Page 569 of Flirting with Darkness

She flinched, looking up at him in surprise.

He returned her feigned surprise with a hard look.

She stared at his eyes, trying to maintain the veneer of innocence for a beat longer.

When it became clear he wasn’t buying it, she laughed.

Breaking character finally, she looked at him with real amusement. She held up her hands as if a fugitive in some old Wild West play.

“Don’t shoot, brother,” she said. “Just assessing your reflexes.”

“Assess them from over there,” he growled, aiming the cane at the opposite bench.

Still smirking at him faintly, she slid backwards on the bench.

She held up her hands a beat longer, then seemed to make up her mind.

As gracefully as she’d come to be on his side of the carriage, she returned to her own. She continued to smile at him as she settled herself across from him.

“Oh, father is going to like you,” she mused. “Very much, I suspect.”

“Does he often send his children to seduce their siblings?” Ghost asked, still annoyed. “Or is this some attempt to assess my English prudishness?”

“Oh, from what father tells me… you’re anything but aprude,brother.”

The knowing look in her violet eyes annoyed him that time, too.

“Is this meant to unnerve me, as well?” he retorted. “These constant insinuations that the old bastard has been spying on me from afar?”

She shrugged, as if the question bored her.

Or perhaps she only found it irrelevant. Or obvious. Or all three.

Her eyes returned to a crack in the thick curtains. From the way the light shone on her face, and the way her pupils moved, she was scanning the horizon outside the carriage.

“He cannot help himself,” she said next.

Ghost frowned.

“Who cannot? Our father?”

She turned her head without lifting it from the back cushion. “Of course our father. And of course he spied upon you. He tells me he could feel you not long after you were born. He knew immediately what you were. He knew immediately you were one like him.”

Ghost frowned for real at that.

Still, he hesitated before pressing her on it.

Did he really want to let her suck him into this game?

She’d obviously come on their father’s orders as well. The twisted old fuck sent this creature ahead to play some sort of mind game with him, to soften the ground or assess his credulousness or his emotional volatility. Were they trying to decide how much of a fool he was? What idiotic story he might believe?

She likely wasn’t his sister at all.

Still, looking at her, he doubted that.

There was a familiarity there, as much as he hated to admit it.

It went beyond the mere physiological similarities he could note.

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