Waiting Game by Sheri Cobb South Page A

the irrational manner of dreams, the theatre was ablaze, with great tongues of flame licking at the red velvet curtains of their box . . .
    She’d awakened then, as was always the case when dreams turned dangerous. And yet it had all seemed so real that she could still smell the smoke, feel the heat scorching her lungs, choking her . . .
    She threw back the covers, ran to the window, and threw open the sash, then leaned out and breathed in great gulps of air—cold air, so cold that her breath appeared as small puffs of white, but wonderfully fresh after the suffocating black clouds of her nightmare.
    Several minutes later, after her breathing had slowed down and her pounding heart had returned to normal, she bent her head and would have ducked back inside, had she not suddenly realized that she was not the only one awake at so late an hour. Across the street, a solitary figure stood in the pool of yellow light cast by the streetlamp on the corner, a tall, slender man dressed all in black. The lamplight was not sufficient for her to see his features clearly, but then, she had no need to; she recognized John Pickett at once, would have recognized him in much darker surroundings than these. Nor did she wonder at his presence; it seemed somehow natural that he should be there, as if he were part of the dream from which she had just awakened. Then an errant gust of wind blew her hair into her eyes, and when she’d brushed it back, he was gone. She closed the window and returned to bed, wondering if he’d ever really been there at all, or if that, too, had been a dream.
    * * *
    “You’ll never believe who I encountered last night in St. James’s Street,” Lord Rupert Latham said, taking a teacup from Julia’s hand and supplementing its contents from the flask in his coat pocket.
    “Perhaps not, but I’m sure you intend to tell me anyway,” Julia responded drily. She had not slept at all well the previous night, for her slumbers had been troubled by half-forgotten dreams that had ranged from the merely disturbing to the truly terrifying.
    Ignoring this jibe, Lord Rupert leaned back complacently against the sofa cushions, the better to observe her discomfiture. “None other than your earnest young husband.”
    Julia’s teacup clattered in its saucer. “Mr. Pickett?”
    “Unless you have another husband I’m not aware of,” said Lord Rupert, his eyebrows arching.
    “How—how was he?” she asked, trying very hard to sound as if it didn’t matter in the least.
    “Half seas over, if you want to know the truth.”
    “Drunk?” she asked, startled. “He didn’t—” She broke off abruptly. He didn’t look drunk , she’d almost said. But it wouldn’t do for Rupert to know about that midnight encounter, for a number of reasons—one of them being that she didn’t know herself whether it had been real, or merely a product of her own half-dreaming imagination. “That is, he—he didn’t ask after me, did he?”
    “My dear Julia! Do you imagine that I make a habit of stopping in the street to bandy words with my intoxicated inferiors?”
    “Not a habit, no,” she retorted. “But I suspect that in the case of Mr. Pickett, you might make an exception.”
    “You know me too well, my dear,” he conceded, chuckling. “That is why we would be so well-matched. As a matter of fact, yes, I did, er, exchange pleasantries with Mr. Pickett.”
    “By which you mean you said something hateful.”
    “Hateful? I?” Lord Rupert’s expression was one of wounded innocence. “My dear Julia, do, pray, acquit me! I was merely emboldened by Mr. Pickett’s, er, excesses to hope that they might be in honor, one might say, of the annulment of your marriage. But alas, he tells me my assumptions were premature.”
    Julia had ceased listening, for another thought had occurred to her. “Tell me, Rupert, was he—was he dressed all in black?”
    Lord Rupert inclined his handsome head. “He was indeed, and it was this, along with