LITMIR.BIZ

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bob of her head, she dashed off into the bedroom. The sounds that followed told him that she was obviously in some haste to remove her makeshift robe and change clothes. Cort did his best not to listen or imagine her appearance between the shedding of one garment and the donning of another. He was studiously examining one of many threadbare spots in the ancient, dirty carpet when she reemerged.

      Aria might have passed for a boy if she had taken the time to bind her breasts and tuck her hair under her cap. As it was, with her tresses tied back in an untidy queue, she looked once again a full five years younger than the twenty or twenty-one years he judged her to be.

      It would be easier, much easier, for him if she wore such clothes for the remainder of his time with her. But that wouldn’t be possible. Soon enough she would be accustomed to wearing proper garments again. Perhaps, given the many layers with which modern women armored themselves, that would make things easiest of all. Her flesh would be confined, untouchable.

      But that wasn’t going to happen soon enough. Her warm body fell against his. “Thank you,” she said, wrapping her arms around his waist.

      Cort closed his eyes, working desperately to suppress his instinctive response. The smell of her hair filled his nose. Her heart thumped against his ribs. She broke away, and he realized with relief that he had been able to stay true to his resolve. She was only expressing her gratitude as a child would, oblivious to the consequences. His body remained under his control.

      His emotions were another matter. He was in another kind of danger now. The danger of becoming fond of her. He could so easily step over the line from a certain admiration to something like affection. And he had given up such feelings many years ago. Any personal interest in her could only lead to disaster.

      “De rien,” he said, setting her back. “It’s nothing.”

      “Au contraire,” she said, speaking with a distinctly European French accent.

      “You speak français very well,” he said.

      “Do I? I wonder where I learned it.”

      From a teacher whose employers considered it an essential skill, he was sure. But why that, and not an appreciation for other pursuits essential to the American rich?

      “Well,” he said casually, “it is an ability not everyone can master.”

      She plopped down in the chair and gazed at him as if he were a demigod and she his acolyte. “You are very kind,” she said.

      Yuri would have laughed. Cort would have done the same if he hadn’t seen in her eyes what he had hoped to see: complete and absolute trust.

      Will you betray that trust? he asked himself, then shook off the thought. “Yuri will be bringing dinner presently. Is there anything more you need?”

      “I want to go outside.”

      She had managed to startle him yet again. “Surely, after what has happened—”

      “I’m not afraid.”

      “Nevertheless, it would not be wise, especially after dark. Those men—”

      “They won’t come around if you’re with me, will they?”

      Not openly, perhaps. But the type of scum Cochrane would employ would use any tactics to get her back, and Cort had no more desire to fight now than he had before.

      “I can’t stay in this room forever,” Aria said.

      “It has only been one day. For the time being …”

      She hopped off the chair. “But you’re like me!” she said. “Why can’t you understand? Werewolves weren’t meant to be confined like—” She broke off and glanced toward the door, jaw set. “You can come and go as you please. Why should you care if I go out, too?”

      The girl was stubborn, yes. And apparently used to getting her way. That was certainly a Renier trait. But her insistence that being loup-garou should allow her to run free was not.

      Cort listened to the quickening of her breath and observed the high color in her cheeks. It was as if she remembered racing through wood and over meadow, hunting the marshes and tasting the raw, steaming flesh of a deer or rabbit.

      He remembered. Once he had relished such barbarities. But he had only Changed a half-dozen times since he’d left New Orleans, and one of those times had been today.

      “You must be patient,” he said. “Your time will come.”

      Aria’s shoulders sagged, and she retreated to the sofa.

      It was an unpalatable victory. Cort knew better than to leave her alone in such a mood, but he could at least give her privacy to overcome her anger. He went out into the hall and sat on the stairs, counting the minutes until Yuri’s return.

      The Russian came bearing a generous dinner and the requested bottle of wine. Cort and Yuri shared the wine without offering any to Aria; she seemed indifferent to the slight. The three of them ate in near-silence. Yuri looked between Cort and Aria with suspicious curiosity. Cort saw no reason to enlighten him as to the cause of the tension.

      That night was not an easy one. Aria had finally agreed to use Cort’s bed, while Yuri slept on the sofa. Cort spent the night pacing back and forth in the street, every sense straining for the approach of footsteps or the smell of the men who had played against him in the tournament. No one came. When he went back inside a few hours before dawn, he could hear Aria tossing and turning in his bed, her warm body tangled among the sheets.

      It was not only Aria who would have to be patient.

      THERE WAS ONLY ONE SMALL, dirty window in the sitting room, and Aria spent nearly all the next three days planted in front of it, watching the parade of men and women in the street below go about their business. She had seen almost every kind of American in her journey west, from the fine ladies Cort so admired to the most common folk, like those she had been accustomed to in the mountains.

      This part of the city, however, had no “real” ladies or gentlemen, except for Cort himself.

      Aria had become very familiar with the dark, stinking streets of the Barbary Coast. When she’d first arrived in San Francisco, she had quickly learned that this city was almost as vast and incomprehensible as New York had been. She had discovered how difficult it was to find anything when you were alone, and how important money was when you didn’t have any.

      She had managed to survive on her own for a while, moving from the brighter areas of the city into the grimy, fetid alleys where she could find food and shelter without having to pay for them, using her hunter’s senses and instincts to win her small advantages over the untrustworthy folk who knew and understood this terrible place so much better than she ever could.

      But Cort had been right. She had assumed everyone she met was human because she didn’t know how to recognize one of her own kind. In the mountains, she had always known that she was stronger and faster, and could smell and hear better, than anyone else she met. Franz had finally told her that all wehrwölfe, at least those of pure blood, had such advantages over humans. She had been able to use them in the human world, but she wouldn’t have known a Carantian werewolf if she had bumped right into him.

      Aria sighed and leaned her chin on the window frame. After weeks of keeping to herself, she had made one mistake. The mistake of letting hunger drive her to trust a stranger because she had not been able to fill her stomach in three days.

      Now she had everything she needed to eat, and a quiet, safe place to rest. She knew she shouldn’t be so ungrateful and troublesome, but she couldn’t help it. Her feet were beginning to itch with the need to run, and her nose longed to smell the ripe scents of wood and mountain.

      If only Cort could understand.

      Someone shouted in the street, and Aria leaned closer to the filthy glass to see what it was. A wagon had turned over, and two men were shaking their fists at each other as the overripe vegetables

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