Free Ravensclaw by Maggie MacKeever

What did you expect? I am vampir .
    She considered this, and the hand that clasped her. Are you lying now?
    No. Are you frightened, little one?
    Maybe. Emily watched him trace a pattern on her ankle. What are you doing to my foot?
    Caressing it. Do you mind?
    Oh. She blinked at him. On the hearth, Drogo stirred. Machka opened one green eye and reached out a sharp-tipped paw.
    Emily snatched back her foot and tucked it under her nightdress. “What are you doing here?”
    Val shrugged off his jacket. “I sleep here, remember? Perhaps I should ask you the same thing. This is hardly so large a house that someone might get lost.”
    Emily fumbled for her spectacles and plopped them on her nose. “You said we would speak tomorrow. Well, now it is tomorrow, so don’t try and put me off again. Have you found out anything about the athame?”
    No, nor had he tried to, having had more urgent fires to douse. “Has anyone ever told you that you are as tenacious as a cockleburr?”
    “Papa, when he was trying to keep things from me. Don’t change the subject. I take it you did not.”
    Val did not feel inclined to explain himself. “You wanted to warn me about your Mr. Ross.”
    Emily looked away. “He’s not my Mr. Ross.”
    Val shrugged out of his coat. “Nonetheless, you know him well.”
    “Not half as well as I once believed I did.” Emily toyed with the edges of her sash. “Thanks to your insistence that I appear at Lady Cullen’s dratted musicale, Michael thinks I followed him to Edinburgh.”
    “Why should he think you followed him? Unless you told him of your suspicions, and that you found his talisman.Did you return it to him, by the way?” Casually, Val removed his waistcoat and cravat.
    Emily’s cheeks reddened. “He claimed it wasn’t his. Before my papa’s death, Michael was, ah, courting me. He may think that we’re betrothed.”
    Val pulled the velvet cord out of his hair. Scooted Machka out of the way and sat down on the bed. “Miss Dinwiddie, you are a femme fatale.”
    Emily adjusted her spectacles. “Don’t poke fun at me. I should have realized it was all moonshine. Michael wants to marry me and thereby gain control of the Society and my pocketbook. However, I have decided that I don’t want to marry anyone. Papa managed matters so I wouldn’t have to, despite the fact that the law doesn’t find females fit to manage their own affairs. Do stop regarding me as if I were some raree show exhibit. You aren’t taking this seriously enough.”
    If so, it was understandable: Val had during the countless years of his existence been hanged, shot, and staked, none of which had been particularly pleasant, but he had lived (so to speak) to tell the tale. “You are serious enough for us both. If Ross did steal the athame, he didn’t have it with him last night.”
    Emily’s expressive eyebrows climbed halfway up her forehead. “How do you know that?”
    Val raised an eyebrow of his own.
    She glared at him. “I fail to understand why your servants are so devoted to you. Unless you’ve swayed their minds.”
    “That would be unsporting of me.”
    “And you never take advantage?”
    “We have strayed from the subject. Indulge my curiosity, Miss Dinwiddie. Most young women would settle for marriage at any price.”
    “Most young women are not as great an oddity as I am. Papa was almost pathetically grateful when Michael began to pay me court.” Emily drew up her legs and wrapped her arms around her knees. “My parents had a marriage of convenience — her dowry and his convenience, that is. They rubbed on well enough together for the most part, except on such occasions as when his experiment with a reverse magnetosphere went awry, and we had rabbits in the drawing room, and Mama fainted into the teapot. I want more than that for myself.”
    “I see,” said Val, and so he did. Miss Dinwiddie was an heiress. Every fortune hunter in Scotland would be hanging on her skirts. Or they would be if