“My father has money. I can pay you . . .”
“If your father had money, you wouldn’t be on Katherine Lane.” That hawklike glare never wavered. Unreadable eyes, he had. “It doesn’t do any good to tell you not to be scared, does it? You’d be a fool if you weren’t scared. What do you want me to do about it?”
I should kick him and run. She didn’t though. Like he said, she wasn’t a fool.
“Do you want me to get out of here? I can go up on deck and let my cabin boy keep you company.”
The lantern he’d hung was swinging still, reshaping the shadows of his face. Revealing and hiding. Hiding and revealing. It was deliberate, the way he stood crowding her at the bunkside. He was showing her he could come as close as he wanted and still not lay a hand on her.
He said, “You can try leaving under your own sail. You won’t get far before you keel over, but I won’t stop you. Take the blanket, if you want.”
A minute ticked by. She said, “You didn’t do anything to me, did you? You didn’t . . . ”
“I did not. I don’t take sport with unconscious gutter-snipes. London’s full of willing women. Pretty ones.” He pushed the bed-curtains back along the railings and cupped his fingers over the bed frame. “Less grubby, too.”
You had to look into that hard face for a while before you saw he was laughing, quiet, underneath. At her. At himself, too, maybe.
“I guess . . . if you wanted to do something, you’d be doing it.”
“I would, if I wanted a woman pale as a fishbelly and listing badly to port. A real villain wouldn’t let that stop him.”
“Fishbelly.”
“Fishbelly green. You still are.”
She wouldn’t have trusted a kindly, reassuring man. This bloke, rude, impatient, and exasperated, though . . .
“Let’s make a deal, Jess. I don’t touch you, and you stop trying to dig a hole through the portside planking. Those are the terms and conditions. Shake on it.”
He wanted her to shake on it. Somehow this made sense. She was pretty sure parts of her mind weren’t working.
“I keep my contracts,” he said. “Ask anybody.”
He had his hand out. It was twice as big as hers and dark with the sun. Bands of callus crossed the palm. He got that reefing sail in high winds when the lines cut into his flesh as the ship bucked and he had to hold on.
She slipped her hand out from under the blanket, into his.
It was a shock, touching him. Made him seem bigger and closer and more real. It set off a pulse in her belly, nervous and twitchy like. A little drum, drum, drum started up between her legs. She recognized the feeling, since she wasn’t ignorant in such matters. That was her body noticing he was a fine-looking man. Her body generally had more sense than that.
He shook her hand and let go. “That’s it, then. I’ll keep you safe tonight. Safe from me, too. Your part is, you trust me. For one night.”
He was already walking away. He tossed the words at her over his shoulder and picked a wide-bottomed decanter out of the brass rack in the bookshelves. “You’re getting the better of that deal. You wouldn’t make it twenty yards if you tried to run.”
He acts like Papa. Like his handshake’s good from Dublin to Damascus, and everybody knows it. I don’t recognize his name, but I’ll bet I just struck a bargain with a master trader.
“I’ll give you a brandy to seal the deal. You’re blue as a whelk and shivering. Wrap that blanket tighter.”
She watched him pour a glass, not being stingy. He stretched up and took a wood box down from the top shelf. When he opened it, it folded to both sides, like a book, to show medicines. Bottles and jars and paper packets were strapped in, neat and shipshape.
He uncorked a blue bottle and counted drops into the brandy.
Not surreptitious, Sebastian. That meant he was daylight honest or else he was deep as a well. No way of knowing which, just at the moment. She’d assume deep as a well till proved otherwise. “I like the way you’re letting me see you doctor that up.”
“That’s to disarm suspicion.”
“You get marks for trying. What are you putting in it?”
“This and that.” He set the bottle back in its place and pulled a muslin pouch out of the box. He unwound the string and jiggled the bag open in the palm of his hand. He picked out a pinch to sprinkle over her glass. “The tincture is to dull the pain. These herbs are to stop that fever you’re about to get. The gray powder floating on top is to show you it’s serious medicine.”
“You think I’m going to drink that.”
He swirled the glass, letting everything mix. “You can toss it out a porthole. Waste of good brandy, though.”
“The fish might enjoy a brandy. It’s a cold, wet night in the Thames.”
“It’s cold up here, too, and nearly as wet.” He carried the glass across to her, being casual, like he didn’t care whether she took it or not. “Drink this and stop being a fool.” His fingers didn’t brush hers when he handed it over. “If you’re not going to trust me, I can always cart you outside and dump you back in the rain. I might even find the exact muddy puddle I picked you out of.”
Empty threats. She preferred them, actually, to the other kind.
She sniffed at the glass. Nothing to smell but brandy and something like smoke. When she took a sip, there was nothing much to taste, either. He was a man of secretive medicines. “What did you say that dusty stuff was?”
“I didn’t. That’s medicinal herbs from the mysterious Orient. Guaranteed to do everything but raise the dead. Can’t possibly hurt you.” The Captain busied himself putting his medical gear away.
Hah. But she took a sip. “I don’t trust medicine much. It’s good brandy, though. My father deals in brandy.” We smuggle it.
Rain tapped on the deck above. That was a good sound. Familiar. She’d spent a hundred nights at sea with the rain overhead. Funny how she felt quiet inside, steady, being with this man. She felt safe. He had practice taking care of his ship and his crew. That’s why his hands were leather, strong and hard. That was from handling ropes and checking cargo and holding onto what he intended to keep. It set prickles of awareness running along her skin, thinking that those hands had undressed her. He’d touched her body, doing that, even if he didn’t admit it. It made sense he wouldn’t want to talk about it.
She looked out the window, past the reflection of the cabin. Rain slapped hard on the glass and ran down in lines.
The light was going. The wharf was empty of carts and horses. Lamps in the warehouse yards cast long, greasy, rippling streaks of light on the stones of the dock. To the left, midriver in the Thames, dozens of ships anchored—schooners and frigates, lighters, barges—all with lanterns, fore and aft, bobbing in the tide. A jagged forest of masts and rigging glowed eerily against the mist.
It’s important what day the ships leave. The sailing dates are half the puzzle. The other half . . . The other half is . . .
And then she didn’t know what the other half of the puzzle was. It made sense a minute ago. Now it didn’t. Maybe this was what it was like, being mad. “I can’t think.”
“Then it’s lucky you don’t have to think.”
“One of those fortunate coincidences.” She wrapped her arms around her knees, looking at the little gray bits floating in the brandy, trying to decide whether she should drink it. It came down to trust, didn’t it? The Captain had risked his neck for her, out there in the streets of London. She’d given him nothing in return but sand and mud in his bed. And she’d made a bargain. She kept bargains. “I haven’t thanked you, have I? For saving my life. I almost remember you doing it.”
“I spend most evenings fishing women out of the deeper puddles in the port area. I consider them legitimate spoil. It doesn’t do any good in the glass, Jess.”
He’d been captain a good, long while. He gave orders like a man used to being obeyed. “I haven’t made up my mind yet.” She yawned, surprising herself.
“I suggest yo
u do so, before you fall asleep again. Or set it aside. You don’t have to worry, you know.” Captain Sebastian’s voice rumbled through her, mild and reassuring, stroking away at the last of the frightened places in her, loosening the knots in her nerves.
He could do anything he wanted to her. Commit any evil. And he didn’t. Here and now, because he was such a dangerous man, she knew she could trust him. Paradox they called that. Looking at it from three or four different angles, she still came up with the same answer.
Wasn’t it lucky her brain worked well enough to tell her that? She took a deep drink of the brandy.
HE saw the exact moment she decided to trust him. She drank the brandy, and she stopped looking like a cat in a sinking lifeboat.
That was good. He was damn sick of scaring her. “Are you still afraid of me?”
“Some. You’re formidable as hell. I suppose you know that.” She tilted her head to one side. “I don’t know how to treat you, Sebastian. I wish you were some pudgy little chap who didn’t scare me to death.”
Alone and hurt, totally at the mercy of a stranger, she could say that and give him a little sidewise grin. Courage to burn, this woman had. “You’ll get used to me.”
He was aroused all over again, seeing that street urchin’s grin. She was going to laugh at him like this, when he had her in bed. She’d tease him and play games under the covers. He’d like that.
Since he wasn’t going to get her underneath him, squirming enthusiastically, anytime soon, he did some walking around, kicking the damp towels together in a pile, rolling up the coastal charts and putting them away in brass tubes, giving his body a chance to cool off.
After a bit, she said, “You carried oranges. I can smell them.”
“First cargo up from the hold.” The Flighty would smell of oranges for a while yet. He didn’t notice, himself. By one of God’s small mercies, the crew stopped smelling cargo after the first day or two. “I sold them on the wharf the morning we docked and was glad to get rid of them. Tricky, delicate cargo.”
“They stow forward and below the waterline, with air moving around them. Then you tear up the water heading home.”
She knew shipping. She had a father or brother or lover who was a shipping clerk or a sailor.
“We leave keel marks on the waves.”
“I can see a picture of it in my mind, how you packed the oranges in. Where they were stowed. How they unloaded. Why do I know so much about your ship?” Panic, just the edge of it, touched her voice. “If I don’t know you, why do I know this ship?”
“There’s lots of ships on the river, Jess.”
She was scaring herself again, thinking she knew Flighty and he was lying to her. So he rolled up a map of the Thames estuary and used it to point to the ships at midriver, the ones they could still see in the gloom, naming them one by one, talking cargoes and ports . . . Canton, Baltimore, the Greek isles, Constantinople. He watched fear eddy and slack inside her. But he’d sold goods all over the Mediterranean. She wasn’t a match for him. He talked and talked, and slowly she let herself be gentled into trusting him. She trusted too easily. Somebody should be taking care of her.
“Feels like I’ve been there, some of those places.” She shifted inside the blankets. He got a brief glimpse of some anatomy he’d been admiring earlier. It was even more tempting, half covered. “Valletta. Crete. Minorca. I can almost see them.”
When she belonged to him, he’d take her to sea and show her Crete and the Greek isles. Why not? She’d take to life shipboard like a seagull. It’d be fine to come on deck and see Jess at the rails, her hair blowing, her bonnet off, and her skin brown from the sun.
Or if she wanted to stay in England, he’d bring the world back to her. He’d drop anchor in London and come home to her and shuck his boots at the door. He’d find her curled up next to the fire, waiting for him. She’d be sleepy, the way she was now, and they’d talk about his trip. Everything he’d seen. He’d bring back baubles from his trading and lay them at her feet. This was a woman he’d enjoy spoiling with presents.
“My brain doesn’t work at all.” She rubbed her hand over her forehead and into her hair to badger her brain better. It was a bad idea. She winced, and her fingers came away red. “I’ve got blood on your blanket. I’m sorry.”
“I have three hundred in the hold. I won’t miss one.”
“A third of a percent. Well within normal shipping loss.”
And she’d got the number right. Mystery after mystery was wrapped around his Cockney sparrow. He was going to enjoy unwrapping them.
She yawned and leaned back against the bulkhead. “I should go home and feed Kedger. Pitney does it if he remembers. But he doesn’t like Kedger. Not really.”
Kedger would be her dog, or a cat. Women liked pets. Maybe when he came home from sea, Jess would be sitting waiting for him with a cat in her lap. Hell, if she didn’t have a cat, he’d buy her one. He liked cats. “Kedger will be fine. Stay with me.”
She was brooding, holding the glass in both hands and looking at the brandy instead of drinking it. “I hate going back to the rooms when Papa’s not there.”
When he sat down next to her, she’d already forgotten to be afraid of him. He cupped her cheek, turning her till he had her whole attention. “Stay with me, Jess. It’s cold out there, and it’s dark, and it’s raining.” In the rookeries, five or six men were waiting for her, hoping for a quiet minute to bash her over the head.
“It is raining.”
“And you’re drunk as a wheelbarrow. Getting there, anyway. ”
“I’m drunk?”
“Three sheets to the wind, as we say at sea. Let’s finish the job.” He tipped up the bottom of her glass and made her drink, hurrying her through the rest of it, getting the medicine into her before she fell asleep. “That’s right. Last drop.”
“Drunk?” She let him have the empty glass. “I can’t think anyway, so it probably doesn’t make much difference. You would not believe how strange it is inside my head.”
“Why don’t you relax and enjoy it.”
“I don’t do that sort of thing. Get drunk, I mean. I’m a very serious person.”
She was a serious person in danger of rolling off the bed in a few minutes, all boneless and relaxed.
She watched him set the glass away on the table. Her topaz-colored gaze was beginning to shift out of focus. “Papa said not to do anything daft. But I think I did.” She frowned. “You ever catch fish in a pool, Captain? The way they dart off when you go after them. It’s like that, trying to remember. There’s something I have to do.”
“Let the fish be for a while. You’ll remember in the morning. ” All that brandy in her, and she was still rummaging through her mind, worried as a conscientious clerk with a misplaced invoice. It was a stubborn woman he had naked in his bed tonight. But she didn’t object when he gathered her together and laid her down on the pillows. Didn’t object when he stroked her hair and the back of her neck. He watched her thoughts dissolve like snow melting off a roof. After a while, her fingers uncurled their grip on the blanket. The gold locket slipped to nestle between her breasts. Her truly excellent breasts.
“You have lots of women, Captain? You look like somebody who’s had lots of them.” Her voice was dreamy. She was already lost in what he was doing to her face and her neck.
None like you. Never anyone like you. “Not so many. A sailor can go without when he needs to. I don’t grab, if that’s what you mean. I ask. Tonight I won’t even ask. Are you warm enough? I can get another blanket.”
“What? Oh, yes. Toast. Be warm in a snowdrift with you doing that to me.”
He leaned over her, looking down, admiring the golden woman he had, half-asleep, in his bed. She put her hand up between them, not pushing him away, just touching him with sleepy curiosity. Accepting him. Her eyelids fluttered when he touched his lips between them and kissed her forehead. She closed her eyes then, for him. It was the first in a long line of surrenders sh
e’d make, and never realize she was making.
He set his lips to her eyelids, breathing across skin tender as flower petals, step by step seducing his professional pickpocket.
This was the beginning for the two of them. Strange, how sure he was of that. Two hours after plucking her out of the mist on Katherine Lane he felt an irrational sense of possession. It was as if the tide had washed her ashore at his feet. He was going to immerse himself in the slow-spun pleasure of winning and loving this woman. He could see the years he’d spend with her stretching out into the future.
“Maybe I’ll go to sleep.” Her voice closed around him in velvet. That was how she’d feel when he was inside her. When she surrounded him. Like velvet.
She was already his Jess, even if he was the only one who knew it. He intended to hold on to her. Tomorrow, he’d track down that careless father of hers and get her away from him. Or find her pimp. Whoever she belonged to. There’d be no more dangerous work for her, out in the cold, picking pockets for that shadowy brute with the lead pipe. Whoever it was who ran her, he’d threaten them or bargain with them or pay them off. Her price didn’t matter. He was a rich man.
Then he’d seduce her into his bed. That would be the voyage of a lifetime, raising her sails to the wind, pulling the lines taut, one by one. She’d started out already, traveling with him.
Within a week he’d have her sweaty under him, not a stitch on her, begging and incoherent. He promised it to himself. She’d open to him like some exotic fruit, achingly tart and sweet, and he’d worship all the length of that sleek body. When she was ready for him, he’d slip inside and explode into her.
He had plenty of time to entice and lure her. He’d be fixed in London a while, seeing to the hanging of Josiah Whitby.
Four
HE LAY BESIDE HER FOR A LONG TIME, KEEPING her covered, watching her sleep. She sprawled with a limp, defenseless abandon he found incredibly touching. He wanted her asleep beside him, like this, tonight and tomorrow and for an endless string of nights in the future. This was no girl for a quick tumble. When a man found a mistress like this, he kept her. Maybe he kept her life long.
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