She’d done it. She had him off balance and she needed desperately to take advantage of that fact. She gulped a steadying breath. “Your woman, Cap. If you want.” She imbued the husky East End accent with low provocation, striving to keep the quaver from her voice.
She stepped closer and undulated against him, nudging her legs within the cincture of his rigid stance. His body was hard, like adamant. “We can come to some sort of an arrangement, Cap. One you’ll fancy. I swear it.”
“Arrangement,” Seward echoed faintly, head dipping down and forward to better scan her face. His cheeks were lean. Hard lines of experience bracketed his mouth and marked the corners of his eyes. Eyes the color of some precious, abused metal.
Ah, yes, she thought, intoxicated by the sense of danger, disoriented by her very boldness, tarnished silver. Slowly he reached up to unmask her.
She could taste the flavor of his warm breath, feel the danger of his regard, the acute awareness arcing from his body, and she knew she was a second from having her identity discovered. Her heart thrummed in violent, fevered response.
She closed her eyes, knocked his hand aside, and wrapped her arms around his neck, drawing her body fully against his, crushing her breasts to his broad chest.
“I’m woman enough to pleasure a man like you.”
“Pleasure.” He spoke the syllables as if saying a foreign word, but he did not back away from her. His intense regard mutated, his curiosity swallowed by the need for some baser knowledge.
It was as if she embraced a razor-sharp blade, rigid, superbly balanced, lethal. With shivering fingers she combed back the clean, silky hair at the nape of his neck and guided his head to hers. He resisted. She arched up, standing on tiptoe to find his lips and opening her mouth over his.
Warm, hard. For three heartbeats he did not respond. And then it was as if something within him, something so long denied its existence had been forgotten, something waiting for release, abruptly found liberation. His passion spilled like acid over her body, bright, burning. He reacted instinctively, drawing her tight against his body, holding her to him by the belt he still clenched in his fist.
His lips softened. His free hand roved up her spine and cupped her skull. He bent over her, forcing her to flex backward and clutch his shoulders to keep from falling.
Too much. Unimagined. Unwanted. Feckless body. Treacherous mouth.
He was purely male, like every other male, being offered what all males seek. And yet …
And yet, dear God, it was so much more.
In the way he held her head to receive his kiss, he betrayed an awful hunger. His lust tasted like starvation, and behind it, in the pleasure—and Lord help her for that pleasure—there was hopelessness.
Worse, she recognized her own hunger in his and answered it. His lips roamed, his breath mated with hers, and she drank in his essence. Her thoughts swam with a hundred impressions: his hand fisted about her belt, holding her captive; the faint astringent aroma of soap beneath the wet scent of the fog drifting through the open window; the heat of his mouth; the slick slide of clean teeth against the tip of her tongue.
She wanted to lose herself in his seductive menace, longed to touch the darkest part of his need. She opened her mouth further, helpless to contain the surging desire created by each stroke of his tongue against hers. Her legs trembled weakly and she gave herself up to his strength, clinging now, wanting to surrender, to let him have her body, her life …
He tore his mouth free, his crippled hand still holding her head. “Bloody hell. Am I to take you on the desk and then, having spent myself in pleasure, let you go? Is that the trade?”
She could barely think. “Yes.”
“I’d rather have you on a bed. Unmasked. Do you think Lady Cotton would mind?” The bitter bite of humor lay thick in his voice.
She shook her head. “Sorry, Cap. Here and now. That’s the deal.”
She twisted against his hold on her belt and he released her. She leaned against him, stood tiptoe, trailed her mouth lightly along his hard jawline. His skin was warm. The stubble of his beard abraded her lips.
“Almost worth it.” He sounded breathless, damned. “Almost.”
His lips were parted, his chest rising and falling in deep, silent breaths. He stared at her, his pale gaze holding her motionless in the moonlit-steeped room, something hard and angry and pleading in his expression.
“All right.” He whispered the words and with them the promise of unimaginable pleasures. In his embrace she might finally lose every last bit of herself. She might forget …
She swayed back toward an embrace she knew would never release her and stopped. No. He was Whitehall’s Hound. He’d use her and take her and do his duty. Heartless. Soulless. She should recognize his type; it was kindred to her own.
She clutched his jacket sleeves, jerking his arms down and driving her knee into his groin. He gasped, doubling over and dropping to his knees. He fell, reaching for her. She leapt clear of his outstretched hand and raced for the window. Before she heard his curse, she was on the sill, vaulting for the opposite roof.
She sprang too late, misgauging the distance to the building across the narrow alley. She landed on the eaves, slick with moss, then stumbled and fell. Frantically she clambered for a handhold, her nails gouging the wet, half-rotted shakes as she struggled to keep from plummeting to the ground.
With the last of her strength failing, she grabbed the lead drainpipe snaking beneath the eaves and fell. Her hands caught the full force of her weight, jerking her arms in their sockets. She hung, suspended fifteen feet above the ground. If she fell, she wouldn’t die, but likely she’d break something and be caught.
Then she’d die.
“Hold on!”
From the corner of her eye she caught sight of Seward, half hanging from the window on the other side of the alley, arm outstretched, too far away to aid—or hinder—her. His expression was taut, only his eyes alive, filled with promises she could not name.
Terror gave her strength. With a grunt, she swung her foot over the eave and hauled herself back onto the roof. She scrambled upright and stood, panting and silent, regarding Seward across the eight-foot-wide gulf.
He gazed mutely back. Then, slowly, mockingly, he lifted two fingers to his dark, scar-traversed brow and saluted her. Even at this distance she could see the self-scorn blazing in his gray eyes, as if he had been retaught a lesson he should have learned long ago and appreciated her instruction.
“Until next time.” Though she barely heard him, she understood the words to be a vow.
Next time? Why? Why had Whitehall’s Hound been set on her trail? It seemed too extreme a measure to protect some wealthy aristocrat’s baubles, no matter how expensive they might be.
She stared at him, a slow surge of triumph replacing her earlier fright. She’d been betrayed by her body, not only by her reaction to Seward’s single, hot-mouthed kiss but by her desire to yield to him for the promise of a passion so heated it would sear the damning memories from her mind. Yet she’d won.
Across the narrow chasm, Seward inclined his head in gracious acceptance of his defeat. She could not let his gesture go unremarked.
Her smile was rife with anticipation as she snapped sharply forward at the waist, a perfect parody of an officer and a gentleman. Then she ducked back behind the chimney pot. She would disappear now. The paths open from here were myriad and secret and high above the plodding footsteps of guards and Bow Street Runners … and Jack Seward.
By morning the Wraith would be gone. In her place would be Anne Wilder, a wealthy member of the ton, a once-celebrated beauty now acting as a debutante’s doyenne … a much-aggrieved widow. No one would ever suspect her.
Yet, even though Anne knew she was safe, she did not feel safe at all.
And, God help her, she liked the sensation.
CHAPTER TWO
Sir Robert Knowles thumbed through the papers on his desk as Henry Jamison and the two other men in
the room awaited his attention. He was being purposefully irksome, Jamison thought. But just whom was he trying to provoke?
An undistinguished and benign-looking man, Knowles’s baby-pink scalp and the soft, pleated lines on his round face belied his character. Jamison knew he looked the complete antithesis: angular, imperious, and proud. It amused Jamison, during those rare moments when he allowed himself introspection, that such diverse looks could contain such similar personalities.
For thirty years Knowles and he had striven to best each other’s equally powerful and equally nebulous positions on the Home Office’s Secret Committee. Neither of them had a title for the posts they occupied, posts wherein they gathered information, thwarted certain plots, aided others, and gathered, manipulated, and manufactured information essential to the secret workings of the government.
Though Knowles currently held the upper hand, it would not last. It could not last. Because Jamison was destined for greatness. Not near greatness. Greatness itself.
Lately Jamison’s political influence had faltered, the strength of his personality alone no longer sufficient to carry out his directives. He needed others to see that his interests were advanced, his power secure. He needed Henry John Seward—the most successful secret agent ever utilized by the British government.
“Have you discovered the thief’s identity?” Knowles asked without looking up.
“No, sir,” Seward said. “I have not.”
Jamison pressed his liver-spotted fingertips to his lips. Wryly he noted how Knowles’s purposefully intimidating desk did nothing to diminish Colonel Seward. He stood at spine-punishing attention before it.
“And why the blazes not?” the young Lord Vedder demanded. A precious little popinjay playing a far deeper game than he imagined, Lord Vedder had been brought into this meeting as the prince regent’s representative and stayed at Jamison’s sufferance. Popinjays, Jamison had long since learned, served their purposes.
“Because I have been occupied with other matters.” Jack gazed passively at Knowles. “A fellow called Brandeth, a situation needing my attention in Manchester. And then there was the Cashman debacle.” For a second anger brushed Jack’s words with coldness.
Knowles had recalled Seward from sabotaging the plots of the increasing number of angry political dissidents especially for the task of apprehending this “Wrexhall’s Wraith.” But if Jamison resented Knowles commandeering Seward, whom Jamison considered his personal agent, Seward resented being commandeered twice as deeply. Seward’s words were a clear reminder—as if any were necessary—that he considered his current job trivial.
Brandeth had raised a small army on the Derby border, which Seward had anticipated. The Manchester affair had involved a far more ambitious plot, the storming of banks and prisons. Seward had infiltrated its leaders’ coven, obstructing the plan before it could come to pass.
Seward had been violently opposed to Knowles’s and Jamison’s locating somewhat tainted evidence against Cashman, so violently that ultimately he’d refused to become involved.
Lord Vedder knew none of this. Jamison wondered if he would treat Seward quite so negligently if he realized that, if Seward so desired, he could engineer Vedder’s death thrice times over—with little effort and less chance of being inconvenienced for it. Vedder adjusted his ridiculous chickenskin gloves, sniffed imperiously, and embarked on a tiresome tirade about Seward’s duty to his future king.
Jamison studied the agent’s reaction to Vedder’s harangue. Much as he expected, Seward didn’t appear to have one. For nearly a quarter of a century Jamison had observed Jack, watched him develop from sinewy youth to densely muscled manhood, observed his violent passion become iron-controlled civility.
Perfect manners coupled with absolute remorselessness. It was a disturbing combination. Seward might stand with the military exactitude that attested to the success of a strict disciplinarian, but his face reflected only a polite interest in Lord Vedder’s vitriol. An interesting creature, Colonel Seward.
Jamison, who’d a long history of manipulating others, had never known so enigmatic a man. It troubled him that he did not understand why Seward—the most effective agent he’d ever harnessed to his will—allowed himself to be used.
What would happen when Seward’s interest did not run in tandem with the Home Office’s Secret Committee? Or worse, Jamison wondered, his own?
“This is unlike you, Seward,” Jamison muttered, cutting off Vedder’s harangue.
The colonel’s gaze swung smoothly about. He’d known all along that Jamison had been studying him.
“Is it, sir?” Perfect sangfroid. Exceptional address. Etiquette, Seward had once told Jamison, was all that mattered. Ideologies waxed and waned, religions developed and eroded, political parties rose and fell from power. Only courtesy remained one of the few things valued by all civilized men.
Seward had gone so far as to suggest that the reason so few of the men he commanded died was because it was the least wasteful way to arrange things, the least repugnant to the sensibilities, the best manners, in fact. A man like that was frightening.
“It is unlike you to be so incompetent,” Jamison snapped, disliking this uncharacteristic alarm. “How do you propose to catch this thief if you cannot bring him in even after he steps into your own trap?”
Vedder slapped his gloves in his hand, demonstrating his ire. “He’ll want more men assigned to him, I suppose.”
“No, sir. Not a bit of it, sir.”
Damn Seward. In spite of all Jamison’s attempts to eradicate the last vestiges of his Scottish accent, he still clung to it.
“What then?” Lord Vedder asked.
“I would like entrée into the prince regent’s social circle.”
“What?” Lord Vedder’s mouth dropped open.
“Be damned, one must admire your audacity,” Jamison said.
“I have been pursuing this thief for six months, sir. By anticipating his choice of victim, I gave myself a chance to catch him. It was an easy enough deduction. The Marchioness of Cotton is well known for carting her gems about to house parties.” His voice grew hoarser with each word. As a souvenir of having been hanged for two minutes by Napoleon’s “patriots,” Seward’s voice carried a slight raspiness. Today the effect was pronounced. “But as you say, I failed to apprehend the thief.”
Jamison noted the knuckles of Seward’s crippled hand gleamed like marble beneath the skin. Interesting. His failure to apprehend the thief bothered him. More than interesting, useful.
An emotion—any emotion—might be honed, worked, used like a whip to drive him. And there were few enough scourges one found to drive the likes of Seward.
“I cannot predict the thief’s next victim other than that he will most probably be, like his predecessors, an intimate of His Royal Highness,” Seward went on. “If I am to catch this thief, I must be able to determine his victims. I will be better able to do so if I can observe who among the prince’s friends attracts notice, appears vulnerable to a thief.”
“Of all the gall!” sputtered Lord Vedder.
“What do you mean by entrée?” Knowles asked, entering the discussion for the first time.
“The crimes are aimed at the ton who are in London for the opening of Parliament, not the innermost circle of the prince’s intimates,” Seward said.
“You would need only attend the larger parties and entertainments?” Knowles asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“I believe—”
“I cannot countenance such an imposition on His Royal Highness’s friends!” Lord Vedder shouted. “This man is a bastard.”
Knowles looked at him with distaste. “If the prince’s ‘friends’ continue to be robbed whenever they attend one of his parties, His Royal Highness may soon find himself dining alone.”
“You overstep yourself, sir,” Vedder declared indignantly.
Knowles raked back his scant white hair. “His Majesty’s demand that his friends no longer b
e targeted by this criminal was quite clear. Do you wish me to tell him you undermined our efforts to see this thief brought to justice because you objected to the circumstances of Colonel Seward’s birth?”
With a sound of choked fury, Lord Vedder snatched up his cane from the table and stormed from the room.
Knowles released a small sigh. “A pity we must tolerate him, but tolerate him we must. He serves to mask our real purpose in finding this thief.” He indicated a chair. “Won’t you sit, Jack?”
“No, thank you, sir.”
“Now, may I surmise that in addition to your failure to apprehend this thief, you have also failed to retrieve the letter?”
“Yes, sir,” Seward replied.
“Dammit, we can’t afford failure,” Knowles said. “Most disappointing, Jack. You had the thief right in the room with you, is this not true? What happened? Did he overwhelm you?”
“Yes.” The admission slipped out in a hushed, intense voice.
Jamison’s attention sharpened.
“Are you getting feeble then, Jack?” Knowles asked in concerned tones. “Should I send some youngster with you to act as your strength?”
“For the ‘youngster’s’ sake, I suggest not.” Though the words were delivered quietly and an apologetic smile curved Seward’s lips, the warning was clear.
Pride? Jamison thought in amazement. No, this was a baser emotion. Jamison leaned forward, every faculty focused on Seward. He considered himself a master of discerning another’s heart, a skill he attributed to having no sentiment of his own clouding his judgment. Seward sounded … possessive.
“You are a bastard, Jack.” Knowles relaxed, satisfied with Seward’s response.
“Yes, sir. A fact Lord Vedder shall doubtless be tiresome in remarking.”
“What do you think, Jamison?” Knowles asked. They might not like each other, but their respect for each other’s acumen was extreme. Together they’d clandestinely orchestrated some of the Secret Committee’s greatest coups and barely avoided as many catastrophes.
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