Hello Stranger

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.

“No, there’s nothing good about it! It doesn’t even have tumblers. You might as well not have a lock.” Appalled, Ethan continued to examine the ancient contraption. “Why hasn’t your father done anything about this? He should know better.”

“We’ve had no problem with it.”

“Only by the grace of God.” Ethan became more agitated by the second as he realized she went to sleep every night with nothing but a crude rattletrap lock between her and the entire criminal population of London. His heart began to beat fast with anxiety. He’d seen what could happen to women who didn’t have sufficient protection from the predators of the world. And Garrett was a public figure who attracted both admiration and controversy. Someone could enter the house so damned easily, and do whatever they wished with her. He couldn’t bear to think about it.

Garrett stood there with a skeptical smile, seeming to think he was overreacting.

In his agony of worry, Ethan couldn’t find the words to make her understand. Still crouching in front of the door, he gestured toward Garrett’s tiny hat, which was little more than a flattened velvet circle decorated with a twist of ribbon and a knot of small feathers. “Give me that.”