Page 20 of Ladies in Hating (Belvoir’s Library Trilogy #3)

Before the bookshelves stood the vampyress, her skin nearly translucent, her lips parted, her expression at once fiendish and seductive…

— from Lady Darling’s manuscript in progress, scratched out and annotated by the author, “This will not do.”

Cat had not precisely intended to seek Georgiana out at the soonest possible moment.

She’d lain awake the rest of the night, waiting for the familiar dawn sounds of coal and footsteps, and thought about Lady Georgiana. About their abrupt and devastating kiss in the library.

She felt—God, she scarcely knew what she felt. Rearranged in some way. Undone.

The animosity that had sparked between them these past weeks had flared into desire hot enough to burn down the library. But when Georgiana had walked away, the taste of her in Cat’s mouth had gone to ash: bitter and cold.

She had been in such a place before. Though she had long since come to accept her attraction to other women—believed it as natural and innate a part of herself as the shape of her own hands—she had learned through painful experience that not all women who shared her desires felt the same.

More than once, Cat had exchanged intimacies with a woman who would not look her in the eye in the morning—who could not speak of what they’d done in the light of day.

She did not feel ashamed for wanting Georgiana, nor for the passion that had sprung up between them.

But she thought perhaps Georgiana did feel shame, and the notion burned the back of her throat.

In the small hours, she’d resolved not to encounter Georgiana again in their remaining days at Renwick House.

Unfortunately, this resolution promptly proved impossible to hold to, thanks to the disappearance of their housekeeper.

Cat’s restraint—thin and fragile thing that it was—had gone quickly when Georgiana had opened the door.

Georgiana had been flushed and disheveled and awkward and still in that damned unbearable dressing gown.

Her toes were bare and all the armor she kept around herself was fractured, somehow.

Her crisp, precise decorum felt like apology; her obvious embarrassment seemed an entreaty.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps Cat was only imagining what she wanted to see.

She followed Georgiana down to the servants’ quarters, which were devoid of inhabitants. The housekeeper’s room was small, and the walls were papered in a black-and-white pattern of—

Ah. More skulls.

Cat bit her lip as she glanced around the dark, chilly room. Bacon sniffed at the empty wardrobe. “You don’t think… Those screams you heard…”

“No,” Georgiana said firmly. “No. I dreamt them. I am certain of it. Besides, it…” She trailed off, her fingers doing something nervous and busy with the purple buttons at her throat.

“What?”

Georgiana picked Bacon up from the floor and addressed her remarks to his upright ear. “It did not sound like Graves. It sounded like you.”

Oh God. The woman made it impossible not to thaw toward her. Cat tried not to let her mouth curl up, and failed.

She followed Georgiana down to the kitchen—no Mort, no Graves, and no breakfast besides—and then watched in frank astonishment as Georgiana swept her rich amethyst skirts to the side, knelt down, and quickly and efficiently built a fire in the hearth.

“I was wondering if there was any leftover bread,” Georgiana said as she rose and turned back to Cat. “From the loaf you—” She broke off, peering into Cat’s face, which must have reflected her consternation. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Cat managed.

Georgiana looked doubtfully down at her skirts and swiped at some invisible ash. “Oh. All right. I—”

“No,” Cat said, “wait. Where the devil did you learn how to do that?”

Somewhere inside herself, she groaned slightly and cursed her unruly mouth, which persisted in saying things she meant to keep inside.

Georgiana glanced back down at the hearth. “Light a fire, do you mean?”

“Yes. When I knew you—back at Woodcote Hall—you wouldn’t have…” Cat trailed off, because Georgiana’s already pale complexion had gone paler. Her shoulders drew back, her posture going upright and perfect.

“I have not lived there since I was eighteen,” Georgiana said stiffly. “I have learned a great deal in the intervening seven years.”

Cat felt her lips part.

Georgiana had not lived at Woodcote Hall since she was eighteen?

“How is that possible?” Cat demanded, her words forming themselves at precisely the same speed as the questions in her mind. “You had only just started publishing your novels at eighteen, had you not? How could you have managed it? And why ?”

Georgiana’s face was expressionless—almost masking her emotions, except for the way her skin had leached of color. “I had three pen names, those first few years. And still it was—lean, at first. For me and my mother.”

Cat felt herself blinking rapidly and could not seem to stop. “But why would you choose to leave Woodcote when you—”

“Some things,” Georgiana said flatly, “are worse than poverty.”

Cat’s brain finally grappled her mouth into submission, and she absorbed Georgiana’s statement silently. Her breath had caught somewhere in her chest.

She remembered Alistair Cleeve. She remembered his neglect, his heedless cruelties.

Once she had seen him throw Lady Alverthorpe’s gloves into the fire because she had bought them without asking—a quick abrupt act of dominance that had sucked the air from the room.

He had not even been ashamed for the servants to see.

Cat and her family had been cast out of Woodcote Hall. Georgiana and her mother had chosen to leave.

And perhaps they had not been so very different after all.

Cat bit her lip, her eyes roaming Georgiana’s angular face.

She kept on not being what Cat had thought her to be. She was not the painfully reserved, almost silent girl that Cat remembered from their adolescence at Woodcote. But she was not quite the sneering aristocrat that Cat had taken her for when they’d met as adults, either. Perhaps she’d never been.

Georgiana knew how to start a fire with her bare hands. She launched herself after her dog, even when it was not in her best interest.

She had left her home when she was eighteen and made her way in the world by her work and her wits, and Cat could not pretend that she didn’t admire Georgiana. Not anymore.

“How did you choose the Desrosiers pen name?” Cat asked finally. “Over the others?”

Her remark had been meant to break the tension between them, and by the hint of gratitude on Georgiana’s face, the tiny softening of her shoulders, it worked. “They sold the best,” she said. “The romances.”

It was not hard, then, to turn the conversation to books, to the progress of their research at Renwick House.

In the absence of Graves, Cat fetched the bread she’d baked the day before and cut thick slices with a black knife enameled in a pattern of thorns.

They toasted it over Georgiana’s fire, and Cat congratulated herself on only once noticing the way Georgiana’s forefinger slid along the rim of her mouth.

After they ate, Cat moved to the kitchen’s rear door, intending to set the crumbs out for the birds. Only, as she set her weight against the ebony slab, she found she could not move it. “How peculiar,” she murmured.

“What’s peculiar?” Georgiana’s voice was close to her ear, and Cat felt a shiver rise uncontrollably through her.

She cleared her throat. “The door is locked. Perhaps Graves fastened it when she left to go… wherever it is that she went.”

Georgiana’s expression tightened, and Cat too felt a tiny thrill of unease.

The door had not been fixed closed when she’d last been in the kitchen. She was certain of it.

“Let us try another door,” Georgiana said, and for once Cat felt no compulsion to argue with Georgiana’s high-handedness.

But the north wing’s main exit also seemed to be fastened shut. Neither of them could stir the door an inch.

They moved hastily on to the south wing, Bacon clutched tight in Georgiana’s arms.

“Do you think,” Cat said cautiously, “that the ghost—”

“Ghosts do not exist.”

“All right. But let us imagine, for the sake of conversation, that the screaming you heard last night was in fact—”

“I dreamt it. Ghosts aren’t—” Georgiana broke off as they reached the large exterior door to set Bacon down. He whined and pawed at the mouseholes at the door’s bottom edge. Georgiana shoved at the door, then ran her fingers helplessly along the frame while Cat had her own go with the handle.

Nothing. The door would not budge.

Georgiana paused suddenly in her fruitless appraisal of the doorjamb. “I can see it,” she said. Her voice sounded uneven, and her hands fell to her sides.

“See what?” Cat’s own voice wobbled, just a touch.

“The bar that’s holding the door closed. I can see its shadow, just here, in the light.”

“What?”

Georgiana’s expression, when she turned to face Cat full-on, was grim. “I believe—” She hesitated, swallowed. Tried again. “I believe that we are trapped inside the manor.”