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now,” Eliza said. She met his eyes at last, the triumphant gleam in her own setting off alarm bells in every corner of Matthew’s psyche. “I meant in San Francisco, after I’ve beaten you out to win the Sky and Steam Rally.”

F OUR

    T HE H ARDISON STEAM car was a clear, bright crimson. As soon as Eliza had seen it, she’d declared she wanted a ball gown in exactly that shade.
    â€œIt’s . . . pink,” Matthew pronounced when he arrived, along with his vehicle, at the dirigible hangar being used as a pre-rally staging facility. Eliza waved him reluctantly past the security detail guarding the velvet rope that cordoned off their area of the hangar. Unlike Eliza, who was clad in a practical coverall over her walking dress, Matthew was cool and crisp in a finely cut spring suit of pale linen with an impeccable blue watered-silk waistcoat. Eliza thought he looked far too buttoned-up and proper to be loitering in a garage. Suddenly she felt frumpy, not dashing at all, in the shapeless coverall.
    â€œIt’s a light shade of red,” Dexter corrected Matthew sharply, peering out from behind the boiler.
    â€œAmaranth,” Eliza suggested, smiling a little too sweetly. “I think it’s a beautiful color.”
    â€œRuns like a top,” Dexter said, “and that’s all that really matters.”
    Eliza ran a proprietary finger along the driver’s side door. “It will get me where I’m going.” She let a hint of skepticism color her expression as she glanced toward Matthew’s steam car. A team was just unloading the sleek, gunmetal gray vehicle from a trailer, their job complicated by the fact that one of the tires had apparently gone flat during transport. A small thing, and irrelevant to the car’s functionality, but Eliza couldn’t resist a snicker when Matthew cursed.
    â€œYou’ll need a realignment,” Dexter remarked.
    At least he was in the right place for such a thing. The vast hangar had been designed to accommodate several dozen luxury air yachts, and it could have housed a hundred steam cars with room left over. There was plenty of space for the eighteen rally cars and all the equipment it might possibly take to ready them, and the swarming attendants looked insignificant in the cavernous building.
    Eliza took a deep breath and released it slowly, trying for the hundredth time to calm the nerves that had her stomach in knots. It was no use. Excitement filled the air she breathed, a buzz of anticipation that had greeted her on her arrival that morning had never ebbed. The press were not allowed into the hangar itself, and for that she was grateful; Dexter had warned her they would mob her whenever she left the hangar, and more would probably be waiting outside the hotel.
    A barricade and a line of policemen secured the open hangar door, but Eliza could sense the crush just beyond them, the babble of reporters and flash of camera bulbs at the fore, the sea of spectators pressing in from behind. The “door” was really the whole end of the hangar, slid to the sides on tracks. It had to be that wide and tall to admit the largest of the dirigibles usually housed there, but the opening gave the space an oddly unprotected feeling.
    â€œThey’re like sharks,” Matthew said, following her gaze to the wide wedge of light spilling in from outside. “Circling at the first scent of blood.”
    â€œHas there been blood already? We haven’t even started off.”
    â€œOf course there’s blood. Don’t you know anything about your competition? Look over there,” he said, nodding in the direction of a long cream-and-white steam car with an elaborately filigreed copper boiler housing. “Whitcombe and Sons, out of Manchester. That’s the fourth or so son in the light gray. He’s the driver.”
    â€œHe’s twice your size, and three times mine,” Eliza whispered.