Heart's Blood(57)

The tenth time it happened-it had been ten days since the first occasion, therefore ten times-and Grey carried her off to his bedroom to quench his thirst for her, he remembered afterward that he had meant to speak to her about it.

They lay naked in his bed, Grey on his back, one arm flung over his head, with actual thoughts floating to the surface of his mind, like dead things rising in a river. Pearl was rather murderous to his thought process, but they did resurrect themselves eventually, and tonight it happened before they collapsed into sleep.

He looked at Pearl, who lay on her stomach, her face burrowed into the featherbed. "Pearl?" He rolled to his side and combed the tangled hair from the visible part of her face. The noise she made encouraged him. "Are you asleep?"

"Not for lack of trying." She opened her unburied eye at him, then turned onto her side with a flounce. "What?"

Grey sighed. But if she was annoyed with him and half asleep, perhaps she would answer his questions with truth. Not that she wasn't truthful, to the point of discomfort most times, but she could evade with the best of them. Meaning himself. "You do know that I am trying very hard to treat you with the respect due one's fiancée, don't you?"

Both of Pearl's eyes came open and she swept her hair out of her face. "Yes, of course."

"Then why aren't you helping me? When I picked you up in my arms tonight and bore you off, why did you put your arms around my neck? Why didn't you at least say something?"

"What would you have me say?" The light in her eyes should have warned him, but fool that he was, he plunged on.

"Something like, ‘Grey, this isn't wise.' Or ‘Grey, think.' Something."

She sat up, and only then did he understand his peril. Not even the linens falling away from her perfect body could distract him from that terrifying realization.

"First of all-" She poked him with her finger. Pearl's were quite as deadly as Elinor's. She'd learned her technique there. "You are not putting me in charge of controlling your lustful urges. That is your job, not mine. I have enough trouble controlling my own urges. Which is the second of all.

"You are assuming I want to control them. Why should I? I want to be here in this bed doing what we do together just as much as you do. When you kiss me like that, I can't think. I'm not sure I can even form words. And you want me to protest?"

Grey sat up beside her, scrubbing a hand over his face in an attempt to order his thoughts. She wants me was trying to drown everything else out, with help from I can kiss her as senseless as she makes me. "We've got to move the wedding up," he muttered.

"Surely that's no longer necessary." Pearl's statement brought his head jerking around.

"It's more necessary than ever." Grey couldn't believe what he'd heard. "The more often we-" He waved a hand at their nakedness, at the bed. "-come together, the more likely there will be consequences."

"Sorcery has magic to prevent conception." The tips of her ears turned charmingly pink, but Grey refused to be charmed. "And as for reputation-ruined is ruined, which I was long before we ever met. Ruination is not compounded each time we-"

She blushed brighter as she repeated his gesture. "There's no need for us to marry. We can simply continue the engagement and when people have forgotten . . ." She waved her hand again, waving him and their engagement away.

"We will marry," Grey said through gritted teeth. "The sooner, the better. As soon as they finish calling the banns. The second calling is tomorrow at St. Ann's. We will, of course, attend. Ruin and reputations do not enter into it."

He wanted to marry Pearl as much for himself as for her sake. More. Pearl would indeed do perfectly well if they did not wed. He very much feared that he would not.

The next morning after service, Grey called Elinor aside and asked her to arrange a wedding. November 30, the day immediately after the third calling of the banns, seemed suitable. That would give her just over a week to arrange for the small private ceremony he and Pearl both wanted. Pearl had no family. Grey wished he didn't-except for Adela. He would invite his sister. Beyond that, a few of their magician friends. Harry and Elinor would stand up with them. Perhaps Amanusa and Jax would be back. That was enough.

The day after that, on Monday, Amanusa and Jax arrived in London on the ten o'clock train. Grey dragged Pearl to the station with Harry, Elinor, and Archaios to meet them.

Pearl wasn't at all sure she wished to go. Morning was surely soon enough to meet the formidable, beautiful Mrs. Greyson, but when Grey insisted, as magic-master rather than as fiancé, Pearl could not very well resist. She was perfectly happy with the magic-master she had and did not want to change, but Grey insisted on so few things.

The train arrived in Euston Station precisely on time, alas. Pearl waited with the anxiously pacing Harry, Grey, and Elinor. Archaios stood more calmly to one side, being taller and able to see farther. As Pearl watched Grey, she wondered whether Grey's impossible love, the one that made him willing to settle for marrying Pearl, might be the happily married Amanusa Greyson, rather than the dead Mary.                       
       
           



       

Then Elinor let out a glad cry and darted forward into the crush of weary travelers. The others followed, except for Grey, who looked around to find Pearl. He extended his hand to her with a sweet smile. She'd only recently discovered he had them as well as the other, wickeder sort.

Elinor rushed up to a giantess of a woman, one quite as tall as Grey, with pale blond hair tucked tidily under a fashionable bonnet. Harry was clapping a taller gentleman on the back, and they were there. Grey took both of the tall willowy woman's hands in his and kissed her cheek. Then he shook hands with the gentleman whose brown hair shone with ruddy lights in the glare of the station lights.

Pearl held very still but she should have known Grey would not forget her. He caught her hand and pulled her forward. "My fiancée," he said. "Miss Pearl Parkin."

The fair one's brows went up and she smiled, extending both hands-bare of gloves-to Pearl. "Why, she's lovely, Grey. Not at all what I would have expected of you."

"You'd have expected me to marry someone ugly?" He stiffened in mock affront.

She laughed. "Of course not, but-forgive me, Miss Parkin, I must greet you and not tease Grey. It is an astonishing privilege to meet the woman who can put up with this man."

"He is a trial, I must admit." Pearl said it for Grey, not the woman. Grey appreciated a good tease. Pearl did not want to like her, for too many reasons.

"Pearl, this is my cousin, Jax Greyson." Grey introduced her to the gentleman standing behind his very tall wife.

"You're the only one who claims me as such." He smiled at Grey, then turned his twinkling smile on Pearl as he took her hand with an old-fashioned bow. "An honor, Miss Parkin."

"No one claims me, either," Grey said. "So we might as well claim each other."

When the gentleman rose, Pearl glanced at his wife-the magister, she supposed, since Mrs. Greyson was the only master sorcerer-and saw her smiling at her husband with such a look on her face . . . No, she was not in love with Grey. It yet remained to be seen whether Grey was in love with her.

"Pearl is also Grey's apprentice," Elinor said. "Studying sorcery."

"She opened the sorcery book in the library without a fumble." Grey's statement sounded so boastful it made Pearl blush.

"However are you managing to learn?" The sorcery magister looked at Pearl in astonishment.

"Out of books." Pearl shrugged. "I'm still at the very beginning."

"Not so," Grey protested. "She's already managed to-ride the blood, isn't it? And lay ghosts."

"Lay ghosts?" Mrs. Greyson blinked her absurdly long, pale lashes. "How does one do that? And riding the blood already-You have outpaced the others altogether."

"Others?" Elinor's face was alight with eager anticipation.

Mrs. Greyson turned to a cluster of women and girls standing behind her, people Pearl should have noticed long before. "Magisters, magicians, and apprentices, I present to you the students of the sorcery school."

There were six of them, ranging in age from the apple-cheeked Nan Jackson who could be no more than fourteen, to Fiona Watson, a sturdy, matronly woman in her thirties.

The niceties done, Mr. Greyson gathered his wife in. He only took her arm, but it seemed to Pearl almost as if he gathered her under protective wings.

"We're worn to the bone," he said, somehow making it clear that by "we" he meant his bride. "Time enough tomorrow for talking shop."

"You said you'd booked rooms at Brown's Hotel," Elinor said. "I assume you meant that you booked enough rooms for everyone."

"Yes, of course." Mrs. Greyson got the whole group moving by sheer force of will, Pearl thought.

Pearl was swept along with them by Grey, who hurried to pace at the sorceress's side. "I want Pearl in your school," he said.

"She's much more advanced than my students." Mrs. Greyson seemed utterly serene.