Authors: Erica Ridley
Even more baffling: No one had ever heard of Miss Elspeth Ramsay.
Chapter Three
If the perturbed expression on her client’s stony face was any indication, Ellie would not be earning a single penny for her fruitless investigation into Mr. Macane. If anything, Miss Breckenridge’s continued silence indicated Ellie should count herself lucky to have been granted a ride home in the Breckenridge carriage. She had been hired to prove Lord Lovenip either monster or fraud, and instead she had first assaulted the suspect, then flirted shamelessly with him, followed most ignominiously by fleeing the scene altogether. Ellie could well acknowledge how such behavior might be perceived as a breach of contract.
“Do forgive me,” she blurted when she could no longer stand staring into her erstwhile client’s icy countenance. “I am all apologies. I should not have—”
“It’s not what you should not have done,” Miss Breckenridge snapped, “but what you
should
have done, yet failed to do. I brought you to the ball specifically so you could scientifically evaluate Mártainn Macane, not so you could—”
“Don’t say it,” Ellie begged, blushing furiously at the realization her client might have witnessed the role reversal in the gardens. She’d gone and ruined an opportunity for easy money by losing her mind. “I know it was not at all well done of me, but when I realized what he was about, my only thought was that the best defense is a quick offense, and the next thing I knew—”
“—was that you’d disappeared entirely,” Miss Breckenridge interrupted coldly. “And once I
did
come across you, nothing would do but to leave. Leave! A mere hour and a half after arriving! Regardless of your contract with me, one does
not
depart a Wedgeworth soirée a moment before three, and it isn’t even half one. I’ll be gossip fodder for days. And here we are, without an iota more information than when we began. What have you to say for yourself?”
“Very little, Miss Breckenridge.” Despite the luxury of the carriage, the sumptuous squab beneath Ellie’s bustle felt as though it were filled with rocks rather than down. Despite the latest technology in joints and shocks, every time the wheels rolled over the slightest pebble, Ellie’s body was so tense, she felt each bump all the way to her bones. She needed Miss Breckenridge’s patronage far more than Miss Breckenridge needed her. For the daughter of a duke, the soirée had been nothing more than an evening’s lark. But for Ellie, it had meant food and shelter. She and her mother needed those ten pounds to survive. “All I can say is that I would not have assaulted him had he not tried to attack me first. When I realized he wished to bite me—”
“What?”
Miss Breckenridge’s jaw dropped. When Ellie failed to elucidate quickly enough, Miss Breckenridge trapped Ellie’s shaking knee in a surprisingly strong grip. “Are you talking about Mártainn Macane?”
“Yes,” Ellie said with a slight frown. “Er . . . aren’t you?”
“You spoke with him? And he tried to
bite
you?”
“Yes,” she repeated, blinking slowly. The thread of the conversation seemed to be unraveling in opposite directions.
Miss Breckenridge clasped Ellie’s knees even tighter. “Where?”
“In the gardens,” she stammered. “There was a Chinese folding screen near the exit, and he—”
“No, no, you ninny, where did he try to bite you?”
“Er . . . on the neck?” Ellie answered, deciding now was not the moment to take offense at being called a ninny. She certainly deserved the appellation for overreacting thusly to a perceived attack.
“On the
neck,
” Miss Breckenridge crowed. “What did I tell you? I knew he was evil!” A panicked expression quickly replaced joy, and Miss Breckenridge’s stupendous grip transferred from Ellie’s knees to her shoulders, jerking her forward. Miss Breckenridge pulled Ellie’s curls from her nape, twisting her head first one way then another as she inspected all angles of Ellie’s neck. “Are you certain he didn’t bite you? You won’t make any kind of witness if you become a monster yourself or succumb to his unholy hypnotism. Dear heavens, what would I do then?”
“He didn’t bite me. I swear it.” Ellie wrenched out of her client’s grasp and flattened her shoulders against the thick wall separating them from the driver’s perch. “And there’s no such thing as monsters.”
Miss Breckenridge sputtered, “No such—my dear girl, you were nearly bitten by the spawn of the devil himself, and you wish to quibble over the
existence
of vampires?” She waved a silk-gloved hand in Ellie’s direction and sat back with a pleased nod. “Certainly now you
must
believe.”
“We have proven he bites,” Ellie admitted begrudgingly. “We have not proven that he drinks blood.”
Even as she said the words, she recalled the taste of that single drop of blood on her tongue, and her body thrilled with a sensation she could only liken to arousal. Her petticoats seemed simultaneously too tight, too heavy, too thick, the carriage too quick and too confining, and the oxygen altogether too insignificant to fulfill the quantity needed by her gasping lungs.
For a moment, a very brief, very intense moment, she had wanted him with terrible acuteness. Her vision had closed to only his face, his neck, and she’d longed to bite him, kiss him, tear his clothes from his limbs and demand he do the same to her.
Even now, she could taste his blood in her mouth, feel his strength beneath her palms, smell his scent and his own arousal, sense the danger exuding from his every pore. It was the disturbing sensation that she, too, was just as dangerous that had snapped her out of her trance long enough for her to gather her wits. Some of them, anyway. At least she’d managed to finish the waltz without attacking him again.
“Even if we’d proven he has a taste for blood,” she said, grateful the dark interior of the carriage would mask her telltale blush, “that would not prove him a vampire. It would just make him . . . an extremely eccentric Scot. One must have empirical evidence before making sweeping claims.”
Miss Breckenridge smiled as if, shadows or no, she detected the lie of Ellie’s forced confidence. As if she saw through the careful façade of bluestocking scientist to the very rattled young woman underneath.
“See? You just presumed it possible—if not
probable
—that we will in fact prove your eccentric Scot boasts a taste for blood.” Miss Breckenridge gave a pleased nod. “Whether you admit it or not, you are already starting to believe.”
Peevishly, Ellie returned her client’s gaze and refused to respond.
Miss Breckenridge carried on nonetheless. “Besides, drinking blood isn’t the only sign of demonic vampirism.”
One of Ellie’s brows lifted despite herself. “No?”
At this query, Miss Breckenridge shook her head triumphantly.
“What else is there, then? Empirically, that is.”
“For one, vampires cannot abide sunlight.” Miss Breckenridge’s voice dropped to a whisper. “And no one has ever seen Mártainn Macane during the day.”
Ellie’s shoulder twitched, but she refrained from indulging in a shrug. “With all due respect, that simply proves he dislikes the sun. Given that pale complexions are de rigueur, avoiding the sun hardly makes him suspicious. I’m a night person myself. I cannot remember the last time I gadded about during the day, if I ever have, and I’m certainly not a vampire. My own mother rarely leaves her bedchamber before dusk—surely you don’t accuse her of vampirism, too?”
“No, no, of course not,” Miss Breckenridge said with a wave of her lace-gloved hand. “But then, your mother hasn’t been running about biting nobility, as Lord Lovenip does.” Miss Breckenridge gasped dramatically and pressed her hand to her throat in obvious consternation. “Oh dear Lord, I’ve gone and used that ridiculous moniker myself.” She screwed up her face and glared at Ellie as if the slip were somehow Ellie’s fault instead of her own. With a sigh, she collapsed back against her seat. “What can I do to convince you vampires exist and that the dashing Mr. Macane is living—or rather undead—proof? Is it money you wish? Here ...” She opened a satin, monogrammed reticule and dug through its contents before brandishing a crumpled five-pound note. “I’ll double the amount. This now, and fifteen more once you conclude the investigation. What do you say?”
Ellie stared at the wrinkled banknote in her client’s elegant outstretched palm. The money would mean everything to her and nothing at all to Miss Breckenridge. Her client hadn’t been about to sack her out of disappointment over her behavior, but rather due to a belief that she wasn’t taking the situation seriously. Given that Ellie had felt herself under her mother’s ultraconservative thumb her entire life, and had begun scientific investigations as much out of rebellion as industriousness, she could certainly empathize with a desire to be taken seriously. To know her own mind. Regardless of whether her beliefs matched everyone else’s.
“Very well.” Ellie plucked the crumpled paper from her client’s palm and slowly, methodically, flattened it across one knee before folding it carefully and consigning it to the darkness of her own, otherwise vacant purse. Then she returned her gaze to her client and tried to apply her most scientific perspective to the topic at hand. “Are there any characteristics shared by supposed vampires that are not also plausibly explained by eccentric, but wholly human, actions of men?”
Miss Breckenridge bit her lip in consideration. “Well, I’ve never seen him eat a morsel of food, or drink a single drop of punch. . . .”
“No one with any brains drinks the ratafia,” Ellie countered logically. “It’s horrid.”
“Fine.” Miss Breckenridge’s eyes narrowed at a spot just above Ellie’s shoulder for a long moment. Her sudden victory squeal nearly knocked Ellie out of her skin. “A mirror!” she exclaimed, rapping Ellie’s knee for emphasis. “Vampires have no reflections, and no one has
ever
seen Macane anywhere near a looking glass. I will double—nay,
treble
—your fee if you but maneuver him before a glass!”
Ellie hesitated. There was little she wouldn’t (honorably) do to earn such a sum, but what was the likelihood of success? She leveled her gaze at her client and infused her voice with as much calm rationality as possible. “If Mr. Macane has a visible reflection, you will agree that I’ve disproved your theory?”
Miss Breckenridge’s blinding grin bespoke utter confidence. “I will, indeed—because he will not have one. And I know just how to find out. My birthday is but a fortnight from now, and I’ve already planned a three-day party. I shall invite Macane—and you shall attend as well, of course—and we will have done with this investigation once and for all.”
The five-pound note in Ellie’s purse weighed as much as a five-ton anchor. Her family desperately needed the income, but there was no hope of Ellie attending a three-day party. She’d had to misrepresent quite a few details of tonight’s festivities to garner her mother’s permission for the outing.
“I apologize,” she said quietly, “but there is no chance at all of my attendance. My mother is quite protective and will never allow me out of her sight for so long. She doesn’t even know where we were tonight.”
Miss Breckenridge’s eyes widened. “Where on earth does she think you are?”
“At a local estate . . . helping you find a lost kitten,” Ellie admitted with another furious blush. “If Mama for one moment suspected I attended a soirée, I should never be allowed out of her sight again.”
The young lady across from her merely laughed in response. “I am a Breckenridge,” she said matter-of-factly, “and no one tells a Breckenridge no. I will call upon you on the morrow to extend the invitation in person. There will be no chance of refusal.”
Ellie gulped. Miss Breckenridge might consider herself a royal flush, but Ellie’s mother was a wild card more likely to be repulsed than impressed by Quality lineage.
Chapter Four
The next morning, Ellie jerked the steel tip of her dip pen out of her mouth for what was surely the hundredth time. She might not damage the dip pen’s metal exterior, but she was certainly flirting with cracked teeth or a splatter-ink moustache.
She’d woken up with a hunger like never before, and when an entire tray of kippers had failed to dampen the cravings, she’d developed a disturbing oral fixation on anything and everything she could put in her mouth. The sudden desire to chew on household miscellany was just as strong as the unladylike stomach rumblings that propelled her into the kitchen a mere hour after she broke her fast.
Luckily, her mother’s predilection for staying abed until after noontime meant Ellie was unlikely to be discovered face-first in the larder.
“Toast? No . . .” Ellie murmured to herself. “Clotted cream? No . . . Boiled vegetables? Definitely not . . . Hrrgmmph?”
She jerked to a stop as she realized she now had an entire carrot protruding from her mouth. She removed the vegetable and glared at the many tooth marks now marring its surface. She had
never
liked carrots, and here she was gnawing at one as if compelled to do so. What she really wanted was meat. Surely there must be—aha! An entire slab of . . . Well, Ellie had never been in a kitchen during the actual cooking process, so she wasn’t exactly certain what it was she was staring at, but it was meat, and therefore, food.
Ellie was thrilled with her find and dying to partake, but how on earth was she to prepare it? Blast. Either she would have to suffer her hunger pangs until lunchtime, or she would be forced to make do with what she had. Biting at her lower lip, Ellie gave in to temptation and reached for the platter.
“Elspeth!”
“Aaagh!”
Ellie whirled around, simultaneously trying to hide the heavy platter behind her back whilst preventing its gravitational slide toward the stone floor. She failed on both counts. Silver clanged to the floor. Pink droplets sprayed the hem of her butter-yellow morning dress. The ill-used carrot rolled to a stop when it collided with the toe of her mother’s slipper.
“Er . . . good morning, Mama.” Ellie did her best at a sunny, innocent smile and hoped she didn’t have bits of carrot—or ink stains—upon her teeth. “Did you sleep well?”