Touch of a Thief

by Mia Marlowe

  Quinn was apparently the sort to rush in where angels fear to tread. He didn’t heed the warning sign she was sure must be affixed to her forehead.

  “After the first one, another bed partner more or less”—he sopped up the gravy from his pie with the bread—“doesn’t do any further damage.”

  “Then you think I’m damaged.”

  “I didn’t say that.” He looked up sharply and seemed to suddenly realize he teetered on the edge of a verbal precipice. She could almost see him dig in his heels to keep from tumbling off. He dragged a hand through his dark hair. “I think we’re all damaged, one way or another. Some types are just easier to guess at than others.”

  “Really.” She laid her fork aside. “How are you damaged, Quinn?”

  He refilled his wineglass and drained it in one long gulp. “I find excessive conversation interferes with digestion, don’t you?”

  “Not particularly.” She popped the bite of pie into her mouth. Now that she had him on the defensive, she found she could eat the food before her with relish. “Would you like me to guess?”

  When he didn’t answer, she plowed ahead.

  “Since you seem to intensely dislike your sire, I can only assume something happened with your father. A secret. Something no one else knows.” She tried the cheese and found it sharp and crumbly, just as she liked it. “But you know. And it’s eating you up.”

  Quinn pulled his napkin from his neck and dropped it across his plate. He pushed back from the table and stood. “I typically take a walk after the evening meal. Please do not feel the need to wait up. If you will excuse me—”

  “No, Quinn, I won’t. I won’t excuse you. Why do you expect me to share your bed if you won’t share the least bit of yourself with me?”

  He gave a puzzled shake of his head. “If we shared a bed, you may be certain I would share myself.”

  “Your body, perhaps.” She rose to her feet. “But that’s not all there is to you.”

  “You’re muddying the issue,” Quinn said. “I suppose I can’t blame you, given your history with that cad. He never should have given you those expectations.”

  “So you imagine I would bed you with no expectations?”

  “Of course not.” He came around to her side of the table and looked down at her. “You should expect pleasure.”

  He lifted a lock of her hair to his lips and kissed it. “Reams of pleasure.”

  His fingertips brushed her cheek, traveled down her neck and feathered along the top of her bodice. “Bliss.”

  He circled her nipples with both hands through the velvet and they rose to meet him, aching for his touch. “A full measure of bliss. Abundant. Pressed down and running over.”

  He kissed her, open-mouthed, his tongue making love to hers. One hand left a breast and skimmed over her ribs, past her navel and settled on her sex. Then he slipped his hand through the slit in her robe and cupped her vulva through her thin nightgown.

  Oh, God. He’d feel how wet she was.

  “You should expect ecstasy, Viola,” Quinn said as his fingers stroked her through the silk, leaving a damp spot. “Not once, but many times. You may plead for me to stop, but I haven’t a drop of mercy in me. I’ll drive you to joy till you’re screaming my name. What do you say? Shall I take you there?”

  She closed her eyes, aching to let him. He kissed her again and began hitching her nightgown higher. When his hand slipped under her hem and his fingers invaded her, it took every ounce of strength she possessed to grasp his wrist.

  “No,” she whispered.

  He flicked a fingertip over her sensitive spot and she shuddered.

  “No.” She pushed against his chest. “I can’t do this. Not without knowing who you are.”

  “You knew who your fiancé was, didn’t you?” He removed his hand and let her nightgown’s hem billow to her feet. “By your own admission that didn’t end well.”

  “No, as it turns out, I didn’t know Neville at all. And I will not make the same mistake with you.”

  “I have no intention of marrying, so I wouldn’t offer you a false promise,” Quinn said.

  “I don’t need a promise. I just need honesty.”

  “What’s more honest than this?”

  “Nothing if you think we are no more than what we can see. You won’t offer me yourself. Only your body.” She ran her hands across his shoulders and down his arms. “Magnificent as you are, tempting as you are, that’s not enough.”

  That wall she’d seen behind his eyes once before rose up afresh. He turned and stalked out the door.

  CHAPTER 6

  Quinn feared he was doomed to a state of perpetual erection. He made six circuits of the ship’s rail before his blood started to cool and his body finally settled. He leaned on the gunwale and watched whitecaps flick over the black sea, brief flashes of silver in the moonlight.

  “Your dinner was unsatisfactory, sahib?”

  “The meal was fine, Sanjay.”

  “But you and the memsahib are not—”

  “No, we’re not.”

  “Good. When a man takes a woman he cannot trust to his bed, it is like taking fire to his bosom.” Sanjay leaned on the rail beside him. “The Lady Viola is lovely. A most tempting armful, as you Angrezi say. You have done well to show such restraint, my friend.”

  “The restraint is not my doing.”

  “Hmph.” Sanjay made a noise of surprise. “The lady is a thief. Such a one has many tricks up her lacy sleeve. I was sure she would use her body to distract you from our purpose, but perhaps she has another plan.”

  She does, Quinn thought ruefully. A plan to know him, God help him.

  With Padmaa, it had all seemed so simple. A man and a woman’s bodies were designed to give each other pleasure. Why did women, Western women in any case, have to make a physical relationship so complicated?

  “If she manages to pass in your London society as a lady, she is no stranger to deception,” Sanjay said. “Baaghh kaa kkhuun exerts much influence over those whose minds are already open to dark forces. Such a one will easily succumb to its power.”

  Oh, Lord, not the evil diamond diatribe again. Once he started on that saga of gloom and doom, Sanjay would put the chorus of a Greek tragedy to shame.

  “Didn’t you just hear me say the lady is not the succumbing type?”

  Sanjay shook his head. “You misunderstand me. She may well resist your charm, sahib. But you do not have the weight of thousands of years behind your seduction. The diamond tempts people with what they want most. It senses a person’s need and feeds it until they are powerless to resist.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Quinn had lived in India long enough to realize that Asiatics didn’t share Englishmen’s high regard for the truth. They considered truth a dangerous commodity, not one to be broadcast about like a handful of seeds. Why divulge the truth if a lie will serve, a holy man had told him once.

  So a number of lies and legends had sprung up about Baaghh kaa kkhuun.

  It drove men mad, Sanjay claimed. Hundreds of years ago, the man who gave the stone its original rose-style cut would only handle it long enough to make one strike every seven days and even so, he was drooling and hearing voices of the dead by the time he chipped away the last bit.

  “It will drain a man’s life force if he does not break free of it,” Sanjay said.

  “Hokum.” The word escaped Quinn’s lips before he realized it had formed on his tongue. He sighed. “I mean no disrespect but—”

  “You do not believe,” Sanjay finished for him. “Whether you believe it or not, the red diamond’s history is a bloody one. It has incited murder. War, even. Some say that is how it came by its color in the first place.”

  “If that were true, why has the East India Company never heard of these killings?”

  Quinn would’ve put a stop to them. He was proud of the way he and the men under his command imposed order and made the streets of India safer. They worked to stop thuggery and put an end to t
he hateful practice of suttee, the custom of burning a man’s living widow with his corpse. Using the excuse that a red diamond incited one to commit murder would get short shrift in an English court.

  “You think because a white man doesn’t know a thing, it hasn’t happened?” Sanjay cast him a sidelong glance. “For many lifetimes, Baaghh kaa kkhuun rested safe in the eye of Shiva, its evil quiet.”

  Then the Thugs stole it for some reason. Several of them would never steal again thanks to him and Sanjay. “Are you trying to tell me the diamond compelled them to steal it?”

  “No, but did you never wonder why those Thugs gave it up to the British so easily?” Sanjay asked.

  “They gave it up for a serious amount of money.”

  “Beshak. Of course,” he amended. Sanjay always tried to speak English to Quinn instead of reverting to his native Hindi. “They had to take the Angrezi money to avert suspicion. But the real reason they gave the diamond to your viceroy was so he would send it to your Queen. Once Baaghh kaa kkhuun resides in the royal treasury, it will call to her, as it calls to all people of power. Your Queen will demand to wear it always and it will destroy her. The Thugs have taken to heart the old proverb, you see.”

  “Which proverb is that? A wise man knows jewelry always fits?”

  “No.” Sanjay lifted a dark brow at him. “To kill a serpent, one must strike the head.”

  Despite the fact that Sanjay compared the queen’s empire to a snake, Quinn preferred that scheme to get rid of the British in India over the fakirs’ cries for the sepoys to mutiny. A new bauble in the royal vault seemed unlikely to result in any actual bloodshed. If the sepoys revolted, hundreds, maybe thousands, would die before order was restored. The return of the red diamond to its rightful place might be all that was needed to show good faith and keep the sepoys from listening to the fakirs.

  “Well then, if Baaghh kaa kkhuun is so dangerous to the touch, I’ll make sure Lady Viola wears gloves when she pinches it,” Quinn said.

  Sanjay nodded approvingly. “Now you understand, sahib. But since she is a thief, I do not know if gloves will be sufficient. Did you not hear what happened to the thug who dug the diamond out of Shiva?”

  Quinn shook his head.

  “Even though he had wrapped it in cloth, he would not release the diamond”—Sanjay’s fist clutched tight in demonstration—“so his friends cut off his hand.”

  “So they could sell it. Blood-thirsty bastards.”

  “No, they did it to save his life. He could not release it. The diamond was feeding on his heart.”

  Quinn didn’t believe a word of it, but a superstitious shudder passed over him.

  “I will see what else may be done to protect Lady Viola from the jewel’s malevolence,” Sanjay promised. A sailor passed close by them, so Sanjay adopted a more correctly deferential posture. “Shall I clear your dinner away, sahib?”

  “Yes.” Quinn turned back to the pitching sea. “And while you’re at it, see if there’s a spare hammock you can string up in the cabin for me. Even if Lady Viola were willing, that bunk is pretty narrow.” Nevertheless, Quinn envisioned several positions from the Kama Sutra that would allow them to share the small space quite happily. “But since she’s not willing, it seems I need other sleeping arrangements.”

  Quinn waited another half hour before heading for the cabin. He wanted to give Sanjay time enough to clear out. The space was small enough for two people. Three made it difficult to draw breath.

  The companionway was dark and he forgot how low the beams were in places until he smacked his forehead on one. He walked the rest of the way in a half crouch, hand on his head, till he reached the cabin door.

  No light showed through the crack under the door.

  He pushed his way in, pleased to find the porthole provided enough starlight for him to make out the placement of the table, his swinging hammock and the curved form of the woman on the bunk.

  Viola had turned her face to the wall, a sure sign she didn’t welcome either his attentions or his conversation. He doubted she was asleep, but she didn’t stir as he moved past her to his hammock.

  She’d braided her hair into one long plait. It draped across her pillow and hung off the side of the bunk. He narrowly resisted giving it a playful tug. She wouldn’t appreciate it.

  He stripped out of his clothing. He always slept in the nude and didn’t see the point in altering his habits to please a woman who wouldn’t be pleased no matter what he did. Quinn wrapped his blanket around himself and climbed into the hammock, sighing as it settled into a gentle rocking motion that matched the waves beyond the porthole.

  Still, she said nothing. Didn’t twitch so much as a shoulder blade.

  He wished the sound of her gentle breathing didn’t go straight to his cock. Or maybe it was her scent, warm and clean with an undertone of musk. Perhaps it was that braid swinging in the dark that made his groin ache.

  “A woman can please a man with her hair in a number of ways,” Padmaa had explained as she loosened her long tresses and dragged them over his prone form. The gleaming black hair was like the caress of a thousand tiny fingers on his skin and left a shiver in its wake.

  But Quinn wasn’t thinking about Padmaa’s jet-colored mane. He was imagining Viola’s auburn braid. Undone. Spreading over her shoulders like an autumn mantle. Teasing over his groin. Forming a living tent as she bent to kiss him.

  He ached so badly, he suspected he’d never get to sleep.

  Then he had an idea. For one of his lessons with Padmaa, she made him concentrate on synchronizing his breath with hers to make their connection as effortless as possible. He closed his eyes and listened to Viola’s breathing.

  It was a soft sound. He had to strain to catch it over the shushing of the ocean against the ship’s hull, but he managed. Once he’d isolated the sound, it was a small matter to match his own breathing to it.

  In.

  Out.

  In.

  He settled into her rhythm and closed his eyes.

  Her breasts rose and fell slightly as she sat cross-legged before him. Viola’s eyes were blindfolded so he let his gaze travel over her without fear of censure. He didn’t know why the woman couldn’t understand that just looking at her gave him pleasure. At least he didn’t have to worry about her trying to cover herself since she thought his eyes were shielded, too. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

  Her nipples were the color of a ripe peach and just as luscious. His gaze traveled down her bare body, past her navel to where her yoni was scantily covered with auburn curls. Her slit was pink and glistening. He could smell her, musky and sweet. He ached to rub his face between her thighs, drunk on her scent.

  But it wasn’t time yet.

  “Like this, Quinn?”

  “Exactly,” he said, reminding himself to breathe. That was the whole point. Joined breath led to joined bodies.

  His lingam stood stiff as a pole.

  “Now we match each other, stroke for stroke.” He reached forward, purposely missing the breast that was his goal, and caressed her collarbone instead. “If I use my right hand, you use yours as well so we mirror each other.”

  She reached for him. Her fingertips danced along his sternum and then brushed the hairs whorling around his nipple. He took it as his cue to move down to torment her breast, circling her nipple till gooseflesh rose around it before he took the little bud between his thumb and forefinger and squeezed.

  A small gasp escaped her lips.

  “Did you like that?” He rolled her taut nipple between his fingers.

  “Oh, yes.”

  He dragged his knuckles over that needy flesh. He flicked it with his fingernail. He tugged it gently. She tried to duplicate the motions on him, but her movements were disjointed. It was clear she was too distracted by her own need to focus on the exercise.

  That was fine with him. He was happy to fan the flames till she erupted in a fireball. He leaned forward and used his mouth. Kissing
her breasts. Licking. Sucking. Nipping.

  “I can’t . . . can’t do that to you at the same time,” she gasped.

  “That’s fine,” he murmured as he cupped both breasts and nuzzled between them. “We’ll take turns.”

  As if he’d play as fair as that.

  While he suckled her, he let his hand drift down over her belly. He teased her curls and smoothed his fingertips over the tender skin of her inner thigh.

  She drew a ragged breath.

  Then he explored her delicate folds. So slick and wet. Her “little pearl” had risen to be stroked and he found the nub of flesh easily.

  Her body jerked in surprise.

  “Don’t you like that?” he asked, all innocence as he circled the sensitive spot. Her mouth went slack.

  “Like it?” she gasped. “I may never let you stop.”

  As if he would.

  To his surprise, she put out her hand and searched blindly along his body, her fingertips skimming his belly, then grasping his erect penis. She wrapped her fingers around him and smoothed her palm over his length from root to tip. His balls clenched.

  She explored the head, and discovered the patch of rough skin at its base. His breath hissed over his teeth.

  “Like that, do you?” she asked slyly.

  “I may never let you stop.”

  A pearl of fluid formed at the tip and he feared he might lose control. Time for a shift in position to distract himself.

  He leaned over to kiss her lips again, lifting her at the waist and depositing her on his lap. She wrapped her legs around him and pressed her body from breast to groin against his. Soft and pliant, she was everything he imagined when he thought woman.

  His lingam stood upright between her wet folds. He matched her breath and felt her heart pounding between her legs, throbbing around him. If he didn’t want a fountain to erupt between them, he needed to enter her now.

  He lifted her again, positioning her above him so he could impale her by finger widths, drawing out their torment. The tip of him slid into her yoni. He narrowly restrained himself from driving in his full length in a single quick stroke.