Heart's Blood(10)

The front windows overlooked the street, but Pearl no longer cared about exposure. Her magic could hide her. She hoped. One way or another, she was leaving this house.

She was halfway out the window when the door to the parlor opened again and Magister Carteret strolled in, handing his hat and his walking stick to the stiff rump of a butler.

The magister looked . . . good. Disheveled. Rumpled. Unshaven, by the dark shadow on his cheeks and chin. It only brought out the "fallen" aspect of his appearance without altering the "angel" side in the least. Pearl couldn't breathe.

Though part of that might be due to the fact that she lay on her stomach over the windowsill with her legs dangling outside.

He turned and saw her there draped half in and half out of the window. His gaze captured her and held her motionless, unable to move in either direction. "So eager to abandon me, Miss Parkin?" he inquired, one eyebrow rising, a perfect wing preparing to take flight.

She couldn't have him thinking the wrong thing, but it was a struggle to escape the breathless web of his gaze. "So eager to reach you, Magister Carteret." She croaked the words out on her last remnant of breath, which somehow overbalanced her and she toppled the rest of the way out the window into the street.

A shout carried through the window as the sidewalk smacked her hard. She collapsed in a heap, sharp pains stabbing her ankle and hip and the palms of her hands. Her elbow hurt, too.

Pearl sat up, whimpering a little with self-pity and embarrassment. Scandalized passers-by pretended she wasn't there, or they stared in open shock and appalled fascination. She'd forgotten her disguising magic when Mr. Carteret and his too-handsome face had come in the room.

She inspected her stinging elbow. The fabric had torn and the skin was scraped away. Drat. Now she would have to mend the borrowed dress, or replace it. She hoped Mr. Carteret didn't reduce the amount of her support, so she could pay for the dress and still have some to save.

"Miss Parkin-"

She looked up to see Mr. Carteret's head poking out the window, as the front door opened and McGregor and a footman hustled down the steps.

"Are you all right?" Carteret asked.

"Nothing seems to be permanently damaged." She tried very hard to behave as if falling out of windows while climbing out of them was something young ladies did every day of the week.

"Ah. Excellent." He disappeared just as the two servants reached her.

Pearl jerked away from McGregor's hands as he bent to help her up. It was his fault she was in this situation. She accepted the footman's hand and pulled herself upright. When she took a step, the pain in her ankle stabbed sharper and she almost fell. McGregor caught her arm, but he let go when she glared at him.

Mr. Carteret came clattering down the front steps in a billow of frock coat. "You have damaged yourself," he accused.

"Not permanently."

But she was ignored, or her words and wishes were, as he swept her up in his arms to carry her into his house.

Oh, this was not good. She was held in steel-banded arms, nestled into a broad, firmly muscled chest, close enough to that Byronesque visage that she could see the last of the light glinting off the individual whiskers of his unshaved cheeks. And he smelled good.

Surprising, since he'd spent a quarter of the previous night lying in a gutter, and the remainder of the day in a jail cell. But then, Pearl's nose had been reeducated over the past several years. It had gone numb perhaps, or learned to ignore the East End effluvia, though since the sewers had been mostly finished, the Thames did smell a great deal better these days. Still, Mr. Carteret simply smelled like himself.

Holding her close in those lovely strong arms, Mr. Carteret clattered up the steps and into the house as if she weighed nothing at all. And while Pearl realized that she didn't weigh much, she also knew that she weighed considerably more than nothing. This demonstration of masculine strength made her heart want to go pitter-pat.

Since it had already gone thumpety, pitter-pat was absolutely not to be tolerated. Mr. Carteret was her master of magic. Her teacher and employer. The fact that he was also the most beautiful man she'd ever seen in the whole of her pitiful life was beside any point anyone might care to make.

She perhaps should have waited for the new sorceress to return to London, and made polite application to become her apprentice. But the opportunity had dropped quite literally at her feet. Pearl had learned through painful experience to jump at any opportunity that presented itself. Opportunities never came around again. Ever.                       
       
           



       

"Why were you climbing out the window?" Mr. Carteret thumped her down on the settee and threw her skirts up.

Pearl pushed them back down again with a little screech, all too aware of the butler and footman. She pinned her skirts in place against Mr. Carteret's determination to fling them aside again, though she could only reach as far as her knees. Her ankles and bony shins were exposed to the world. Or the world inside the bobble-decked parlor.

McGregor sent the footman away. For clean water and a maid, Pearl hoped, rather than a doctor. Then he retreated with a clearing of his throat to the doorway. Mr. Carteret glanced up, then stopped trying to shove her skirts higher in the ridiculous tug-of-war. Push-of-war. Instead, he unbuttoned her boy's boot and removed it.

Pearl flipped her skirts over her shins, leaving the ankle exposed. Mr. Carteret already had her stocking foot in his hands, manipulating it this way and that.

"Do you actually know what you're doing?" she asked.

"Enough to know that if you'd broken anything, you'd be screaming." He twisted it in a new direction, and Pearl yelped.

She didn't intend to. But it hurt, and she didn't expect it. She yanked her foot from his grasp and hid it beneath her, tucking her skirts all around to keep them out of his clutches. "Brute."

"Very probably." He sprang to his feet and propped his hands on his hips, glowering down at her. The effect was quite different from when Mr. Tomlinson did it. "But I'm fairly certain you've only bruised your foot, rather than breaking or spraining the ankle. Now, if you would be so kind as to tell me why you felt it incumbent upon you to climb out the front window of my house like some schoolboy bent on mischief-though a schoolboy would have sense enough to climb out a back window."

Pearl blinked at him. "Are you angry?"

"Yes, damn it, I am. I don't like being angry. This is why I didn't want an apprentice. Because I have to get angry when they do stupid, boneheaded things like climbing out of windows six feet off the ground for no discernable reason at all." His voice had begun with a mild snap to it, but built in power and volume until he was almost, but not quite, shouting.

He seemed to hear the sound as it echoed around the red-on-red parlor, cocking his head to listen. The tension slid out of his body. "Bloody hell," he said gently.

Bewildered, Pearl put her feet on the floor and sat up to watch him stroll to the hallway door and bellow for McGregor.

"Yes, sir?" The butler stepped from his place of invisibility near the door inside the room.

"Tea." Mr. Carteret flourished a hand. "Go. Bring tea. Oceans of it. And scones. Or crumpets or cakes or whatever Cook's got at hand."

McGregor bowed and absented himself.

Mr. Carteret spun on his heel to face Pearl, an eyebrow rising in question. "Well?"

Oh. The window. Pearl rummaged in her pocket and pulled out the sadly crumpled apprenticeship papers. "I was going to bring you these at the jail, get them signed. Make things official."

Mr. Carteret held up his left hand, raised the forefinger, and waggled it up and down at her. "It's been sealed in blood. Don't see how much more official it can be."

"Well, I can." She limped toward him, papers out. "Signed, sealed, and registered with the council is official. This-" She waggled her own previously punctured finger at him. "Is real."

"But why were you climbing out the window?" He sounded more bewildered than angry now. "There is a front door. For that matter, I have footmen. Any one of them could have delivered papers to the jail."

"Your blasted butler wouldn't let me out. Nor would he send a footman to deliver the papers. I was a prisoner in this room." She tried very hard to keep her voice matter-of-fact and free of emotion. She thought she did for the most part. "So I decided to climb out the window."

Another thing she'd learned in the past several years. Her size meant that tackling obstacles head-on usually resulted in failure, but there was always a way around.

"Yes, but you knew I was on my way home."

Pearl goggled at him. "No, I didn't. How would I know? Mr. Tomlinson didn't think he could get you out before tomorrow. I was beginning to worry I might have to sleep in this dreadful parlor. How did you get out?"

"My father's solicitor came to obtain my release. I have been completely exonerated-"

"What? How?" She could scarcely believe it.

"Free as a bird. Cleared of all accusations by virtue of Mr. Archaios and his sensitive nose. Which you should know." He scowled at her, then spun on his heel and shouted for McGregor again.