by Lara Archer
She’d given him a shield here, if he chose to take it. He needed her, desperately, but she was letting him make this a game. Make it about poetry. Make it about teaching her what she wanted to know. It was just enough to hold him together. He withdrew his mouth from hers, whispered in her ear, “What lesson do you wish to learn, ma nonnette? What shall I teach you today?”
“Everything,” she whispered back. She was trying to move her body against his, though she could scarcely budge with his legs pinning her skirts.
To help her, he reached down for her hem. He lifted his weight just enough to bring the fabric upwards. His fingers trailed along her stockings as he did, relishing the feel of the silk. “I will teach you something men like. Men dream of doing this—undressing a woman. Discovering the mystery beneath. The best courtesans know it, and dress accordingly.”
It felt ridiculous, to speak like this, so coolly, when his heart was so achingly full.
“This is your first lesson,” he murmured. “Men are remarkably simple creatures. Seeing a woman’s flesh revealed inch by inch is enough to drive us mad. All the other pleasures are magnified if this part of love play is good.”
“Mmm,” was all she said. She was stretched out along his coverlet, looking rosy and pliant, her green eyes darkening.
His blood raced, heating him as though it were midsummer. In truth, he didn’t want to go slowly. He wanted her naked, now, and beneath him.
But this was new to her. He couldn’t rush.
“Undo your hair,” he said. “And spread it out across the pillow. I’ve been waiting a very long time to see that.”
She reached behind her to pull out her tortoiseshell combs, and her rich auburn curls tumbled about her. He wanted to bury his face in them. How beautiful she was.
Sitting up so he could touch her where he willed, he stroked his hands slowly up her calves, savoring each inch. “Lovely.” He slid his hand to the sensitive place in back of her knee, and then up the inner curve of her thigh, and she jerked against his hand with the shock of it. He found the top of one stocking and deftly undid the ribbon. “It’s like unwrapping a gift. Though it can also be delightful if the lady helps.”
“How?” she breathed. “Can I undress you?”
“If you like. In a little while. But for now I should prefer to watch you roll down your stockings.” His breathing deepened, and so did hers. “Slowly.”
She blushed, but she slid her fingers beneath her skirts. He caught at the hem and held it to keep her skirt from hiking up all the way. “Don’t show too much at once,” he cautioned. “One secret at a time. Your knee is a treasure worth revealing on its own, worth a purse of gold.” He bent to press a kiss to it. “More than gold. You can make a man promise you anything.”
She blushed more prettily. And then with an unpracticed but graceful motion, she slid the silk of her stocking slowly down. The skin she revealed was lovelier than silk, glowing and ripe. As she worked her other stocking down, she cast a meaningful glance at his torso. “Take off your jacket,” she said, her voice sultry.
His body pulsed at the sound of her words, and he obeyed her willingly. It was all he could do not to tear his shirt and his trousers off at the same time. “You’re sure you’ve never undressed yourself for a man before?” he joked.
“Never. You were the one who undid my garments before.”
He swallowed hard. “I remember very well.” He knew that, of course. Knew how innocent she still was at the core. And yet he was utterly enraptured by her. Worse than enraptured. Desire heated him, but something more pulled on him. A need like he’d never known—to have her here, to keep her here.
Somehow, the dark empty places in him needed her. Something flowed from her that was like a balm to him.
He could lose himself completely if he wasn’t careful.
He made himself focus on the technicalities of what they were doing. On the physical only. He was skilled at that—he knew how to play a woman like a pianoforte. So he stroked his hand along the length of her bared leg, and her back arched. Damnation. Unable to resist, he ran his hand up over her bodice, from the flat of her belly to the sleek rise of the underside of her breast.
She arched further, and made a sound like a purr.
He stretched himself out over her again, laying between her legs but supporting himself with his elbows and knees so their bodies weren’t quite touching. He laid his mouth to the swell of her breasts just above the neck of her gown. “And this,” he said, trailing kisses over one satiny curve, “is worth more than diamonds and pearls. A pasha would bankrupt his treasury for it.”
She gave a low laugh. “Should I be asking you for jewels now?”
“A true courtesan would have a king’s ransom.”
“Then give me a king’s ransom, marquess.”
In response, he tugged at the sleeve of her gown until it moved down over her shoulder, then lower, until it exposed the full swell of her breast. It thrilled him to see it in the sunlight, more beautiful than he could have imagined, more luminous, like mother-of-pearl. He fitted his mouth to the rosy nub, suckling, and she cried out.
He moved to the other breast and did the same, and she stopped talking of jewels.
She was panting, and her head was thrown back. He thought perhaps she had already gone beyond the point of talking, but after a few moments she drew herself up on her own elbows and asked with a charming earnestness, “Can I touch you now, too? You haven’t given me much opportunity for that before.”
Oh, God. “Please.”
She gave him a push on his chest so he sat almost upright. With trembling fingers, she loosened his neckcloth and stock, and spread her fingers across his throat, stroking along the line of his pulse. “You’re golden. Golden everywhere. Take off your shirt again.”
“Again?”
“Yes,” she said. “Like you did when we left Corunna. When we were in the woods.”
“When we were . . . good Lord, were you ogling me then, wench?”
“Yes,” she said, tugging the hem of his shirt from his trousers and urging the whole thing up and over his head with a speed that was likely to burst the seams. “When I wasn’t tending to you like a ministering angel.”
He found himself smiling. “You were a ministering angel. You have always been one.” Oh, Lord, this was not the path their conversation should be taking.
Her palms were skimming over his torso, driving his blood to a pounding roar. She bent her head to feather kisses across his chest.
He groaned.
Where the calm that usually filled him when he was with a woman?
His hands found their way beneath her skirts again, and drew the fabric up towards her thighs. He felt the heat of her as he stroked his fingers through her V of curls.
“Lay back,” he urged her, and slid his fingers down along the silken folds between her legs, pressing just enough to catch the edge of the moisture there. “And this treasure,” he told her, as he lowered his head to kiss along her thighs, “should not be traded for less than a kingdom.”
The scent of her was intoxicating—lavender and musk and the tang of salt. He nuzzled her with his mouth and she nearly arched off the bed. He slid two fingers inside her sheath. She was blazing hot, and slick, and every instinct was driving him to be done with all this play and mount her. “I was wrong before,” he sighed. “This you shouldn’t trade for less than planets and stars.”
“Sebastian,” she insisted, putting her hands to his shoulders and trying to draw him upwards and on top of her. “Come here.”
When he didn’t comply, she wriggled her way to sitting again, drawing herself away from his mouth and hands. Her palm slid along his belly and down, cupping him through his trousers. “Take these off.”
The way she was looking at him, all desire, and yet all gentleness at the same time. Pure acceptance. She should hate him, revile him, but she didn’t. She wanted him.
He couldn’t lie to himself—what drove him now
had nothing to do with the mission.
She felt like life itself, the gift of life. Forgiveness. She pressed herself to him, her torso against his, and he felt every inch of the softness and warmth of her skin. It was too much, overwhelming—he burrowed his face into her hair and clutched her to him. His hands stilled. He would be weeping in a moment if he didn’t recover himself. Words were pushing their way up from his throat, words he could never take back.
Desperately as he wanted her, as long as he’d waited for this, he made himself pause, made himself stop and think. Did he have any right to this? Any right to take so much from her?
It was one thing to admit his heart was still a living thing, and another to claim ownership of hers. If they managed to survive what was coming in the next few days, she might want to start her life over, start fresh. And if he took her innocence now, he’d be stealing that opportunity from her.
She must have sensed the change in him. She pulled back suddenly, and she was watching him, looking confused. “Sebastian?” she asked tentatively. “Are you all right? Have I done something wrong?”
“No, sweetheart. Just be still a moment.” He held her against him, not allowing either one of them to move. He tried to clear his mind, to bring cool reason back.
I’m supposed to protect her, he found himself thinking. I’m supposed to keep her safe. And in his mind’s eye, he saw the image of her again at the Baronesa de Talandrina’s, standing with her back to him as Victoire de Laurent pointed a pistol her chest.
His breath hitched in remembered fear.
I have to keep her safe.
And then it was as if someone had clapped a pair of cymbals in the middle of his brain. The memory crystallized, focusing on Victoire’s face as she looked in frightened amazement at the woman she thought was Sal, the woman she believed was dead.
Damn it—how had he not realized this before?. Victoire was frightened, and Victoire was surprised.
She hadn’t known Sal was coming.
Good God. Whoever it was had sent the French warship after the Calliope, it wasn’t Victoire de Laurent. They had another enemy, and he’d let himself become too distracted by his feelings for Rachel to put the pieces together.
And if that enemy had tried to kill Rachel once before . . .
He pushed Rachel away from him now. “I’m sorry,” he said roughly. He rose to his feet. The cooler air seemed to scrape against his skin.
Rachel sat up, a look of shock and hurt on her face. “Sebastian?”
He reached out to tug her jumbled skirts back to her ankles, and yanked her bodice back up over her bosom.
She’d given him a shield, and he’d damned well use it to protect her.
He couldn’t afford to let desire muddle his thinking anymore. He made himself as icy and heartless as he knew how to be.
“Go to your own room, love,” he said, taking her arm to lift her from the bed. “And I’ll stay in mine. You know everything you need to know already to drive a man to madness. There’s nothing more you need from me.”
Chapter Seventeen
Rachel snatched up a book from Sarah’s shelf at random, just to clutch it to her chest. She threw herself on the bed and drew up a heavy quilt. She wanted, needed, weight pressing down upon her, to quell the sensation that she was splitting apart at the seams.
With what Sebastian had confessed to her, she had the last piece of the puzzle of Sal’s life, and her death. It was like in childhood, probing the gap of a lost tooth with her tongue. Sore, but also a relief. The jagged pain was gone, and healing could begin.
She was grateful to know it.
It was what happened after their conversation that truly left her raw and hurting.
Her body still throbbed and ached with desire—her skin burned where the faint traces of Sebastian’s whiskers had rasped against her skin.
Her heart felt like it had been kicked.
She’d felt such an aching well of tenderness towards him for what he’d gone through, thinking himself to blame for Sarah’s death. And he’d caressed her and kissed her as though she were the only thing that mattered, as though she were his one hope of survival.
And then he’d booted her out.
Tossed her from the room like a—like a meal he’d found over-salted.
Like she was nothing.
Like the light she seen in his eyes as he looked at her had been no more substantial than a will-o-the-wisp.
But what else should she have expected from Lord Gargoyle?
What use was she here in Vigo anyway? In all the days since she’d left Lancashire, what had she accomplished? She’d fooled one or two silly aristocrats into believing her sister still lived, and she’d driven Victoire de Laurent back into hiding.
Useless. She was useless, just as Sebastian had judged her when he first set eyes on her.
Unless, of course, she could find the notebook Sarah had stolen from Victoire de Laurent.
The thought of it was like finding a patch of dry and solid ground on an icy road, as if she found some unexpected footing and had control of herself once more.
She sat up and cast her gaze around the room. Sebastian said this room had been carefully searched after Sarah’s death. Nothing had been found. That didn’t mean nothing was here—Sarah had been good at lying, good at hiding things. Perhaps it could be found by someone who knew Sarah’s mind, whose mind worked like hers.
In a room full of books, someone might have missed something.
Systematically, Rachel began to remove volumes from the shelves, running her thumb over the pages to fan them, looking for any signs of cryptographic writing. Nearly every book had Sarah’s commentary inked in the margins, in a variety of languages, but except for what was in Greek, most of it was in Roman letters, or in that simple cipher she and Sarah had used back home.
After an hour, piles of books heaped the floor.
Exhaustion and despair were getting the better of her, when suddenly she opened a volume of Tacitus that had been tucked behind a row of other Latin texts, and her heart jumped: these pages had strange strings of symbols along the margins—not Greek or Roman letters, and not their familiar childhood cipher either.
Whatever it was, the writing had the look of Sarah’s hand, in her favorite blue ink. Rachel carried the book under the lamp that glowed on the desk and drew it up close to her eyes to examine the details. A few of the symbols looked similar to ones from the ciphering games she and Sarah played as girls, though they weren’t identical. Almost surely Sarah’s invention, then, not something she’d stolen from the French.
Rachel counted: 23 distinct symbols, the same number as the classical Latin alphabet. Latin notes, then? With some simple substitution of symbols for letters? A cross for L, perhaps, or a circle within a circle for D?
Nothing she was trying to hide from a serious enemy, then. But perhaps it was something.
The trick to breaking such a cipher was to notice frequency, and order. Mr. Rapson had taught them the method, all those years ago. The most common letters in Latin were E, I, T, and A, most often as the second or last letter of a word. M or S also ended many words, but no Latin words ended with F, Q, H, G, Y, Z or P. Infrequent symbols were likely to be rare letters—D or B. And certain combinations would occur frequently: US, ENT, TIS, IUM. A little time, a little guesswork, and process of elimination were usually all it took.
She let her eyes run over the page. The Tacitus markings included many instances of an s-shaped swirl with a line looping back through the middle, rather like a treble clef.
A good candidate for E, I. or T.
Better still, a particular cluster of letters—seven characters long—appeared several times, and twice on one page. A thrill shot through her. The word had none of the treble-clefs. But another symbol, a circle topped by a line, came both first and third-to-last, and appeared several other times on the page as well.
The second letter and final symbols were also high-frequency, perhaps E or A, but t
he second-to-last letter—a sort of sideways lightning bolt—appeared only one other time on the page. Perhaps a C or an X, especially if that last letter was in fact E.
Or a U, if the last letter was an S.
And then the word simply came to her, as though her eyes found the right focus: Tacitus.
Simple as that: the repeated word was Tacitus.
Of course—Sarah had been commenting on what Tacitus was saying in the book.
Rachel fell back on the floor, half-laughing, hugging the book to her chest.
She had it then. Taking up a blank piece of paper and a lead pencil, she set to work. A little trial and error, and soon she’d be able to decipher the rest.
When she broke this cipher, perhaps it would reveal nothing more than Sarah’s critique of Tacitus’ account of the military campaigns of the Huns. Hardly the key to a stunning victory over Napoleon.
But at least it felt like progress.
* * *
Sebastian lay on his bed, cursing himself, watching the trail of the sun crawl across his wall.
He was a fool, a hundred times over.
Blinded by emotion, he’d missed the critical proof that someone besides Victoire de Laurent was on the hunt for them. He’d put Rachel in more danger than ever. How stupid, how selfish, how . . . weak.
Telling her what he’d told her about Sal’s death was something he’d needed to do; he’d owed her that, and he still had his own penance to pay. But even without that secret hanging between them, he had no business trying to claim her body more than he had already, and he certainly had no right to claim her affections. Hadn’t he sworn that since the very beginning of this business? If he got her out alive, he’d get her out without the burden of any entanglement with him. She deserved the possibility of a future—the future he’d cost Sal.
She’d just taken him by surprise, listening to his confession with such gentleness, such compassion. He’d disgorged this awful, dark, heavy truth, and she hadn’t shied away. Hadn’t blamed him, or hated him. She’d taken his hands, and kissed him, and offered herself so willingly. An ache went through him now that had nothing to do with his body.