But her pursuer must have been otherwise occupied. After a moment Cassidy heard voices, and she knew her gentleman was leaving the house in company with the lady. She angled for a better view and watched them make their way to the waiting carriage.
She lingered in hiding until the doors to carriage and house were safely shut, and the carriage had started off. Then she sprinted after the carriage as she had done before, praying that the man clinging to the rear platform behind the wheels didn’t notice, and that no one else would try to stop her.
But even as she ran, her thoughts kept returning to the way her gentleman had looked among all those proud and fancy folk, the way he’d dominated the room just by standing there.
And who was the lady he’d claimed so boldly? She was a match for him in every way, splendid and proud. Not a tigress to his Tyger, but… a Snow Queen, cool and regal.
Cassidy shivered in her wet clothes. It wasn’t too late to stop and make her way back to the hotel. The carriage was retracing its path to her gentleman’s house; what would she do there? Follow him inside?
Yes, a rich inner voice sang out, vibrating in her blood and bones. Yes.
Still she hung back as the carriage turned into the square and stopped before the gentleman’s house. She was safely hidden behind a shrub across the lane before the Tyger and his lady were on the front steps. They were bowed through the door by the costumed man who’d accompanied the coachman, and then Cassidy was alone in the London night.
She knew what Isabelle would say at this moment. She had an idea of what was proper, and how things were or were not done among these folk. She knew she was only a drab, skinny girl wearing boy’s clothes, a scraggly desert mouse in a nest of elegant tropical birds. But her inner voice was not to be denied. It was her mother’s legacy; it was her destiny.
“Ask me no more,” she whispered, “thy fate and mine are seal’d: I strove against the stream and all in vain: Let the great river take me to the main: No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield…”
She was getting to her feet when powerful fingers seized her arm and swung her in a circle.
She gazed up into the face of her Tyger. His green eyes were mere slits, his face grim and forbidding.
“Who are you?” he demanded, the velvet stripped from his voice. “You’ve been following me.”
She was mute, gone from startled to sizzling in his presence. “I—”
He jerked her closer, nostrils flaring. “You’re one of us,” he said. His mouth twitched, and he lifted his free hand to touch her face. “Impossible. I would have known—”
It was all Cassidy could do to keep her feet as his fingers traced her jaw, her cheek, her ear. She had the crazy thought that maybe she was back in the hotel, and this was a dream, cruelly unreal. She was afraid, yet fear was the smallest part of the emotions that set her whole body trembling. She was speechless, struggling to pull from memory a line of poetry or fragment of some fanciful story that would explain her reaction to his touch—the incomprehensible joy of feeling him only a heartbeat away, freeing all those half-familiar and somehow terrible needs that she’d never dared let loose…
“You’re one of us,” he repeated, and there might have been wonder in his words if not for their harshness. His grip tightened, and his breath stirred the flyaway tendrils other hair. “Who are you?”
“C-Cassidy,” she whispered.
He gazed at her with that piercing stare, green eyes like her aunt’s treasured emerald. “Cassidy who?”
“Holt,” she choked out. “From America. Cassidy Holt.”
She was so lost in him that she saw every subtle change in his expression: the relaxing of his mouth, the parting of his lips, the softly withdrawn breath, the way the line between his dark brows smoothed out. His hand fell to grip her other arm, and he held her as if he would devour her like the Tyger he was.