“Sacrificed by whom?” Garrett asked.

“Selfish bastards who only give a damn about their own power and profit.”

She was silent for a moment, wondering if the “selfish bastards” were men he worked for. Perhaps he was referring to members of Parliament who were against Irish independence. Which side of the “Irish question” was he on? Did he have sympathy for secret societies such as the one that plotted the Guildhall bombing? It was difficult to believe he would conspire to harm innocent people, especially after what he’d just said. But she couldn’t deny that she was too blinded by her own attraction to have any objectivity about who or what he really was.

Garrett turned to face him, wondering whether or not she wanted to know the truth about him. Don’t be a coward, she told herself, and looked directly into his eyes. “Éatán . . .” She felt the subtle tightening of his grip. “I’ve heard rumors about you and your work. I don’t know what to believe. But—”

“Don’t ask.” Ransom’s hands dropped away from her. “You’d be a fool to trust any answer I gave you.”

“You would lie to me?”

“I lie to everyone.”

“Still, I must ask about the night of the Guildhall reception . . . the man who died . . . did you have anything to do with that?”

His fingertips touched her lips to silence her.

“Would the truth make me think better or worse of you?” she persisted.

“It doesn’t matter. Tomorrow we’ll be strangers again. As if tonight never happened.”

There was no mistaking the finality in his voice.

In the past, whenever there had been a conflict between Garrett’s head and her heart, her head always won. This time, however, her heart was putting up a ripping fight. She couldn’t fathom how she was going to make herself accept such an abrupt end to the promise of a relationship unlike anything she’d ever experienced.

“I don’t see how that’s possible,” she said.

“We both know I’m not for the likes of you,” Ransom said quietly. “Someday you’ll have a good, decent husband of the ould stock, who’ll give you a fireside of children, and take you to church of a Sunday. A man with some softness to him.”

“I’ll thank you to let me choose my own companion,” Garrett said. “If I took a husband, I certainly wouldn’t choose some milksop.”

“Don’t mistake softness for weakness. Only a strong man can be soft with a woman.”

Garrett responded with a distracted flick of her hand, having no patience for aphorisms when so many thoughts were colliding in her head. “Also, I don’t plan to have children. I have a career. Not every woman’s destiny is to go from maidenhood to motherhood.”

Ransom tilted his head, studying her. “The men of your profession can have a family. Why can’t you?”

“Because—no, I won’t be drawn into a diversionary argument. I want to talk with you.”

“We are talking.”

A mixture of impatience and desire had made her reckless. “Not here. Somewhere private. Do you have a rented room? A flat?”

“I can’t take you where I live.”

“Why not? Is it dangerous there?”

Ransom took an unaccountably long time to reply. “For you, it is.”

Every inch of Garrett’s skin heated in the darkness. She could still feel the places on her neck where he’d kissed, as if his lips had left invisible scorch marks. “That doesn’t worry me.”

“It should.”

Garrett was silent. The air felt tight and thin, as if the oxygen had been pressed out of it. Tonight had turned out to be one of the happiest nights of her life, a gift that had somehow fallen into her hands. She had never bothered much over the question of her own happiness, having been far too busy working toward her goals.

She had just become a cliché, a lovelorn woman of spinsterish age falling for a handsome and mysterious stranger. But in time, Ethan Ransom’s dark and dangerous allure would probably vanish, and he would seem entirely ordinary to her. A man no different from any other man.

As she looked up into his shadowed face, however, she thought, He would never seem ordinary to me, even if he were ordinary.

And she heard herself asking, “Would you escort me home, please?”

Chapter 7

No matter the time of day or night, a ride in a hansom cab was a breakneck dash that made conversation impossible. The vehicles typically careened and swayed with violent disregard for the laws of traffic or physics, rounding corners so recklessly one could feel the wheels lifting from the street.

However, Garrett Gibson, well versed in the hazards of hansom cabs, was unperturbed. She sat braced in the corner of the seat, stoically observing the passing scenery.

Ethan stole covert glances at her, unable to interpret her mood. She’d turned quiet after he’d refused to answer her question about the night of the Guildhall reception. He guessed that she was beginning to grasp how unsavory a character he was, and had come to her senses. Good. From now on, she would want him to stay away from her.

If there was one thing this night had made clear, it was exactly how great a danger Garrett posed for him. He wasn’t himself around her . . . or perhaps the problem was that he was himself. Either way, she was making him unfit for his job at the time he most needed to be dispassionate.

“The secret to staying alive,” another of Jenkyn’s men, William Gamble, had once said to him, “is not giving a damn.”

It was true. If you started to care, it changed the reactive choices you made, even about small things such as dodging to the left or the right. In his line of work, a man’s desire to preserve his own life was usually the thing that doomed him. So far, it had never been a problem for Ethan to remain more or less philosophical about his future: when your number was up, it was up.

But lately that necessary dispassion had begun to unravel. He’d caught himself wanting things he knew better than to want. Tonight he’d behaved like a besotted lunatic, flirting and lusting after Garrett Gibson. Running to her like a well-trained sheepdog as soon as she’d whistled. Accompanying her out in public, and watching pyrotechnics with his hands wandering all over her. He’d lost his bloody mind, taking such chances.

But how could any man keep his wits around such a woman? Garrett had bewitched him like a love charm on a May-morning. She was at once respectable and subversive, worldly and innocent. Hearing her say “involuntary erection” in that crisp, ladylike voice had been the high point of his year.

He wanted her so badly, it had put the heart crossways in him. This woman, in his bed, spread beneath him . . . he actually trembled at the thought of it. She would try so hard not to lose her dignity even as he teased it away from her, little by little, kissing the spaces between her toes, the soft creases behind her knees—

Enough, he told himself grimly. She wasn’t his. She would never be his.

They approached a row of identical Georgian-style terrace houses. It was an orderly middle-class street with a paved walk and a few weatherbeaten trees. The vehicle came to a rattling, jingling halt in front of a crimson-bricked house with a separate railed basement entrance for servants and deliverymen. One of the upper floors was brilliantly lit, the sound of men’s voices drifting through an open window. Three men . . . no, four.

Ethan descended from the hansom with the doctor’s bag and cane. He reached up to Garrett. Although she didn’t need assistance, she took his hand and alighted from the vehicle with an agility that even a corset couldn’t constrain.

“Wait here,” Ethan told the driver, “while I escort the lady to her door.”

“Cost extra for the waitin’,” the driver warned, and Ethan responded with a short nod.

Garrett looked up at him with the clear-eyed seriousness that captivated him a thousand times more than any come-hitherish pout or seductive glance. She had the most direct stare of any woman he’d ever met. “Will you come inside with me, Mr. Ransom?”

The momentum of fate ground to a halt. Ethan knew he should walk away from her. No, he should break into a full-bore run. Instead, he hesitated.

“You have guests,” he said reluctantly, his gaze flickering to the upper windows.

“It’s only my father’s weekly draw poker game. He and his friends usually stay upstairs until midnight. My surgery takes up most of the ground floor—we can talk privately there.”

Ethan hesitated. He’d begun the evening intending to follow this woman at a safe distance, and now he was considering going into her house, with her father and his friends there. How the hell had it come to this?

“Acushla,” he began gruffly, “I can’t—”

“I have an operating room, and a small laboratory,” Garrett continued in an offhand tone.

His curiosity was sparked by the mention of the laboratory. “What do you keep in there?” he couldn’t keep from asking. “Rats and rabbits? Dishes of bacteria?”

“I’m afraid not.” Her lips quirked. “I use the laboratory for mixing medicines and sterilizing equipment. And viewing microscopic slides.”

“You have a microscope?”

“The most advanced medical microscope available,” she said, seeing his interest. “With two eyepieces, German lenses, and an achromatic condenser to correct distortion.” She grinned at his expression. “I’ll show it to you. Have you ever seen a butterfly’s wing magnified a hundred times?”

The cabbie had been following the conversation attentively. “Lad, are you daft a’thegither?” he asked from his perch. “Don’t stand there like stuffed beef—go inside with the lady!”

Giving him a narrow-eyed glance, Ethan handed up a few coins and sent the hansom away. He found himself following Garrett to the front of the house. “I won’t stay for long,” he muttered. “And devil take you if you try to introduce me to anyone.”

“I won’t. Although we won’t be able to avoid my cookmaid.”

As Garrett fished a key from the pocket of her walking jacket, Ethan ran an assessing glance over the front door. A brass plate emblazoned with the name Dr. G. Gibson had been affixed to one of the upper panels. His gaze slid lower, and he was almost startled by the sight of an iron rim-mounted box lock beside the door handle. He hadn’t seen a design that ancient since he’d apprenticed for the prison locksmith.

“Wait,” he said before Garrett unlocked the door. Frowning, he handed her the bag and cane, and lowered to his haunches to have a better look. The primitive lock was laughably inadequate for a street door, and had probably been installed when the house had first been built. “This is an old-fashioned warded lock,” he said incredulously.

“Yes, a good, stout one,” Garrett said, sounding pleased.