A Study in Silks (4 page)

Yet, dangerous or not, the power pushed at her as urgently as thirst or desire. It wasn’t something a person could just shut down. Plus, it was the strongest link to her childhood. Denying it would be like denying half her flesh.

She put her fingers on the hasps of the box, breathing hard. There was too much going on. She needed to calm herself.
Everything’s going to be fine
.

“Evelina.” Breath stirred the fine hairs at the nape of her neck.

Shock vaulted her out of her chair. The candlestick wobbled as she braced herself to wheel around, sending shadows lurching over the walls and ceiling. Before she had fully focused on the intruder’s face, Evelina was holding a paper knife inches from the speaker’s eyes.

He held her gaze, as if daring her to look. Evelina obliged, cataloguing what she saw: straight dark hair falling to his collar, dark eyes fanned in lashes any woman would have envied, and skin the color of milky coffee. Candlelight sculpted a face like a young falcon, lean and hook-nosed. A faint bruise fanned his cheekbone, as if he had caught a fist there, and a thin white scar tracked like a tear under one eye. His clothes, a curious mix of homespun and silks, were threadbare
and wet with rain. Wisely, he held his hands away from his sides, showing them open and empty of weapons.

The knife hadn’t wavered from where she held it poised to strike. Evelina’s hand was perfectly steady, but her pulse thundered like the sea in a typhoon. Her mouth drifted open in astonishment.

Doubting, hoping, she flicked her attention back to those liquid brown eyes. Yes, she knew the face, or a version of it. Same gold hoops in his ears. Same quirk at the corners of his mouth. But the strong, muscled body smelling of saddle leather and adult male was entirely new.

“Nick?” she said in a choked whisper. “What are you doing here?”

“Is that how your fine governess taught you to welcome guests?” He smiled, teeth showing white in his swarthy face.

She lowered the impromptu weapon, stepping back until the edge of the table pressed into her skirts. So it had been
Nick
in the corridor, frightening her half to death. He had the Blood, too, but a different bloodline than the Coopers. Somehow it had given him an annoying ability to sneak up on other people with the silence of a falling shadow. Gran had said she’d never seen anything like it—but then Nick was one of a kind.

But knowing who it had been scarcely improved matters. She kept her fingers curled around the wooden handle of the knife, if only for the feeling of something solid to cling to. Her breath was coming in short, sharp pants, but she forced her voice to be crisp. Five years. She hadn’t seen him in five whole years. It felt like a lifetime.

The moment stretched uncomfortably until she saw the flicker of doubt in his eyes. In that instant, her heart cracked. She dropped the knife onto the table and stepped into him, flinging her arms around his neck as she had when she was no more than a child. He closed the embrace carefully, his touch far more cautious than his bold words. A hot ache filled her throat, yearning and sorrow mixed with dread.

And anger—because there was nothing safe or good in this reunion. All the anxiety she had felt during her earlier
adventure flooded back. She would be disgraced if the household found a strange man in her bedchamber—and just as bad, her past with the circus would be revealed. There would be no chance to explain, not with her history, and Nick would be arrested whether or not he was actually committing a crime. She couldn’t count on luck saving her this time. Surely she’d used up her store for the night.

Even more dangerous, she felt a familiar ripple of energy pass between them as Blood met Blood. A hot, heavy pressure stirred inside her, calling her own magic to the surface. As they had grown older, whatever it was that made Nick unique made her own talents almost impossible to hide when he was near. Now, after so many years, the pull was stronger than ever before. In the flickering candlelight, she could almost see a silvery glimmer where they touched. Power—raw and uncontrolled. Whenever they had called it, it had slipped its leash. That was the last thing they needed now.

Evelina shivered, and as Nick ran his hands down her arms in a time-honored gesture of comfort, magic tingled along her skin. Her throat constricted with unspoken pain. The very spark that made them who they were made it incredibly dangerous to be together.

Swallowing back a rush of sadness, she took a deep, steadying breath. It had taken so long to get over the loss of him that he couldn’t—he just
couldn’t
be there. The sight of him brought back too much pain. She pushed him away, wanting to stop the reunion before old wounds began to bleed. “You’re damp with rain.”

He pressed a hand over his heart. “That is enough to send me away? A little rain shouldn’t frighten you. We’ve slept together under the open stars.”

She crossed her arms, keeping her embraces to herself. “I was eleven, and it was disgustingly cold. And Old Ploughman was snoring a dozen feet away.”

“Your memory lacks romance.”

“I like accuracy.” She shot the words back before the sheer physical presence of this new, fully adult Nick could cloud her mind. Her gaze roved over him, taking in the lean
hips and strong shoulders, the long, lithe legs of the horseman. There was nothing of the boy left in the hard muscles she’d felt under his shirt, or in the graceful power of his every gesture. Her skin felt hot and tight, as if she’d suddenly contracted a fever.

“You pierce my heart, fair lady.”

“Rot. Don’t waste your patter on me; you’re impervious to a mere comment. I’m willing to wager you have more knives on your person than Lady Bancroft has place settings.”

He shrugged—the gesture so familiar it brought a throb to her chest. Memories crashed in, stifling in their urgency. When they had parted, Nick had been seventeen years old; she had been not quite fourteen. If she had stayed with the travelers, they would eventually have wed as surely as summer followed spring.

But that hadn’t happened. She looked at him now, wondering what he would have been like as a husband. Wondering what secrets this older Nick had hidden behind his cautious smile and those silken rags. The thought of it left her empty and aching.

“What are you doing in my bedchamber?” she demanded.

“Do you think I am here to ravish you, after all this time?”

She allowed herself a smile. His showman’s persona never quite came off with the costume. “I doubt you’ve kept the image of my pigtails and pinafore etched on your soul.”

“How little you understand me,” he said with another flash of teeth. “I was not whisked away by a long-lost and eminently respectable grandmamma. Perhaps my memory can afford to be longer.”

“Why are you here?”

“I asked for you at every stop the traveling show made, from Scotland to Dover.”

“No.” She had to deny it. She couldn’t bear the idea of him suffering anything like what she had felt. But then Nick, for all his faults—including the foolhardy bravery that had brought him there tonight—had always been loyal.

“It’s true.” He reached across the distance between them, his fingertips barely brushing her cheek. They were rough, but she didn’t flinch away. Instead, she felt turned to stone, mesmerized
by his plain, almost coarse accent. No Mayfair polish here.

“Stop,” she whispered.

“I knew you would grow into a beauty. Skin like the moon and hair like a starless night, as the old song goes.” His voice was husky. “We were close once. Are you so far above me now? I suppose you are.”

As long as no one burst in and found them together. At the very least, that would send her plunging back to the mud as fast as the laws of gravity allowed. She had to make him leave.

Still, Evelina wanted to know everything. Where he’d been. If he still devoured any and every book that fell into his hands. If he had found another girl to follow him around like a worshipful duckling. She had run away to find him once, when her courage failed at the beginning of their life apart. Her Grandmamma Holmes had locked her in the cellar.

The questions jammed up, tangling her tongue. “Are you still with the show?” she managed.

He dropped his hand, a mix of irony and pride flickering over his features. “Where else would I be? I’m the Indomitable Niccolo, supreme knife man and best trick rider in all Italia.”

“You’ve never been farther south than Kent,” she said in caustic tones. And she suspected his parents had been more Romany than Italian, but no one actually knew. He’d been a foundling who knew his first name and nothing else.

“Italia plays better with the crowd. Besides, it’s no more a sham than you playing at gentlewoman. Your father was one of us.”

There it was, the betrayal. She’d left Nick behind.

“But this,” Evelina gestured at the elegant room, “was my mother’s world.” And she was caught between, half gentry and half vagabond, two halves that never knit properly together.

Nick’s gaze roved over the bedchamber, lingering long on the silver candlesticks. Instinctively, she moved to screen his view of the box. “Why are you here?” she repeated.
“What are you doing in London? Ploughman’s never wintered here.” It wasn’t one of the big, famous shows. She remembered when all the performers had taken a cut in wages so the show could afford to buy the lions.

“We’ve been here since November.”

That meant they were moving up in the hierarchy of the circus world. That should have been good news, but Evelina’s throat tightened at the thought of her Gran, of Nick, of all the circus folk she’d grown up with being in the same city and never knowing it.

“I’ve been watching the house, wondering what was the best time to come see you, if you might be happy to see me. But then I saw you climbing a tree tonight, and I knew that at least part of you was still the same girl I knew. What were you doing, little Evie?”

The old endearment stung, reducing her back to the barefoot girl picking up pennies the crowds threw for her elders. “It’s none of your business anymore.”

His face went solemn. “Perhaps. But I saw you two days ago. In the street. I had given up hope of ever finding you. But a little silver to your groom and a gardener let me know where you sleep.”

The look Nick gave her was far too soft. She felt blood mount to her cheeks. How she had wished he would look at her like that, once upon a time. How it had finally started to happen when it was time for her to leave him. Now it was too late. “You know it’s madness for us to be together.”

“I do. I’m not stupid, Evie, but knowing you’re safe is worth the risk.”

She bit her lip. He didn’t have the right to choose that risk for her. “Are you so certain about that?”

He blinked, his face falling back to his insouciant expression. “I don’t expect you to come home with me. I just needed to know that you are happy. Is that so wrong?”

She took a breath, held it, and tried to find the right answer. “No. Are you? Happy, I mean.”

He shrugged. “You know me. I am content as long as I am the best.” He looked around the room again, as if trying to
memorize it. “So what do you do with yourself now? Have tea parties? Look for a husband?”

It was a good question, and one Evelina asked herself daily. She was caught between her circus past, with its hidden magic and its poverty, and her present, with schooling and science and enough to eat. She’d thought long and hard about another option, a place where she might find a brand-new path. “I want to go to university. There are colleges for women.”

His gaze came back to her, wide with surprise. “Why do you want that?” Probably no one in his acquaintance had set foot inside a proper schoolroom, much less a lecture hall.

“I’m good at learning. I want to see how far I can go. Maybe I’ll figure out … things.”

“What for?” Nick asked practically. “What don’t you already know?”

How to be whole
. In her daydreams, she had fabricated a place where she would finally fit in. There would be women like her who loved a book of chemistry more than a new ball gown, and who didn’t care where she grew up. She could study with the finest scholars. Maybe, with their help, she could crack the code to why magic worked and how it meshed with science. She could finally solve the puzzle of her own nature.

At last, she would know where she belonged. And maybe that mattered more than anything else.

The look on Nick’s face was hard to read, so she changed the subject. “I’m glad you came.”

One corner of his mouth curled up. “Is that the truth?”

“It is.” But she couldn’t tell. She felt suffocated by an emotion that was not guilt or loneliness or irritation, but a painful mix of all three.
It’s not my fault that I couldn’t stay with you
.

Nick watched her with eyes that missed nothing. His mouth was a flat line, with the deliberate neutrality of someone hiding pain.

Please go
. She wanted to say it, but that would sever everything between them. She didn’t want that, either. Instead, she grasped his hand. It was warm and hard with calluses
and the slow, languorous pulse of his power. It tingled up her arm, a sensual temptation to throw caution to the wind. It was hard to be the only one with Blood. Falling into Nick’s arms would put an end to isolation—but also an end to both their lives. “We’ll find a way to talk later, but now you should leave before you’re caught. And don’t go through the corridor this time. It’s late, but there’s a maid about.”

Nick had been staring at her hand clasping his, but now he looked up in confusion. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “I climbed the wall and came in that window. I wasn’t in the corridor.”

Downstairs, a woman shrieked—a long, chilling wail of terror.

Evelina locked eyes with Nick. “Somebody was, and I think we know which way he went.”