The Mirador Read Free

sake! Would you just go away already?”
    Somehow, it seemed like good advice. I went.

Mehitabel
    Mildmay shut the door behind him carefully—a tidy-minded man, he was—and I made a face at my reflection. “Oh, very well played. What will you do for an encore, kick him in the crotch?”
    It wasn’t that I’d lied—he did sometimes call me Ginevra. It was just that I’d never meant to tell him. Unless of course, I thought, disliking myself intensely, I’d just been saving it. Because I knew exactly why I’d said it. I was scared and angry and needed to lash out at someone . And Mildmay was safe. I knew he’d forgive me. The worst of it was that I actually felt calmer, better able to attend to tonight’s business with a clear head.
    Corinna and Susan between them had the Empyrean’s ushers and prompt-boys well trained, and I hadn’t hesitated to take advantage of that. The prompt-boys in particular loved the sense of intrigue—God only knows what stories they told each other about our goings-on. So there’d been no difficulty in finding out which boxes were being used tonight.
    Lionel Verlalius had come, but he’d brought his fiancée—an insipid creature and I hoped he’d be as happy with her money as he thought he would. Barnabas and Harcourt Malanius were in their family box, but I really wasn’t in the mood for a threesome, and picking one over the other wasn’t worth the resulting aggravation. Arthur Lelius, Rudolph Novadius . . . Felix, who was not himself a problem—or even a factor—but I hadn’t needed an exasperating and time-consuming scene to know that Mildmay was a problem.
    I’d been right about that.
    But the prompt-boy had also told me that Lord Peter Jessamyn was attending the play, and I’d spotted him myself: Peter Jessamyn, sitting alone and meek as an anchorite’s cat in the box he and several other wizards had gone shares in for the season.
    Peter Jessamyn was ideal for my purposes; I’d sent him a primly worded note in the first intermission, to which he’d responded, equally primly, in the second. And since Peter could hardly be expected to be enthusiastic with Mildmay playing Eofor Henning all over the place, I’d cleared the stage the quickest—and dirtiest—way I could. I’d told the doorman to stop everyone else.
    I was glad of the knock on the door; feeling guilty about something you’ve done on purpose is a terrible waste of time. And I liked Peter: middle-aged, nondescript, soft-bellied and soft-handed, and a keen and cynical observer of the Mirador’s politics. Also a considerate and imaginative lover. Not as good as Mildmay— no one was as good as Mildmay, who sometimes seemed to forget that he, too, had a right to climax—but a charming bed-companion. And he liked having me on top.
    We went to The Harpy’s Kiss, where Peter had thoughtfully bespoken the Rose Room and a late supper. We talked about the play while we ate; Peter nearly made me choke with a wickedly accurate imitation of Susan Dravanya, and I retaliated by describing, and even acting out bits of, the mimed and furious cat-fights that were an inevitable part of life backstage. “One of these days, Drin is going to murder Bartholmew and then go shooting out on stage with his hands covered in blood. Because it will never occur to him to wash them.”
    “Well, as long as he waits until the fifth act,” Peter said reasonably and grinned at me over the rim of his wineglass.
    I grinned back. It was easy with Peter. We enjoyed sex with each other; we enjoyed gossiping with each other. He appreciated the cachet of being my paramour—Mildmay’s scornful cant term “boy-toy” echoed unpleasantly in my head—and I quite liked having a lover who wasn’t high-profile, who didn’t have to please anyone but himself. And who didn’t want anything from me except bone-rattlingly good sex.
    We managed that all right, and in the aftermath, lying together companionably to wait and see if Peter was going to