Authors: Kerrigan Byrne
Millie’s eyes shone with something Christopher couldn’t even begin to name. Something cautious and yet … soft. “No,
kochanie,
” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “No, he wasn’t.”
“Just
where
the blazes have
you
been sleeping?” Loretta Teague-Washington flipped a long, peroxide-blond ringlet away from her face before planting her hands on her ample hips.
Guilty color tickled Millie’s neck as it crawled toward her hairline from the collar of the peach day dress she’d only just changed into.
“In bed,” she evaded, stepping to the side as Mr. Émile-Baptiste Teague-Washington hefted Loretta’s many bags and cases, disappearing down the hall that led to Millie’s dressing room.
“Whose bed?” the woman demanded. “His?” She gestured to Argent, who hovered over her like a storm cloud, heavy and threatening.
Millie pressed her hands to her burning cheeks, grateful Jakub was in the kitchen with Mrs. Brimtree having a snack.
Ignoring her mortification, Loretta stepped closer to inspect Millie’s skin. “I have to admit, you’ve never looked so dewy before. Never glowed with such … vigor. What have you been doing to your skin? Who have you been seeing behind my back? Are you stepping out on me, woman?”
Millie shook her head, having forgotten how Loretta’s smoky voice could fill a room nigh to bursting. “I—I don’t know what you mean.”
“Nonsense.” The buxom woman flapped a hand at her as she bustled over to one of her cases, flinging open the latch, and then turning back as though forgetting why she’d done so. Her perfect style and smooth, porcelain skin made it impossible to guess her age. She was either a mature thirty or an age-defying fifty. “Your eyebrows get all pinched when you lie to me. You’re either using something different or you’re getting that radiance from sharing a bed with this brawny Viking, here.” She winked up at Christopher, who remained unhelpfully stoic.
As adept an actress as she prided herself on being, Millie couldn’t hide her guilty look in time. Loretta’s smile slid over her cheeks with a sly languor. “You hussy.” She laughed.
“How did you—I mean—who else knows?” Millie pressed a hand to her heated cheeks. News in London traveled with the speed of a steam engine, but she hadn’t thought anyone had known she’d slept at Argent’s Belgravia mansion the night before.
“I wasn’t even certain you had a lover, until you just confirmed it.” Loretta gave Argent an appreciative once-over, her eyes touching on his broad shoulders straining the stitching of his expensive gray waistcoat. “And who could blame you?”
Mr. Teague-Washington gently nudged Millie with his elbow as he passed, which elicited a sharp breath from the assassin behind her.
“’Bout time you had a man to call your own, chère,” the coffee-skinned Cajun boomed in his luscious baritone, flashing her white teeth and charming dimples. “My lady and I hear of your troubles, and we say ‘ain’t right she got no man to protect her.’ But now we see she do.” Mr. Teague-Washington’s lips appeared extra dark on his Irish-American wife’s cheek as he wrapped a long, lanky arm around her plump shoulders and tucked her into his side. It was that disparity of skin color that had caused the couple to flee their home in America. That country might call itself the United States, but some divisions still ran so deep, it would likely take them centuries to progress past the rifts. Europe tended to be more accepting of interracial marriages, especially among the demimonde, and at the very least it was legal.
Loretta squeezed her husband fondly before advancing on Millie. “I only knew you hadn’t been sleeping in your own bed, or you would have been using the lavender and white lily tincture I gave you for the eye compress and you wouldn’t look so damn puffy.” Gripping Millie’s chin in her strong fingers, she lifted her face to the light and narrowed Irish moss-green eyes in observant disapproval. “Unless you’ve been crying.”
Millie grimaced, worried that the strain of recent events was beginning to show. “It’s been a trying couple of days.” Glancing into the mirror at her right, she gave herself a quick appraisal. Her hair did seem rather dull, perhaps missing its usual luster and bounce. The skin around her eyes and brow was pinched with tension and a little swollen from last night’s bout of tears. She did note the glow Loretta had spoken of. She could see the iridescence in her skin, the unholy knowledge in her eyes, as though the secrets of the darkness had been revealed to her.
And not all of them had been dreadful. They’d been wicked, though. So very wicked.
Behind her, Christopher’s reflection regarded her with that ever-present alertness. He stood too close, loomed too tall and wide.
Looked too fine.
When she’d first met him, she’d thought his eyes dead and cold and utterly indecipherable. But now, when he looked at her as he was doing, she read volumes in their depths. Beautiful things. Terrible things. Words and desires she dare not indentify, because they would set her entire world aflame.
Lord, but this man was dangerous.
Loretta made a noise of appreciation and fanned herself. “
Mon Dieu,
but you two must set those bedclothes on fire.”
“Loretta!” Millie exclaimed.
“Well, hey now, if we were all planning on being polite, you’d have introduced me to your Viking ages ago.” Loretta winked again, showing that she meant no malice.
“Oh dear!” Millie turned to the Viking in question. “Mr. and Mrs. Teague-Washington, meet my—um—meet Christopher Argent.”
“A pleasure, Mr. Argent.” Loretta gave Christopher a handshake every bit as firm as her husband’s. “You’ve caught the woman every man would give an eye for.”
“So I have,” Christopher remarked without a crack in his enigmatic façade.
“I can see why; you’ve strength enough to handle her.”
“Loretta,
please,
” Millie begged.
“I know, I know, you stolid, persnickety Brits can’t stand a bit of bawd if it has any truth to it. Are these rumors I’ve heard circulating about true? That you survived not just one, but two attacks by a killer?”
Millie paused to consider her answer carefully. Of course, the madness the night before at the Royal Theater would have circulated through the late-night crowd of the demimonde rather quickly. And most people already knew about the time Argent had broken into her house and kissed her senseless. Though they now likely assumed Dorshaw had perpetrated both crimes.
Argent had been meaning to kill her at the time. She’d do well to remember that.
He
was
a monster. He had no qualms about it. So why couldn’t she see it when she looked at him? What was wrong with her, that his brutal features and dangerous skills somehow compelled instead of deterred her?
Perhaps because he was currently using those skills on her behalf, not against her.
“I have been the target of such a man, yes,” Millie answered carefully.
“You poor thing.” Loretta reached for her, and pulled her against a generous bosom, squeezing the breath from her lungs before releasing her just as abruptly.
“Sounds like some dark hoodoo to me.” Émile-Baptiste made a strange sign with his hands and then spat.
“Surely does,” Loretta agreed. “You know that gypsy actress, calls herself ‘Contessa’ and puts on a bunch of airs that don’t belong to her … I heard she put the evil eye on you that time you got the part of Carmen over her.”
“She need be looking to a holy man to remove the curse, and then she be safe from the evil,” Mr. Teague-Washington remarked soberly.
“Curses and superstitions don’t hire killers, people do,” Christopher remarked.
Loretta’s eyebrow, a dark confession to the pretense of her hair color, climbed her forehead. “Where’d you find this ray of sunshine, a morgue? Doesn’t have the doughy hands of an idle lord, he
works
for his fine suits. What do you do, Mr. Argent, are you an undertaker perhaps?”
Christopher’s shoulder lifted, though he remained unperturbed. “Close enough.”
The stylist smirked. “Can’t say there isn’t much to appreciate about a plainspoken man. Well, come on back here, Millie darling, and let me work my magic.” Loretta gestured toward the hall that led to the dressing room. “Not you.” She thrust a perfectly manicured finger at Argent, who’d made to follow them. “The time between a woman and her stylist is a sacred and mystical rite. You menfolk have no business interfering.”
Argent glanced at Millie. He looked very large and very out of place in this richly appointed, warm, and overstuffed home. Her handful of rooms seemed to contain enough furniture, knickknacks, antiques, and various oddities to fill his entire vacant mansion. Framed playbills hung next to Moroccan lanterns over Grecian table statues, which posed next to faux Egyptian papyri and a vase full of arranged peacock feathers rather than flowers.
Surrounded by such feminine bohemian chaos, Argent’s marble skin and monochromatic suit contrasted with the brilliance of his short auburn hair. He looked so hard. So brutal. A mysterious shadow caught within an explosion of color. The image was dynamic, and both women stopped to appreciate it for a moment longer than necessary.
“I think I’m going down for a nip and a smoke at the pub,” Mr. Teague-Washington cut in, obviously not amused. “Care to join me, Mr. Argent?”
“Thank you, but I’ll stay.” Argent claimed a corner of the olive-green couch.
“So long as you stay out of our way,” Loretta reminded, all but dragging Millie down the hall.
“Je t’aime, mon cœur,”
she called to her husband, as she had every week she’d visited Millie over the last two years.
“Et vous, mon
âme,”
he sang back to her, closing the door behind him.
I love you, my heart.
And you, my soul.
The ritual usually caused Millie to smile. Today it made her feel bleak, somehow, or guilty, as though she’d spied upon a private sacrament of which she’d never be a part.
Oddly depressed, she sank into the high-backed arabesque velvet chair Loretta pulled out for her, feeling like a wilted flower.
“I’ll start with your hair and work my way down.” Loretta said this at the beginning of every appointment. Taking the few pins out of Millie’s hair, she began her treatments with a concoction of rare oils and herbs native to the American continent like “jojoba” mixed with a tincture of yucca root and wild rose. Once she oiled the tips and the scalp, she wet the rest of it with her fingers and trimmed the uneven ends with a sharp razor.
Scents of musk and wild, unfamiliar earth infused the room with an exotic fragrance, and for the first time in days, Millie began to relax.
“Where did you find this Viking of yours?” Loretta asked, her voice transforming into something more melodious as her ritual took hold of them both.
“He found me, actually.”
“I see. Is this an affair of the heart, or of a more … conjugal nature?” Only Loretta could get away with asking such a blunt question, and for some reason, the relationship between the stylist and her clients was more circumspect than that of a confessor to his priest.
And still, Millie couldn’t conjure the words to describe what Christopher was to her, exactly. Assassin turned protector. Villain turned lover.
“We have an … arrangement,” Millie evaded.
“That arrangement have anything to do with the fact that you’ve been in danger and that brute out there looks like he could break a man in half with his big bare hands?” Loretta might be brash and brassy, and a bit uneducated, but she was anything but stupid.
“I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t.” Millie sighed.
“Well.” Loretta twisted her hair and pinned it to the top of her head and wrapped it, letting the oils sink in and do their job before she washed it out. “You wouldn’t be the first woman to invite a dangerous man into her bed in exchange for his protection … done it a few times, myself, before I found Mr. Teague-Washington.”
“Really?” Swamped with a strange sense of relief, Millie inwardly blessed the woman for not calling her a prostitute.
“Oh sure.” Next came a mask of honey, beeswax, white lily, and lemon juice applied to Millie’s face with a wooden applicator, to tighten the skin and shrink any pores or imperfections. “Protection comes in many forms. Money, food, shelter, strength, and sometimes just a dangerous know-how and a willingness to kill. Looks like your Mr. Argent out there could provide it all.”
“Indeed he can.” Leaning back, Millie closed her eyes and enjoyed the sensation of the warm, thick syrup spreading on her beleaguered skin. Many women in her profession took a “protector.” In most cases, the term only meant that she had a man who paid her as his mistress. The protection was from poverty, from starvation, and often from the fate of the cruel streets filled with foul men and, even worse, disease.
Now, when Millie confessed to having a protector, she’d mean it in a more literal sense of the word. Though the services rendered had been the same.
“You have to tell me,” Loretta whispered conspiratorially. “How are his skills in bed? Is your Viking any good? How many times did he give you
la petite mort
?”
The little death,
that mysterious climax so many women went on and on about. The cause of the panting mewls and bellows she’d heard in her days of sharing thin walls with fallen women.
Millie fumbled to cover her inexperience with a shallow explanation. “I really couldn’t say. We’ve only—I’ve only lain with him once.”
The smooth movements paused before resuming more gently. “Don’t fear, darling, it often takes lovers a couple tries to learn each other’s needs. To become familiar with their pleasures and their desires.”
“Does it?”Millie queried before she thought the better of it.
“If I can give you one word of advice, never use your acting skills in bed. Do not portray pleasure you do not feel. You’re doing neither of you any favors.”
“Acting during—why would you do such a thing?” Millie wondered aloud.
Loretta’s voice was softer now, more motherly than it had ever been. “You’re not as worldly as you would have us all think, are you, darling?”