He said, “I like your hair.”
“I like yours, too.” Those Greek boys who dived in the sea and brought up sponges had the same jet black hair. It was soft when she put her hands up in it, the color and texture of Russian sables. If Badger had stabbed her this afternoon, she would have missed all this—the feel of a man’s harsh shaved chin, the black hair slipping through her fingers.
He played with his mouth on her earlobe. So damned skillful. It was all meant to be enjoyed.
There’d never been a man who made her want to close her eyes and let him take over. Not ever. Not even Ned. But here she was trembling, letting Kennett wash over her like a wave, drowning her in pleasure. If she let go, he’d pull her under. The pleasure would be worth it. To forget for a few minutes . . .
So much she wanted to forget . . .
She pushed away from him. About an inch away. “Bloody damn cripes. I can’t do this.”
It was the right thing to say. Instead of trying to convince her that she could, indeed, do this, Sebastian threw his head back and laughed. “All right Jess, then you don’t have to.”
He didn’t let her go. Whatever he planned to do with her next, having her backed hard against the wall seemed to be the starting point. “Why did you walk into that place? You almost got yourself gutted in front of me. Do you want to die?”
“It was one of those calculated risks.”
“Calculated madness. Did you really kill somebody for him when you were eight?”
“Not exactly. Look, I don’t want to talk about that.” There didn’t seem to be any pins left in her hair. She shoved him away some more and bundled her hair back over her shoulder. “I’m cautious, generally. Ask anyone. You barging in there and asking Lazarus for me—now that was daft.”
She’d watched the two of them, Lazarus and the Captain, trading for her. Dickering. Somehow, Sebastian said the right words and she walked out of there. There wasn’t another man in London who could have managed it. Only the Captain.
She’d never meet another man in her life like him. It hurt, how much she wanted to make love to him.
“If you’re going to look at me like that, we might as well get back to what we were doing.” His hands just took up where they’d left off. He started kissing her eyebrows, for pity’s sake. Whoever heard of someone kissing eyebrows?
It worked, though. He went back and forth across her with his lips and his fingers, and it was like he was weaving some complicated spell with her flesh. When she said, “I think I want to stop doing this,” he sucked the words right out of her mouth as she spoke them. She might as well have kept quiet. She shook her head back and forth. It didn’t budge his hands any at all. They just played across whatever was going by—cheek, lips, hair. It all worked fine for him, whatever part of her he touched. “It’s not going to work. I’m not going to make love with you.”
“Some people enjoy just kissing.” He breathed it warm into her ear, casual and innocent, as if he didn’t know how that felt to her. He was going much, much more slowly, just like he said he would.
“I don’t want to enjoy it.”
“You are, though, aren’t you?”
She was meshed up in what he was doing to her. Burning, every place he put his hands on her. He was so wise with her body, there didn’t seem to be any way to stop him. He must have done this to a hundred women. Velvet, his lips were, all over her face.
“I’m a damn fool.” She said that because she was sucking on his hand, where he’d set it to her lips. That was worse, somehow, than kissing him, this wanting to know what his hands tasted like. “I’m not going to bed with you, Sebastian, no matter how well you’re seducing me. Remember that.”
“I’ll remember that.” He spoke down into her hair.
“You didn’t expect to get me all the way upstairs like this, did you?” she said. “I’d have got my senses back somewhere in the front hall probably. Or on the stairs at the latest.”
“Certainly on the stairs.” His smile sank into her bones. He did it on purpose. “My very dear Jess, I’m not trying to get you to my bedroom. We have all the time in the world. There are many, many things to do before we go to bed.”
“I don’t want to do any of those either.”
“You don’t even know what they are. You don’t know anything.”
She shivered for him. He watched her do it and his eyes turned to black, hot lava.
“You liked seeing me do that, didn’t you?”
“Immensely. Don’t be so nervous. When we go to bed together, you’ll want it as much as I do. I don’t take anything by force from women. Not even a kiss.”
“You talk them into it. It’s more fun that way.” He’d ask nicely. So very nicely . . .
“Much more fun.” He said it like it was an old joke between the two of them. “Since you’re not going to end up in my bed tonight, you can just relax and see what happens next.”
“I don’t want to relax. Can’t anyway.” She wanted to unbutton his shirt and put her cheek on his chest and smell his skin. She wanted to taste him. That was what came of not being innocent. If she’d been innocent, she wouldn’t know about naked chests.
“You’re waiting to see what happens next, aren’t you?” He ran his hands up and down her back, all friendly. “Maybe you’re curious.”
“I doubt that’s it.” She swayed into him, where he was touching her. Sort of putting herself into his hands. It felt wonderful. “Dunnoh why I’m letting you do this. Generally I have more backbone. I think it’s being terrified for an hour straight. Loosens you all up inside, somehow. Makes everything hit harder afterwards.”
White teeth flashed in his dark face. Oh, but she was amusing him, wasn’t she? “When you brush up against death, you want to couple afterwards. I found that out years ago. I didn’t know it worked the same with women. Does it?”
“Does this time,” she said frankly. “Mostly I was real young. And the last couple times I was so seasick I didn’t want to do anything but curl up and die. I’m glad Lazarus didn’t kill you.”
“I’m glad he didn’t kill either of us.” The Captain seemed to find that funny, too. Outside, in the hallway, somebody clopped rapidly down the stairs.
“It would have been a great waste.” She slipped her hands under his jacket, on his shirt. “Do you know, you are the most alive person I’ve ever seen. I can’t explain it. I was looking at you back there when I thought I might be going to die, and it was like there was fire everywhere inside you.” Wherever she touched his body, the fire crossed through their flesh, till she was burning with it.
She didn’t drop her hands away. She held on.
He must have seen the pleading in her eyes. He kissed her then, giving her what she’d wanted. When she kissed back, her lips and tongue scraped on that stubble of beard along his jaw. She got rubbed sensitive by it. He ran his tongue over her lips then, and there was hardly any skin between them. Just feelings brushing against each other.
She’d go upstairs with him in a few minutes and they’d make love. When they couldn’t stand this kissing anymore, they’d stop lying to each other and get into bed. That was where this was leading, and they both knew it.
“Ah, there you are.” Standish stood in the doorway, looking pleased to have found them.
The Captain’s mouth lifted from hers. “Yes. Here I am.”
“I wish you’d be more careful of the pots, Sebastian. That’s a Minoan dolphin beaker next to your elbow. Eunice says, will you please go get the midwife for . . . Dear me, I’ve forgotten her name.”
“Oh my God,” Sebastian said.
Had to happen sooner or later. “Flora. That’s her name. Lazarus must have really liked her. He cut this one close.”
Twenty-five
Hungerford Market
DOYLE WAS EXACTLY WHERE HE WAS SUPPOSED to be, where she’d arranged to meet him. He was standing on the bridge, a fishing pole out over the canal. Jess stopped two feet away and set her basket
on the footpath.
“Nice day for ducks, miss,” he said respectfully and pulled at his cap.
She grinned and leaned her elbows on the stone rail and looked down at the ducks so nobody could see her lips when she spoke. “Hello, Mr. Doyle. How’s the fishing?”
Doyle peered down into the water and twiddled with his line. “Good enough, me not having any particular need for fishes today. We got ourselves what you might call a special agreement, me and the fishes. I don’t put anything on the hook, and they don’t bite it.” He was frowning like he had bad news to deliver, but he didn’t spit it out. Instead he said, “You’re being followed. Four men.” He looked up the road, the way she’d come, then, casually, back along the canal. “British Service. They’re being sloppy.”
“They aren’t trying to hide. They’re intimidating me with their official demeanor. Makes me feel like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, leading a pack of rats around.” They were ugly ducks in the canal, patched up from a couple different lines of ancestry. When they saw her, they swam over quacking, raucous, milling around and nipping at each other. Cockney ducks. She’d brought bread. She started tossing bits at them.
“The Service put a couple of men to watching you, right from the first. Adrian wanted you safe.” Doyle twitched the fishing rod. “Safe as you could be, all considered.”
And that was the bad news. She thought it over, trying to decide how she felt about it, and tossed more bread into the water. Wherever it landed, the same ducks always got it. There was a lesson in that, she thought. “The men watching me . . . you were the first of them.”
“With orders to keep you safe. Give you the information what you asked for. Give you advice, if you’d take it.” He glanced at her, sharp, quick, humorous, tough. “Adrian told me to keep you outa trouble.” The scar on his cheek creased. “Not likely.”
She didn’t seem to feel anything. Not anger. Not betrayal. She’d got used to the world falling down around her ears. Maybe she didn’t have any more shock left in her.
Doyle was British Service. Adrian had sent him to her. To protect her.
She rolled it around in her mind, and nothing changed. He was still Doyle. If sea monsters climbed out of that canal, this minute, he’d put down the fishing rod and fight them off with his penknife, telling her to “hop it.” He’d do the same for the fishmonger’s daughter. Working for the Service was irrelevant to the likes of Mr. Doyle.
“Adrian wouldn’t just do it straightforward and have me followed. He has to be sneaky about it.”
“That’s him.”
Adrian, plotting and plotting to make sure she was safe. He’d sent the very best he had. She was sure of it. Doyle would be an important man in the British Service—he’d be a general manager if he worked for Whitby’s. Adrian had set him to running errands for her.
And all of a sudden it was funny. She’d sent Doyle out to hire dozens of men to follow villains and break into offices all over London. He’d probably just set Service agents to doing it. This last month, she’d been funding British Service operations. “How long have you been British Service, Mr. Doyle?”
“All me life. Started telling lies to pretty girls like you when I was a nipper.”
She leaned out far and got rid of the last of her bread. “I never knew. Not the least niggle of a suspicion. Not once.”
“Well, I’m good, see. Around Meeks Street they call me Doyle, the Secret Shadow. I got me a reputation.”
She didn’t laugh. Or maybe a little.
He looked at her keenly, bushy eyebrows and lined face serious. “I have a daughter your age, Jess. She’s out in the wilds of Spain, last time I heard from her, making life difficult for the French. I hope somebody looks after her if she needs it. I was doing this for your father, as much as Adrian.”
Papa, being two pins in a paper with a man like Doyle, would agree. Knocked the legs out from under her being angry. “I am just replete to the gills with everybody taking care of me and figuring they have to lie to me three ways from Sunday to get it done.” She reached down to pick up her basket. “You know what this means, don’t you? Means I’m not going to pay you for last week. I’m damned if I’ll put a Service agent on the payroll.”
“I can see the sense of that. ’Ere now. Let me, miss.”
Anyone watching would have seen the amiable, rough-looking man set his fishing pole down on the stones and stoop to pick up the basket for the lady. He handed it to her and she thanked him very prettily. He raised his cap to her as she left.
SEBASTIAN followed her and watched her do it right before his eyes. Talking to Doyle on the bridge, she’d been every inch a respectable young matron on her way to market. By the time she turned down Brantel Street, he was following what was unmistakably a pert servant girl on orders from the cook to do the shopping and get back to the kitchen smart, if you please.
Hungerford Market fronted the river. The market men landed their wares at the stairs on the Thames and wheeled them up in barrows. It was ordinary, just fresh vegetables and plump geese laid out in rows. It was small, a mere long block with a market house. The Ashtons sent the cart to Covent Garden at dawn twice a week to do the main shopping. Hungerford Market was just for what they needed fresh each day.
They needed fish, evidently. Jess was eyeing a pile of mackerel laid out under the awnings on damp burlap. She’d given her basket to one of the market boys.
“I dunnoh,” she was saying. “I thought maybe a bit of haddock would go down nice.” Then she listened with patent disbelief to the claim that the haddock at the next stand had been lying there nigh onto three days, but this here mackerel were fresh caught this morning.
“I dunnoh.” Jess prodded a largish specimen. “Haddock’s cheaper, too.”
The conversation deteriorated into minutia of one and six for three medium mackerel or four bigger ones for two shillings, thr’pence. He propped himself on a stall heaped with cabbages and turnips and listened for ten long minutes while Jess resolutely reduced the price of two mackerel and five tiny, anonymous, silvery-gray fishes to two shillings, ha’penny. The market woman wrapped the fish in a broadsheet and stowed them in the basket with the satisfaction of a woman who’d been willing to go to two shillings even.
“Oysters,” Jess murmured to herself as he approached. “Hello, Sebastian, why are you following me?”
“I like following you.” The ragged boy carrying the basket, about half full of fish, eyed him balefully. Evidently Jess aroused protective instincts in his young breast. “Must you do the shopping? I haven’t checked lately, but we usually have half a dozen girls sitting around the kitchen doing nothing in particular. One of them could do this just as well.”
“If you will bring women home to pup in the guest bedroom, you must expect some disorder. Your cook is drunk. You’re having fish stew for dinner. It’s about the only thing I know how to make.”
“Anything is better than letting Aunt Eunice loose in the kitchen. Where to next?”
“Onions. No, not that kind.” She ignored the baskets they were passing. “Spring onions. Over with the greens. Why don’t you go . . .” she waved him away from the stall, “. . . look at things or something.”
So he wandered around. The ground was covered with floating feathers from the geese they were plucking upwind. The man selling dried fruit and nuts had some almonds, so he bought a handful, wrapped up in a twist of paper, and carried them around, eating as he went. He liked the look of the oranges, too. They were probably some of his. He whistled to the boy Jess had picked out and, when he trotted up, dropped the almonds on top of the oysters and started loading oranges in.
He kept a pair of oranges, one in each jacket pocket, and walked back to where Jess was, at long last, concluding the contract on a handful of spring onions and a tiny bunch of what looked like weeds. This involved counting out much very small change.
She peered in the basket. “Oranges. You know you already have a basket or two cluttering up your pantry.
Or you don’t know, I guess. And almonds. Oh well, they don’t go bad. Take it to Kennett House, please. You know it?”
The boy indicated he did by rolling his eyes heavenwards and murmuring, “. . . where they keep all them doxies . . .” He grabbed the penny Sebastian offered and disappeared.
“ He’s supposed to get a farthing piece,” Jess said.
“I’ve set him up for life then, haven’t I? Do you enjoy this sort of thing?”
“Buying fish? I do, actually. Most places I live they don’t even let me in the kitchen. It must be three years since I bought fish. I mean, one fish, not a boatload, dried.” She began threading her way briskly through the stalls, around piled vegetables and crates of live chickens and the baskets of fish that spilled out into the narrow walkways between the vendors. “You’ve ruined my reputation in there,” she said. “I’ll never be able to go back. You have them all convinced I’m your dolly mop.”
“That’ll teach you to chatter broad Cockney to them.” Jess had dark circles under her eyes again. They’d both been up all the night. Flora’s baby, a boy, had been born with the sun. Healthy chap. Loud pair of lungs on him.
A little girl sat with her tattered skirts spread out, selling violets at the edge of the market. He flipped her a sixpence and picked a bunch and presented them to Jess. She slowed down after that. They walked along and she turned them in her hands and didn’t seem certain what to do with them.
“You didn’t need to give her sixpence,” she said at last. “Pointless, too. The old lady who runs her will just take it away from her.”
“You’re supposed to say, ‘Thank you very much’ and hold them to your nose and smile. Hasn’t anyone ever given you violets before?”
They were out of the market, heading down one of the side streets that led to the river. She smelled the flowers. But it wasn’t a smile, more a considering and puzzled frown. “I don’t think anyone ever did give me violets.”
My Lord and Spymaster Page 26
