“I saw three ships come sailing in on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day…”
A mink-lined cloak hooked beneath her chin, and hands ensconced in a matching muff, Cornelia Peabody approached a band of children caroling near the Beacon Street entrance of Boston Commons. A frigid wind off the harbor had the children huddling close together, and after a quick glance up at the darkening sky, Cornelia paused to dig for some coins.
“What strong voices you have to carry us into the new century.” She smiled at the oldest youth. “How much more must you make before you’re allowed in out of the cold?”
The teenage boy glanced at her with crafty eyes. With an efficiency that spoke volumes of long practice, he took in her silver-buckled boots, dark blond hair secured by a garnet-accented snood, and the black silk top hat that shielded her face with a fishnet veil.
Eureka. The word was all but scrawled in six-inch letters across his face.
“My brothers and sisters would sing for nothing at all for a fine lady such as yourself, miss,” he began, his gaze earnest. “Only… We can’t go home without nothin’, or our father will beat us and make us sleep in the woodshed again. If it’s this cold now, we’ll surely freeze to death by sunup.” As he spoke, one of the younger children scooted closer to her, the touch feather-light.
Not bad. But of course, she was better.
“Quite a decent blab, boyo. Delivery was smooth, too.” Cornelia’s smile never wavered as she caught the tiny thief’s hand still clutching her decoy purse. “But there’s a pair of coppers who patrol this part of Beacon Street, not to mention we’re on the cusp of Irish Paddy’s known territory. You wouldn’t want either of those anvils falling down upon your precious heads, now would you?”
The singing stopped and the teen looked like he’d swallowed an icicle sideways. “M-Miss, please forgive my little brother. He ain’t never pulled this sort of mischief before—”
“Now, now, don’t misunderstand. Consider this a friendly warning, from one survivor to another. Try the pickings south of Faneuil Hall. A lively marketplace has set up there, it always does this time of year. Lots of distracted pigeons, and you’ll be in no one’s established territory.” She let the child go, then brought out the money to give to the stunned teen. “You hearing my words, boyo? If not, I’ll say it plain—don’t come back to Beacon Street.”
Cornelia’s smile vanished into the evening along with the pack of street urchins. They got younger by the day, she thought as she crossed the street, the flare of gas lamps casting a rosy hue over the frozen city. Though she had been that young when she’d embarked on her own career. Younger. And those urchins had each other to lean on. She’d had no one but—
Her thoughts came to a teeth-jarring halt as her brownstone came into view. It was a lovely building, three stories of rooms she’d customized to fit her needs. It was her bank vault, her sanctuary and her fortress, complete with her own specially devised sentries. The sight of the twin white flags perched atop the building never failed to fill her with reassurance. But as her gaze flicked to the gothic cornice along the brownstone’s rooftop, the sight of only one flag blowing in the December wind froze the blood in her veins.
The alarm had been tripped.
The flag could have blown down, came the knee-jerk denial, but ruthless logic squashed the weakness for what it was. She had designed that flag to retract, not fall over. The tripwire connecting the flag to the brownstone’s first-floor entry points had been activated.
Someone had broken into her house.
Well, isn’t that a fine irony.
Her pulse pounded as she stared at the empty place where the flag should be. Calling for the police was not only impossible, it was a real knee-slapper. Police were the enemy, or so her worthless mother had claimed. Then it occurred to her—perhaps the police were the ones who had fumbled their ham-handed way past her defenses in the first place. Perhaps they were waiting in her empty front parlor right now with a pair of iron shackles with her name on them.
Again Cornelia’s pragmatic brain slammed the door on the panic before her knees could jelly
If it were the police, they would have made a much bigger show of it than quietly tripping her first-floor intruder flag. The coppers enjoyed making important to-dos of big arrests, so the good citizens would know just how hard they were working to keep them safe. But not a Blue Bottle was in sight to grandstand for some cock-of-the-walk preening.
So…what then?
With one last glance at the solitary flag above, she then examined the brownstone’s front steps. A light dusting of snow covered then, unblemished by footprints. Fitful snow had been falling off and on for the past couple of hours, so this meant one of two things. Either the front door wasn’t the point of entry for her unwanted visitor, or he had gone in—and stayed in—before the snow had begun to fall. But that made little sense. When it came to burglary, the name of the game was speed—in and out before any dullard was the wiser. And she doubted her visitor was stupid enough to make a daylight entry through the front door. That meant the entry and exit point had to be the back alley.
But she wouldn’t know for sure until she checked.
Hullo, hullo, anyone home?
As silent as a ghost, Cornelia shut the door behind her and removed her boots, her eyes searching the still corners of the room as she did so. She never felt the cold of the foyer’s marble floor bite into her stocking feet as she moved without sound to the cloakroom. She shed her outerwear before pushing on a wooden panel built into the wall on a catch-spring. The panel swung aside to reveal three rows of brass-edged optical sights.
Mirrors weren’t only used to check for an unpleasant shine on a civilized lady’s nose. Set at angles of forty-five degrees, they made great periscopes.
For long minutes through the gathering gloom, Cornelia searched the brownstone floor by floor, room by room, the lenses of the periscopes embedded into the walls swiveling in futility. The silence of her fortress all but deafened her with the sound of empty space. Which was normal. Empty was the way it should be.
Except for that flag.
With her mind speeding along faster than a steam engine at full throttle, Cornelia shut the periscope’s cabinet door. She needed to look at the back stoop, and if there was no sign of a break-in there, she would have to check the tripwire junction hidden away in her private office to see if it had malfunctioned. This was good practice for her, she decided even as she dug out a palm-sized, tri-barreled Lady Derringer from its nesting place in her muff. Her success had made her too complacent. This jolt was just what she needed to bring her back to the lessons she’d learned in childhood—no matter what, she had to be more cunning than anything the big, bad world had to offer.
One cursory glance at the pristine mantle of snow on the back stoop had Cornelia heading for the kitchen’s dumbwaiter, making quick work of the button
s on her burgundy velvet dress as she went. With a whisper of fabric it billowed to the ground along with the bulky crinoline, leaving her in black silk stockings, garter with matching high-cut drawers and a black and burgundy whalebone hourglass corset. The chill brought out gooseflesh along her arms and the mess of scars across her back. She gritted her teeth to keep them from chattering, and she took just enough time to snatch up the dress’s shrug before climbing into the dumbwaiter’s small space that she could now easily fit. Jaw tight with aggravation as much as the cold, she shouldered into the shrug and hit the appropriate button. In an instant, the dumbwaiter door slid shut and the platform on which she crouched zoomed up as the steam-powered pistons hidden behind the walls hissed and wheezed.
It had to be a snapped wire that brought the sentinel flag down, she decided as the dumbwaiter stopped at the third floor, the most direct route to her hidden office. Once she checked the system and pinpointed the problem, she—
The dumbwaiter door slid open to her office aglow with the cheery warmth of a fire.
What…?
Before she could swing the Derringer around, her arm was grabbed and she was thrown halfway across the room. She landed with an undignified squeak, but before she could roll with the impact a heavy body in all black pounced on her.
In a blink her wrists were pinned to the Aubusson rug, and her fingers weakened on the Derringer under the vise-like grip of her captor’s gloved hand. A growl escaped her as she twisted against the smothering weight atop her, but it was like trying to throw off a mountain. He was a big one, whoever he was, dwarfing her compact stature by nearly a foot and perhaps twice her weight. The part of her brain that wasn’t focused on survival filed away the golden brown hair tumbling over his brow, as well as the violence roiling in stormy eyes the color of aquamarines. That flash of brutality was all that mattered to her. It was a look she recognized, a look that made every scar on her body writhe.
This man, whoever he was, wanted to hurt her. Break her. Bleed her.
Kill her.
Another trapped-animal growl hissed from Cornelia as she bucked her hips hard up against his to get a knee between them. Before she could deliver the blow her attacker swiveled his hips to wedge himself between her thighs. For a heartbeat of time the world seemed to pause as their bodies locked into a position as old as humanity itself, with both of them suspended in a surreal moment of impossible realization.
They were a perfect fit.
A furious howl of denial burst from her even as the swell of his manhood thrust against her most vulnerable point, cloaked by the thinnest veil of her drawers and his trousers. From the feel of his powerful length, that wasn’t nearly enough shielding.
“No!” Rage and a panic she loathed herself for feeling bit their
venomous teeth into her. Adrenaline surged hard and fast, and with an almost superhuman strength she snapped her head forward to strike him across the bridge of his nose. But in her haste to get to her office she had forgotten to remove her hat, which partially cushioned the blow before flying off into the fire-lit shadows.
Damn and blast, undermined by the vagaries of fashion.
“Enough!” The glacier-eyed behemoth’s voice was as unpleasant as the rest of him—harsh with violence and as rough as sandpaper. “That’s enough, you hellion!”
“Oh, am I inconveniencing you by struggling? How…shameful!” Again she tried to wriggle a knee between them. Again she failed. She did, however, manage to rub the length of his shaft with her inner thigh before he clamped down even harder on her, and the iron rod that now throbbed against the juncture of her thighs was very much like an insistent threat of a volcano heating up to one almighty eruption.
A shudder went through his big frame and a broken groan raged out from between his clenched teeth. “Stop moving, you thing, or I swear I’ll—”
“What?” Cornelia hissed, too incensed to care she was poking a rabid bear with a short stick. Bloody bastard broke into her sanctuary, then called her a thing. Who the hell did he think he was? “Or you’ll what, eh? Plow my field like the rutting pig you are?”
“I would never touch a guttersnipe such as you,” he snarled back. Then, as if he couldn’t help himself, his eyes fell to where his chest rested against her heaving breasts now
swelling out of the corset, the faintest hint of rosy areolas showing with each agitated breath. “No matter how tempting the banquet might appear to be, I can only imagine the unclean poison hidden beneath.”
“Unclean? Why, you disgusting, odious—”
“Don’t. Move. Cornelia.”
The use of her name turned her to stone, and her gaze flew to his while the seriousness of the situation hit home with all the subtlety of a railroad spike between the eyes. He knew her. Damn and blast, this behemoth knew her. Her name rang in her ears while her heart slammed against her rib cage so hard she had no doubt he felt every frantic beat. This changed everything. This was no perved-up lurker out to bend someone over to get his jollies, nor was he a random thief eager to snap up a few shiny trinkets to make some quick coin. No. This man knew who she was.
That was all sorts of bad news.
Her stillness made him smile, but there was no humor in the vicious baring of teeth. “What an outstanding reaction. Your shock is sublime, better than I’d imagined.”
“So you’ve imagined this moment, have you?”
“More times than I can count.”
That did not bode well. “Then it would seem you do indeed know who I am.”...
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