“Only because I hurt your ribs.”
“There’s that.” His voice was grave—too grave, he thought—but she didn’t seem to catch the growing amusement underlying his words. Watching her scowl at him, he had suddenly, absurdly, felt that he had been transported off this worm-eaten vessel into a duchess’s drawing room.
His gaze shifted so that he was staring up at the dark underpanel of the upper bunk some three feet above his head, which he absently noted was dusty and festooned with cobwebs. Frowning, he asked himself: How likely was it that a tart could give an impression like that?
If he didn’t know better, he would almost have believed that her to-the-manner-born dignity was real. That her sweetness was real. That her story—too ridiculous to be even remotely possible—was real.
Did he know better?
She hadn’t pulled the trigger, the letters were not anywhere on her person or among her clothes, and she didn’t kiss like any tart he had ever kissed in his life. She kissed like a wet-behind-the-ears miss.
If she were acting, Mrs. Siddons had best look to her laurels.
On the other hand, she—or rather Sophy Towbridge, in case they should not be one and the same—had managed to plant some doubt in his mind. The identity scales could tip either way.
But then add the clincher: The Venus-faced girl who was even now watching him with clearly growing anxiety out of big, innocent-looking eyes had been at the rendezvous point at the appointed time. The rendezvous point arranged by the hidden web of Boney’s agents in England—his own counterparts—to deliver Sophy Towbridge, and the information she possessed, into the hands of the French.
If she wasn’t Sophy Towbridge, what had she been doing on that beach? And, on a corollary note, where was Sophy Towbridge? The woman could not have just disappeared into the ether.
That was the sticking point. In order to believe the charmer at his side, he had to believe that there were two women, one of whom had unaccountably gone missing while the other one had just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Now, how likely was that?
His head told him: Not likely at all. His senses, which were, of course, possibly clouded by the soft warmth of her pressing against his side, by the big gold eyes with the fluttery lashes that were fixed on his face and the soft pink curve of her lips, which were parted as she breathed, said: Maybe.
Careful, he warned himself. He could not afford to let a consummate actress with the face of an angel and the body of a nymph play him for a fool. There was too much at stake. And not only for himself. For the other British agents in France, and, most important, for England.
“Where did you hide the letters?” he asked almost conversationally, his gaze shifting to consider her. She lay on her side, watching him, her head resting on the bunk’s only pillow, a dingy, lumpy-looking affair, her cheek nestled on one small hand, the blanket wrapped securely around her person.
As he asked the question, he felt her stiffen. The dagger-look she sent him glittered brightly gold with anger.
“Where you’ll never find them,” she said, too sweetly.
Now that was brilliant, he decided, shifting his attention back to the cobwebby panel and considering. That was just exactly what she would say if she was what she claimed to be—a falsely accused innocent with no idea of the gravity of the situation in which she found herself. Her snippy tone conveyed clearly that she wasn’t much afraid of him. Sophy Towbridge might not know who he was, but she would be able to make a fairly accurate guess as to what he was, and she would be mortally afraid, as, indeed, she should be. On the other hand, that saucy little reply might also be what Sophy Towbridge would say if she was guilty as hell, cool as hock, clever as doxies usually weren’t, and desperately trying to convince him that she was innocent.
“Actually, I don’t have your stupid letters,” she said in a sulky tone when he didn’t reply. “For the simple reason that I am not Sophy Towbridge. My name is Claire.”
Claire.
“So you keep telling me, angel eyes,” he said dryly, flicking her an assessing glance. She met his gaze without flinching, and he was almost ready to swear that there was nothing of deception in her countenance.
“Because I keep hoping it will sink in. I should have remembered that very little penetrates solid rock.”
He had to smile at that—being insulted by a woman prisoner as she was lying in bed with him added a whole new chapter to the annals of his career—and as she saw his smile she narrowed her eyes at him.
“I’m glad you’re finding this amusing. I, unfortunately, am not.”
“You should have thought of that before you took up spying.”
She made an inarticulate sound of rage. Instantly mindful of the possibilities, he rolled onto his side, awkwardly because he was being careful of his ribs, and grabbed her hands—clenched into fists as he had known they would be—through the scratchy blanket.
“Ah-ah,” he warned, shaking his head at her.
“Coward,” she replied.
“Damn right.”
She gave him a fulminating look but said nothing more. As his gaze moved over her face, he noticed how truly exhausted she appeared: Her lids drooped wearily, as if barely able to support the weight of her lashes, and there were faint bluish smudges beneath her eyes. Her skin was so pale it was almost translucent, paler even than it had been when he’d last taken note of it. Even as he registered that, she shifted slightly—the bunk was narrow, and she had very little room—and he became acutely aware that the soft warm weight of her was now pressed fully against him. Breasts, belly, thighs—he identified each point of contact automatically, and his body responded just as automatically.
Then the question occurred: Was she doing it deliberately?
He released her fists and shifted onto his back again, refocusing on the dusty wooden panel above him and frowning at it as if it could help him reason the matter through. He was, first and foremost, a soldier, and his country was in a fight to the death. For the last ten years, through campaigns fought everywhere from Africa to Spain, he had waged war against the French monster, putting country above all else. Never once had he even questioned an order. His reckless disregard for his own safety—dispatches called it bravery, but it was easy to be brave when he had entered the war not altogether certain that he wanted to make it out alive—plus his luck in always escaping disaster by the skin of his teeth, objective accomplished, had led his superiors to depend on him to carry out missions that had grown more and more dangerous over the years. His current operation in France was a high-wire act performed without a net, and vital to his country’s interests.
She—Sophy Towbridge—could bring that operation down around his ears. He had been ordered to kill her.
He had never failed to carry out an order, even when he disagreed with it, which he occasionally did. And Hildebrand knew this, of course. Hugh sometimes suspected that Hildebrand knew more about him than was strictly necessary. It was Hildebrand’s knowledge of him—of part of his past—that had prompted the spy-master to send Hugh after Sophy Towbridge. But Hildebrand did not know everything about him. Otherwise, he never would have charged him with killing a woman.
No, he corrected himself, he had been charged with killing a traitor. That the traitor was a woman was—or should be—immaterial.
In principle, Hugh was in full agreement with the dictum that traitors deserved to die.
But this traitor was scarcely more than a girl. She was also sweet and saucy—and heart-stoppingly beautiful. Reluctant though he was to face it, he found her more than a little enchanting.
Grimly, Hugh tried to picture himself killing her. He could not.
But the assignment was his. He had undertaken to carry it out successfully, and his orders were that Sophy Towbridge was to die.
The question then became: Was the troublesome chit lying so snugly against him Sophy Towbridge? Or was she not?
Solomon had never faced so agon
izing a decision.
13
Still moving a tad cautiously, Hugh shifted so that he once again lay on his side, facing the subject of his dilemma. Propping his head on one hand, he looked down at her consideringly. Her gaze met his, a little wary but not betraying any appreciable amount of fear, and again he thought that Sophy Towbridge would have known enough to be afraid of him. As he searched her eyes for any signs of hidden fear or guilt or anything else that might persuade him one way or the other, he noticed absently that the clear gold of her irises was actually composed of shades of gold and brown and gray, rather like tortoiseshell, with a dark outer ring. Set slightly aslant beneath thick black curling lashes, they were the eyes of a female who had certainly been a heartbreaker from her cradle. Was their innocence a sham?
It would be easy to let them sway him. He’d been right in what he had first thought—they were siren’s eyes.
Was he on the brink of falling for a siren’s song?
“Do I have a smudge on my nose, to make you stare at me so?”
Slightly taken aback at this tart interruption to his weighty ponderings, Hugh almost smiled. No, she didn’t seem to fear him to any appreciable degree, which was telling in itself. Responding without thought, he lifted a hand to trail a questing finger down the feature in question. She wrinkled it. Adorably.
Was he being taken for a ride? It was possible. Hell, anything was possible. He very much feared that he was on the brink of losing his vaunted good judgment where she was concerned.
“Actually, you seem to be developing a spot.”
“Oh, no! I am not!” Her hand immediately flew to her nose.
This time Hugh did smile. A threat to England—and she was concerned about developing a spot on her nose? His mind boggled. She dropped her hand, glared as she realized she was being teased—then broke into a roguish, dimpled grin that was utterly beguiling.
Even if she was Sophy Towbridge, he thought, teetering on the brink of total intoxication by that dazzling smile and knowing it, did she have any real idea of how deadly the consequences were in this game that was only played for keeps?
Deliberately he reminded himself that it didn’t matter whether she did or not. If she was Sophy Towbridge, his orders were that she had to die.
“You should smile more,” she said.
That, coming as it did out of nowhere and uttered in a vaguely disapproving tone, made him blink.
“Should I?” he asked, trying desperately to maintain some sense of balance. Her nearness—and her smile and her youth and her beauty and just about every other damned thing about her—was warping his objectivity, he feared.
“It makes you look younger.”
“I’m thirty-one.” His tone was defensive, as if he cared that she might think he was older than he was, and as he heard it he felt like kicking himself. In danger of losing his good judgment? Hah! Any impartial observer might be excused for concluding that he’d lost it, utterly and completely, already.
“Really? You’re ten years older than I am, then.”
“Hmm.” If his response was less than encouraging, it was because he was struggling desperately to regroup. He just could not accept what his senses told him about her, because his senses, clouded by the look of her, the feel of her, the smell of her, were growing maddeningly unreliable. He had to remain objective, to weigh, to think.
It was difficult, though, with her resting full against him again; even through the not-inconsiderable barrier of the scratchy blanket he could feel the shape of her, the softness of her, the warmth of her. She stretched a little, catlike, and he could feel the fullness of her breasts press against his chest, and, farther down, the sweet indentation of her waist and the gentle curve of her hips and thighs. The sensation was acutely arousing. He set his teeth in an effort to combat it.
Did she know what she was doing to him? He searched her eyes again—she was watching him almost sleepily, with no apparent guard on her expression whatsoever—and he was ready to swear that she did not.
Frowning thoughtfully now, he reached out to smooth a wayward strand of her hair back behind her ear. It felt like tangled silk beneath his fingers.
She blinked at him.
“You know, you can really be very nice.”
“Do you think so?” He was almost fascinated by his reaction to her. Either she was entirely guileless, or he was as susceptible to female wiles as the greenest of green lads.
“Mm-hmm. When you’re not trying to frighten me.”
“Is that what I’m trying to do?”
“I think so.”
He worked at maintaining his skepticism, but it wasn’t easy. He looked at her, hard, but she appeared utterly innocent of trying to manipulate him. Whoever she was, Sophy Towbridge or Lady Claire Lynes as she claimed, she should have been afraid of him. He was, after all, her captor, and she was his prisoner. She was totally at his mercy, and he could do anything, anything at all, anything he chose, to her with none to say him nay. But if she realized that, she didn’t appear to.
“And am I succeeding?”
“Mmm. Not so much now.”
This time her mouth barely curved, but her eyes smiled up at him in a way that he found, to his annoyance, made his heart beat faster. The thought of putting her innocence to the test in a decidedly nonverbal fashion occurred to him, and as he considered, it became almost irresistible. When he had kissed her earlier, she had been wide awake and more than a little on her guard. Now she was practically asleep in his arms, comfortable and far more vulnerable to letting her true self emerge.
Whoa. He pulled himself up sharply, before temptation could get the better of him. Under the circumstances, the very worst thing he could do was kiss her.
Talk about clouding his judgment . . .
“You should be afraid of me,” he said on a harsher note, his gaze moving restlessly over her face. “You’re a fool not to be afraid of me.”
“I must be a fool, then.”
She looked up at him for a moment, her eyes heavy-lidded and slumberous, her mouth soft and sweetly curved. Quite of its own volition, his hand came up to stroke the velvety softness of her cheek. Her skin was exquisitely smooth, making him think of the petals of a rose, a white rose edged in pink, and it was warm. So warm.
He could understand that, Hugh thought. For his part, he seemed suddenly to be suffused with heat.
“You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life,” he said, realizing that he was on the verge of making a mistake of quite possibly historic proportions but totally unable to stop himself. His thumb touched the corner of her mouth, feathered over it, and, still sleepy-eyed, she smiled at him.
He bent his head and kissed her. Just like that. By the time he realized just what it was he had done, it was too late. His heart was slamming against the walls of his chest and his breathing was coming harsh and fast and he was so hard and hot and hungry for her that it was all he could do not to flip her onto her backside there and then and pump out his lust between her legs with a savagery that owed more to beast than man.
What stopped him was the innocence of her mouth.
He was a grown man, a grown man who liked women and whom women found attractive. He had bedded so many members of the fairer sex that he’d long since lost count. He knew what a woman in the throes of passion looked like, what she sounded like, how she kissed.
Not like this.
Though most of the time he managed to forget it, he had been born and raised a gentleman. That distant upbringing gave him the strength he needed to pull his mouth from hers as soon as the extent of her inexperience became clear to him. He gave himself credit for that much self-control at least. But she had her hands twined in his shirt front now, which, he supposed as he lifted his head, gave him as much excuse as he needed for not peeling himself off that bunk and away from her.
The truth was, he didn’t want to move off that bunk and away from her. He admitted it to himself even as she opened her eyes a
nd looked at him as if she had just glimpsed the sun after a fortnight of rain. She was inexperienced—he knew that as well as he knew his own name. But he also knew with equal certainty that she was willing.
“Hugh?” she murmured, her hands tightening on his shirt.
That was all the invitation he needed. All the invitation he could stand.
Because the first touch of his lips to hers had set him on fire. She hadn’t protested, hadn’t so much as tried to turn her head away. Instead she had turned her face up to his with a little sigh, and seemed to welcome his kiss. Her lips were soft, and tremulous, and parted for him easily. By the time his eyes closed and his tongue slid inside her mouth, the blaze that consumed him had turned into a full-fledged conflagration. He had found her tongue, caressed it, probed deep inside her mouth. Her mouth had tasted, just faintly, of brandy, and was so warm, so warm and wet and sweet, that he had nearly lost himself in the taking of it. His heart had raced. His breathing had grown ragged. His body had hardened until it strained painfully against the confines of his breeches.
But she hadn’t kissed him back.
This time, he was going to make sure she did.
“Put your arms around my neck,” he said, smoothing her hair back from her face with a hand that he was bemused to see was slightly unsteady. She met his gaze, her eyes still faintly glazed from the kiss they had shared. He saw the minute his words registered: Her eyes flared, and she let out her breath on a long but clearly quiescent sigh.
Then she let go of his shirt, and slid her arms around his neck. The feel of those cool, silky-skinned fingers clasping the nape of his neck made his breathing stop. Fiercely he wanted them all over him; he imagined them stroking his arms, caressing his chest, clawing his back. . . .
For a moment longer he managed to remain motionless. He was leaning over her, his upper-body weight supported by his elbows, and his gaze searched her face before he said or did anything more, anything he was going to regret. The cabin, lit by a single swaying lantern, was dim. Deep in the recesses of the bunk, as they were, there was more shadow than light. But the delicate angles and elegant lines of her features were only emphasized by the shadows that danced across them, and her eyes gleamed with the soft patina of old coins. Her lips, still faintly damp from his kiss, were parted and inviting.
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