Cold Copper: The Age of Steam Read Online Free Page B

floor and straight on out the door. The door hadn’t even clicked shut before the piano man started playing again, and one of the women laughed.
    She kept right on walking. It was cold out, Rose knew that. But she didn’t feel the wind, didn’t hear the clatter and racket of people making their way along the wide dirt streets with horse, wagon, carriage, and the grumbling steamer carts.
    All she could hear was the echo of Hink’s voice saying her name. Saying it like he was trying to catch up a fleeting thing.
    Too late. It was too late. He wanted a life of drinking to soothe the anger of losing his eye and crashing his airship. If he wanted a life with a woman full of ruffles on his lap, then he could have it. She had other things planned. Greater things.
    And she was the kind of woman most likely to be wearing goggles or men’s trousers rather than ruffles and perfume.
    Maybe they weren’t made for each other after all.
    It was time to be moving on. She’d sold just enough devices through the watch shop; she’d have money for a train ticket east. Straight through to Chicago, then on to New York City. She wanted that, wanted to shake this town and the coven soil from her boots and get on with seeing the wonder this wide world could bring.
    But she hadn’t planned on seeing it alone. Her best friend, Mae Lindson, was gone with Cedar Hunt, the Madders, and Miss Dupuis, looking for the next bit of the Holder.
    She knew what they were doing was important work—the ache in her shoulder and terrible scar where the tin scrap of the last piece of the Holder lodged in her flesh reminded her daily of what that dangerous device could do. She was glad they were hunting for it before it brought plague, madness, and destruction to all it touched.
    And now she wished she’d gone along with them instead of staying here with the witches at the coven and, most especially, with that no good, cheating air pirate Captain Lee Hink.
    “Out of the way!” A set of hands—no, a whole body: hands, arms, and the rest—slammed into her all in one motion and sent her spinning down to the ground.
    She braced for the fall, throwing hands out in front of her, but instead two hands quickly moved around her waist and stopped her fall.
    Suddenly finding herself suspended an inch or two off the road, Rose watched as her cap took a tumble in the wind and rolled down to the corner of the sidewalk.
    “Please excuse my manners,” a man’s soft tenor said. “I am terribly sorry for our collision. I’m going to hoist you up on your feet now, if you’ll pardon my handling of your overcoat.”
    Rose nodded, wondering if she was about to be pickpocketed by the most polite thief she’d ever met.
    The man shifted his grip so that he stood close against her, then lifted. In a moment, she was standing, and for a tick or two longer than that, the man held her with his fingers resting lightly on the top of her hips and all the rest of his body pressed against her back.
    Rose had spent most her life in Hallelujah avoiding the sort of men who manhandled women. She knew how to break free of a man’s embrace, knew how to hurt a man, in both polite and less-genteel ways.
    But she found herself wishing he might just turn into some kind of fairy-tale prince, come to save her from that airship pirate, come to put the happy back into her ever after.
    “Are you recovered, miss?” he asked.
    “Yes,” Rose said. “Yes, I am.” She finally stepped away and turned so she could properly thank him.
    That nice voice of his went with a smooth shaved face, sharp jaw, and an elegant sort of arc to his cheekbones and nose. He wore spectacles, gold-wire circles that couldn’t contain his wide and startlinggreen eyes. The man also had on a bowler hat that didn’t quite cover the brown bangs swept across his forehead.
    He wasn’t much taller than her, and had a trim, thin build.
    “Excellent,” he said with a smile. “I must apologize. Wearing that…fashion, I