Lord Maccon sighed. Trust Miss Tarabotti to get straight to the meat of the issue. He answered her questions in order. “Not seriously. No. And mostly rove vampire and loner wolf files. Some of the more detailed research documentation also vanished, and...” He looked upset, pursing his lips.
Miss Tarabotti was worried more by his expression than by his words. She had never seen the earl with a look of such worry on his face. “And?” she prompted, sitting forward anxiously.
“Your files.”
“Ah.” She leaned back.
“Lyall returned to the office to check on something or other, even though I had ordered him home to bed, only to find all those on duty insensate.”
“Good gracious, how?”
“Well, there was not a mark on them, but they were quite solidly asleep. He checked the office and found it ransacked and those certain records stolen. That was when he came to alert me here. I verified his information, although, by the time I arrived, everyone was awake once more.”
“Chloroform?” suggested Alexia.
The earl nodded. “That does seem to be the case. He said a lingering scent was on the air. It would have taken quite a considerable amount of it too. Few have access to such a quantity of the chemical. I have all available agents tracking major scientific and medical institutions for any recent orders for large shipments of chloroform, but my resources are always taxed at full moon.”
Alexia looked thoughtful. “There are a number of such organizations around London these days, are there not?”
Lord Maccon shifted toward her, his eyes soft caramel and affectionate. “You can see that there is further concern for your safety? Before, we could assume that they did not know exactly what you were, they thought you just an interfering daylighter. Now they know you are a preternatural, and they know it means you can neutralize the supernatural. They will want to dissect you and understand this.”
Lord Maccon hoped to impress upon Miss Tarabotti the full range of the danger. She could be very stubborn over these kinds of things. Tonight, being full moon, neither he nor his pack could keep watch over her. He trusted his other BUR agents, even the vampires, but they were not pack, and a werewolf could not help whom he trusted most. That would always be pack. But no were-wolf could guard on full moon—all the human parts of them vanished in the space of one night. In fact, he himself should not even be outside right now. He should be home safe and asleep, with his claviger handlers keeping an eye on everything. Especially, he realized, he should not be around Alexia Tarabotti, whom, like it or not, his carnal urges had taken an overly proprietary interest in. There was a reason werewolf couples were locked in the same cell together on full moon. Everyone else had to take solitary vigil in bestial form, vicious and relentless, but passion was passion and could be channeled into more pleasurable and slightly less violent pursuits, so long as the female was equally cursed and so able to survive the experience. How, he wondered, would it be to weather the moon in human form, held there by the touch of a preternatural lover? What an experience that would be. His baser instincts urged such musings on, driven by the damnable neckline of Miss Tarabotti's dress.
Lord Maccon picked up the paisley shawl and shoved it at Alexia's chest area. “Put that back on,” he ordered gruffly.
Miss Tarabotti, instead of taking offense, smiled serenely, lifted the garment from his grasp, and placed it carefully behind her and out of his reach.
She turned back and, greatly daring, took one of his large rough hands in both of hers.
“You are worried for my safety, which is sweet, but your guards were most efficacious last night. I have no doubt they will be equally competent this evening.”
He nodded. He did not withdraw his hand from her tentative touch but turned it to curl about hers. “They reported the incident to me just before dawn.”
Alexia shivered. “Do you know who he is?”
“He who?” asked the earl, sounding like a donkey. Absentmindedly, he ran his thumb over her wrist in a reassuring caress.
“The wax-faced man,” said Miss Tarabotti, eyes glazed with memory and fear.
“No. Not human, not supernatural, not preternatural,” he said. “A medical experiment gone astray, perhaps? He is filled with blood.”
She was startled. “How would you know such a thing?”
He explained. “The fight, at the carriage? When they tried to abduct you. I bit him; do you not recall?” She nodded, remembering the way the earl had only changed his head into wolf form and how he had wiped the blood from his face onto his sleeve.
One shapely male lip curled in disgust. “That meat was not fresh.”
Alexia shuddered. No, not fresh. She did not like to think of the wax man and his compatriots having her personal information. She knew Lord Maccon would do his best to see her protected. And, of course, last night had proved that these mysterious enemies knew where to find her, so nothing had fundamentally changed with the theft of the BUR papers. But now that the wax-faced man and the shadowed man with his chloroform handkerchief knew she was soulless, Miss Tarabotti felt somehow terribly exposed.
“I know this will not please you,” she said, “but I have decided to call on Lord Akeldama this evening while my family is out. Do not worry. I will make certain your guards can follow me. I am convinced LordAkeldama's residence is extremely secure.”
The Alpha grunted. “If you must.”
“He knows things,” she tried to reassure him.
Lord Maccon could not argue with that. “He generally knows too many things, if you ask me.”
Miss Tarabotti tried to make her position clear. “He is not interested in me, as anything, well... significant”
“Why would he be?” wondered Lord Maccon. “You are a preternatural, soulless.”
Alexia winced but strode doggedly onward. “However, you are?”
A pause.
Lord Maccon looked most put upon. His caressing thumb movement stopped, but he did not withdraw his hand from hers.
Alexia wondered if she should force the issue. He was acting as though he had not given the matter much thought. Perhaps he had not: Professor Lyall said the Alpha was acting entirely on instinct. And this was full moon, a notoriously bad time for werewolves and their instincts. Was it appropriate to inquire as to his feelings on the matter of her good self at this particular time of the month? Then again, wasn't this the time when she was most likely to get an honest answer?
“I am what?” The earl was not making this easy for her.
Alexia swallowed her pride, sat up very straight, and said, “Interested in me?”
Lord Maccon was quiet for a few long minutes. He examined his emotions. While admitting that at that moment—her small hands in his, the smell of vanilla and cinnamon in the air, the neckline of that damnable dress—his mind possessed all the clarity of pea soup full of ham-hock-sized chunks of need, there was something else lurking in said soup. Whatever it was, it made him angry, for it would desperately complicate everything in his well-ordered life, and now was not the time to tackle it.
“I have spent a good deal of time and energy during the course of our association trying not to like you,” he admitted finally. It was not an answer to her question.
“And yet I find not liking you comparatively easy, especially when you say things such as that!” Miss Tarabotti replied, trying desperately to extract her hand from his odious caress.
The action backfired. Lord Maccon tugged and lifted her forward as if she weighed no more than thistle down.
Miss Tarabotti found herself sitting flush against him on the small couch. The day was suddenly as warm as she had previously implied. She was scorched from shoulder to thigh by intimate contact with his lordship's prodigious muscles. What is it, she wondered, about werewolves and muscles?
“Oh my,” said Alexia.
“I am finding,” said the earl, turning toward her and caressing her face with one hand, “it very difficult to imagine not not disliking you on a regular and intimate basis for a very long time to come.”
Miss Tarabotti smiled. The smell of open fields was all about her, that breezy scent only the earl produced.
He did not kiss her, simply touched her face, as though he were waiting for something.
“You have not apologized for your behavior,” Miss Tarabotti said, leaning into his hand with her cheek. Best not to let him get the upper hand, so to speak, in this conversation by getting her all flustered. She wondered if she dared turn her face to kiss his fingertips.
“Mmm? Apologize? For which of my many transgressions?” Lord Maccon was fascinated by the smoothness of the skin of her neck, just below her ear. He liked the old-fashioned way she had put up her hair, all caught up at the back like a governess—better access.
“You ignored me at that dinner party,” Alexia persisted. It still rankled, and Miss Tarabotti was not about to let him slide without some pretense at contrition.
Lord Maccon nodded, tracing her arched black brows with a fingertip. “Yet you spent the evening engaging in a far more interesting conversation than I and went driving the next morning with a young scientist.”
He sounded so forlorn, Alexia almost laughed. Still no apology, but this was as close as an Alpha got, she supposed. She looked him dead-on. “He finds me interesting.”
Lord Maccon looked livid at that revelation. “Of that I am perfectly well aware,” he snarled.
Miss Tarabotti sighed. She had not meant to make him angry, fun as that could be. “What am I supposed to say at this juncture? What would you, or your pack protocol, like me to say?” she asked finally.
That you want me, his baser urges thought. That there is a future, not too far away in space or time, involving you and me and a particularly large bed. He tried to grapple with such salacious visions and extract himself from their influence. Blasted full moon, he thought, almost trembling with the effort.
He managed to control himself enough so that he did not actually attack her. But with the dampening down of his needs, he was forced to deal with his emotions. There it was, like a stone in the pit of his stomach. The one feeling he did not want to acknowledge. Further than just need, or want, or any of those less-civilized instincts he could so easily blame on his werewolf nature.
Lyall had known. Lyall had not mentioned it, but he had known. How many Alphas, Lord Maccon wondered, had Professor Lyall watched fall in love?
Lord Maccon turned a very wolflike gaze on the one woman who could keep him from ever becoming a wolf again. He wondered how much of his love was tied into that—the very uniqueness of it. Preternatural and supernatural—was such a pairing even possible?
Mine, said his look.
Alexia did not understand that glance. And she did not understand the silence that came with it.
She cleared her throat, suddenly nervous. “Bitch's Dance. Is it... my move?” she asked, naming pack protocol to give herself some credence. She did not know what was required, but she wanted him to know she had come to understand some part of his behavior.
Lord Maccon, still bowled over by the revelation he had just come to, looked at her as though he had never really seen her before. He stopped caressing her face and tiredly scrubbed at his own with both hands, like a little child. “My Beta has been talking, I see.” He looked at her through his hands. “Well, Professor Lyall has assured me that I have committed a grave transgression in my handling of this situation. That Alpha you may be, but werewolf you are not. Though I will add that, appropriate or not, I have enjoyed our interactions immensely.” He looked over at the wing chair.