Luck of the Wolf

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.