Verus said, “Ja, maku!” but someone called urgently to him from down the main staircase and he stepped out of view.

With his longer stride, Vai caught me just as I pushed past the beads and set foot on the back staircase. He grabbed my shoulders and pressed me back, trapping me between him and the wall, beneath the dead gas lamp.

“It isn’t like it might seem,” I said. “I can explain.”

His cold fire blazed through the gas lamp above us. “I gave you a chance to explain. So why start now when you let me walk blind into that meeting and look like a complete fool?”

I managed words. “What do you wish you knew?”

“What do I wish I knew? Where do I even start? You had no trouble telling them everything you knew about Camjiata, so if you didn’t tell me before, it was certainly on purpose. For that matter, why should I believe your story about the binding from the spirit world? You could have made up the whole thing to stop me from prying!”

Such cold surged around him that my breath steamed as mist. “But I didn’t make it up!”

He wasn’t listening as he stormed on in a voice made icy by fury. “And why stop there? Maybe Drake wasn’t the first. I have to wonder about black-haired Brennan, although he doesn’t have black hair. The handsomest man alive. A very persuasive man, with his enchanting smile.”

My heart was galloping in my breast, crashing between chagrin and exasperation. “I never! Drake lied to me. You know that. Anyway, Brennan Du is the sort of man who isn’t interested in a callow young female like myself.”

He was absolutely crushing me against the wall, his body pressed against the length of mine. I had never known you could be so agitatedly abashed and yet recklessly excited at the same time. For I wasn’t scared of him. I just needed him to slow down and listen to me.

He whispered, his lips a kiss away from my mouth. “And what sort of man do you think would be interested in a callow young female like yourself??”

Frost crackled up the wall behind me. My lips had parted but I could not speak. All I could do was tip my head back and lick the corner of my mouth in a way that made him suck in a breath.

“An infatuated dupe?” he continued hoarsely.

I slid my hands up his back. I couldn’t breathe properly, much less talk.

He raged on. “Can’t think of any questions to retort with? Cat got your tongue?”

He was pressed so closely we might almost have been engaged in sexual congress.

“How many nights have I dreamed of doing this?” he murmured in the tone a man uses when contemplating the necessity of cutting into his own flesh to excise a festering wound.

He caught my face in his hands and kissed me.

And he kissed me.

And he kept kissing me.

Nothing existed outside of my body straining into his, his mouth and tongue a glorious pressure on mine. I wrapped my arms around him, explored the breadth and strength of his shoulders. One of his hands splayed along my neck while the other dropped to the curve of my hip, pressing us together. We could have moved closer only if we had taken off our clothes.

“Magnificent Jupiter with he lightning!” said a cheery male voice that sounded a cursed lot like Kofi. “Is there no rooms for that?”

Vai was planting kisses on my lips and my cheek, and my lips and my chin, and my lips and my eyes, incandescently oblivious to his friend’s arrival. Hazily, I opened my eyes, trying to recall where I was. Hadn’t we been alone in an entirely deserted stairwell? Footfalls thumped along the corridor below. An unknown number of men in wardens’ tabards had clustered up behind a big, broad-shouldered man who was blocking the lower stairwell.

Eyes still closed, Vai drew back just enough to whisper. “Wardens. Kiss me so they don’t realize we know they’re there.”

“Yes,” I murmured with my lips moving against the caress of his mouth. I could barely grope for and fasten my left hand around the ghost hilt of my sword, but I knew I had to, so I did.

“Move aside, yee lout,” said a man below. “I’s a warden and we is come to make an arrest.”

Another warden chimed in. “Oh, by Venus Lennaya! Have they no rooms for that? Curse it! My wick died.”

Kofi laughed with utterly false heartiness. “His have not yet, fortunate man. Good view, too, with that gaslight burning right above him.”

“I said to stand aside!” said the first warden. “We have arrests to make upstairs.”

“So this is where yee got to, Cousin!” Kofi stumped up the stairs making a foul echo of noise. He slammed into us. Vai stepped back so swiftly I realized he’d braced for it.