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Cort set down the packages and watched her, careful not to reveal any of his thoughts. Her skill was evident in her deft motions and the painstaking care she put into the task. Ladies of good family might embroidered handkerchiefs or antimacassars, but few made or mended their own clothing.
“Where did you learn to sew so well?” he asked.
Aria looked up, and Cort could see the pleasure she quickly concealed. “It isn’t difficult. Anyone can learn to do it.”
Especially anyone who didn’t have the luxury of replacing worn clothes with new ones.
“I’ve brought you a few more items you’ll need,” he said.
Aria set down her sewing. “My shirt and trousers?”
“Among other things.”
“Thank y—” She wrinkled her nose. “Something smells awful.”
Cort couldn’t have agreed more. He knew better than to give a loup-garou female perfume, no matter how subtle, but the paper the shop girl had wrapped the items in was scented.
“It will fade,” he said. He laid out a selection of hair combs, a mirror, a brush and other toilet items. Aria slid off the couch and approached, real interest in her expression. She picked up and examined each item in turn. The mirror she held a little longer, staring ferociously into the glass as if she could make no sense of what she saw in it. After a minute she put it down.
“Thank you,” she said.
Cort was unaccountably pleased by her gratitude. “Voilà,” he said, opening the last package.
As soon as she saw the trousers she gave a crow of delight and nearly knocked Cort over in her eagerness to take them from him. She held them up to her waist.
“They are perfect!” She danced like a foal kicking up its heels as he displayed the shirt and cap and shoes. “How wonderful!”
Bemused and reluctantly charmed by her antics, Cort considered how mortified any respectable mama would be to see her daughter in such bliss over a secondhand, outgrown set of common boy’s clothes. But Aria was unaware, or simply didn’t care, how she must appear or who might disapprove.
With a little 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 were crushed on the ground beneath their feet.
The sight didn’t distract her for long. She was too busy trying to decide who Cort Renier really was. After she’d gone to bed last night, when she’d really taken the time to think, she had remembered all the expectations she had carried with her from Carantia.
She had always assumed that the wehrwölfe she met would be like her. Any werewolf would prefer the freedom of the wild to a human city with its high brick walls and crowds of people, even if they had to live among humans some of the time.
But Cort liked this place. He felt at home in it. He didn’t understand why she wanted to get out, even if it was dangerous.
Were the werewolf families, the Hemmings and the Phelans, like him? Cort had made very clear that they would want her to be a lady. Were they happy to stay in small boxes like this one, in a world where you couldn’t smell anything green or hear anything but the clatter of wheels and loud voices and clashing metal?
The itch in Aria’s feet became a nagging pain. She moved around the room, and examined each stick of furniture and the faded paintings as if she hadn’t already memorized every inch of them.
No, she couldn’t make any sense of Cort. What was worse, she couldn’t make any sense of herself. She’d never had such feelings as she had when she was with him. Unease, annoyance, frustration, confusion.
But those were not the only feelings. Nor even the strongest ones. She had been so glad when he had offered to help her and when he’d agreed to bring her the boys’ clothes. She had basked in his compliment about her French. She had wanted to tell him so much more than just her real name. She had wanted to surrender the last of her suspicions.
Maybe that was why she had embraced him. Because she finally wanted to let go. She’d wanted him to.
Her face went hot, and she touched her forehead with her fingertips. Franz had told her about men and women when she was sixteen. Humans and werewolves weren’t so different from the wild animals she’d seen mating in the woods, he’d said. They wanted to be together, male and female, and make children in the same way the forest animals did.
She had wanted to see that for herself and had gone to the edge of the village to watch the people there. What she’d observed had only confused her more. Some of the villagers spent a great deal of time kissing each other, not at all the way Franz kissed her on the forehead. It had looked very nice indeed.
But once they were in New York, she noticed something very different … men and women in shadowed alleys, the men grunting and groaning as they pushed themselves into women with paint all over their faces. Franz had turned very red and finally admitted that those men didn’t want to make babies. They enjoyed what they were doing, even if the women did not. Franz had warned her to be very careful around such men.
She hadn’t given any real thought to his warning. When the evil men had taken her, she hadn’t realized what they wanted at first. But when she listened to the things they said about her, everything fell into place.
They didn’t want to make children, either. They wanted to sell her to someone who would take his pleasure with her, just as those other men had done with those women in the dark streets. Whether she wanted to or not.
Cort hadn’t tried to do that. But when he had held her and looked down into her face, his mouth so close to hers, she had remembered what she’d seen in the village, the gentler things those people had done, and had known something wonderful was about to happen. Something she wanted with all her heart.
The sound of footsteps climbing the outside stairs pulled her out of her pleasant dreams. She ran to the door. The scent was unmistakable, like the rhythm of the footsteps themselves.
Not Cort, but Yuri. Aria backed away from the door and waited for him to come in.
He gave her a cursory smile that she didn’t quite believe, though she knew he wanted her to think he was her friend.
“Hello,” she said warily. “Where is Cort?”
Yuri eased himself into the chair with a grunt. “He is conducting necessary business.” He stared at her in a way she found disconcerting, and she stared back, trying to make him look away.
But he didn’t. He seemed to be weighing his thoughts, getting ready to say something important.
“Do you remember nothing more of your past?” he asked at last.
Aria shook her head.
Yuri stroked his beard. “Well,” he said, “we may have discovered something of interest. Cort did not want to tell you until he had made further inquiries, but …”
“What have you found?” she demanded, circling his chair.
Once again he made a show of hesitating, as if he enjoyed keeping her in suspense. “We believe we have located your relations, but they are not here in San Francisco.”
Not in San Francisco. That meant they couldn’t be the Hemmings or the Phelans or the Carantian exiles.
“Where?” she asked, refusing to give up hope.
“My dear, prepare yourself for a shock. Your kin are the Reniers of the city of New Orleans in the state of Louisiana.”
CHAPTER FIVE
HIS LUCK HAD most definitely changed. Cort laid out his winning hand, and the other players accepted in silence, grimaced or threw down their cards in disgust.
Two thousand dollars. It wasn’t much, but, added to his winnings during the past few days, it would be enough to make a serious start on Aria’s “education.”
Nodding to the other players, he gathered up his chips and went to cash them in. This was a decent establishment, aboveboard and free of the dangers that lurked in the worst of the gambling dens on the Coast. But after his recent run of luck, his reputation was beginning to make him less than welcome at the better places. If he intended to keep earning what he and Yuri needed, he would have to return to the less savory locations.
As he collected his money and secured it under his coat, he heard someone coming up behind him.
“Monsieur Renier?”
The voice held the cadences of a foreign tongue. Cort had never heard it before.
He turned and sized the man up quickly. Expensive clothes, a taut, proud bearing, a lean face punctuated with icy blue eyes, graying hair under a spotless top hat. Cort judged him to be in his fifties, and of an educated background.
He was also loup-garou.
“How may I assist you?” Cort asked.
Removing his gloves, the man bowed. “I have a business proposition for you, Monsieur Renier. One I think you will find interesting.”
Cort smiled, but he wasn’t amused. San Francisco was full of “businessmen” of every sort, many far from legitimate. “What sort of proposition?” he asked, leaning back against the bar. “Are you a gambling man?”
“Forgive me.” The man bowed again. “I am Hugo Brecht. What I propose would be no gamble for you, monsieur. It would be, as they say, a ‘sure thing.’“
“You intrigue me, sir,” Cort said, “but I am content with my winnings.” He tipped his hat. “Au revoir.”
He got no farther than a few steps before Brecht laid a hand on his arm to stop him. Cort didn’t so much as give him a glance.
