He said, “Good, then. We couldn’t do this if that nubbin between your legs didn’t make you happy.”
One does not speak of such things. “You lack subtlety.”
“I’ll get to it, one of these days. Subtlety. I got a whole list of things I plan to learn.”
He was pulling her shift down her body, and his eyes were deep wells, mysterious and contained. He did no more than brush her skin when he took her last clothes away. So fast. So matter-of-fact. She might have been alone, removing her own clothing, except that she felt his fingers through the cloth.
She was naked. He was naked and aroused. I am not ready for this. I need time to think. I need—
Hawker lifted her from her feet, into his arms. She held on. There was only his skin beneath her hands and pressed to her side and holding her. The world swept by in a rush of confusion. He was the most real of all realities. Alive, solid, unyielding, sure of himself. He was perfectly, absolutely made of strength.
Fear struck through her. Memory of—
He did not carry her to the bed. He kicked the door of the cottage open. They were outside in the light, in the rain, in the sound of wind.
Rain fell into her face, across her breasts and belly, shockingly cold. His body shielded her from the worst of it. Ten paces and they were under the loose cover of tree branches. Under the beech tree that stood in front of his cottage.
“Don’t you dare change your damn mind. Understand me?” He set her to stand and pushed her bare back to the tree. The bark poked long rough lines and ridges against her. Her feet slipped on the cold, soft cushion of moss. She was warm only where their bodies met. Where Hawker was hot and dense against her belly and thighs.
“Close your eyes,” he said. “Do it!”
She closed her eyes.
“Listen.” His voice fell like a stone through the buzz of rain. “What do you hear?”
She heard sharp taps, thousands of them, becoming one muffled note that rose and fell with the wind. The rain rode that wind in sideways to where they sheltered, sneaking under the leaves, pelting Hawker’s bare back that protected her. Little drops worked their way through the leaves above and fell onto her shoulders.
He said again, “What do you hear?”
“I hear a madman who has brought me out to freeze in the rain.”
“You hear rain. It’s making a wall around us. Nobody can get close. We’re alone.” His mouth closed over her mouth. He was heat and flavor and demand. His body was the only warmth in the world. “What do you smell? Tell me.”
He crushed mint, carrying me here. I smell that. And rain. Cool, gray rain that is clean and washes everything away. “I am cold and you are entirely mad.”
“But you’re with me, aren’t you?” Knuckles persuaded her chin upward till her mouth was an inch from his. “Every freezing inch of you is here with me. Kiss me back. It’s your turn.”
Rain slanted in past him and hit her face with little cold darts. Drops slid down her forehead and cheeks, into her mouth.
He said, “Don’t think about it. Just do it.”
When she kissed him, he tasted like rain. She sucked it off his tongue and his teeth. She drank him in. A column of energy built in her body, beginning where their mouths joined, that spun and twisted inside her.
Still kissing, he muttered, “Oh, yes. My God, yes,” and bit down on her lips. Response jerked inside her, pulled her loose of all control. She could feel herself shaking.
“What do I taste like?” he demanded into her mouth. His hands took her breasts, shaping them, gentle, gentle across the nipples. He brushed them with the side of his thumbs and her blood jangled in her veins.
“Rain.” It came out a whisper. It was hard to get her breath. She put her arms around and him and pulled close.
His voice. “Taste me. Be here, with me.”
She tasted soap on his lips and the stubble of his chin. Harsh soap. No perfume. Not like the others. He was compounded of simple flavors—tea, rain, soap, smoke, flame.
Under everything, she smelled Adrian himself. She had not once imagined the smell of his skin. It dragged her to him, like fingers pulling at her skin. She stretched upward and filled her mouth with his hair. Set her teeth into the texture of it and tasted. Sucked the rain from it.
He nuzzled her aside to get to her ear, biting, licking, filling her mind with his breath. “Feel this,” he said. “And this.” Somehow his lips, his teeth, found her breast with its goose bumps and the pucker of cold. So sensitive. He warmed her nipples with his tongue. A hum, deep in his chest, appreciative, vibrated on her there. The words, “So good,” were in there somewhere. The hint of his teeth sent frantic, nervous energy to pluck between her legs.
She squirmed with it. Not away from him. Toward him. His hands spread wide on her ribs, to hold her. His arms hardened to steel. He lifted her off her feet and slowly let her slide against him as he brought her down to earth.
They were slick with the rain, chilled, almost shivering. But there was no cold where they were together. His cock was the center of all that heat, hard and insistent on her belly.
A man. The edges of her nerves flicked and twisted like leaves in a high wind. He was very much a man. He would—
“None of that.” He lifted her upward again. Let her glide with agonizing slowness down the architecture of his body. A thousand shocks pricked where every part of her was against every part of him. Surface to surface. One to the other. Complexities interwoven.
He said, “Look at me. Who am I, Owl? Who’s here with you?”
“’Awker.” His name was a talisman. Hawker did these things to her. Rain fell in her face, washing everything away. All the past. All other hands, other men, all the smudges on her soul. The dark cloud of them dissolved, and the rain carried them away. Ghosts, washed away. Gone. Leaving her clean.
Hawker was real. Nothing else. She gripped her hands on his shoulders and leaned to him. Yes. She opened her legs around him, to hold him to her, to make her warm.
Cold roughness at her back. More kisses to her breasts. She was gasping now. His hands soothed downward over breast and belly till he stroked between her thighs, then upward to the joining of her legs. Skillful and sure, he found the fold there and touched inside. She cried out.
“Just my hand, giving you pleasure. That’s all. You and me. Pour le plaisir.”
Him, touching her. Only pleasure. Dark, secret pleasure, like the night. Dark fire. She rocked against his hand.
“I want to be inside you,” he said. “I can’t hold out much longer. You ready for this?”
Anything. It did not matter, if only he would keep touching her. She nodded once, jerkily.
He slipped his hands around her. Brought her to him. At the end of the long caress of his skin against her skin, he was inside her.
They hurt me there—
He bit down hard on her earlobe, and she lost the thought. Rough bites to her lips tore every dark memory away before it took hold. He was a storm contained in a body. He swept over her. He kissed deep and she whimpered into his mouth, overwhelmed.
He thrust. The pang of it shot through the tension inside her. She was the center of a thousand sensations. Shock upon shock as he eased outward. Entered again slowly. Fully.
He was still talking to her. She didn’t try to understand the words, only heard the tone of his voice. Determined. Unrelenting. His hand found her. Was between them. Caressed, so softly, so skillfully, rhythmic, following her as she twisted and gasped.
Faster now, he thrust deep, driving against her. She tried to climb him, while her legs slipped and slid on his thigh. She throbbed and could not escape, she was so unbearably open. Did not want to escape. Offered herself and gloried in it. Heat swept through her, down every pathway of her body, sweeping decision and fear ahead of it.
She dug her fingers into his back. Opened her mouth and bit his neck. Braced her feet on the ground, arched backward, and drove herself toward what he gave her.
She was seized and tossed by the climax. Grabbed and shaken as by a great fist. Inside, she closed around him again and again, and every time was a new beat of pleasure. She heard herself cry out in a sound like pain.
He was pleasing himself now, with rough, quick thrusts inside her. Absorbed. Drinking his own pleasure. Lost in her.
He has done so much for me.
She gave back to him, as she knew how to do. Rose to reach for him. Took his hair strongly with her fingers and pulled his mouth to hers. Licked, teased, played with his mouth. Used all her knowledge upon him. Gloried that she knew so much.
Below, she clenched herself around him, where he was within her. Squeezed him tightly. She knew the muscles to use. Had practiced and practiced. She contracted against the hardness inside her.
This, she could give him. This, she knew how to do.
But this time it was no indifferent service. This was beyond words different from anything before. She had not known, could not have imagined, how the tension twisted and exploded. Joy came from everywhere and gathered there, where she held him. She tightened and tightened and felt him move and was struck with ecstasy. Breathless with it. Dizzy.
He was no careful and controlled expert. Not any longer. He had become wild, pounding into her. He was beyond thought. Mad. Consumed. A cry rasped in and out of his throat. His body shocked and stiffened.
His last thrust withdrew. She felt him shudder in her arms and spill himself against her thigh.
They held each other. While he shook. While she trembled and her bones melted and she let her head fall to his chest. While he gasped into her hair.
His grip opened and closed on her shoulders. It was long minutes before he spoke. “Well. That was . . . That was very good.” His voice was gritty. Hoarse.
She did not want to open her eyes. She was crying. She could not imagine why she was crying. “I will not tell you . . . You are conceited enough.” Then she said, “It was good. I didn’t know it would be that good.”
“Me neither. Joke’s on us, innit?” He breathed heavily. “Let’s get inside before you catch an ague.”
“Yes. That is wise.”
“We’ll see how we do in bed.” He did not make her walk back to the cottage in her bare feet. He carried her in his arms while it rained down on them, hard, every step of the front path back to the door. She became cold, as well as filled with amazement.
He dried them both in front of the fire. They made love in bed, very slowly, and it worked there too. He had the most skillful and amazing mouth.
Twenty-two
1818
Meeks Street, London
SHE WAS IN HAWKER’S ARMS. SHE KNEW THAT before she knew where she was. It was rare and important, being with him.
Even now, after so many years, she dreamed of him. Sometimes, when she first woke up, she’d think he was with her. She’d feel his arm under her head, his body naked beside her. Then the day would come and wash dreams away. Then it was not his arm under her. It was a pillow. It was not his body. It was the rolled and tumbled blanket. Time after time, she slid out of a dream and she was alone, but for an instant, the bed smelled of him.
This time, it wasn’t a dream.
She lay awake for a time before she opened her eyes, hurting and vaguely angry about it.
She was in bed, in a quiet room, under a soft blanket, held by Hawker. She glided back to consciousness, riding the currents of that certainty. She was with Hawker, so she was safe. In all the world, there was no flesh, no bone, no sound of breathing she would mistake for Hawker’s.
“I can tell when you’re awake,” he said.
Her mouth was dry. “You always could.”
“A matter of being cautious.” He unwound from her and tucked the blanket into the space he’d emptied. The bed moved. He sat up to lean over and look down at her. “I never quite trusted you, you know, not even when we were closest. I just thought it was worth the risk. You were always worth the risk.”
I was stabbed because I came to warn you. “You do not trust me. Wise.”
“We did well enough, for enemies.” His smile pulled down at the side and didn’t reach his eyes. He shifted his weight, careful not to joggle her. “You’re harmless for the moment. You were about half dead for a while.”
“How long?”
“It’s been three days. A little more.”
So long? She thought of days frittered away, like small coins out of a pocket. Pouring from her mind, like grains of silver. “I don’t remember.”
“Just as well.”
Someone had put her in a night shift. Her left arm was an ache from shoulder to fingers. Under the bandage, she itched. She held her hands up. So heavy. Her joints felt like old iron wheels and gears that had lain abandoned for a long time and were now set moving again, creakily.
Bruises circled her wrists and ran in regimented lines, forearm to elbow. Blue finger marks showed where someone had held her.
“I am bruised.” Events took shape in her mind like shadows in fog. She had been in Braddy Square, trying to get to Hawker, to warn him. She remembered being stabbed. Staggering toward Meeks Street. “Who did I fight?”
“I held you down when you were being sewed up. You objected to that for some reason. And later, when you were out of your head with fever.” He rolled smoothly off the bed and stood over her. “I hurt you doing it. No choice.”
His voice said how little he had liked hurting her.
Oh, Hawker. We have hurt each other so much.
He was unshaven, which always made a ruffian of him. He wore trousers and a loose shirt, open halfway down his chest. She had felt it next to her as she slept, cradling the edge of her dreams—the warmth of him, the creases of the linen of his shirt, the old, familiar comfort of his skin.
He poured from a pitcher to a small cup. “Everybody wants you to drink this. I have seldom encountered such unanimity of opinion. I’m going to slip in next to you and hold it up. You sip out of the side here.”
It was not water, but lemonade. Exactly right. She was very thirsty.
They looked at each other while she drank. He was deeply tired. His face was pared to the bone, to sarcasm and deadliness. He had watched her come very close to death, she thought.
“That’s better.” He eased her down to the pillow again. “You almost slipped away from me. There was one time there, you stopped fighting. I thought it was over.”
“It was not. Not this time.” When she lay still, the pain was not great. There was much to be said for holding still. “Lie beside me, if you would. For comfort. I am in pain and I’m cold.”
“My pleasure, anyway.”
She started to laugh and took the warning her body gave and did not. “The papers? You have them. Important.”
“I have them.” He lifted the blanket and crawled in beside her. So many times, he had done that.
“I will tell you what I saw . . . when I wake up.” One more thing to say. “Do not send for Séverine.” She would come all this long distance and worry about her. “It is unnecessary.”
“Go to sleep, Owl.”
“Do you know? You are the only one in the world . . . who still calls me Owl.”
The darkness was huge and friendly. She would rest in it awhile.
Twenty-three
HAWKER PICKED UP HIS RAZOR. IN THE MIRROR over the dresser, he looked back at himself with hard, steady eyes. A killer’s eyes.
“She’s alive for the next little while.” Alive. Exhausted. Sleeping. Just sleeping. Felicity was watching her.
He’d never got into the habit of using a brush to put soap on his face. Just lathered up between his palms.
“Let’s say there’s two groups. One of them goes poking knives into various Frenchmen. The other is trying to gut Justine. Both of them are mad at me and both hav
e some of my knives handy.” He shook his head. “Not likely.”
No argument from the mirror.
He tried the razor along the hair on his arm. Nicely sharp. He did like a good edge on his steel. Swish his hands in the basin. Pull his skin taut with his thumb and shave the right side. No hurry.
Wipe soap off the razor on a towel. Rinse it in the basin. “Not two groups, then. One. They go after the Frenchmen to frame me. They go after Justine because it’ll hurt me.”
Finish the right side. Wipe the razor down again. “They know me fairly well.”
Now for the left side. “But it’s easier to shoot me one balmy evening. Who’s going to take the time and trouble to be that convoluted and that patient? Who hates me that much?”
One name came to mind.
Shaving’s a meditative business. He did the short, careful strokes under the chin. Always a tricky part.
Wipe the final soap off the razor. Wash the blade.
“Try this. Say Justine’s been collecting my knives for a while. She kills a pair of Frenchmen, planning to lay it on me.” Dry the blade with the clean corner of the towel. “Before she dispatches another hapless French cove, one of her confederates gets peevish and pokes the knife into her.”
Fold the razor. Lay it down beside the bowl. Take a new towel and wash his face. “That gives us one group, with infighting. And Justine behind everything.”
Toss the towel away with the other one.
A long time ago, he’d thought it was special between him and Owl. They were friends, right to the heart. Being enemies didn’t change that. Even when he was staggering around, half dead, with her bullet in his shoulder, he kept thinking they were friends.
His eyes looked back at him, particularly bleak this morning. “Owl won’t stop, you know. She never gives up. If she’s behind this, I’ll wake up one morning with my throat slit.” He fingered his throat. “Because I’m still a damn fool when it comes to that woman.”
No answer to that either.
He strapped on the arm sheath, settled his shoulder harness, checked the knives, and wished he was out in the field where he might get to use them. He was in the mood to confront somebody a good deal more dangerous than Lord Cummings, Head of Military Intelligence.
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