Lovemaking is a good place to hide. “What we will do,” he said, “is take a little trip.”
He kissed her fingers, one by one. She was watching him, interested. This was the very beginning. Soon, she wouldn’t watch him do anything at all. She’d feel it. He said, “Look over the edge.”
Perplexed, she looked where he pointed, over the edge of the bed.
“Rug sharks.” He shook his head sadly.
“Rug sharks?”
“Lots of them. Hungry looking, too. Can’t get out that way.” He crawled across the bed to the window, motioning her to follow. It was only just first light. “See that?” he pointed to the garden in the middle of the square.
“Yes . . .”
“That’s the island. I imagine we’ll drift up against it sometime or other. Probably in a day or two. Till then . . .” He put his hands on her shoulders. That was a good place to start, the shoulders. “We’re stuck here. On the raft.”
She smiled, tentative. “It’s a nice raft, though.”
“A fine raft.” She had lean, elegant muscles, tense as carriage springs. He kneaded up and down her neck, loosening them up. “There’s just the raft. No past. No future. Only the ocean around us. Nowhere to go and nothing to do but make love to each other.”
He watched her let go of them—past and future. “I’d like that,” she said.
“Lie down then. No. On your stomach.”
She lay down, willing, but puzzled. When he got on top, straddling her thighs, her skin startled. Little ripples of shock spread out.
So this was new. Her first lover, that boy, had taken care with her. Been gentle. But he hadn’t known much. There’d be lots of surprises for her this morning.
He patted her rump, Hello, rump. Aren’t you a pretty thing, and introduced himself to the muscles up and down her back . . . fingering his way along . . . stroking them the way they liked . . . getting them on his side . . . telling them they were safe with him. He knew what he was doing. It was a beautiful, beautiful body she had.
She had her head to one side, looking around his room, glancing back to see what he was about. “Shouldn’t we be doing something?”
“Can’t do anything. All those rug sharks. We just have to stay here and amuse ourselves.”
“I meant, amusing ourselves. I’ve done this before. I know there’s more to it.”
“Indeed there is. But we’re not in any hurry. Got a couple of days to fill up before we get to the island.”
After he’d been working a bit, she forgot to worry. Her eyes closed. A little while onward, she whispered, “This is what it feels like afterwards. Like I’m melted.”
So that was enough on those back muscles. She’d loosened up nicely. When he got off and rolled her over, she almost flopped.
He started in on her hand. Many bones and muscles to make friends with there. Then up her arms to her shoulders. Her eyes were half-closed when he went down to get acquainted with her feet. Jess could relax and enjoy herself. It just took a while.
“That feels good. I didn’t know.” She spun the words out of a soft breath. “Didn’t know.” Her eyes closed. “Are you sure there isn’t something I should be doing? It doesn’t seem fair.”
She was breathing deeply, letting his hands tell her when to breathe. This was where he wanted her to be. This was what he wanted her to feel.
“You truly hate to lie back and do nothing, don’t you?” he said.
“This isn’t doing nothing. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not doing nothing.”
He knelt between her legs. So beautiful. It took all his strength to hold himself in check, thinking what it was going to feel like . . . Jess, closed around him.
SHE liked what Sebastian was doing to her. Kissing her knee. Made it hard to get her breath. Hard to stay still. But, oh, she liked it. Was this what people generally did in bed together? She hadn’t known it took this long. She was almost certain you could get to it faster if you wanted to.
Then he kissed her breast, and it was like being plunked down over a fire. Heat everywhere.
He put his mouth on her, eating her with noisy sucks and bites, like she was a melon or something, and he was hungry. He pressed his teeth against her nipple. She would have sworn she was drawn too tight to move, but she thrashed like a hooked fish when he did that.
“I want . . .” She wanted to grab him and crawl through his skin. Into him. She wanted him there. She held her legs open for him because that was what this was all about. She wasn’t ignorant.
“You never do anything by halves, do you, Jess?” He stroked from her shoulder to her breast and down her belly, between her legs. She jerked and jerked in the wake of his hand. “No defenses at all. Nothing held in reserve.”
That probably all meant something. She’d think about it later. “Could we . . . could we do the rest of it?”
“We are.”
“I mean a little faster. Now.”
“Why would we want to go fast? Remember? No place to go. Nothing to do.” He wound some of her hair around his fingers. “I like this. It’s the color of the ropes on a ship, when they’re dried out in the sun.” He played with her hair, doing something to it. “You watch for that color because the ropes lengthen up, and you have to send the boys about tightening them to trim the sails. It’s a good color. It means fair weather.”
“I don’t think I can stand much more of this.”
Damned if he wasn’t pulling one strand through the other, like he was braiding it somehow. Braiding her hair. “This is a reef knot,” he said. “That’s the first one you learn on a ship.”
He was tying knots in her hair. Sailor’s knots. The man was insane.
“You use it for holding ropes together,” he said.
“I don’t care if you . . . dance jigs in it. Look, can we talk about this some other time?”
He took her hair apart. No more reef knot. He stroked her again, oh, slow and strong down her belly, and she pushed her whole body up underneath his hand. He let her press herself up into the heel of his hand four or five times, till she was dancing for him. She whimpered when he took his hand away.
“Please . . .”
Kneeling over her, he played with her hair some more. “This one’s called a sheet bend. It’s another one you use for joining ropes.”
She watched while he undid her hair. She was tensing and untensing, rhythmically, waiting for him to finish with the damned knot nonsense. He was waiting, too, being stern with himself. When she set her fists on his chest, he was iron. He was oak-hard flesh, quivering. He wanted her.
He said, “The joy at the end takes only a minute. Pleasuring can last as long as you like.”
There was a logical fallacy behind those words. She was sure of it. When they were through in bed, she was going to kill him. “I don’t like this.”
“What part don’t you like? This?” He trailed his thumb, soft, across her, where she was open.
Her eyes spasmed shut with the poignancy of it. She was shaking now, continually. “It’s not being able to . . . stop. I don’t belong to myself when you do that.” She lay panting. She hadn’t known she’d have no control at all.
She wasn’t the only one. He was gasping for air. Shaking. He kept his hand cupped over her there, at the center of all that pleasure, all that urgency, and looked down at her. She saw it in his eyes. He was caught, too. Famished. Fascinated.
But he was the one who knew what happened next. That made him so damned powerful. He could do anything to her when he touched her there.
“It’s just me,” he whispered. “Just me. I like luring you along till you can’t think anymore. No harm in it, between the two of us, here in bed.” Another kiss. He had a thousand different kinds of kisses. This was the brush of lips on the inside of her thigh. “Let me pull your sails into the wind. There’s nothing you have to take charge of.”
She couldn’t have taken charge of a folded napkin. She felt him, warm as water, licking her be
tween her legs. Madness was what she felt. Oceans of madness.
He didn’t stop till she was gasping out his name. Till she was shaking.
He propped himself on his forearms, above her, looking down. “Do you know, Jess, a while back I swore to myself I’d have you like this, underneath me, with not a stitch on you, begging and incoherent. It’s as good as I thought it would be.”
“Not quite incoherent yet.”
“We will arrange that. Open your eyes. I want to see in.”
He lay his length upon her and came into her. She didn’t know what he saw in her eyes when he entered her. Surprise maybe.
What she saw was Sebastian filling up the whole world above her and then filling up the whole world inside of her, too. He was exactly what she needed—strong and powerful and not gentle at all. Her pleasure started with the first thrust and kept on as he thrust into her again and again and again.
“STAY with me,” he said.
Sebastian lay in bed and watched Jess slip the cotton nightgown on over her head with that same simple grace he’d seen when she was taking it off. In the first light, her hair was a fall of tawny silk. Her body was alert as a tiger, happy, suave muscle gliding easily under her skin. The way she was meant to look. But her eyes were so sad.
“Stay,” he said.
“The maids are up. I’m not going to make a scandal in your aunt’s house. I know better than that.”
“I need to tell you what’s going to happen—”
“I can’t.” She was already at the door. “Let me go do what I have to do. We’ll talk about it later.”
She was going to her father. She needed to do that alone. There was nothing anyone on earth could do to make that easy for her.
He’d met with Adrian, hurriedly, last night. Between the two of them they could save Whitby from the hangman. Whitby would spend the rest of his years as a convict in New South Wales. Not easy for an old man. He’d suffer. Maybe that would be enough.
Her father’s life would be his wedding gift to Jess. He’d set aside his vengeance. Josiah Whitby, damn his soul, was right. That was the only way he could have a life with Jess.
He said, “Marry me, Jess.”
For an instant, she stopped. She laid her forehead to the wood of the door. “Sebastian . . .” She didn’t look at him. “Ask me tomorrow.” Then she fumbled with the doorknob, those clever hands of hers clumsy as paws.
Thirty-two
HER NAME WAS BRIDGET AND SHE CAME FROM County Mayo in the west of Ireland. She was a whore, a good one, and as shrewd and grasping as a magpie. Even respectably dressed, she looked like three pence against the nearest wall or ten pence upstairs in a bed.
She drank ale from a large pewter tankard and wiped her mouth. “She’s gone. Girl slipped out at first light and left those lumbering fools behind.”
“Alone, then.” The Irishman set his elbows on the sticky table. “Was she carrying a bag?”
“You think I pranced up and asked her? Jaysus.” She drank again. “And you bastards owe me a pound, even.”
“Later.”
Next to him on the bench, the other man said, “If she’s leaving England, we know where she’ll be.” He shoved to his feet. “Let’s go. Out the back way.”
“You could pay for me drink,” the woman muttered. “Pigs.”
PITNEY wasn’t at his house. His housekeeper, all flustered, said he’d come in late last night and packed a bag and left. He wasn’t at the warehouse either. When Jess checked the safe, the ready money was missing, so he’d been there and gone. But he wouldn’t have been fast enough to sail out on last night’s tide. He was still in London.
She took a hackney to Commercial Road, which was as far as the jarvey wanted to venture into these waters. A sensible man. She counted coins for him while her bodyguard assembled at a discreet distance.
She’d dodged Sebastian’s men, but not the Service. That was the next item on her agenda. Cutting loose the Service.
She slipped around the corner and down the alley, listening to heavy boots hurrying after her. At the end of Goose Lane she climbed a rain barrel and went over the palings into the narrow, crooked pathways nobody ever got around to naming. They were in her part of town now.
CLAUDIA sat in the ugly front parlor at Meeks Street, red-eyed, clutching her reticule in her lap.
“. . . his clothing gone from his room. All his things. The door to your study was open.” She swallowed and went on. “The drawers of your desk have been pried out. The miniatures are missing from the upstairs hallway, and some of the other paintings. My jewel case . . .” She kept her face averted from them while she talked. Her eyes stayed fixed on some knob or curlicue on the hideous sideboard to the left of the door. “My jewel case was extracted from my room last night, while I slept. I found it in your office, on the floor, broken open and emptied. Eunice’s jewels were—”
“He’s run for it.” Sebastian stopped her. There was no need to make her count through the whole wretched list of what was stolen. He felt sick. “It was Quentin all along. Quentin and Whitby. It adds up.”
“Quentin.” Adrian was doing some adding of his own. “But not Josiah.”
Doyle didn’t move from his position near the window. “It’s Pitney.” Doyle met his eye, soberly. “Your cousin knows Pitney, not Josiah Whitby. It’s Pitney who carries paperwork to the Board of Trade.”
“A conspiracy of small fishes,” Adrian said. “That’s why we missed it. Sebastian, I’m sorry.”
Service agents were silent at the edges of the room, watching.
Adrian said, “Your cousin had access to secrets. Pitney could use Whitby company ships any way he wanted. Josiah wouldn’t question him.”
Quentin had done treason. Quentin lived in his house. He’d sat beside him, eating dinner every night. He’d offered sympathy, damp-eyed, when the Neptune Dancer went down. His cousin had been playing a part for years. “Quentin is in charge. His ideas. He needed a man with access to ships, so he pulled Pitney into it somehow.”
Adrian was up, pacing off the room. “Jess knows it’s Pitney. ” After a minute. “She knew it when she left last night. She warned him.”
“Pitney was waiting at the gate when we left the Admiralty. ” He remembered what Jess had said. He remembered their faces—Jess resolute and frozen, Pitney gray as death. “She told him right under my nose. I watched her do it.”
“Mr. Pitney.” Claudia’s voice was tight. Her hands twitched in her lap. “From the Whitby company. When he came, they’d leave the house and walk along the street, to talk. Quentin made certain they wouldn’t be overheard. I knew something was wrong. I saw Quentin, once, hand money to him.”
She had the attention of every man in the room.
“I have known, for some time, that Quentin was engaged in something shameful. I had hoped it was . . . an unimportant corruption. My father committed numberless depravities without becoming a traitor.” Her face was proud. Impassive. “My brother has not succeeded in even that.”
“Claudia . . .” This was his fault. He should have seen what was happening in his own home. He’d ignored Quentin because he disliked him. What could he say? She’d never wanted friendship or comfort from him before. He didn’t know how to offer it now. “Where has he gone?”
“To Hades, I devoutly pray.” Claudia rose and shook her skirts out. “It’s as well the Ashton name will die in this generation. The bastard shoot is the best we’ve produced. Have a care to your Jessamyn, Sebastian. I’ve seen how Quentin looks at something he plans to steal. He watched your Persian miniatures that way. That’s the way he looks at Jess.” She smoothed her glove. “And he likes to hurt things.”
Jess was headed to Pitney, wherever he was hiding. To Pitney. And to Quentin.
FROM the outside, all rookeries look the same, but some are more dangerous than others.
Ludmill Street was peaceable in its rough way. Safe enough, if you knew what you were doing. When a pair of Irishmen approac
hed, making monetary offers, she snapped back, sharp, in Italian. They left her alone, thinking she belonged to the Italians. There were lots of hot-tempered Italians in this section who didn’t like even their whores approached by Irishmen. A few hundred yards farther on, she sent an Italian boy on his way with a Gaelic curse. Lots of hot-tempered Irishmen in this quarter, too.
When she got to the Limehouse, to Asker Street, it would be considerably more dangerous. She’d be unwise to visit alone.
The Reverend’s soup kitchen was open, and the door to his office unlocked. Guess he felt the same way she did about locks. An invitation to thievery, locks were. Being the Reverend, though, he probably came to the same conclusion in a more roundabout way.
When he walked in a few minutes later, she had his communion chalice down. “I should get you something better than this,” she said. “Something that’s real silver, at least.”
“I don’t own anything worth stealing, Jess.” Which was more or less what he said to her the first time they met, when she was eight and planning to lift that particular cup.
She set it back on the shelf. “Reverend, you would not believe the trouble I’m in.” Which was exactly what she said to him on another memorable occasion, a couple hours before she sold herself to Lazarus.
WHEN Sebastian came into the study, Josiah Whitby was staring into the fire. The old man didn’t look up. Not making a point, just not much interested. Some rumor from last night had reached him. He knew it’d been Whitby ships.
Sebastian collapsed into the chair. “I’ll take that port you didn’t offer me yesterday.”
That got Whitby’s attention. A cool, shrewd look, and Whitby read everything he was saying. Confirmation of his innocence. The amende honorable. Apology.
Whitby responded with his own set of messages. He brought the bottle and two glasses to the desk and poured for them both. “Looks like you could use it.”
“Why the hell didn’t you get Jess out of England the day you were arrested? Anybody but an iron-plated bastard like you would have kept her out of this.”
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