A Forbidden Alchemy (The Artisan Trilogy)

by Stacey McEwan

There were the people like my father, who worked honestly. Craftsmen who were paid far too little for their long days in the mines, the factories, the farms. And then there were Artisans: the fortunate. The high-society swanks with their magic.

Ma used to say it was one thing to be down, and quite another to dig yourself a grave.

He shook himself from his reverie. “Well,” he said. “That fuckin’ showed me, didn’t it?” Patrick Colson liked to say fuck a lot.

“There’s meanin’ in everythin’ if you look hard enough. There’s joy in it, too.

I’d never thought of desire that way—that it was the wanting that consumed a person, not the object they sought.

All of it reminded Patrick of that courtyard girl—the one whose hand he’d held in Belavere City. The one whose cheek he’d kissed. The one he’d thought of every day since.

“I suspect my honor has never entered your mind.” “Oh, it has,” he said darkly. He leaned so close that his mouth hovered over my ear. “Say the word, darlin’, and I’ll carry you up those stairs.”

“You’re too beautiful to be real,” he said suddenly, softly. With my ear pressed to his chest, I could feel the words, too. “There’s your compliment.”

“I think I’ve fallen in love with you,” he said gruffly. “So you’d better fuckin’ come out, Nina. Promise me. Now.”

“I can think of better ways to fill the moments,” he said in a voice like smoke.