Acier Read online

cubes. Milky white fizzling champagne dripped into the absinthe, giving it a pearly yet resiliently jewel green quality as it settled.

  Eden slid the flute across the table to Acier, then topped off her own glass.

  “Tell me more about you.”

  The candlelight wavered gently as Acier took the glass she had pressed toward him. A slight red tinge crept into his cheeks as she watched him intently over the rim of her glass. “Well–” Acier drank from his own glass and gave a long moan, his eyes closing. He opened them and looked at the glass as if he had never before seen it. “This is excellent!”

  Eden smiled, a rather seductive curve of her full lips. “Magic from an angel’s slender hands.”

  “My compliments,” he said with another drink.

  “Not too fast,” she whispered, watching him as she sipped silently. “Not too much, oui?”

  Acier smiled, swirling the milky green absinthe in his glass absently. “I was born into my father’s money. He owned several properties in Elbrus–I own them now. I manage the printer that produces the Times. My mother, as I said, told me I was born in France, but I don’t remember.”

  A place like this can make you forget, Eden thought. “What do you remember?”

  Suddenly, the strain of violins rose from the Ballroom. Eden’s eyes flickered, closed, as she was enraptured by the sweet, crisp sparkling green absinthe on her tongue, the gravity of heather-gray eyes, and the golden sunset of the candlelit room around them.

  Acier stared into the candlelight.

  “I remember the snow…cold…a dreamlike darkness,” Acier whispered. His eyes glazed slightly. Was he trapped in the memory that led to nowhere? “No matter how hard I try, I can’t remember….”

  To this, Eden said nothing. There were things in Elbrus that were real and things that were surreal. Elbrus was nostalgia. This place, this Acier, was a medium for that nostalgia, a place for dreams to dream. And this man had no memories of France because…

  Perhaps there were none.

  Because perhaps he was a dream to.

  Acier blinked.

  They finished their drinks in silence.

  Robin glided across the Parlor from behind the black curtains on the far wall. He bowed to them. He was straightening when he saw Eden’s face. His body stiffened in shock and his eyes grew wide like saucer plates.

  “Mon dieu!”

  “She is beautiful, oui?” Acier asked, following Robin’s avid gaze as it swept Eden’s face.

  Robin replied with an enthusiastic nod, “Beyond any words of mine, Sir.”

  Eden turned her face away. “We were made by the Hand of God Himself and not intended to be ugly in the eye of any beholder.” Beneath the table, her hands curled into fists. Humans were made in His image and saw one another through varying views. Before humans, WE were and always will be God’s beautiful, flawless birds.

  Robin bowed at the seemingly ingeniously poetic words with a smile. Acier stared with a curious frown.

  “The Lady is beautiful and a poetess to boot,” Robin said, straightening, still gazing at Eden in some awe. “Our little charade is over, My Lady?”

  “It would seem so, Robin, since my identity has been revealed.”

  Robin bowed once more. “I’ll see that the two of you are not disturbed.” It would cause quite a stir if any other patrons were to enter and notice the woman in men’s clothing in the corner, his words said as well.

  Robin left as quietly as he had come, a silhouette in the sunset and candlelight. Eden alternated between watching Acier and staring into the candlelight for several long moments as she drained and refilled her glass twice.

  “Not too fast.” His low voice broke her silent reverie, echoing her earlier suggestion through the candlelight as he filled his third glass and she filled her fifth.

  Eden smiled, saying, “I’ll keep that in mind.” Was he worried that she would do something unladylike in a drunken stupor? She smirked quietly. It took a lot more to inebriate one such as her.

  “Is something funny?”

  “I was just wondering what the root of your concern is. Do you fear I will do something inappropriate as I gradually work my way toward inebriation? Or…are you afraid you may not behave like a gentleman?”

  Their gazes clashed, steel gray and dark rose red, lit by the candlelight and turned to molten liquid by more than the absinthe that loosened their tongues and warmed their veins.

  Acier drained his glass quickly, as if invoking a draft of courage, his gaze straying from hers. “The latter, I fear.”

  If she hadn’t been able to see into his heart, to hear him say deep inside Because you have enchanted me, she would never have believed such a straight-laced, well-mannered gentleman would even admit to such a thing. If she had been anything but what she was, Eden wouldn’t have known his thoughts at all.

  Eden smiled into her glass. “But we have only just met, Mr. Bruyere.”

  Acier’s eyes were a little glazed now. The Green Fairy was setting her magic upon him. “You should be appalled–why are you not appalled at what I have just said–admitted–to you? Eden, you should slap my face and be done with me.”

  “Indulge in your emotions, is what I always say,” she replied briskly. You were made to feel them.

  Acier leaned toward her over the table, gray eyes alight. “Let us get out of here,” he whispered in a rather loud conspiratorial tone. “I want to run through the snow and look at the stars.”

  “As you wish.”

  Acier drained his last glass and finished Eden’s as well. She raised her brow, biting back a smile. He swept on his great coat, then helped her into hers, balancing her top hat on her head then placing his own hat on his head. They left the warmth of Acier’s warm, sunset-filled Parlor. Through the kitchen they went, shocking the chefs, and through the servant’s entrance. They dashed into the cold, glittering snow packed streets of Elbrus’s back alleys. Holding onto Eden’s hand, Acier ran with an abandon he had never felt before, his coat flapping behind him, kicking up piles of snow. She floated behind him, her hat brim hiding her expression from him. He ran and ran until the twinkling stars forced their way in the black velvet sky through the wispy snow drifts.

  It seemed a long time before they stopped. Looking around, Acier found himself standing in the Town Circle. The lamps circling the center had been extinguished by the cold.

  His breathing labored, Acier stood at the single centermost lamp and stared up into the inverted cup of the sky. It was hard for him to believe at that moment that somehow somewhere out there beyond Elbrus’s quiet, snowy night there were other towns and people, that there was a France just waiting to be remembered. Acier put his hand on the lamp post, wondering how far Eden stood behind him.

  “You must think I am very foolish,” he said quietly, “running through the streets like a child as I have.”

  “No,” she said and he knew she stood only a few feet away a little to his left.

  “Truly?”

  “Truly.”

  “I have never behaved this way before.”

  “Good, I was happy to be with you the first time that you did.” She approached, her long overcoat whispering across the snow dunes. She stood behind him quietly, staring at a crystalline snowflake glistening on his shoulder. “Be true, Acier. Tell me, if I told you I was leaving Elbrus tomorrow and this would be the last moment you would ever see me again, what would you do?”

  He turned around sharply, dredging up snow. Acier’s gray eyes shone almost like silver. “I would go with you.”

  “And if you could not?”

  His gaze strayed. “I would have to tell you right now what I have never told anyone else in my life.” He whispered the words and his voice was as still and soft as the quiet around them.

  “What would that be?”

  “That I…wish to be intimate with you.”

  “And what would you ask of me–a woman dressed in men’s clothes?” she inquired softly. “If
I told you I would do it, what would you ask for?”

  Acier looked at her then. What was it about her red-brown eyes and delicate presence that made him want to confess everything that was inside of him? he wondered. Acier reached for her. His hands curled around her waist and he drew her to him. Spinning her around, he pressed her back to the cold lamp post. Eden watched him quietly, without uttering a single word. Not protesting. Not slapping his face or crying out for help. Just watching him calmly, her arms at her sides. In a single motion, he swept the top hat from her head. It fell to the snow unheeded. He pushed her overcoat from her shoulders. It, too, met the snow like a heavy blanket. Acier laid his hands on her torso, around her ribs, his fingers pressing the velvet of her tailored suit coat. She was warm and so small that the fingers of his hands almost met where they curled around her torso.

  “Tell me,” she whispered. Acier thought that she looked very young compared to his own twenty-seven years all of a sudden, staring up at him with those warm, russet colored eyes.

  Acier’s body seemed to suck at the cold, feeling it, really feeling it, for the first time in years. A yearning tore at him, clawing inside him, as Acier pressed his forehead to hers. A scent rose from her, a fragrance he shouldn’t recognize but did.

  He whispered low and heavy in the same soft language as his name. Hold me.

  Eden wrapped her arms around him. The whole of her body aligned with his though she was a few inches shorter than he.

  The cold disappeared.

  His hands moved up and down her waist and he pressed her against him