thought. With his example to prompt her, she pulled her skirts back down and tugged her dress back into order. She watched her hands while she rearranged herself. Her hands were safe and familiar.

During the process, a sense of duty crept up upon her, even as she winced away. She didn’t want to say what came next. She wanted to avoid that conversation almost as much as she’d wanted to feel Stephen’s hand between her thighs or his lips on her breast.

The comparison only made the conversation more necessary.

“I don’t think we can ignore this”—she waved a hand, unsure of what to call the situation and unwilling to put it into more specific words—“any longer.”

“I’d not have said we were ignoring it just now,” Stephen said. “But aye, you’re right. Though I’m not at all sure what else is to be done about it.”

“You could lock me in my room, couldn’t you?” Mina couldn’t help saying it, or laughing as she did—and the whole state of affairs was funny, really. “Or I could lock myself in, but that wouldn’t be half as dramatic.”

“No. If we’re going to overreact, we’d best not do it by halves. I’d have to find a dungeon somewhere.”

“There’s always the wine cellar.”

“Baldwin would never forgive me. Besides,” Stephen said, and glanced back over his shoulder, “I’d not want to be hunting Ward without your help, not if I had a choice in it.”

“Go on with you,” said Mina. A spot of warmth started up in her chest, though, and she smiled despite herself. He’d come to tell her about the thieves, too. Another man might have kept it from her, worried about feminine nerves.

Stephen smiled. “Truly. It’s a hard enough business as it is. Going it alone would be even worse.”

“Could be the problem,” she said. “Us being alone in this, I mean. Except for Professor Carter, and he doesn’t live here, and he doesn’t know what you really are. Maybe we’ve been…impulsive…because neither of us exactly has another, um—”

“Outlet?” She couldn’t hear anything in Stephen’s voice but polite contribution. He’d turned his head and was looking at the bookcase again.

“Right. Especially you. I mean, we both know I’m not exactly the sort of…of person you’d associate with normally.” She would press on ruthlessly, though saying the words out loud made her hurt in a dull and foolish way, but she couldn’t make herself say woman, or kiss, or anything of the sort. “Under normal circumstances. And certainly not the kind who’d know anything secret about you.”

“Outside my family,” Stephen said, still in that politely remote voice, “I can count on one hand those who know my other form. You’re the only full human among them—the only one living, at least.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mina. She looked up from her hands at the straight line of his back, at his squared shoulders. “Our lives must go by pretty quickly, for you.”

“Very quickly. If—” he started to say, and then shook his head. “One grows accustomed.”

The air between them felt heavy with the things Mina didn’t ask. She settled on a relatively safe question, one that didn’t bring up the sort of people who did know Stephen well, or the identity of anyone in particular he might have lost. “You still have friends, though, don’t you?”

“Friends, aye. Some.”

“Oh. Well. That’s what I was saying, really,” she said. Stopping to think about the implications of being the only mortal to know his secret—or to wonder if he thought of her as some sort of more intelligent and more, er, eligible pet—would have been a disaster, so Mina pressed on, heedless of whether one sentence really led into another.

“You don’t really get to see your friends right now. Or your own sort. And I’m about the place, being helpful, and I already know a few things, so—well, so it makes sense that you’d, um, turn to me.”

His dark head moved, the merest suggestion of a nod. “I suppose that would be an explanation. And for you?”

Just as well that Stephen was facing the other way. Mina was blushing before she’d even begun to answer. “I’m not exactly at home myself, am I? Nobody else here knows what’s going on. Until the servants got used to me, I didn’t talk much with anyone but you, and even now I can’t tell them everything we’re doing. I’m out of my depth by half, and you’re a handsome man.”

“You’re a lovely woman,” said Stephen. “I’d rather assumed that was the main cause of what’s between us.”

“Polly’s just as pretty as I am, and you’ve never kissed her. But thank you.”

Stephen turned to face her, laughing and surprised. “You’re far from the usual sort of woman, Cerberus. I hope you know that. And how do you know I’ve never kissed Polly?”

“She would’ve said. And you’re a gentleman.”

“It’s nice to know how you weigh the evidence,” he said wryly. “And now what? Assuming you’re correct, what do you propose doing about the situation?”

Mina shrugged. “Be around other people, even if we can’t tell them everything? Spend more time apart? Just knowing will help, I hope. Knowing why we feel the way we do. And that it’s irrational. And that nothing would work between us,” she made herself add.

It was painful, and it was true. Even if Stephen’s blood had been only human, it would still have been blue. If they gave in to their passion and the worst happened, she could be his pet, if he took her as a mistress, or his obligation, if he did the gentlemanly thing. She could never be his equal. She doubted if she’d ever come as close as she was now.

All she could do was throw away the last five years of her life. All she could do was discard independence and ambition and training in exchange for physical satisfaction and a connection that would disappear as soon as the situation changed.

Stephen must have known something similar, to pull away when he did. Now, however, he didn’t speak either to confirm or deny Mina’s assertion. He only watched her, and the shadows from the bookcase slanted across his face, hiding his expression more than his will already did.