“I’d better not!” But he was grinning as he said it and for the first time since Skeeter had known Kit Carson, the threat didn’t terrify him. Kit stuck out a hand and Skeeter grasped it hard, suddenly finding himself grinning fit to crack his face in half.
My God, he thought as he followed Kit Carson out of the Silkworm Caterpillar. A private eye! Working for Kit Carson, of all people, the man who’d once threatened to shove him down the nearest unstable gate, minus his privates.
La-La Land would never be the same again.
He wasn’t entirely sure Shangri-La Station would recover from the shock.
* * *
Jenna Nicole Caddrick had spent a full eight days trapped in a little room at the top of a scrubbed, wooden staircase, staring out the window into the grimy, soot-filled working world of Spitalfields, London. She was too ill to travel even as far as the kitchen. Dr. Mindel’s tinctures left her woozy and afraid for the tiny life growing inside her, but the gunshot wound to her head required treatment and she was too deep in shock to protest necessity.
Her strength began to return, however, as the wound healed, and with healing came the restless urge to do something. She couldn’t spend the rest of her life sitting beside a window, disguised as a Victorian man in a world she scarcely understood. And Carl’s blood called out for vengeance, Carl’s and Aunt Cassie’s, both, murdered by her own father’s hired killers. When Jenna woke early on the morning of her eighth day in London, she knew she had to do something to stop her father. She lay staring for a long time at the ceiling, stained where rainwater had seeped through the roof at some point before Noah had paid to have it repaired, and considered where she might begin.