Morgan might not be the pleasure-seeking Siren she’d portrayed in Edinburgh last winter. But she wasn’t all hard-bitten, ruthless warrior-woman either. She was both.
One aspect of her personality hadn’t changed. She was as unpredictable as always.
He stifled a laugh, sure that wouldn’t go over well.
“What are you smirking at?” she asked.
“You scared ten years off my life.”
Her gaze darkened, grew troubled. She fumbled with the flask.
He’d surprised her. Hadn’t given her the response she’d expected. And Cam knew he’d won that round.
But what had he given up?
He leaned forward, wishing he had the right to offer comfort. A touch. A kiss. But he knew what that would get him. A scathing comment at best. A blow to his midsection at worst. He swallowed the impulse, though not the desire. Decided to confront her head-on. “Have you ever seen death? Violent death? Been close enough to smell the blood or watch the light fade from someone’s eyes? Have you ever dealt it with your own hand? Looked a man in the face while his life drains in front of you?”
Morgan plucked a grass blade from the ground. Twirled it between her fingers. “I’ve seen…not…No.”
Memories surfaced. Recollections that resisted all his drunken attempts to obliterate them. “I have. It sours your stomach. Makes your blood run fevered, then frozen through your veins. But you do what you have to do. You don’t think. You don’t care. You simply act or react. That’s what makes a perfect soldier.”
That’s what makes a perfect killer. But he didn’t say it.
Tossing the grass away, Morgan faced him, her eyes honey gold in the westering light. “What are you trying to tell me?” Her voice and her expression had lost their edge. She cocked her head as if trying to understand.
“I…” Just talking about it made him go cold. Made his gut churn. “I’m trying to tell you it’s all right to be shaky in the knees and want to cast up your accounts. It’s all right if you’re not the dirtiest, meanest son of a bitch out there.” He dropped his gaze to the ground. To a crush of pebbles. A broken stalk of grass. Anywhere so he didn’t have to meet Morgan’s eyes. That keen gaze of hers would pick out every crime he’d ever committed in the name of duty. See every man who hadn’t been as quick or as cunning or as good as he was. And unfortunately for their sakes, he’d been damn good once.
“Cam?” Her hand on his arm snapped his head up. Her hair fell forward, a loose strand caught in her lips.
That simple gesture was all it took. He leaned toward her. Caught her face in his hands. And before she could resist, claimed her mouth in a hungry, desperate kiss. Her lips moving over his overpowered the raging flashbacks. There was no room for thought. Only sensation. The faint whiskey taste of her lips, the exquisite softness of her skin, the deep, spreading burn of his body as seconds passed and she didn’t pull away. Could it be this easy?
She started in his arms. Shoved him away. “No.”
Out of reach, she scrambled to her feet, dragging her sleeve across her mouth. Erasing all trace of him. Her expression was enough to tell him how badly he’d cocked things up.
Her voice trembled. “Thank you for your concern, but I don’t need your advice. I can see where it’s led you.”
Cam plowed a frustrated hand through his hair. “Aye, stuck with the most stubborn, pigheaded pain in the…neck.” He stood, faking a calm that took all his energy. Afraid of what he’d just done. The emotions he’d unleashed with one thoughtless kiss. But she’d felt perfect in his arms. Just as he remembered.
He wondered if she remembered too.
Cam sat—drink in hand, though he’d yet to take a sip. He’d ordered it more for reassurance. To have if he needed it. And the way this investigation was shaping up, he’d need it soon.
The message had been waiting for him at the inn when they’d returned.
Come to The Forlorn Hope at seven.
Take a table by the stairs.
Fingering his glass, he worked on blending in. Disappearing. Difficult because of the placement of his table, but not impossible. He’d not abandoned his battle skills when he’d stepped off the boat in Portsmouth. Just drowned them.
While he waited, he kept an eye on those coming and going. Counted the men heading upstairs. Made mental note of all exits.
A loud party of militia officers held court by the hearth. Near the back, a group of infantry sat, their attention all for their ongoing card game. Lucy and her kind served drinks as they sought customers for the tavern’s upstairs rooms.
Cam couldn’t help but compare their rice-powdered breasts and pasted smiles to Morgan’s prowling grace, the huntress light in her golden stare. Even now, with all her efforts bent on proving herself one of the boys, she was the most feminine female he’d ever known.
Sex with a sword.
There was a dangerous thought. He glanced at his watch. It was long past seven. He’d give it another ten minutes.
The stairs behind him creaked as another satisfied john returned to the taproom from the brothel above. But halfway down, the footsteps slowed. A hoarse, gravelly voice sounded low in Cam’s ear. “Remember me, Sin?”
He stiffened. Few people knew him by that name. And with good reason. It was a name he hated. A name that symbolized a time in his life he thought ended last year with a dagger thrust through his upper back. Another tearing into his thigh.
“Unfortunately, yes,” Cam answered without turning around, his fingers tightening on his glass.
A soldier in the scarlet jacket and gosling green facings of the Fifth Foot dropped into a seat across from him, though it could just as easily have been the scarlet and white of the Third Dragoon Guards. Or even a French grenadier’s bearskin cap and epaulettes. Cam had seen him in all of them.
Uniforms meant little to Rastus. A scrounger extraordinaire, he used what came to hand or what was most expedient under the circumstances. It’s how he survived when others smarter, faster, or stronger didn’t. “Welcome home, Colonel. Been a while.”
“Not long enough, Corporal. I heard they shot you for a deserter.”
Weedy and pouch-faced with a terminal shake in his hands, Rastus lit a cheroot. Closed his eyes as he inhaled. Blew the smoke out through his nose with a yellow smile. “Nah, just a mite of confusion. I decided to head back to Spain with my woman. You remember Dolores? There was a bit of trouble, but it come right in the end.”
“Did you finally make an honest woman of her?”
“Ha,” Rastus snorted. “Marriage? I ain’t one for shackling myself. Dolores found herself a butcher in San Millan. Fought as a guerilla in the war. Lots of practice cutting meat, eh?” Rastus cracked his knuckles. Snapped his neck.
Cam cringed, remembering where he’d been and what he’d been preparing to do the last time he’d heard that incessant, aggravating one-by-one crunch of bone. He picked up his glass, knowing it wouldn’t take much to push those thoughts away.
“I hear you’re a free man again too, Sin,” Rastus droned on. “That hag of a wife finally nasty herself into the grave? Or maybe you brought a bit of work home with you when they shipped you out?” He slid Cam a knowing look. Flexed his fingers. “Never took much, did it?”
Cam placed the glass back on the table with deliberate care, his fist crushed around it, the urge to pick the sleazy grub up by the collar and shake him until his teeth rattled burning its way up his throat. “You brought me here for a reason, Rastus.”
Rastus stubbed his cheroot out on the table. Immediately lit another. “You’re looking for a sergeant.”
“I am. What do you know?”
“A man’s got to live, and the army don’t pay.” Rastus’s sob story was as familiar as his tobacco-stained teeth, the broken veins across his flattened nose.
Cam shrugged. “You forget who you’re talking to. I know where the bodies are buried—so to speak. You’re not starving.”
Rastus grinned. “Ah, no, b
ut that bit of sparkle’s my retirement fund. I’ve got to have a little brass to live on day to day. What are you willing to pay me?”
“Depends on what you’re selling.”
“My life won’t be worth a whore’s promise if Buchanan finds I’ve spoken to you.”
Cam flashed a dangerous smile. “Then you better hope he doesn’t find out.”
The corporal didn’t flinch exactly, but his easy manner stiffened into something approaching fear.
Cam had him hooked. He just needed to ease him into the boat. “You’ve the lives of a cat. What have you got to fear from this Buchanan? Spill it, and we’ll toast to old times. You and me.” God, there was a thought to sour his stomach.
Rastus nodded slowly, his demeanor still cautious. His eyes scanned the room, much as Cam’s had done earlier. He lowered his voice, forcing Cam to lean closer. “Buchanan ain’t no ordinary sergeant, that’s for certain. Can’t put my finger on why, but it’s a feeling I get. He’s got a way of looking right through you like he was reading your mind.”
That caught Cam’s attention, though he never moved a muscle, not even a break in eye contact. Rastus would see it and up the price.
“You’ve seen him more than once?”
“Scads of times. He’s tight with a group that lives in a set of houses by the canal. A queer bunch. Some are officers. Some no more than rankless lobster backs. I do a bit of work over that way from time to time. Just to keep my hand in.”
Cam fixed the man with a deadly stare. “If you’re setting me up…”
Rastus had the grace to look offended. “Would I do that to a fellow Serpent?”
In a knee-jerk reaction, Cam reached across the table, pulling the other man close enough to smell the sour odor of sweat on his skin, hear the terrified hitch in his breathing. Whiskey sloshed over the plate onto Cam’s breeks. “Never speak that name again,” he growled. Before any could note the strange behavior, he released him. Sat back. “The war’s over. That’s no longer who I am.”
His jaw working, Rastus cleared his throat. “Is it, Colonel? You can pretend it’s not a part of you, but the serpent’s always there. Waiting.”
Bands of pressure tightened around Cam’s skull; his hands trembled despite his best effort at controlling the fury that narrowed his vision to a pinprick.
Rastus rose from his seat at the table. Straightened his stock, the seam of his jacket. “If I were you, I’d let it out, Sin. If you’re set on tangling with Buchanan you’re gonna need every trick you ever learned. The skills of the killer are all that’s gonna keep you alive.”
Chapter 9
Doran watched the slow crawl of the murky canal water past his window, digesting the news his last runner had brought.
Questions were being asked. Someone searched for a mysterious sergeant. Someone who paid well for answers.
The mistakes that had brought him to this point were his alone.
He’d left a trail when he left the last soldier alive. Trusting to the rapid decay of the man’s body his first lapse in judgment. Death came slower than anticipated. He lived long enough to talk of what he saw before the goddess blade pierced his heart. But that was an oversight Doran could remedy.
His second mistake was underestimating the strength of Other and mortal combined.
Morgan Bligh was competent among the Amhas-draoi, though nowhere near the caliber of her cousin, Conor. Trading on her family’s power among the Other, rather than her own skills, to advance.
Sinclair had been a thorn in his side for months now, but his investigation turned up nothing that Doran didn’t want him to find. He’d become a joke. Referred to as the undertaker, his task reduced to finding and burying the abandoned bodies. The riverside attack had been a halfhearted ploy, the rabble Doran contracted to carry it out not worth the coin he’d paid.
Now the hunt grew serious. Pursuit became real. And he could afford no more mistakes.
He’d end the questions and the threat. Tonight.
Morgan never took her eyes from the tavern across the street. She’d traced Cam to The Forlorn Hope after waiting at their room for over an hour. She understood his reasons for leaving her behind. But still, it grated on her desire to keep busy. Stay involved.
Cam saw her as a helpless female. One who needed protection. Well, to hell with that. She’d been fighting that fight her whole life. First against brothers and cousins who tormented her until she landed her first bloody nose. Then against the men she trained with on Skye who paraded their physiques in front of her as if one look at their hard bodies would send her over the moon. The bloody noses there had been harder to achieve, but she managed to gain their grudging approval as well.
But both her family and the Amhas-draoi held an advantage over Cam. They’d grown up with capable women. As mothers, teachers, leaders. Cam was a novice. It was up to her to prove she could hold her own.
She shifted, trying to regain feeling in her right arm. Pressed back into a doorway, unmoving for what seemed a lifetime, she’d gone tingly and then numb. By now, it felt as if a dead fish hung from her shoulder.
September’s chill stole in off the moors, dusting the ground with hoarfrost. Fog silvered her hair, dampened her face. She tried heaving the boat cloak farther over her, but the lack of mobility in her arm and the confined space made it impossible. Half numb, half freezing. Could it get any better?
Where was Cam? Had he slipped out the back, losing himself in the smoky, gray cloud hovering ghostlike in the air? Or had something happened to him?
The image of him blood-soaked and horrified sent a lightning jolt of fear through her, bringing painful sensation back to her arm. Another part of her—the angry part—imagined him hunched comatose over a whiskey, or worse still, wrapped between the legs of some riverside whore.
No. She shook her head, ridding her mind of that unwelcome idea.
She’d not come out here to spy. She’d come to force Cam to see her as an equal in this fight, a partner. If they stopped Doran and retrieved Andraste’s sword, Cam could skewer any whore who’d have him.
She straightened, new resolve firing her cold, stiff body.
She didn’t have long after that to wait. Ten minutes after a loud group of drunks weaved off into the night, she spotted Cam. She recognized him as soon as he stepped into the street. If he’d been drinking it hadn’t been enough to dull the controlled power of his movements, the aura of invincibility surrounding him. Despite his knife injury, there was just something about him that spoke of hidden strength—intense single-mindedness.
She held far enough behind that even if by chance he glanced her way, she’d have time to blend in with the darker shadows. Step into the gloom of an alley or a doorway. But he never looked back, his path steady on an unerring course to take him across town to the inn. Head down, hands shoved in his coat, he acted as if he were out for a Sunday stroll and not returning from a mysterious meeting with who knew what kind of scum.
This should be harder. Mayhap she needed to amend her first reaction. Mayhap Cam’s aura was as superficial as the perfect uniform, the gold braid, the strong jaw.
Just more of the brilliance that had blinded her the first time.
She drew closer, now no more than a hundred yards separating them. She’d leave her gotcha moment for just before the inn. The pinprick of her dagger at his back. A whispered told-you-so in his ear.
Cam crossed the street, rounding the corner, still with no idea she followed only steps behind.
Morgan jogged to catch up. Too many side alleys and narrow lanes broke off from the main streets through town. She wanted to keep him in visual as long as she could. But rounding the corner, not seconds after, she slammed to a stop.
The street stood empty.
She blinked, narrowing her gaze as she scanned from corner to corner, but nothing moved. No telltale scrape of a footfall. No harsh breath giving away his position. Not even a print in the frost.
He’d vanished.
&
nbsp; She swallowed an uncomfortable lump. This wasn’t going exactly as she’d planned, her gotcha moment slipping away before her eyes. Picking up the pace, she hurried down the street, passing into a lane that brought her out close to the inn. She’d cut time and distance going this way, and be waiting when Cam arrived.
That’s when it happened.
One minute she slid from shadow to shadow, the hunter on the trail of her prey; the next, a hurtling punch slammed her between the shoulders. Another smashed her in the small of the back. She landed with a head-cracking thud in the dirt, the wind knocked out of her.
A hand grabbed her, flipping her over. Her attacker straddled her hips, his knife inches from her face.
Eyes, gleaming with deadly purpose, stared down at her, before widening with a mixture of surprise, confusion, and horror.
She opened and closed her mouth, trying to work her crushed lungs. Pump some air back into her body.
“Shit.” The knife clattered forgotten to the ground. “Morgan, are you all right?” Cam wiped a hand down his face. “Shit,” he groaned again.
She tried croaking out an answer, but aside from her squashy lungs, Cam’s weight still pinned her to the ground. “Fine,” she managed to squeeze out, “I think.”
The solid weight of him on top of her was doing crazy things to her earlier resolve to stay as far away from Cam’s dazzle as possible. “Off,” she gasped. “Off me.”
“What?” He leaned toward her and those amazing lips drew closer, the stubble on his jaw within kissing distance. Delicious heat spread outward from her center, twisting through her, tying her in knots.
“Off,” she squawked, thrusting up with her hips to dislodge him.
Oh, that was definitely the wrong thing to do.
Her body went on instant alert, as did his. But he got the message. He scrambled off her as if she’d caught fire.
She pushed up on her elbows, breath finally expanding to fill her airways. Doing her best to ignore the explosive mixture of pleasure at the closeness of his body and tension at what that pleasure might mean. When she spoke she tried sounding as if she’d meant for this to happen all along. “You’re better than good. I never heard you.”
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