Transmuted by Karina Cooper Read Free Book Online Page B

whispered dead man’s haunt.
    Them what risked venturing below the lowest of the drift rarely had intentions of returning to the light—and they hated, with great passion, toffs. ’Twas an enmity as natural as fire and water Perhaps, I thought as I studied the dull glass chit that would allow my entry, it was long past time for London’s only female collector to reacquaint herself with such souls as might steal a diamond for twenty thousand pounds.

Chapter Five
    By the time we made it back to Little Chelsea, dawn had long since danced fragile fingers over the devil-black fog. It was to be a fairly poor day, given the stench already choking the street outside.
    Creeping yellow fingers, dull hue of a morning swallowed by the drifting smoke, and stinging throat all turned out to be little more than harbingers for the real challenge ahead.
    To wit, convincing my overprotective companions that a jaunt to the Underground would be just the thing for an evening’s excursion.
    Mr. Darlington helped us alight, thanked us most civilly for our services, then escaped as the front door of Fanny’s home opened.
    Booth held the door for us, an expected courtesy.“Welcome home, misses.”
    I smiled warmly. “Thank you.”
    Zylphia sighed. “Thought that’d be a sight more difficult.”
    Booth leaned in, lowering his whitecapped head to murmur, “I am afraid the difficulties have only begun. Mr. Ashmore is in residence, miss.”
    Bloody hell. “Did you summon him?”
    “No, miss. He arrived with the dawn.” His gaze slipped down the hall, and a murmured voice of masculine depth vibrated through the small corridor—and through my suddenly pounding heart. “And he came with a guest.”
    Booth did not have to name the owner of that voice aloud. I already knew who awaited in my parlor.
    Micajah Hawke had finally seen fit to gift me with his presence, had he? The first he’d bothered to do so in near a fortnight, and he chose this moment.
    He had the Devil’s own luck—or simply the serpent’s unearthly sense of trouble.
    “Lord help us now,” Zylphia murmured.
    Seizing my skirts in hand, I hiked them high enough that I might stride without obstruction. The sudden snap of my temper might seem out of sorts to most anyone else, but all in my household had been made aware of the uncoordinated waltz I danced with the once ringmaster. Even Fanny had quietly come to suspect what role Hawke played in the tableau of my life.
    That it continued to be one lacking in significant words no doubt weighed heavily upon all caught up in our wake.
    I was as guilty of this tension, as I was saddled by the same burden.
    Ashmore cut my grand entrance off at the parlor door.
    “Were you even five minutes later,” he said from his favored armchair, a steaming cup that smelled of bitter Turkish coffee in hand, “there would have been a reckoning.”
    Like me, my tutor was not given to hyperbole. The deadly seriousness of his tone suggested that I had narrowly missed exactly that what he’d said.
    I froze in the doorway, one gloved hand seizing the frame.
    Ashmore was a handsome man, there was no doubt of it. While my hair retained the deeply garnet hues of my mother’s, Ashmore’s was more of a polished copper in color. It swept back from his face in a corona longer than fashion deemed acceptable, and contrasted the milkwhite shade of his skin.
    With aristocratic features of an often stern disposition—especially, as now, when irritated or when he saw fit to make of a circumstance an object lesson—and a slim build given to subtle athleticism, he was likely to be listed an eligible bachelor on every matron’s marriageable list.
    The unfashionable hue of a man’s hair may be forgiven, if his prospects were strong enough. A man’s wealth was of far more paramount interest.
    It was no secret that Fanny had once entertained hopes of such a match between him and I, regardless that he had been my guardian first. It certainly would not have been