Page 19 of Darkest at Dusk (Revenant Roses)

She should have felt chastised, cowed. Instead, she felt angry —angry at his dismissiveness, angry at his effortless calm while she still felt as though her skin was stretched too tight over her bones.

Worse, she felt a spark of something sharp and enticing, as though his very indifference dared her to provoke him.

“In future, I will be sure to chase only those noises that promise certain danger,” she said, acerbic. “What is the point of wandering in the night if there is no threat?”

His huff of laughter was low and warm. Unsettling.

“I, too, wander when I cannot sleep,” he said, then glanced down at himself before meeting her eyes once more, his expression sardonic. “I had not expected to meet anyone in my nocturnal wanderings, or I would have dressed with more formality. Please excuse the state in which I find myself.”

His words only served to draw her attention to his naked skin, the ridges of his belly, the thin, dark trail of hair that descended?—

Pressing her lips together, she dragged her gaze away.

He took a step closer. The scent of his skin teased her, a clean hint of citrus and…mint. It felt illicit to breathe it in; even so, she did, letting the scent stroke her senses.

Her mouth grew dry, her pulse racing.

She took a hasty step back.

“Come,” he said, his voice low, his gaze locked on hers. “I will take you back to your room.”

“No need.” She shook her head, stepping away.

He watched her, expectant, amused.

“No need? Then please lead the way, Miss Barrett.”

She edged around him and paused as she took in the hallway, trying to remember how she had arrived at this spot. Finally, she took an awkward, sliding step to the right.

His voice was a low murmur behind her. “Other way.”

She turned, her movements rigid.

Without another word, he led her through the darkened corridors.

As they walked, her senses betrayed her, focusing on the subtle sway of his gait, the faint rasp of linen over his hips, the warmth radiating from him in the cold dark.

She was acutely aware of everything about him, his height, the breadth of his shoulders, the muscles of his back shifting beneath his skin as he moved.

His state of undress. She had never seen a man without his shirt.

Oh, she had read Papa’s books of anatomy, seen the drawings therein, but nothing had prepared her for this.

Rhys Caradoc was…beautiful.

As they turned down yet another hallway, her shoulder bumped his arm. He made no indication that he even noticed. But she noticed, her skin tingling beneath her wrap.

Her pulse beat a frantic rhythm, her every sense painfully aware of him in the velvet-dark corridor, that unfamiliar twist low in her belly gnawing at her like hunger.

When they reached her door, he turned to her, his gaze lingering on her face. The shadows softened the hard lines of his jaw, but his eyes, those piercing gray eyes, held an intensity that made her stomach flutter.

“Why did you buy my father’s collection?” she asked, both because she wanted the answer and because she wanted to prolong their moment together. “Are you an antiquarian?”

If he was surprised by her questions, uttered here in the dim corridor while they stood improperly close, he made no indication.

“The answer to the second question is no,” he said. “The answer to the first is that I wanted to gain his good favor.”

“Because you wanted something from him.” Her thoughts drifted to the key around her neck.

It lay beneath her bodice against her skin, the metal cold.

“You wanted his private collection. How disappointed you must have been when those books were not included in the material you purchased. Doubly disappointed when he refused to part with them that day when you came to call.”

Mr. Caradoc took a step closer. His shadow swallowed her, the air between them crackling until she could feel the whisper of his breath on her cheek.

“I know only what I received,” he said. “If there was something your father kept apart…something uncatalogued…I have no direct knowledge of it.” He paused. “Do you?”

Isabella stiffened. “No,” she said, too quickly. The lie felt brittle on her tongue.

He tilted his head, watching her with an unsettling calm. “Next time you hear something in the night,” he murmured, “stay in your room.”

The warning in his tone sent a shiver down her spine.

And then, before she could reply, he leaned in and tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear, his knuckles grazing the angle of her jaw, his fingertips lingering at the sensitive skin just beneath her earlobe.

The world narrowed to that single point of contact.

The warmth of his touch combined with the way he looked at her sent heat spiraling through her veins.

She swayed toward him.

They were separated by mere inches, his gaze fixed on her mouth in a way that made her edgy and nervous, wanting…no, needing something she could not name.

Her pulse raced. Her lips parted. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. He filled her senses. The heat of his body, the rough texture of his fingertips, the weight of his gaze?—

He stepped back.

“Goodnight, Miss Barrett,” he said.

A small bow. A turn.

And then he was gone, swallowed by the darkness.

Isabella stood there for a long moment, forcing her ragged breathing under control.

She entered her room and closed the door behind her then pressed her forehead against the wood, her body trembling, not with fear or cold, but something else, something unfamiliar and exciting.

Desire, she thought. It pricked her like pins from the inside. Confusion lapped at its edges.

She made a soft, shaky laugh, unsure which haunted her more, the wraith or the man who had walked her through the shadowed dark.

A buzz drew her glance to the floor. A crisped fly lay on the rug at her feet, its wing giving one last brittle flutter before falling still.

Rhys strode along the dark corridor, the feel of Isabella’s skin lingering in his palm like a brand.

With each step away from her, the thin, needling susurrus he had learned to endure crawled back into his ears.

But the noise was a pale imitation of itself, as if someone had draped wet muslin over a violin and bid it play.

Just having her in the house made the hum bearable but touching her made the sound weak and toothless.

He told himself that was the reason his pulse had stumbled when she swayed toward him, the only reason his thumb had found the hollow beneath her ear and rested there as if it belonged.

He had meant to keep his distance. He had meant a hundred sensible things.

She had looked at him, a proper little scholar with a straight spine and threadbare wrapper.

She had seen him and not looked away. That had surprised him, as had the truth of it: desire arrived not as a blaze but as recognition, the clean, undeniable sort a man feels when a key finds the lock he’s been turning bloody for years.

He dismissed the metaphor before it could fully form.

She was not a key, not a tool to be used. She was a woman who did not flinch.

And he was a man who had already decided what he must ask of her, how he must use her, though she deserved better.

At his door, he stilled, recalling the round, steady drum of her pulse beneath the delicate bones of her wrist when he’d held it. Had he not released her, the chorus might have stilled altogether. A seductive thought. A dangerous one. A man might do unforgivable things for quiet.

A child’s cry carried from inside the wall, a thin warble that might have been his name.

Or not. The sound was tinny with distance, heavy with despair.

Another cry followed, a woman’s wrenching sob that sat heavy on his heart.

Then the scrape came low along the skirting, nails on stone, chasing the others away, sharpening itself on his regrets.

He opened the door and stepped inside. The fire had fallen to red embers and ash. On the table lay a half-sorted sheaf of notes…dates, marginalia, the diagram he had sketched of a half-circle and its broken twin. Two halves, the grimoire had stated.

Two willing halves joined, and the gate would open.

Two halves, one of them a living conductor that could reach into the ethereal place not quite of this world when the gate began to sing.

He had chased that promise—the promise of freedom for the souls of those he loved—through ink and rumor until it had brought him to a man in London and the man’s daughter who steadied a haunted house simply by being in it.

As he set the papers in order, he made a silent vow.

He would keep her safe and he would have what he needed of her.

Both truths could live in the same space.

He could keep her here, arrange her circumstances so leaving felt unthinkable, pay her well and call it mercy, pretending all the while that he was not the villain in this tale.

“She is staying,” he said aloud, and only then allowed himself to acknowledge the truth.

He wanted Isabella Barrett for more reasons than he cared to admit.

And if he could keep his hands from her, if he could do what needed to be done, then the weeping in these walls would at last go quiet for good.