Weather Witch by Shannon Delany Page A

his mother’s face. Once she had called Cynthia Astraea her “best of best friends.” And yet she had abandoned her—believed the Tester and accepted the worst of all rumors …
    She had not defended her in her time of need.
    His fingers tightened on the frame. Just a small move to lift it off the hook and …
    “It is a fine portrait.”
    He jumped, hands clamping down on the picture in surprise and pulling it free from the wall.
    Catrina blinked in surprise.
    Rowen swallowed a groan. “Would you”— leave me the hell alone for a while, for once? He stretched his lips into a smile—“like to see it closer?”
    She tilted her head. Weighing the scene with glittering eyes. “Why yes,” she said, stepping over so that she stood tucked up into the curve of his side, her skirts pressing against his hip, her shoulder warm against him. “Oh. Wait,” she said, and she ducked under his arm to stand between him and the portrait in his hands.
    The change in position was unsettling. Her skirts brushed the front of his trousers and her perfume filled the small space between them. Then she spun in the circle formed by his arms and the huge portrait and managed to press her bodice— was something that low cut truly the fashion of the day? he wondered—against his chest. “Remarkable,” she whispered, batting her eyelashes, her nose nearly at his chin as she looked up at him from beneath lacy lashes.
    She leaned in, stretched up …
    Rowen belched and she shrieked, engulfed in a scent that surely clashed with the bouquet of her perfume.
    Straining his shoulder with the weight of the picture, Rowen’s right hand released it to allow Catrina some distance. He turned back to the wall and hung the portrait again. He belched again. “Yes. Nearly as remarkable as the cucumber sandwiches I had at the Astraea estate—they keep”—he belched once more and rapped on his chest with a fist as he turned back to face her—“talking to me.”
    “Oh, Rowen,” Catrina said, pulling her fan free to move the offensive air away. “Whatever would your mother say?”
    “She would say, ‘Dear heavens, Rowen, have you not yet managed to come to grips that your innards are not capable of appropriately processing cucumbers?’” He shrugged. “I will surely spend more than my fair amount of time in the water closet as a result.”
    Catrina wrinkled her nose.
    “And God help whoever attempts to use it after me—I can curl your hair without pins or presses,” he said, pressing his lips into a firm line and nodding with an expression frighteningly akin to pride.
    Catrina fanned faster. “Rowen, that is highly inappropriate talk— offensive talk—to share with a lady.”
    “Then perhaps you’d better go, because I do not feel a desire to be tremendously proper on this eve.”
    “Oh. I see.”
    Rowen turned to head down the hall. She had not moved farther, so he determined it was up to him to put greater distance between them. But only a few feet toward his next destination he heard the clatter of her heels as she raced to catch up.
    “Perhaps just this once I might be a bit improper, too,” she suggested with a wink.
    Inwardly he groaned and instead of turning left at the next intersection of hallways, he turned right, pausing at the top of a set of stairs.
    “Excellent well,” he said, sounding far heartier than the shadows in his eyes proved him to be. “Let’s get drunk.”
    Catrina startled at the suggestion, stepping back from the top of the stairs and eyeing Rowen in disbelief. “Get drunk? Imbibe? ”
    “Imbibe our asses off,” he clarified.
    Her eyes shot wide open. “Why, Rowen … Such language.”
    “I’m ranked Sixth of the Nine. We imbibe. We smoke. We curse. Jordan understood that.”
    She opened and closed her fan again and again. “Well, Jordan had reason to understand such behaviors, considering the taint of her blood.”
    “Do not.”
    “Do not what?”
    “Do not speak that way about Jordan.