Stranger by Zoe Archer

again.
    “Wait!”
    He swung around at her cry. She closed the distance between them. When she reached up to his face, he pulled back with a frown.
    Gemma licked her thumb and rubbed it over his cheek, where the thug’s hook had cut him. The contact of wet skin to skin was a visceral charge. “You had a little blood on your face,” she breathed in the close space between them.
    The air of hard authority fell away from him for a moment as his frown disappeared. He swallowed, tried to speak, then, finding no words, turned and strode toward the ticket counter. His long, dashing coat billowed behind him as he paced away.
    Gemma watched him, saw the crowds part ahead of him,deferring to his natural air of command. She had seen the swift, confident grace of his movement in combat, the speed of his mind and body working together to create a man of devastating potency. Yet, with her, he became cautious, uncertain. What a paradox, one that fascinated her not as a journalist, but as a woman.
    She broke her gaze to find Astrid Bramfield studying her. Gemma sent a challenging look right back. Yet, for some reason, the Englishwoman’s gaze was more contemplative than critical.
    A few minutes later, Graves returned and handed each of them tickets. “We’ll have to change trains a few times, but we should reach Southampton by tonight.”
    “And then?” asked Gemma.
    “And then,” he said, “we will convene with the rest of our friends, plan our attack strategy. Nothing can be gambled when so much is at stake. And you will remain in Southampton under guard whilst we battle the Heirs.”
    “Under guard,” she repeated, glowering. “You mean, held prisoner.”
    He did not blink at her accusation. “Call it what you like. But you
will
be safe.” He turned away. “We have a train to catch.”
    The world rushed by, smokestacks and suburban developments giving way to farmland and fields. Gemma sat at the window, watching England as it unfolded around the rushing train, her mind filling with images and words as it always did whenever she observed something new.
    A tame place, she decided, compared to home. Everything she saw out the train’s window seemed old, weighted down with millennia and history. Green, gentle hills and low stone walls. Farmhouses and biscuit-tin villages. She tried to picture the magic that must exist beneath thiscultivated country, the magic the Heirs of Albion would seize for themselves to ensure England’s dominance.
    Yet when Catullus Graves sat opposite her in the train carriage, thoughts of secret wars for magic fled from her mind. She couldn’t look away from him. He’d cleaned the cut on his face and now presented the image of an elegant gentleman traveling. One would hardly suspect that not an hour earlier, he’d been fighting in a Liverpool street like a born warrior. But Gemma saw the small powder burns on his left hand and knew that his outward sophistication made up one small part of the whole.
    Gemma openly studied him now.
    He was abstracted, deep in contemplation, with that ever-present line between his brows. She wondered what he thought about: The Heirs? A new invention? Her?
    His distracted gaze drifted to the window, then, restless, moved over her. And as soon as that happened, he suddenly remembered that she was in the carriage, too, and his demeanor changed.
    He focused on the landscape speeding past, almost as if too shy to look at her. He’d been so imposing at the train station, and then, moments earlier, he’d been the picture of a brooding general on the eve of battle. Now he was diffident. They were alone in the carriage, Astrid Bramfield and Lesperance having gone to the dining car for something to eat. The air, as it often did when she and Graves were alone together, became charged.
    A somewhat awkward silence stretched between them, with the clatter of the train as a steady undertone.
    “Did you really make that shotgun shell with the net in it?” she asked.
    He turned