You’re dead; nothing can hurt you, Winnie sometimes said, but Genevieve knew that was a lie.
Kendrick’s free hand came around her waist, and he lifted her, whisking her back to his room. He shut the door and set her down. Genevieve fumbled instinctively for the doorknob and yanked on it, but the weight of one large hand held it shut. Kendrick didn’t touch her again. He was still talking.
Her ears stopped roaring.
“Easy, love,” he was saying. “I mean you no harm.”
Genevieve clenched her hands together, feeling the small hole in her left glove rub against her finger.I need to mend that,she thought, swallowing. She’d do it tonight. Envisioning the neat, tiny stitches she’d use calmed the tremors in her body, and her lungs came back under her control. No help for feeling like a shivering, panicky fool in front of this man, though. As terror left, embarrassment and anger with herself flooded in. She hadn’t had a bad turn like that in years.
“There,” he said, in a voice like smoke. “Better?”
She pursed her lips and lifted her chin. She would not fall to pieces in front of a stranger. Or not any further. She threw her shoulders back and turned to face him.
From far away, the man had seemed larger than life. This close, he took her breath away—even after the panic had subsided. His mane of hair filled her vision. She had never seen a man with such long hair before. Broad shoulders strained the seams of his shirt—of a rougher quality than she’d expect for the master of the London Ossuary, who could afford the finest London’s tailors could supply. But his coat was working man’s tweed, a support against the elements, and his waistcoat corduroy. He wore no cravat or collar—only a cloth wound around his neck—again, a working man’s attire. His bright-gold eyes fixed on her with interest and a too-canny insight. What did he see in her?
He gripped the sword still. A man out of time, as all vampires were. A warrior, a fighter.
He looked as though he might have stepped directly from the pages ofWynnflaed’s KnightorFinwold Law, tales of heroism in early Britain, before the Norman conquest, when the Saxons and Vikings had invaded and come to make the land their own, mingling with the British tribes and carving kingdoms from the heather and bracken.
He had lifted her with one hand. The rational part of her knew that was vampiric strength. Another part thought he probably could have done it when he had been human, too.
A smile curled over his mouth. “I have been combing the news sellers and the printers for my mysterious note-leaver, and here she comes to see me, instead.”
Her eyes widened.
The smile broadened, his teeth flashing white in his closely trimmed beard. “Your eyes are very expressive. Did you know that, Miss…?”
“Dryden.” She forced the word through her throat.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Dryden. Will you tell me his name?”
Her brows drew together. “Who?”
“The man who put that look on your face.”
Her suspicion deepened. “Why?”
“So I can kill him.”
The woman was tall enough to nearly look him in the eye, her head covered by a badly dyed black bonnet. Her worn gown, also dyed black, looked nearly two decades old. The woman’s colorless eyes were blown wide with panic, and her face was bloodless, even for a vampire.
Kendrick kept his expression deliberately calm and warm, even though a knot of anger burned in his gut and grew stronger by the second.
Someone had frightened her very badly in the past. Hurt her, almost certainly. The knowledge lit a fuse in him. What it led to, he had no idea.
Her lips pinched, her eyes narrowing with disapproval. “Is that your only approach to problems?” she shot back. “Killing them?”
Her tart response increased his fascination. He lifted a sardonic brow. “Because swinging a sword is the only thing I know how to do? I confess that it was my main function for many a year. I am very good at it.” He looked down at the weapon in his hand and set it on the desk, the naked blade gleaming in the lamplight. “But I am a man of many talents.”
She lifted her pointed chin at him in challenge. “I am sorry to inform you that he is already dead. In fact, it’s likely you dispatched him a month ago.” Her gaze sharpened as if to ask,Now what?
Good. A dark surge of satisfaction flared in him—shocking and surprising. “Ah, efficiency—another of my talents.”
She snorted.
His eyebrows shot up. “You disagree, madam?”
She stilled, a mouse in front of a lion.
