“Miss Elspeth Ramsay. Red-blond hair, dimple in her left cheek, impertinent but undeniably bonny...” Cain trailed off as he realized both his words and the accompanying hand gestures were ill-advised in polite society. “That is to say, the lovely young woman I was just dancing with.”
A passing countess came to a sharp halt upon overhearing this last. There! He knew finding a simple direction wouldn’t be that difficult.
“Did you dance the last waltz?” she asked, blinking as if just having awoken from a deep sleep. She rapped his shoulder with a painted fan. “Horrid, horrid beast. You well know I would love to be your... partner.”
Cain made the expected flirtatious replies and circled about the room, growing more and more incredulous after each frustrating encounter. Not a soul could help him. For the first time since he’d entered Society, the lords and ladies had taken their eyes from him. Just long enough to have missed his waltz partner—and the detour into the gardens—entirely.
Even more baffling: No one present had ever heard of Miss Elspeth Ramsay.
Chapter 4
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. 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.
Such behavior could well 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 ruined an opportunity for easy money by losing her mind. “It was not 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 padded squab beneath Ellie’s posterior 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 viscount, 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 to 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 tighter. “Where?”
“In the gardens,” she stammered. “There was a folding screen near the exit, and he?—”
“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 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.”
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.
