Page 12 of Threadbound

And then the half-human looked up and blood rushed to his cheeks, staining the fair skin a rose pink as his deep blue eyes widened in… Bran couldn’t tell if the expression was surprise, recognition, or both.

“Hello!” chirped the woman, and both men jumped. She grinned, and the expression was almost feral.

Jamie resisted the urge to punch her—gently—in the arm.

“Jamie,” she said, in a sing-songy tone so cheerful Jamie had to shove his hands into the pockets of his chinos to keep from strangling her, “you’ve got time for a tour, right?” She beamed at the guy. “You’re in luck! Jamie’s one of the smartest guides we have. He can answeranything.”

“Is that so?” the gorgeous man asked, his voice thick with a Scottish burr that sounded less Edinburgh and more Highlands, at least to Jamie’s admittedly unpracticed ears.

“Oh, absolutely,” Trixie went on. “He’d be happy to.” She turned her predatory smile on Jamie. “Wouldn’t you, Jamie?”

Jamie forced himself to swallow, part hoping the guy would agree to it and part hoping that the minute his Tennessee accent came out, the man would politely decline. Because then it would at least definitively end whatever was wrong with him and let him move on with his currently-nonexistent love life. “Of course,” he managed.

The man studied him with slightly too-large eyes that were a shade of mossy green that Jamie had never seen in a person’s eyes before. “Verra well,” came the answer, and Jamie struggledto force his heart back down out of his throat and into his chest where it belonged.

The guy paid Trixie, then allowed Jamie to hold the door for him, the top of his dark head passing just at Jamie’s shoulder level. It threw him for a second, because as tiny as the guy seemed up close, his presence felt a lot bigger.

Or maybe you’re just thinking with the wrong head, Jamie, he told himself.

A half hour later, Jamie had relaxed, and was happily talking about the history of early eighteenth century anatomization and medical theaters. A lot of people who had taken his tours found the subject morbid, but this guy didn’t seem at all bothered by it, instead occasionally asking a clever question, like the one he’d just asked.

“But decomposition begins verra quickly after death, so wouldn’t they have run into the problem that things were?—”

“Falling apart on them as they worked?” Jamie finished with a slightly lopsided smile. “Yes. It’s also one of the reasons people believed that the pituitary gland was the seat of the soul—since it was one of the first parts of the brain to break down.”

The man looked thoughtful.

“Where is that, precisely? The pituitary gland?” he asked.

Jamie touched the side of his head. “Right in the middle, under all of the rest of the brain. It’s right up against the brain stem, basically.”

The guy hummed softly. “And what does it do?”

“Produces hormones,” Jamie answered, then flushed.Stupid hormones. “Ah… stress hormones. Growth. Other… things.”God, I’m such a dork.

Jamie swore that he saw the man’s nostrils flare slightly.

Yeah, those hormones.It was definitely time for a new topic.

“But you’re right that decomposition essentially slowed down scientific progress for a long time,” he plowed on, needingto regain his composure. “Because it was hard to get actual fresh bodies, so they had to settle for recently buried or executed bodies.”

“That seems… limiting,” the smaller man observed, his tone a little dry.

“Well, that’s where Burke and Hare came in,” Jamie replied, grateful that his cheeks were cooling. Nothing like murder to take your mind off sex. In theory, anyway. Because even talking about dismemberment and decomposition wasn’t completely distracting Jamie’s mind from thoughts that were decidedly sexual in nature and had nothing at all to do with murder or surgical practices. “They made a living for almost a year selling fresh bodies to anatomists here in Edinburgh—they were highly sought-after because they had a, ah, better product than most Resurrectionists.”

“A better product?” the guy repeated.

“Afresherproduct,” Jamie clarified.

“Killing people to sell the corpses, were they?”

Jamie grinned. “Exactly. But they did it without causing significant physical trauma in order to avoid suspicion.”

The man’s eyes—they really were an astonishing shade of green—sparkled. “Used suffocation, did they?” he asked.

Jamie nodded. “Manual suffocation, yes.” Maybe he should have been more disturbed by the fact that this beautiful stranger seemed to be very quick on the uptake about things like strangulation and cutting up bodies, but Jamie couldn’t quite bring himself to be put off by it. In his defense, this was what he studied, andhe’d never actually contemplated killing anyone.

The man put his hand on his own throat, his long fingers able to wrap surprisingly far around his slender neck. “Like this?”

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