he cast her one last inscrutable look, then strode past her to the door. his fingers on the handle, he yanked it open and turned back. "i never figured you for a coward, narcise."

she slammed the door behind him, wishing for a lock.

it was a long time before she stopped trembling. and even longer until she managed to dry her tears.

he couldn't get her scent off his hands. it was as if he'd dipped his fingers into the inkwell of miss maia woodmore, and now they were stained for good.

dimitri closed his eyes. he had, in fact, dipped his fingers, his mouth, himself into her inkwell-so to speak. he couldn't slip any more deeply into that inky abyss where he would lose himself, lose control, lose the great walls he'd constructed. where he'd feel.

his disgusted snort was loud enough to pull himself out of the mental miasma. satan's bloody bones, the woman's got me thinking in metaphors.

he focused his attention on the scenery of london passing by the window of his carriage. the same carriage in which the incident with miss woodmore had occurred early this morning, and the reason he didn't seem able to dismiss it from his mind. aside from the fact that her very self permeated the cushions.

braving the sun and getting out of blackmont hall early this afternoon-after a fitful attempt to gain a few hours' sleep-had been the lesser of two evils. he hadn't been jesting when he enthusiastically agreed with miss woodmore's suggestion that she and bradington spend their time walking in the garden. but dimitri hadn't thought any further than the benefit of getting them out of the parlor, which was too near his study for vampiric ears, and hadn't considered the fact that the garden was, in fact, just outside the windows of his study.

he simply wouldn't be able to endure listening to the slushy, sloppy romantic prattle of the reunited lovers.

and it was only partly because, to his great mortification, he had once endowed his own sloppy, romantic prattle upon the lovely, if not improper, meg. many, many decades ago.

when he was young and foolish and in love.

he'd been so in love, in fact, that he'd traded his soul in order to live with her forever.

or so he'd thought.

bitterness twisted inside him, and dimitri settled on that unpleasant emotion. it was much better than thinking on feminine inkwells, which had the infuriating result of his belly softening and his veins swelling.

he glanced out the window of the carriage and saw that they'd turned onto bond and were making their way along a street filled with shops and ladies patronizing them. their maids and footmen followed along, carrying packages and navigating around dogs, street vendors, dirty-faced urchins and well-dressed gentlemen.

when he'd climbed into his vehicle, dimitri had no particular destination in mind. he'd simply needed to leave. and tren, smart man that he was, knew better than to ask if he wasn't given a direction...and also better than to allow his master to sit in the drive, waiting for the journey to commence. so he'd clucked to the horses and started off.

dimitri had considered visiting rubey's, which was, to put it bluntly, a brothel that catered specifically to the needs of the dracule. its eponymously named proprietress, one in a long line of women who'd taken on the name of the original madam, was a particular friend of giordan cale-and voss, as well. she was also exceedingly astute for a mortal woman, as well as attractive, sensual and maternal-all at once.

however, dimitri had no use for one of rubey's women. certainly there'd been times-rare times-over the last century when he had taken his pleasure, and usually given some in return...but that was always after he'd fed, when the blood thirst wasn't on him...though there'd been the one incident when his body had gotten ahead of him. he still had the scars on his arm where he'd ended up driving his fangs, instead of into the heaving, writhing woman beneath him.

dimitri closed his eyes momentarily. the last thing he needed to think about was a heaving, writhing woman beneath him, since he'd had just that this morning. only with clothing between them, thank the fates.

he lifted his hand to pinch the bridge of his nose in frustration, and maia's scent came with it. this after he'd washed his hands thrice.

was he now branded with her?

and he simply must not think of her as anything other than miss woodmore.

when he next looked out the window again, he noted that tren had taken the opportunity to drive along fleet and east toward ludgate. the dome of the new st. paul's cathedral rose over the tightly packed houses clustering around it, visible even through london's constant filter of fog. at least, to dimitri the church was new. to everyone else in london, it was the same cathedral that had always been there since its completion a hundred years ago.

but dimitri clearly recalled the previous structure, whose spire had been destroyed by lightning in 1561, and then almost exactly a hundred years later, the rest of the cathedral had gone up in flames with eighty-eight other churches and thirteen thousand houses in london. the great fire of 1666 had melted st. paul's lead roof, sending the molten metal pouring onto the streets, making rivers of glowing red heat.

he would never forget the sounds of houses collapsing and towers falling, combined with the shrieks of women and men shouting. the streets were so hot that neither man nor horse could bear to walk on them. he and meg had earlier taken a room at one of the public houses on cheapside and were awakened in the dead of night by the shouts and bells clanging. by then the fire already turned the sky golden-red, and smoke filled the air, enveloping the citizens in soot and choking them with smoke.

they stumbled out of the public house as the fire danced on the rooftop next to it, flames leaping like curling devils. dimitri heard a cry behind him and saw a woman screaming at the small, flaming house, and realized her husband was trapped inside. he didn't hesitate but dashed around, trying to find an opening in the lashing tongues of fire. only the front was burning, and dimitri tore the door from the rear of the building and ducked into a dark, smoky hell.

it was his good fortune that the man was collapsed near the door, and dimitri was able to pull him free. but by the time he reemerged, meg had gone missing.

even now, dimitri remembered the terror of losing her. the paralysis, empty and cold amid all the hot chaos.

she'd become everything to him, to the man of thirty who'd spent most of his life buried with books and studies and had had little time or experience with the feminine gender. his romanian mother, in adopting her new homeland of england, had embraced the puritan tenet that affection toward children led them away from godliness. thus she'd been remote and cool throughout all of his youth.

his father the earl, a royalist who'd remained in england during the cromwell years, took care to stay below the notice of the new government and taught his five sons to do the same by also seeming to adopt the simple, rigid cromwellian ways. they had little social engagement and spent much of the time during the lord protector's reign away from london.

thus, the sensual, earthy meg-who was several years older than he-had changed dimitri's world, bringing in a breath of life to an otherwise staid and bland one. she told him about her exciting, dangerous life as an actress in southwark's stealth theaters during the time when the public stages were shuttered under cromwell. filled with enthusiasm and smiles, she was a bold woman who exuded sensual promise.

meg had become his life. she lured him, the proper and staid fifth son of an earl, into her bed, and in doing so, wholly snared his heart and mind.

in retrospect, dimitri had come to realize that she wasn't nearly as in love with him as he had been with her. meg was enamoured by the thought of him being a peer and of a wealthy family, and what that might mean if they were attached, but she was not of his class, nor, more importantly, of his moral makeup. she lived for the moment and was scandalously loose while the genteel dimitri lived only for the future.

yet, that hot, red night when he emerged from saving the man from a house afire and found meg missing, dimitri's life stopped. he simply couldn't imagine his world without the sloe-eyed, coy-smiling, curvy redhead and he stood in the burning street, frantic.

then, somehow, above all of the chaos around them, he heard her voice.

there, up in the window of the room they'd let at the small inn, next to the flaming house. he saw her leaning out the window, screaming for him. she'd gone back inside? why? then he saw the ruby necklace dangling from her fingers.

she'd gone back in to retrieve the most recent gift he'd given her.

his mind blank and terrified, dimitri thought of nothing but saving her. he bolted through the door of the inn, which had just begun to catch fire. inside it was already filled with choking ash and the heat radiated from the buildings around it.

but he could save her. there was time.

he ran up the stairs, already narrow and steep, but now darker and clogged with hot smoke. stumbling, staggering, he went two flights until he found the room they'd used, blind and hot, barely able to breathe. the roar of fire filled his ears, the sounds of timber shuddering and heaving as it crackled into debris, the walls warm and rough beneath his fingers.

somehow, he found her, his hands filled with the soft, familiar warmth of meg, who'd collapsed on the floor near the door. he gathered her up and fell more than ran down the stairs, his eyes stinging with smoke, gritty and blind. the roof above was now ablaze, and falling pieces from the rafters scattered in front of him, tumbling down the steps and catching against his legs and trousers.

down, down, down he went, staggering against the walls, at last reaching the bottom. just then, a loud rumble filled his ears, followed by a horrible crash.

the next thing he knew, there was pain and heat bearing him to the ground, and everything was light...tinged with red and orange leaping everywhere. he coughed, tasted smoke, choking out her name and tried to crawl toward what he thought was the door.

dimitri dragged them to the opening, his body weak and burning, his lover boneless and unmoving, the ruby still clutched in her hand, the chain wound around her wrist.