Speech was beyond her. She nodded and whimpered instead, long past dissembling. His head moved lower, still trailing kisses downward, until it reached the spot his hand had so recently vacated. She nearly swooned at the sensation. A pleasure so intense that it set her every nerve to throbbing began to pulse over her. Rapid, shallow breaths could not keep pace with the demands of his mouth.
Just when she thought she would burst into flames, Ethan relented and eased upward, the heat and texture of his skin unbearably intimate as it slid along hers. He murmured nonsensical words in her ear and she had the distinct impression that he was gentling her, soothing her, as one would a skittish mare. His hand returned to her passage and he stroked slowly, gradually increasing both depth and pace, until Sarah was ready to weep with the unbearable pressure building at her core.
“Oh,” she sobbed, holding him so close that he could barely move. “Oh, Ethan! Please!”
And he pleased her very much indeed.
“Yes, Sadie. Yes,” he whispered. “My God, you are so beautiful. I can feel you close around me, I can feel your muscles contracting. You are more than I ever expected. I cannot wait until ’tis me inside you—”
But Sarah heard no more. Wave after wave of shimmering heat and pulsating electricity washed through her, drowning her in the sensation. She was only dimly aware of Ethan’s hand, gentle and evocative, his mouth nibbling her flesh in the most delicious ways, and then the utter peace as she slowly surfaced from the swirling maelstrom of passion.
Faint chiming broke the peace and quiet of the room, and Ethan turned toward the sound, muttering darkly under his breath. When he turned back to her, his eyes, now a deep greenish brown, softened. He cupped her face and wiped her cheeks with his thumbs, a look of concern darkening his eyes. “Sadie, was I clumsy? Did I hurt you?”
She could not think of what to say. How could she put pure energy and beauty into words? How could she tell him what she felt? Her voice quavering, she said the only thing that made sense. “Thank you.”
He laughed, throwing his head back with pure animal pride. “You are very welcome, Sadie,” he said, and then returned his attention to the tender spot beneath her ear.
After a moment, he smoothed her hair back from her fevered cheeks and studied her, his touch warm with shared intimacy. “I am proud to have been your teacher in this.”
A second wave of chimes began, and Sarah glanced toward the sound—Ethan’s pocket watch. She pulled her shirt together and tugged her trousers up. Guiltily she realized that she had not thought of finding Dicken once since Ethan began his lesson in pleasure.
“Bloody goddamned hell!” He stood and buttoned his own shirt. “I must go, Sadie. I am sorry to leave you so. Here.” He dropped a sovereign on the table as he retrieved his pocket watch and thrust his arms into his jacket. “Take a coach home when you are steadier. It is still raining, and I do not want you wandering the streets in your present condition.”
A sovereign? Public coaches could not cost so much. Sarah frowned. “H-how much—” she began.
He pushed his cravat into his jacket pocket and grinned. “No charge, Miss Sadie. ’Twas my pleasure. Next time, however, it will cost you dear.”
He was teasing her. An unfamiliar heat crept up her cheeks. The memory of what they—he—had just done swept over her and she had a vague recollection of her pleas and whimperings. She recalled, too, how his hands had felt and the sensations they evoked. She could not meet his gaze.
He returned to the cot and knelt by her side. “My goodness, Miss Sadie, is that a blush?” He stroked her cheek with the back of his hand. “I do not believe I have seen you do that before.”
“You are mistaken,” she murmured. “I never blush.”
“Hmm. Then it must be the afterglow of—”
“Stop!” she said, mortified.
His lips twitched as if he were fighting another of those crooked grins. “As you say, Sadie. Please keep safe until we can meet again. Tomorrow?”
“St. Paul’s,” she murmured, a thousand questions crowding in on her muddled mind. Foremost among them was whether or not she would have the nerve to face him again.
He nodded and went to the door. “I regret leaving now more than you will ever know. We will have to talk seriously about our unlikely friendship very soon. Do you understand?”
She nodded, still holding her shirt together with one hand. “You…keep safe, too, Mr. Travis.”
He came back to her, lifted her chin and dropped a light kiss on her lips. “Sadie, we are past formality. Ethan. Or Travis. Even scoundrel, rake or ne’er-do-well. But there are now things I know about you that you do not know about yourself. Do not dismiss me with a formality.”
Dismiss him? How would she ever think of anything but him, ever again? When she looked up again, he was gone.
Reality dropped with a sudden thud and tears blurred her vision as she struggled to sit up. Ethan had done her no favor in teaching her the power of passion. He had shown her what was possible. But she could never again know the sheer joy of surrendering to Ethan. Had they gone any further, he would have known the worst. And he would have been filled with disgust.
Her gaze dropped to the table and the single sovereign. Had Ethan just paid her for that incident? Had she actually become a prostitute?
Which was worse, she wondered.
Chapter Nine
Sarah did use Ethan’s sovereign to take a coach back to St. Paul’s, but neither Dicken nor Sticky Joe were anywhere to be found. She suspected they were at the King’s Head Tavern waiting out the weather, and debated the merit of risking a meeting with the lads there. Would anyone note her in the crush of people taking refuge? Likely not. A quick inspection of her garments revealed nothing untoward.
Not so her emotions. She could not drag her thoughts away from the room above the Black Dog Tavern. Nor could she make any sense of it. She and Ethan had crossed some invisible threshold, and now she felt somehow bound to him. Nothing would ever be the same between them again. She could still see his tender smile and feel his soft persuasive touch. The very strength of her emotions frightened her. She dared not need him so. Needing him could only end disastrously.
She put those thoughts from her mind as she opened the door to the King’s Head. She ducked and pushed her way through the crowd with her shoulder, knowing Dicken and Sticky Joe would be at the benches along the back wall. They were young and would have little money for ale.
Dicken’s eyes grew round when he recognized her. “Gor! What’re ye doin’ here?”
“I think I have found one of the boys,” she whispered. “We must go there at once.”
Dicken studied her with a frown. “Tell us where, Sadie, an’ we’ll go after ’im. You look a mite bedraggled.”
She could not possibly look more exhausted or unsettled than she felt, Sarah thought. But Dicken was right. She would only slow them down. “Number 8 Vauxhall Row. I cannot be certain that it is Teddy or Benjamin, but I heard a child’s cry, and Whitlock had been there for a short visit.”
“Number 8 Vauxhall,” Sticky Joe repeated. “We’ll look into it, Sadie. Then report back to you?”
“No. Whitlock is moving the children every few days. We must seize the opportunity when it presents itself.”
“An’ what’ll we do with ’im once we got ’im?”
“Take him to the kitchen door at 11 London Square in Mayfair. Tell the cook that she should make a place for him. If she has any questions, she should speak with Lady Sarah.”
“Mayfair? Blimey!” Dicken looked impressed. “That’s the Hunter mansion, ain’t it? D’you know them, Sadie?”
Well enough to know they’d lock her in a closet if they knew the half of what she was doing. “Better than I’d like,” she admitted. She pulled her cap down over her eyes and pushed her way out of the King’s Head. She would have to sneak in her window, put on her nightgown and go wake Cook to tell her to expect a knock on the kitchen door.
; The storm had ended and dawn slashed a violent pink across the warehouse skylight before Ethan finished debriefing Ayers. Thank God Rob had busied himself with settling the three hostages who had returned with Ayers. The Scot would not like what their agent had to tell them.
Ethan tossed his pen down and pushed the chair back from his desk. His back ached and his eyes burned from the tedious work of recording the information he’d gleaned. He stretched, wishing himself home in bed. Better than that—back at the Black Dog, in bed with Sadie.
Just the thought of her brought a smile to his lips. What a contradiction little Miss Hunt was! He would swear that her responses to his attentions had not only surprised her, they had shocked her. She was such a delightful little Puritan for one engaged in her profession. And new to it, unless he missed his guess. All the more reason to find a way to save her from it.
“What has you so amused, Travis?” McHugh asked, leaning against the doorjamb and rubbing his eyes wearily.
“Myself, McHugh. I scarcely know myself anymore,” he admitted.
“That would make two of us,” McHugh sighed wearily. “Christ, Travis. The stories these hostages tell! It sets my teeth on edge. Maeve…” He shook his head and cleared his throat.
Ethan glanced down at the notes he had made. He simply could not bear to see the pain in Rob’s eyes again. “Ayers says the others will never be found. Only a scant handful left in all of Algiers, if any.” He paused and glanced upward at the approaching dawn again. Anywhere but at Rob’s tortured eyes. “We’re finished, McHugh. ’Tis time to call it a day.”
A low growl built in Rob’s throat. “No. No, damn it. There has to be something we missed, somewhere we didn’t look.”
Although he knew he was signing Rob’s death warrant, Ethan could not withhold the last piece of information. “Ayers only came up with one more lead. It is whispered that a pasha from the interior desert bought several fairskinned women to enhance his harem. Nothing about a lad.”
“God’s eyes!” the Scotsman cursed and slammed his doubled fist into the wall. His knuckles came away bloody. “If she’s been violated…”
Ethan tightened his jaw. He knew from bitter experience that nothing he could say would lessen his friend’s self-recrimination.
“One last mission,” McHugh muttered, calmer now. “I have to be sure. I have to know it is not her.”
Ethan nodded. He knew the futility of pointing out the practical impossibility of finding the specific pasha, and then looking into the man’s harem. “One last mission,” he agreed. “We’d best make it count.”
“I’ll go myself. I know all the right people, all the right places.”
“No, Rob,” Ethan said. He could not even contemplate what the Algerians would do to Rob McHugh if they caught him. “They’ve got your name and face carved on every gate to the city, not to mention posted in every inn, tavern and brothel within five hundred miles of Algiers. You are the legend Algerian mothers frighten their children with. ‘Behave, little Abdullah, or the McHugh will come for you.’”
“I shall grow a beard.”
“Excellent,” Ethan grinned. “You are dark enough to carry that off, and speak the language like a native, but I’ve yet to meet an Arab with green eyes. They will be watching for you. Enough hostages are missing to have alerted them. Aside from that, I need you here.”
“Peters can manage for me. Or I can trade duties with Ayers.”
Ethan studied Rob. His friend has been drinking too much, living too much on the edge, trying too hard to push the pain away. The ghosts and the guilt had taken their toll. He could never put the past to rest until he’d seen for himself that Maeve and Hamish were lost to him forever and that there was nothing further he could do. Still, because of Kilgrew’s assignment, and his connection to the Foreign Office, there was an unacceptable level of risk that someone could inform the Dey of their mission. Unless…
“Wait until this new lot is gone home. Give me another week or two while I put other matters aside and ferret out the blackmail evidence against Kilgrew. Once he is out of the picture, the risk of exposure will ease.”
“How do you propose to find the evidence?”
“I am to guard Whitlock, keep him safe, but not to pursue any evidence. Kilgrew said he would handle that end. He admitted he was ‘keeping an eye’ on me, but if I can recover the evidence and hand it over, Kilgrew will have no interest in me.”
“What do you think he has done to get himself blackmailed?” Rob posed the question with a hint of relish.
Ethan tilted his chair onto the back two legs. “An indiscretion with a married woman? I doubt Kilgrew’s wife, or his paramour’s husband, would wink at such a thing. Kilgrew is a bit long in the tooth to be fighting a duel at dawn.”
McHugh gave him a dark smile. “A fortnight, Travis. Then, suicide mission or not, I’m bound for Algiers.”
As if to taunt her, fate delivered Mr. Travis to Sarah the very next evening. He was standing in the foyer of the Hobart manor at the foot of the stairs, deep in conversation with their host. He looked the very picture of haute ton, dressed in elegant, expensive black, but for his burgundy waistcoat. She was perversely pleased to see that he had not cut his hair for the occasion. She rather liked the feel of the soft clean curls at his nape. He did not see her arrive with her brothers, and she was quick to separate herself from them after promising a dance to James later.
She turned down a corridor and ran for the ladies’ retiring room, desperate to delay the moment when she would have to speak to him. Completely disconcerted, she realized she had thought her chance meeting with Mr. Travis at the Websters’ crush was an aberration, unlikely to ever occur again, but now she suspected she had made a total miscalculation. Was he following her?
She was playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse. It was only a matter of time before Mr. Travis asked someone about her. That prospect unsettled her. She could not imagine what he might do with such knowledge.
In the ladies’ retiring room, Mrs. Hobart’s maid helped her put her hair to rights and repaired a small tear in the hem of her emerald-green gown caused by her flight down the corridor. She primped before the mirror, pinching color back into her cheeks. When she began chiding herself for the depth of décolletage, she realized she cared more than she should about what Ethan Travis thought of her. Heavens! He thought she was a prostitute! Could anything be worse than that?
She squared her shoulders, lifted her chin, took a deep, bracing breath and stepped into the corridor. By the time she reached the drawing room, Annica had seen her. She was standing in a small circle with the Wednesday League and waved Sarah over to the group. Sarah gave them the happy news that Teddy was safely ensconced in Cook’s apartments at Hunter Hall, and then moved on before Ethan could see her with them.
She could not risk anyone addressing her as “Lady Sarah” in front of him, so she spent the next half hour moving about the Hobart affair to keep Ethan at bay until he was alone. If he even suspected who she was, he would never help her. His begrudging confession to being enough of a gentleman to feel protective of her convinced her of that. She would just have to keep him at bay until he was alone.
Bloody Hell! The last he’d seen of Collin, he’d been standing on the staircase of Linsday Manor, warning Ethan not to darken the door ever again. Ethan hadn’t been back to Wiltshire since. He’d thought London a good place to avoid such encounters. But then, he hadn’t planned to mix in “polite” society. So when had his brother come to town? And why? All the possibilities for such a visit crowded into Ethan’s mind.
Reconciliation? He had a brief flash of his indulgent older brother comforting him at age eight when their mother died, teaching him to ride and helping him with his Latin lessons. In those days, he’d believed Collin was his best friend and staunchest ally. But that was before Collin had realized that Ethan was their father’s favorite. The day of their father’s funeral, Collin had banished Ethan without so much as the blink of an
eye. No, his reason would not be reconciliation.
Money? Also not likely. As eldest, Collin inherited the bulk of the Linsday fortune while, as the younger son, Ethan had been left the equivalent of a stipend. Ethan had done quite well investing his share, and had made a respectable profit in the import business he had started to shield the search for Maeve and Hamish McHugh and the hostage recovery effort. Collin, with his larger share, must have done even better.
Social standing, then? Collin must want to carve a place for himself and his wife amongst the haute ton. They would want to come to town now and then, and prepare their children to take their places when Collin had his heir.
His gut twisted when Amelia turned and her profile, perfect and serene, was outlined against the glow of candlelight. Amelia. His former fiancée—now his brother’s wife. She was still as beautiful, as perfect, as a portrait. Elegance defined her every move, her every gesture. Men literally stopped to watch her glide through a room or sip a cup of tea.
Amelia had sworn her eternal love and fidelity to him, but she had not reckoned with scandal. A woman of Amelia’s gentle birth and standing could not withstand the censure of society. But damn if her defection didn’t still sting.
To compound his hurt, she had delivered the jilt at his father’s wake. Her parents were compelling her to break their engagement, she said. They would not permit her to waste herself on a man who would forever live with the stain of treason, and her duty was to obey. From that day to this, he regretted the ugliness the scandal had caused her.
For Amelia’s sake then, and no matter the reason they were here now, he would leave them in peace.
He halted and prepared to retreat when Collin’s aquiline nose twitched as if he smelled something rotten. “Ah, Ethan,” he said, his hands clasped behind his back in military fashion. “I hoped we might run into you.”
Ethan stopped a few feet away and performed a perfunctory bow. “Did you? I thought you might prefer not to.”
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