The Hunger by Susan Squires Page A

shoulders and guided her out the door to the waiting carriage. The wheels had spokes picked out in her signature electric blue. The gold crest on the door from her imaginary count looked impressive. Another footman opened the door and Langley pushed her up into the carriage in a most ungentlemanly way. She sank gratefully into the blue velvet squabs.
    “Berkeley Square, man,” Langley called up to her driver.
    To her surprise, he stepped up into the carriage and sat opposite her. She was so exhausted she could not protest. Did she want to protest? Her eyes closed without her permission. Her stomach still felt queasy.
    They were more than halfway to the square when she came to herself. Langley was quiet, though she could see him gazing at her in the gloom of the carriage.
    “Feeling more the thing?” he said, his baritone husky in the darkness.
    “Yes.” She cleared her throat and sat up. “I can’t think what came over me.”
    “Perhaps a touch of the influenza,” he remarked. “It often comes upon one unawares.”
    “It’s nothing physical, I’m afraid,” she said. It couldn’t be. The Companion gave her perfect health. Then she realized what she had just admitted and felt sick all over again. What was coming over her? She could not let it get about that she was a madwoman subject to fainting spells. She had always despised the weak. Now she might well be one of them.
    “Still . . . May I call you a doctor? I am fairly well connected in Harley Street.”
    She shot him a glance. The best defense was a thrust direct. “I should think you would be, what with being patched up from wounds like the one in your shoulder. Does that happen often?”
    “Do you often become faint in the middle of balls?” he lashed out in return.
    This thrusting at each other would get both of them nowhere. “Think of it as a killing preoccupation with the past,” she said as lightly as she could. He would think she was joking, or insulting him. Who would guess she was telling the truth? “The past can be deadly, you know.”
    His eyes narrowed. “You want me to believe you are making up a cause, when most probably you are not.” He paused. “Just as you realized I threw doubt on the story of the footpads the other night so everyone would think I was in a duel over a woman. So that means you really think it is a kind of memory sickness. Is that what you’re saying?”
    Oh, she did not like this. This man was dangerous. “How ungracious,” she muttered.
    He raised his brows. “I hate to think we have that in common. In your case, I expect the easy repartee and gracious conversation is a ruse for the young bucks who need a goddess and the old fools who want a beautiful and intelligent woman focused on them. But that is not the real you, is it? There is nothing easy about you.”
    “I do not know who the real me is,” she snapped. “And in any case I do not care to discuss it with someone who has quite as many secrets of his own. Do you know who you are?”
    He clutched the breast of his coat. “Ah, a thrust to the heart!”
    Hmph. He hadn’t even claimed his cloak at Bessborough House. He was bareheaded, no gloves, no cane. She flushed. She was snapping at him when he had saved her from certain embarrassment. She cleared her throat. “If you are cold, there is a lap rug in the corner.”
    “Thank you for your solicitous impulse,” he said, mocking her.
    “I could say the same.”
    The carriage slowed. They were already in the square. Would he ask to come up? Her dread of meaninglessness and memory had retreated. Her head was clear. Dangerous as he was, with his ability to observe and his intuition, he was at least interesting. A flash of imagination showed his naked body lying across her bed, his eyes on fire. He would be strongly built, with the bulky muscles of full manhood, not like the youngsters she usually took. How long since she had allowed herself to take blood from the kind of body she enjoyed most? She