by Jane Feather
“I am,” Meg returned. “Is the Mary Rose still out there?”
He laughed softly. “Of course.” He walked across the sand to the dinghy. “Get in and I’ll push us off.”
Once they were floating free he said, “Under the thwart you’ll find a pouch with a whistle. Blow three long and one short, and then repeat.”
“I feel like a genuine spy,” Meg observed, feeling for the pouch. “Hiding in privies and ditches and signaling ships.” She blew on the whistle as instructed and they were rewarded almost immediately by a signaling light in the darkness.
Cosimo pulled strongly towards the light that gradually threw a guiding pathway over the black sea. Miles was clinging one-handed to the bottom of the rope ladder as they came up alongside, and grabbed the painter from Meg, pulling the dinghy close in. He jumped into the dinghy and helped Meg onto the ladder. She climbed rapidly upwards, aware that she was using the last dregs of strength as she toppled over the railing onto the deck.
It was David who helped her to her feet. “Dear God, what madness to go out in a night like this. What were you thinking, Cosimo? The poor woman’s a drowned rat.”
“There’s nothing of the poor woman about her,” Cosimo declared as he swung onto the deck beside them. He seemed enviably unaffected by the events of the night. “She’s as strong as a horse . . . Meg, go below,” he continued in the same brusque manner. “Biggins, hot water now. And tell Silas to make hot grog and bring it to the cabin. Come, Meg, don’t just stand there. David, if you want to send some prophylactic against chills to my cabin, feel free to do so.”
Meg didn’t resist the helping hand that propelled her towards the companionway. The cabin was lit by a lamp, its wick turned down low. There was no sign of Gus, and Meg assumed the gregarious bird had sought company elsewhere.
“Stand still. Let me unfasten the oilskin.” Cosimo was now all consideration, undoing the wet, stiff buttons and pulling the garment off her. “God, you’re soaked,” he muttered. “You’ll be lucky not to get a chill on the lungs.”
“You’re just as wet,” Meg retorted through chattering teeth, and he shook his head with a tiny laugh.
“I’m a little more accustomed to it, my dear Meg.” He was undressing her as he spoke, and didn’t stop when the door opened to admit Biggins with jugs of hot water. “Fill the bath, Biggins.”
“Aye, sir.”
Meg was too cold to care who saw her at this stage. Her skin was a mass of pimply goose bumps, like a plucked chicken, and her breasts seemed to have shrunk to the size of walnuts. Cosimo passed her the paisley shawl and she wrapped herself up while Biggins continued to fill the tub.
“Get out of your own clothes,” she insisted to the privateer when he’d made no attempt even to divest himself of the oilskin.
“Get into the hot water and then I will.” He pointed towards the head. “There should be enough to be going on with and I’ll pour in more when Biggins brings it.”
Meg didn’t argue. She slid beneath the water and felt the convulsive shivering ease. Cosimo came in naked with two more jugs and poured them over her. “Move up a little, I have to get in.”
She scrunched up to the end as he stepped carefully in opposite her, and then he slid down, shoving his icy feet beneath her backside as he dipped his head beneath the hot water.
“That’s better,” he muttered, coming up for air. “How about you?”
“Getting better,” she said, wriggling against his feet in an effort to warm them up. “Did you get the message you went for?”
He squinted a little through the drops of water that clung to his eyelashes. “Yes.”
“So it was worth it?” Meg splashed water on her shoulders as her body chilled.
“It was. And now you need to get out and get dry.”
“Was it a message from Ana?” Meg asked, standing up in a shower of drops. “Am I entitled to ask that?”
Cosimo dipped below the water again. He had no desire to tell her anything about the message, anything at all about Ana, not until he’d absorbed all the implications and come to terms with his own emotions. They were too raw at present to be explored, and he certainly didn’t want to do it in company. And yet Meg was entitled to something, and more to the point, he suspected that if he didn’t attempt to satisfy her curiosity, she would go on digging. Better to cut her off at the pass. When he raised his head he said, “Yes, it was.”
“Did I do as well as Ana would have?” She wrapped herself in a towel as she asked a question that she didn’t know why she was asking. Why did she feel in some kind of competition with this unknown woman?
Trust Meg to go straight to the heart of the matter. She was unfailingly straightforward. “Ana shouldn’t concern you,” he said dismissively, reaching for a towel as he stood up, hoping that would be the end of it.
“She doesn’t,” Meg said. “She interests me. They’re two very different things.” She walked back into the cabin, toweling her hair and wondering whether they really were.
Cosimo dried himself and followed her into the cabin. Biggins had set a steaming jug of hot spiced rum on the table with two beakers, and the privateer poured the fragrant grog and handed Meg a beaker. “Are you hungry?”
She considered this as she cupped her hands around the comforting heat of the mug. “I don’t think so.” She took an appreciative sip and then set down the beaker and went to get her nightgown. Once more decently clad, and warmly wrapped in the paisley shawl, she took up the mug again. “So, what did the message say?”
Cosimo, dressed again in shirt and britches, accepted that delaying tactics were getting him nowhere. “You know that I’ve been trying to discover what happened to Ana in Folkestone.” He chose his words carefully; there was much he had no intention of telling her, but he needed to give her just enough to satisfy her. “I was hoping for a message at Quiberon. When that didn’t come, La Rochelle was the last opportunity before Bordeaux.”
“So Ana is a spy, or whatever it is you are?”
“Among other things,” he said evasively. “Anyway, I discovered tonight that she is now safe and well. So there you have it.”
“So she told you what had happened in the message?”
The message had not been from Ana, but from one of his agents. They had found Ana and sprung her loose, but she was far from well. The message had been terse, as it had to be, but Cosimo had had no difficulty reading between the lines. The French had not been gentle with her. She had certainly been forced to give up the location of the outpost at Quiberon and he wondered if the raid tonight had been the result of interrogation. It was highly likely. The only saving grace was that Ana had not known the details of their mission. She had known they would make landfall at Brest and would be making an overland journey, and that much she would have been compelled to reveal, but as was customary she would not have known the detailed object of the endeavor until she was safely aboard. So, while she could have given away much that would endanger him and others, she could not have spilled the ultimate secret of his mission. They would be on the lookout for the Mary Rose, but he was leaving the ship at Bordeaux, something Ana had not known. The mission was still feasible.
Meg looked at him in puzzlement. He hadn’t answered her question and he was clearly thinking deeply about something. Something unpleasant, judging by the hardness of his mouth and the coldness of his eyes. “So now your mind’s at rest,” she pressed.
“Yes,” he said shortly. But his face said the opposite.
She could see that he considered the subject closed, but she couldn’t help herself. “So what did happen to her? What delayed her?”
“I don’t know exactly,” he said in the same curt tone. “Messages by courier pigeon tend not to be detailed, as you can imagine. I only know she’s safe.”
“Well, that’s good,” Meg said. He wasn’t telling her everything, she could feel the deception in the air. He was a smooth liar, but there was something that didn’t sit quite right abou
t this short, glib explanation that was no explanation at all. And she most definitely didn’t like the look in his eye, the shadow that mingled with an anger that she had never seen before. She had encountered his frigid look, but that was not an angry look. In fact, Meg thought, she had believed the privateer when he’d said he didn’t believe in anger, considered it a wasteful emotion. He’d never appeared more than determined and sometimes annoyed. He was coldly ruthless on occasion, but he never raised his voice, was never discourteous even when giving orders.
She felt a small frisson of fear. Ridiculous because that suppressed rage was not directed at her. But there was a power to it that made her fervently pray that she would never be the cause of it.
And then abruptly he smiled, a slow, lascivious smile that lit his eyes from behind and banished all shadows, any vestige of anger, as if they had never existed. “So, my love, it seems that danger excites you,” he murmured, reaching for her, drawing her between his knees as he sat on the window seat. He held her hips lightly, pressing his thumbs into her hip bones. “Cold, wet, filthy, covered in weeds . . . you’d have made love in that ditch regardless of a rampaging army of enemy soldiers just waiting for something to move that they could plunge their bayonets into.”
“You started it,” she answered, running her hands over his head, twisting an auburn lock around her finger and tugging gently. “You were as hard as a rock.”
“Well, I’ve never denied that for me danger and arousal are closely connected. I just hadn’t guessed it would be the same for you.” He bunched up the hem of her nightgown and began to ease it upwards inch by sensual inch.
If this was his way of closing a conversation, Meg reflected distractedly, it was certainly effective.
There came a sharp rap at the door and Cosimo swore under his breath. He let the nightgown drop again and called, “Who is it?”
“David.”
He got up and went to open the door. Gus flew off David’s shoulder and onto his perch with a cheerful “G’day.”
“Bad moment?” David inquired, reading Cosimo’s impatient expression. “Forgive the intrusion but Gus was clamoring, and I brought this for Meg. Echinacea.” He handed a small vial to Cosimo. “It’s proven quite efficacious against chills.”
“Thank you, David.” Cosimo took the vial. “Good night, now.”
“Good night . . . good night, Meg,” David called over Cosimo’s shoulder. “Take the echinacea before you go to sleep. Six drops in water.”
Cosimo closed the door rather firmly on his departure and with the same firmness put Gus into his cage and dropped the cloth over it. A mournful “G’night” came from beneath the crimson covering and then there was silence.
“Now,” Cosimo said, “where were we?”
“In a ditch, I believe,” Meg responded, her eyes shining. “With a troop of soldiers with bayonets searching for us.”
“Ah, yes.” He reached for her hands and pulled her against him, pushing his hands up under her hair. “God, I want you.” He kissed her mouth, his teeth nibbling her lip, and the surge of arousal flooded her loins, tightened her thighs.
There was no time now for the niceties. When he spun her to face the bed, she knew what he wanted and toppled forward, bracing herself on her hands. He threw her nightgown up over her head, then held her hips as he drove into her. She pushed back against his belly, reveling in each thrust that seemed to reach further to her core, to fill her with sensation. His nails scribbled down her spine, his fingers kneaded her backside, as she drew closer and closer to the edge, and when her knees finally buckled and she collapsed onto the cot as the joy became almost unbearable, he flipped her over and entered her again, his gaze, dark with passion, fixed upon her as if he would read her very soul.
And when finally he allowed his own climax to engulf him, Meg lay sweat-soaked and exhausted, unable to believe that such heights of passion could be scaled by one mortal woman.
Chapter 16
What happens when we get to Bordeaux?” Meg asked sleepily, sensing Cosimo’s approach across the sun-dappled deck.
“Ah, you’re awake at last. I thought you were going to sleep the day away.” He stood over her, his shadow blotting out the sunlight.
“The way you choose to spend the nights, the days are the only time I have to catch up on sleep,” she retorted, squinting up at him. “Could you step out of my sun?”
He moved aside. “I wasn’t aware the choice was only mine.”
“Well, now, perhaps it isn’t,” she agreed with an indolent stretch as she lay full length on the deck.
She reminded Cosimo of a thoroughly self-satisfied, contented cat at that moment. He dropped down to the deck beside her, leaning his back against the rail. “So what was your question?”
“What happens when we get to Bordeaux?” she repeated, pillowing her head on his thighs. “I assume there’ll be some rendezvous for handing over the dispatches. Is it to another ship, or somewhere on land? Is it in the town itself? Or somewhere outside?”
“Such a lot of questions,” he said, his fingers trawling through the sun-fragrant red curls.
“Well, I’m curious. We’re half a day’s sail from Bordeaux, or so you said this morning. That’s the end of your mission, then we go home. I’d like to know how it’s going to work.”
Cosimo still hadn’t decided on the opportune moment to tell her they were not going back to England. “I can’t risk the Mary Rose by sailing up the estuary to the harbor,” he said. “Even if we disguise ourselves as a merchantman, the danger’s still too great. So, I’ll make a night landfall by dinghy as usual in a little fishing village just this side of the city. That’s where I’ll deliver the dispatches.”
Dispatches that Meg still hadn’t seen hide nor hair of, despite her clandestine but nonetheless thorough searches of the cabin. It had become something of an obsession with her. She’d already deduced that the various dictionaries were used for writing and breaking codes. The knives she preferred not to think about. But where were the dispatches? They weren’t in the locked drawer and she could find no other safe. They could be somewhere else on the ship, of course. Maybe in David’s cabin. She wasn’t sufficiently obsessed to poke around there.
“Silas was saying something about supplies,” she said. “Where will they get those?”
“Another village,” he said casually. “There are those outside the towns who don’t mind whom they sell to as long as the price is right.”
“And how long do you think it will take us to sail back to Folkestone?”
“Maybe we won’t go back to Folkestone,” he said.
“Oh? Well, I suppose it doesn’t much matter where we land. I can always take a post chaise home. Only, I’m afraid you’ll have to lend me the money.” She sat up, and swiveled to face him, brushing the hair away from her eyes. “I didn’t have much with me when I fell.”
If he’d hoped to lead into a gentle discussion of the possibilities of continuing their journey awhile longer, it was a fond hope, Cosimo reflected. Meg was in no way obtuse, but she was so straightforward herself she didn’t suspect a roundabout approach to any subject. He would have to wait for the right moment to spring his surprise without artifice.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, leaning forward to rub the little line between his brows with a fingertip.
For answer he took her hand and sucked her finger into his mouth, and felt the quiver run through her, the way her body quickened with lust. Passion was an addiction, he thought as he had done once before. They were both enthralled by desire, by the slightest brush of a finger, the merest touch of skin. He could bring her to the brink of arousal by a raised eyebrow, and all Meg had to do was give him her narrow-eyed look, touch her tongue to her lips, and he was lost.
It would serve him well in this greater purpose, but for some reason the knowledge didn’t please him as much as it should. He found it faintly distasteful to be considering the openness of Meg’s sexual passions as a means to
an end. Which was a novel feeling. In his past relations, such a benefit outweighed everything. His own lust was easily subsumed into the greater purpose. His world was dangerous and unstable and there was no room in it for emotion or dependency, mutual or otherwise. And yet he knew he could not bear to hurt this woman who gave herself with such uninhibited delight, and whose passion fired his own beyond anything he had previously experienced. But he was deceiving her, and he intended to go on doing so for as long as necessary. So where did that leave him and his scruples?
“You’re thinking too much,” Meg said with a soft laugh. “I don’t find it flattering to play second fiddle to thoughts that aren’t of the pleasantest, judging by your expression.”
“Daytime intrusions,” he said, turning her palm up and planting a kiss in the middle. “Forgotten now.”
“Shall we go below?” Her sandy brows lifted in mischievous invitation. “We could be very quick.”
He glanced around. The Mary Rose was sailing serenely on quiet waters. There was no sign of other shipping, hostile or otherwise. And Bordeaux and all the disruptive decisions that would have to made there were only a half day’s sail. A wise man took the opportunities offered to him.
“Why not?” He stood up, reaching a hand down to pull her to her feet.
“Why won’t you let me come with you this time?” Meg demanded, watching as Cosimo pulled his black cloak tightly around him. “It’s a perfect night for a row . . . unlike the last time.”
“The person I’m meeting is expecting me to come alone.” He bent to kiss her. “Wait up for me. I’ll be back before midnight.”
She followed him up onto the deck and stood at the rail in the moonlight as he climbed down into the dinghy, took up the oars, and began to pull towards the sandy cove about half a mile away. She’d been following him around like a dog all day and she still hadn’t seen him take the dispatches from wherever they’d been hidden. She couldn’t even see where he’d put them for the journey to shore. Dispatches had to be bulky, surely. But there were no bulging pockets in his britches, no lumps beneath his shirt. Nothing she could feel when she kissed him goodbye.
