He’d be doing her a favor, buying her and seducing her into love with him. She needed somebody to take care of her.
“You’re a trusting fool, Jess, whatever else you are,” he went on without a pause or raising his voice, “and if men slip by my guards and try sneaking up on me, I’m likely to gut them first and regret it later.”
“How is she?” Adrian was in the cabin, silent as if one of the shadows had stepped off the wall and gone walking around. He was that good.
“Drunk. Asleep. Hurting. Not sure where she is or why. That crack on the head has her confused. She’ll be better when she wakes up in the morning.”
“Good.” Adrian’s voice was cold. “Now tell me why she’s naked in bed with you, you rutting bastard.”
Hell. He rolled off the bed fast. His feet thumped to the boards, and he stood, confronting his friend across the dim cabin. There was no trace of amusement in Adrian’s expression. He was dead serious. Angry. Very angry. This was Adrian as his enemies saw him.
He remembered Adrian kneeling over Jess in the alley, smears of her blood on his hands. Quick, clever Jess, with the Cockney accent and pockets of surprising knowledge. She was Adrian’s match in so many ways.
He should have known a girl like this would belong to somebody. The certainty hit him like a blow.
I’ve taken Adrian’s woman to bed.
Adrian said tightly, “What have you done to Jess?”
There was a time for truth. It was not now. “Nothing. I didn’t do a thing to her you couldn’t have watched.”
“Nothing?” The blanket had slipped. Jess was showing a yard of wanton golden skin. “Why do I find that so hard to believe? Gods in Hades, she’s stone cold unconscious.” For an instant, Adrian looked as dangerous as he was. “I wouldn’t have thought you were a man for complicated revenge. What are you doing?”
“What revenge?”
A stark minute ticked by. Adrian said, “You don’t even know who she is.”
“Your woman? Tell me, goddammit. Is she your woman or not?”
“You don’t know.” Adrian’s face was utterly unrevealing. “You took one look at Jess and tumbled her into bed. Why didn’t I see that was going to happen?”
“I didn’t tumble her anywhere. I was keeping her warm.”
“How very gullible I must look these days.”
The bloody-minded, antic bastard was laughing at him. “She’s not yours.”
“I should make you sweat, Bastian. I really should.” Slowly, his friend’s face changed. Unholy amusement gleamed in his eyes. “You can stop looking like I’ve gut-shot you. She is not, as you so engagingly put it, my woman.”
His breath loosened. “She’s not one of your agents?”
“Not remotely.”
He hadn’t realized how rigid he was till his muscles loosened. Relief swept through him, amazingly strong. It was an emotion he set aside to analyze later. “Who is she?”
“Ah. That is the question of the hour, isn’t it?” Adrian stood beside the bunk, watching the girl, a complex, unreadable expression on his face. “The last time I spoke to her, she was fourteen, skinny as a lamppost, and flat as a board.”
“She’s changed. Now tell me who she is.”
Jess turned onto her side and moaned softly. They both looked down. Adrian was there first, pulling the blanket to cover her, lifting her hands and tucking them inside . . . a protective gesture, but curiously detached. “Let’s take this up on deck. She sleeps light, and I don’t want her to see me.”
“She doesn’t sleep light with a mug of brandy poured down her throat.” He shouldered past and sat back on the bed beside Jess. She’d got her hair caught under her arm. He set it free, spread it over the pillow so she’d be comfortable. She didn’t wake up. She nestled into his hand, putting her breath into his fingers. “She’s not hearing a thing. What the deuce is going on? Who were those men?”
“Let me think about this for a while. Do you have any brandy left, or did you waste it all knocking Jess out?”
“Talk.”
“I’m thinking.” Adrian picked up the glass Jess had used and sniffed at it. “You drugged her.” He held it up in the light. “What did you use? I’m always willing to try new things.”
“The powder I picked up in Alexandria. Just medicine.” He held on to his patience. When Adrian was like this, there was nothing to do but wait it out. “What was she doing on Katherine Lane?”
“Now that I can tell you. She was lurking with intent, very artfully. Waiting for you.”
He stayed sitting beside her on the bed. Her hair was soft and a little damp between his fingertips. She might have sensed him. She stretched restlessly, not waking up. Her head butted his knee, and she sighed and relaxed against him, as if she’d just tied up safe in the shoals of some tricky bay. “What does she want from me?”
“She wants to pick your pockets, of course. Doyle supplies that exciting news. She did not tell him why.”
Doyle was British Service, Adrian’s second-in-command. “That was Doyle in the alley, with the lead pipe.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t recognize him. Not many men in London his size.”
“I didn’t see his face.” If the British Service was interested in Jess, she was in deep trouble. “Why does the Service have its top field agent following a Cockney pickpocket?”
“I will amaze you by revealing that she is not a simple Cockney pickpocket.” Adrian lifted the decanter and poured, stopping neatly halfway up, as if there were an invisible mark on the side of the glass. “Doyle has the greatest respect for her, by the way. He’s managed to inveigle himself onto her payroll. He says he’s getting rich.”
“Why was she picking my pocket?”
“An irresistible interest in their contents, I’d imagine. She has the most endearingly straightforward mind.”
“Why?”
“That, we do not know. She does not trust Doyle with her girlish secrets. It’ll be something pocket-sized, one presumes. Shall we investigate? Empty out, and we shall see.”
Damn Adrian. “You want to see what’s in my pockets?” He coiled off the bed. His greatcoat and jacket were slung over the chair, wet, dirty, and bloody from the fight. He pulled out a coin pouch and spilled it into his palm. “Five shillings. Half crown. Ha’pence.” He slapped that on the table. “And in the pockets we have . . . couple of pence . . . another grubby ha’penny. That’s seven and nine. We can buy out the store with that. What else? Silver watch.” He pulled it out and laid it next to the coins. “If you want my pocket picked, why don’t you do it yourself?”
“I’m not the one light-fingering about your person. Jess is. What else?”
“If this is one of your games, I’m going to wring your neck.” He turned out the pockets of his coat and added to the pile. “Jackknife. Key to the strongbox in my desk at home. House key. And now we strike gold—a letter from Cousin Penelope in Little Thrushing, Hants. She’s putting in roses. You’ll find that riveting.”
“Enormously. What’s the rest of that?”
He’d stuffed a few papers into his greatcoat at the last minute, leaving the shipping office. “Invoice for the sale of oranges. Receipt for 300 yards of rope. Copy of the waybill for some furniture I transshipped to Scotland.” He dropped them on the table. “That’s the lot. What’s going on? I want the short answer.”
“With Jess, alas, there are no short answers.” Adrian quested with a finger, turning papers over. “This is unpromising, isn’t it? What are you hoping to find in my friend’s pockets, Jess? He has captured your vagrant regard, and that I find very interesting indeed.”
“She’s not a pickpocket. Not your agent. Is she a whore?”
“Good heavens, no. Whatever gave you that idea?” Carrying his glass of brandy, Adrian picked his way around the cabin. “I’m sure there are dozens of respectable women walking Katherine Lane. You have crates stacked all over.” Three long, flat wooden boxes were lashed to the bulkhead. �
�I don’t call myself an expert, but I’m almost certain these belong in that big, damp pit you’ve got down below. The hold, you seafaring sorts call it.”
“It’s a Roman mural from some villa Napoleon sacked near Milan, headed to a collector in Hampstead. It’s worth the rest of the cargo put together. I’d sleep with it under my pillow if it would fit. Why is the Service watching Jess?”
“You probably have it listed on the manifest as ballast. The customs evasion practiced by the so-called respectable merchant community—”
“I don’t want to talk about customs evasion, Adrian.”
Adrian took another long swallow. Liquor never had any effect on him. Hard to know why he bothered. “Doyle tracked down one of the surviving Irishman. They hail, quite recently, from Dublin, where they are likely unlamented. They were hired from the dock two days ago with orders to kidnap Jess. Hired by—and I quote—‘a black-haired cove, all muffled up,’ which limits my search to half the male population of London. Sebastian . . . she’s Josiah Whitby’s daughter.”
It was like the long drop when the ship slides down the trough of a storm swell. Only he never hit bottom. He plummeted, feeling sick all the way down, endlessly.
“Jess . . . Whitby.”
“Yes.”
Josiah Whitby was Cinq, a murderer and a traitor. Nobody knew this better than Sebastian. He’d gathered the evidence that was going to hang the man.
Jess sighed and stirred. The curve of her shoulder emerged from the striped wool like the line of a wave coming to shore.
She was a woman of many small beauties. Cinq’s daughter was sleeping in his bed.
They called the traitor Cinq because he signed his messages with the sketch of a pair of dice, the fives uppermost. The offices in Whitehall were his private lending library. Somehow, he helped himself to secrets at the War Office and the Admiralty. Somehow, he slipped them out of England, past the British naval blockade, into France. Napoleon knew British plans before the British army in Spain did.
Two years ago, French frigates ambushed the Neptune Dancer in the Jersey straits. She went down with all hands.
His ship. His men. All of them dead because Cinq gave her sailing plans to the French. The first mate of the Neptune Dancer had been Sam Carter, a wild, tough Yankee from Portland. The best friend a man could have. They’d sailed together to Ceylon and India, back when they were fifteen.
He’d been hunting Cinq for two long years. He’d found him and gathered the evidence that would send the man to hell. Josiah Whitby would die. The gallows was a quicker death than he’d given Sam Carter.
He walked over to look out at the Thames so he didn’t have to see Jess Whitby.
Adrian said, “Josiah isn’t guilty, you know.”
They’d argued about this endlessly. “He’s your friend.”
“Friendship has nothing to do with it.”
“It does. I’m sorry. That’s the whole point.” There was too much light in the cabin for him to see past the glass. He shaded a spot with his hand to look upriver. There were still ships moving out on the tide, even with the last light going. Not something he’d let one of his captains do. “You used to talk about a daughter, didn’t you? You knew her in Russia. That’s this girl.”
“She put together the company. That accounting system you like so much. That’s her work. When she was sixteen.”
“It’s . . . remarkable.” That splendid clockwork of numbers, precise and clever and subtle. It was impossible to believe a sixteen-year-old girl made that.
“Josiah dickers for goods. But it’s Jess who made them rich. When she was twelve, back in St. Petersburg, she used to hold forth at the breakfast table, laying down the law to Josiah how much he could bid for amber or sables. She’d sit there calculating the profit margin on smuggling across three borders, and I’d lean over and remind her to keep her braids out of the butter dish.”
“Her name’s not really Jess, is it? You called her something else.”
“Jessie. It’s Jessamyn really.”
Jessie. That was it. He remembered hiding in a pigeon loft near Boulogne, waiting for the smuggler’s boat to come at dawn, listening to Adrian talk about Jessie in St. Petersburg, who still wore pinafores and long braids and ran her father’s business like a top. “Somebody should get her out of England. There’s nothing she can do here but see her father die.”
“You underestimate her.” Adrian emptied his glass. “She’s going to find Cinq for me. I gave her the best reason in the world when I arrested Josiah.”
“You arrested Whitby because I gave you a mountain of overwhelming evidence.”
“I arrested Whitby so Colonel Reams of Military Intelligence wouldn’t get his grubby paws on him. I keep saying that, and nobody listens. Can I offer you some of this? It’s quite good.”
“You go ahead.”
“I’ve always admired your taste in brandy.” Careful as an apothecary, Adrian measured out another finger’s worth. “I cannot understand why a bright girl like Jess doesn’t see my logic for incarcerating her father. Bastian, why is my mad, brilliant Jess going through your pockets, at considerable discomfort and personal risk?”
“I don’t give a damn why—” He knew then, suddenly, what Jess Whitby had been up to. “Bloody hell. She wasn’t searching me. She was planting something. That’s it.” He grabbed his coat and dug his fingers into the corners of the pockets.
“I wondered if you’d think of that.”
“Next time, say it.” He checked the next pocket. “Something small. A scrap of a memorandum from the War Office. Something easy to overlook and damning.” There was nothing in the jacket. “They’re brilliant, all right. That’s how they get Whitby free. They make me the scapegoat. She drops one piece of paper in my pocket, and they get rid of the man who built the case against him.”
“How diabolically clever of her.”
“Go ahead and laugh. Your Josiah Whitby is a dung-eating pig who sent his daughter to rub herself all over me. He doesn’t give a damn about her.” He dropped the coat. “I could have raped that girl against a wall instead of bargaining a price. It’s not here, whatever it was. It wasn’t in her clothes, either. I’d find it back on the ground in Katherine Lane if I went to check.”
“I doubt it. I wonder what was supposed to be in Cinq’s pockets tonight.” Adrian set the glass on the chart table, on a map of the south coast of England. “I will inquire, delicately, at the War Office if anything has gone missing lately.”
“Ask what you want. I need to clean up.”
Blood from the fight had dried on his skin. His clothes were sticky with it. Jess’s blood. And blood from the men he’d killed for her. He unbuttoned his waistcoat and tossed it in a corner—that was ruined—and eased his shirt off over his head, gritting his teeth. He’d gotten himself hit with a crowbar, protecting the girl.
“Need that strapped up?”
He rotated his shoulder, letting loose slashes of pain. “It’ll do.” The water in the bucket was still warm. He slopped it into the basin. The dried blood washed off, disconcertingly red, as if he were still bleeding. He took a towel from the floor, the one he’d used to dry her hair. It smelled like spices when he washed with it.
He poured the last clean water over his head, getting some of it in the basin, some on the floor.
Jess slept with her hand tucked at her cheek, like a child. The curl of her fingers was as beautiful as a seashell. I wouldn’t have touched her if I’d known what she was. But, holy God, I would have wanted to. He’d been gut-deep certain this woman belonged to him. He couldn’t remember the last time his instincts had betrayed him. “Your brilliant Jess is a fool if she thinks she can play that game with me. She has no idea the kind of man I am.”
“She has plans,” Adrian murmured. “What? Probably something that involves risking her neck. I’ve got the only man who can stop her locked up. Even Doyle can’t do it. How very much I wish she and I were on speaking terms.”
&nb
sp; “Save it. Listen.” Under the clank and rattle of the Flighty and the racket of rain hitting the deck, he heard wheels on the wharf. “Someone’s here.”
Adrian cocked his head. “That’ll be Doyle with the hackney. ” He studied the girl on the bed with a remote intensity. “You won’t ever forgive me for arresting Josiah, will you? I don’t generally betray my friends. But then, my dealings with you Whitbys have always been exceedingly complex.” He touched her cheek. Her head rolled to the side, completely lax. “Out of the hunt. She never did have a head for liquor.”
“A concussion is more to the point.”
“How right you are. Between the knock on her head and the potent powders of the East, she won’t even remember being here. When I take her away, she won’t remember you at all, mon vieux.”
Adrian always thought he was being subtle.
Jess Whitby had got herself wound up in his blankets. Her leg was bare to the thigh, long, with a down of golden hair. Erotic images started rolling around his mind like badly stowed lumber.
He pulled on a clean shirt. The linen was salty from being washed at sea, a good, familiar smell. Nothing exotic and woman-scented. “Get her off my ship.”
“Oh, I will. I will. Carry her for me, will you? I threw my knee out, fighting.” Adrian wrapped the blanket around Jess with a proprietary air. “And no clothes at all. You are so . . . thorough. It always complicates matters when they don’t have any clothes.”
You’re not funny, Adrian. “Where are you taking her?”
Adrian found her shoes. “I’m in the process of deciding that. Let’s proceed, shall we? I want her out of here before more gentlemen with knives show up.”
It was mostly blanket he felt when he picked her up. But a bundle of blankets wouldn’t have shaped itself to fit his arms or leaned, confident and accepting, against his shoulder. Her hair blew back in his face when he pushed through the companionway door and the outside cold rolled over them. He recognized the spice on her now. She smelled of cardamom.
She won’t remember me. He wanted to shake her and wake her up and make her look at him so he’d be sure she wouldn’t forget him. He wanted to see her eyes dilated, huge and dark, with his image inside. Most of all, he wanted her gone.
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