Page 45 of Ladies in Hating
It was better this way. Better for Cat to believe her pretentious and remote, for the wall to come between them again.
Better not to touch.
“Yes,” she said evenly, “I should like to investigate. I’ve been to the servants’ quarters before.”
She clicked her tongue for Bacon to follow her. As she left, she tried not to pass too close to Cat, who’d stepped backward into the hallway to make room. She was three or four paces down the hall when she heard Cat’s voice behind her, sounding ever so slightly smothered.
“Will you be wanting shoes? Your ladyship?”
Georgiana glanced down at her feet—at the traitorous nudity of her toes—and felt her entire body go up in flames. Shoes. She’d forgotten shoes.
Also clothing.
She stared fixedly at her feet and did not reply. Could she possibly brazen it out? Was there any conceivable universe in which she could pretend that she was barefoot in the hallway on purpose?
The marble tiles were cold as the devil. Her dressing gown was made of silk.
No,she reflected with some despair. She could not.
She turned around with her chin held high and caught sight of Cat’s expression before she returned to her chamber in dignified silence.
Cat’s teeth were sunk into her lush bottom lip and—devil take it.
Georgiana’s heart bounded ludicrously upward despite her best efforts at restraint. Cat was smiling beneath the impression of her teeth, a curl to her lips she was trying not to set free. There was laughter at the corner of her mouth, and her eyes were on Georgiana’s face.
Chapter 15
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…”
