Her hands gripped his hair, seeking an anchor, her legs widened and her pleasure became his pleasure. They were joined together in this act, the most intimate pleasure he could afford to give her, and the most she could afford to receive. Wanting had not destroyed his sense of reason entirely. They could have this and perhaps survive it, although that seemed in question at the moment. His heart was pounding as she arched into him, pressing her core to his mouth, to his tongue, pushing him, pushing herself to the precipice of release where they might soar. Above him, Anna cried out, an incoherent series of sobs, her body starting to thrash and strain against him—wanting freedom, wanting release, wanting him. And then, when it seemed she would burst, she shattered against his hand, his mouth. With a final cry she slipped from the chair and into his arms, her body boneless.
He held her in his arms, their bodies stretched before the fire, as she recovered. This was a new sweetness, to hold her, to know that he alone had brought her to this state, at her invitation. His arm tightened around her in realisation and in possession. How long could he have her? How long would it take her to realise his flaw—and that it went far deeper than smuggling—that he knew plenty of pleasure, but nothing of love? He pushed the idea away, refusing to let such thoughts cloud the moment. Here and now, he was enough.
Her hand rested over his heart where it still pounded from his own exertions and he felt her smile where her head lay against his chest. ‘There was pleasure for you?’ she asked softly, a reminder that while she was indeed fire and passion, she was innocent, too.
‘Yes. To offer another pleasure is a pleasure for the giver, as well.’
‘But it is not all. There can be more.’ The hand over his heart moved lower. He stalled it in a gentle grip. She would find a full erection there if he allowed it and he could not. He’d already allowed too much.
‘There is more,’ he acceded. ‘But not tonight.’ Perhaps not ever, he silently chided himself. Most likely not ever. To say perhaps created the hope that the possibility of wedding her, of bedding her, existed. Wedding her was the only way the latter could happen for him. He would not take her to his bed without the sanctity of marriage. She was not like the widows of the Kubanian court. She was pure diamond, full of light. He would not sully that nor would he limit that light by claiming it and taking away her choices. Anna-Maria was the light and she was meant for so much more than his darkness.
Darkness always swallowed light, much as cool water overcame hot. He’d learned that from his father. No matter what efforts he’d made to make his father love him, want him, the darkness had won. As a result, it lived in him now, the curse, perhaps, of the Shevchenko men who seemed doomed to destroy those around them. He could only hope to contain it, to keep it from tainting her. He would not let his darkness devour Anna.
He returned her hand to his chest and released it. She sighed reluctantly at the loss. ‘Tell me about smuggling, Stepan. Tell me about your cause.’
Stepan recognised a flanking motion when he saw one. He would have to grant her these questions. If she could not have him one way, she would have him another. ‘Because I must fight injustice where I find it.’ He felt more than saw the pucker of her brow and settled her closer against him as he explained. ‘Freedom comes in many forms, as does tyranny. Taxing decides who can participate in the economy and how. Only the rich can afford to import and pay taxes on those cargos. And for what? To fill a king’s pockets for his own luxury. Enslavement has multiple guises, Anna, labour is just the most obvious. Economic enslavement is more subtle.’
‘As is marriage,’ Anna commented with a wry edge to her sleepy voice. ‘But a man does not hang for that.’
‘No, he does not,’ Stepan whispered, doubly glad he had limited their foray into pleasure of the revocable kind, the kind that did no damage. He’d left her untouched in all the ways that mattered to society. She still had her choices before her. She could walk away from him.
‘I think of it sometimes,’ she whispered quietly, her hand playing on his chest. ‘If I had married the Pasha’s son, I’d be living in Turkey, part of a man’s harem, at his beck and call, my own will of no import to him.’
There was a catch to her voice. Stepan hurried to ease it. ‘It cannot happen now. The laws are abolished and you are a continent away.’ He did not like to think of her in that foreign arrangement. Polygamy was not for her, its concept of marriage and love so very different than hers. It would have destroyed her.
‘No, but it could have if no one had fought for me. If Dimitri had not offered himself, if Yulian had not been willing, if you hadn’t come for me against my father’s objections.’ She was drawing circles around his nipple. ‘I will never forget that night. You were so fierce, standing up to my father. I would have walked out of the house with you right then, in nothing but my nightgown.’
Stepan chuckled softly. ‘You would have been cold.’
‘I doubt it. You would not have allowed it.’
‘Hmmm.’ He liked the feel of her hand on him, her touch light as it skimmed his chest, and he wondered, ‘Is that why you resist marriage? Because you think of him? Of what it would have been like in the Pasha’s household?’
‘Perhaps.’ Her hand stilled on his chest. ‘Or maybe I resist because I know little of marriage, polygamous or otherwise. What I do know hardly recommends itself. It tore my father apart. Love hurts.’
‘True enough. And yet Dimitri has embraced it, to the good, I think. It’s a pleasure to see him with Evie. Their happiness is obvious.’ He was torturing himself going down this path.
‘Yes. I wonder, though, can we all be Dimitri?’ she argued, testing his hypothesis with her cynicism.
‘Nikolay and Illarion think so. Ruslan, too.’ Stepan couldn’t help but crack that nut open with her here before the fire. ‘I did not peg you for a cynic, Anna.’
‘A realist.’ She sighed against him. ‘Marriage is different for a woman. She gives her all to it whether she chooses to or not. There is no equality in marriage. Equality is freedom, as you’ve so adequately advocated tonight. Why should marital equality be any different than economic equality? Why should only certain people have access to it?’
She shifted, her body warm. ‘Love can be both empowering and disempowering, a double-edged sword.’
‘Indeed,’ Stepan murmured. He’d worried about taking her innocence only to find it was quite gone and had been for some time. And yet the light in her still remained. Despite her cynicism, she’d found a way to defeat the darkness. He envied her that. It intensified his desire for her, his desire to possess her, to fight for her. The woman nestled against his shoulder held his heart and his secrets, and tonight they’d made another secret. No one could ever guess what had happened in this room any more than anyone could ever guess he was a smuggler. Those secrets were dangerous in their own ways and she possessed them both.
Outside, the storm raged, battering the windows. There was no question of sending her away now, storm or not. He should feel guilty over what he’d done. But not yet. There would be plenty of time for guilt later and it would come, Stepan was sure of it. Tonight he’d broken promises to himself and betrayed a friend’s trust whether that friend knew it or not, all for the selfish fantasy of having Anna-Maria, of pretending for a short while that he knew how to love.
Chapter Fifteen
He needed penetration—something more than putting up roadblocks and sea blockades. Those were external, passive measures. They could not expose. He needed someone on the inside, a rat, a mole, or an unsuspecting innocent. It was the one thought in Elias Denning’s mind as he listened to his lieutenants run through their weekly reports, all of them with a singular theme: after two weeks of laying siege to Shoreham, their efforts had caught nothing.
It was not enough to smash windows and beat shopkeepers, to seize importers’ ledgers and ransack warehouses full of legitimately acquired go
ods. He needed to catch someone red-handed and that was not going to happen no matter how many roadblocks he set up until he broke Shoreham’s complicity. As long as the good citizens of Shoreham thought to protect each other, that complicity would stand.
Denning leaned back in his chair, hands laced over the flat of his stomach, and looked each of his officers in the eye. ‘Gentlemen, can you tell me what each of your reports have in common?’ he said benignly. He would unleash the full force of his dissatisfaction on them soon, but he’d let them walk into the trap first.
One lieutenant drew himself up smartly, taking the bait. ‘They all indicate there has not been a smuggling attempt since our methods have been put in place, Captain.’
Denning came forward over the table, ready to wipe the pride from the lieutenant’s face as he roared, ‘That means absolutely nothing! Do you know why it means nothing? Because we have no proof.’ Without tangible evidence, who knew what some enterprising soul might have smuggled out of town in plain sight or who was still running illegal goods along the back roads of Sussex?
He’d discovered successful smuggling was far more about relationships and trust than it was about fast horses and secret pathways. With collaboration, one could smuggle in plain sight. There was nothing he loved better than a good mystery and the thrill of pitting his mind against the unknown. It was like a knot that, when unravelled, revealed truth at its core. Shoreham-by-Sea was proving to be such a knot, although the unravelling was not going as smoothly as Denning had hoped.
He braced both his hands on the table and fixed his men with a dark stare. ‘What we need is to find a weak link and expose it. That link is not a thing or an action, it’s a “who”. We need to find a tattler. Use whatever leverage you have to.’ His men exchanged looks and he knew what they were thinking. Force hadn’t worked well so far. They’d smashed windows and beaten merchants and still submission hadn’t come. No one had talked and the damnable thing was, everyone knew who the captain was looking for and Denning knew they knew that he knew they knew. But no one said a thing.
The theory was that eventually a merchant would tire of shelves full of goods customers couldn’t afford to buy and would come forward, or a smuggler would tire of empty pockets and would make a reckless run. ‘Shoreham as a collective isn’t desperate enough. Not yet. But perhaps there is an individual who is desperate and, if so, I want that individual found. Turn your attention to the poor, the most needy and the most vulnerable.’ He recognised now that it had been folly to pursue the wealthy importers. They might be fully participating in the smuggling and catching them might be the quickest route to bringing down the whole operation, but they were also the most well protected. They had money and resources. The poor tub man who smuggled to augment his piddling wages as a fisherman didn’t have those protections. It was not as flashy to net ‘Jones the common fisherman’ as it was to bring down a wealthy importer, but it would be a start.
Denning gave instructions to continue searching the coastline for hidden coves and caves and dismissed the officers. He had his own work to do. His men might indeed turn up a much-needed weak link in the chain and give him a legitimate fish on the line. But if not, he needed a private contingency. If he wanted a promotion he had to show that if one could not catch a real smuggler, one could always fabricate one.
Denning paced the length of his field office, thoughts forming and coalescing into a strategy. If he chose the right victim to frame, no one would gainsay him. He had the authority of the military and English law behind him, and others would be more concerned for their own hides than that of their neighbour, as long as he chose the right one.
Stepan Shevchenko came to mind quite readily for several reasons. He was an outsider and a foreigner, someone Shoreham might be less likely to protect if given the right inducements, especially if there was nothing to protect. Shoreham could give him Shevchenko if they weren’t protecting anyone in his network—especially if there wasn’t one—or if there were any struggling tub men to protect, or products the community was counting on, the cost in betraying Shevchenko would be minimal.
Denning smirked. The more he thought about it, the more he liked it. Framing someone for smuggling might actually work better than catching the real thing. Shevchenko was exactly the ‘big fish’ he hoped to net. He’d prefer catching a wealthy importer who ostensibly sat atop his own smuggling network. Denning knew he was spinning fictions at this point. Shevchenko’s books had turned up nothing of note and his ship had been...well, to put it bluntly, ‘shipshape’. But Shoreham could afford to give him up.
There were other reasons to go after Shevchenko, as well. The haughty ‘prince’ had tried to interfere with his work. He had not hesitated to call off the soldiers in the street. That sort of man might decide to rally the people against him. The last thing he needed was for the smugglers to organise any more than they already were. Right now, he understood fear was driving them underground and forcing them to keep to themselves. But if someone were to unite them, they would have power. He wouldn’t be able to stop them, then. Shevchenko had already made him look foolish on more than one occasion: the inn yard the night of the ball, during his visit to Seacrest, on board the Lady Frances. The list was mounting.
He would not tolerate an upstart, self-styled royal from a place he’d never heard of before last year to get the jump on him—professionally or personally. There was the issue of Miss Petrova between them, as well. When Elias Denning wanted a woman, he took her regardless of what previous claims might have been made. Few women complained and few men resisted. It was seldom in either of their better interests to do otherwise. It was time Stepan Shevchenko learned that lesson as the unfortunate provincial Governor in Barbados had learned. That man he’d generously let watch. Denning smiled in remembrance. The more powerful the man, the more he liked to bring them down. It was time for another visit to Seacrest.
* * *
It was past time to go down to breakfast. Anna-Maria had been putting it off. If she waited long enough, she might come up with an answer to her question: The morning after, how did a girl face the man who’d given her pleasure? Evie’s lessons had not covered such a topic. Then again, Evie’s lessons hadn’t covered what had happened last night. More than one rule had been broken. Stepan might have pleasured her, but she’d started it and that hadn’t been covered in Evie’s lessons either. Debutantes didn’t invite men to seduce them. Anna-Maria approached the stairs with uncharacteristic tentativeness. Maybe Stepan would already be gone for the day.
What a ninny she was! She’d finally got what she wanted. She’d broken his staunch self-control—she had seen what lay beyond when they set aside their prescribed roles. She’d had the full force of his attentions and now she wanted him to be gone? That wasn’t quite true. She wanted the awkwardness to be gone. She wished she were sophisticated like his other lovers in Kuban, worldly women of the court who knew just how to behave in any given situation.
The breakfast room was deserted when she reached it. She didn’t know if she should be relieved or not. She didn’t have to face him, but at the same time she wanted to face him, wanted to see in his eyes what she’d seen last night: the passion, the pleasure, the desire, all for her. Just her. She wanted it again, only this time, she wanted to pleasure him. Could she make him shatter against her hand as he had her? The possibility made her face go warm as she fixed her eggs—her hand on Stepan, stroking him, holding the hardness of him. They were bold thoughts for a girl raised in sheltered circumstances. Did other girls think such things? Want such things? If they did, did they claim them? She would claim them, tonight if possible. She smiled to herself as she ate. Simply being here was a victory in itself. Stepan had not sent her away, after all. Proof of what a girl could do when she set her mind to it. What it all meant, she had no idea. She would take it day by day.
‘Have I caught you at a guilty pleasure?’
She looked up s
tartled, her mind not registering what her ears had heard. She’d been expecting Stepan. She still was. She blinked, not believing her eyes. It was not Stepan who stood before her, but Captain Denning, dressed in his impeccable uniform and holding flowers. He smiled and swept her a bow. This was bad. Flowers were bad. Actually, they were good, technically. Evie’s lessons had covered this. Only she didn’t want flowers from Captain Denning. ‘Captain, what a surprise.’ Behind his shoulder the butler looked upset, indicating the captain had overridden protocol and charged forward without permission.
She glanced at the little clock on a side table. The captain had violated protocol in another way, too. She might have been late for breakfast, but she hadn’t been that late. ‘The flowers are lovely. I’ll send for a vase right away.’ She nodded to the butler, who hurried away. With luck, he would return with more than a vase. Then she offered the captain a coy smile. ‘Isn’t it a bit early for a social call?’
‘It would be, except that this not a social call, Miss Petrova. May I sit?’ Captain Denning smiled, too, and helped himself to the chair across from her, another breach of good etiquette. A gentleman never sat until invited. She’d not taken him as an ill-bred man on previous occasions. She could only infer these oversights were intentional. What she couldn’t divine was the reason for flaunting convention. Was it meant as an insult? If so, she wasn’t sure what she’d done to earn the comment, or was it meant to be a show of authority? Did he mean to suggest he was above the law or that he made his own rules? The butler returned with a vase and took the bouquet to the sideboard before discreetly withdrawing. Either Stepan was nowhere to be found, or the butler hadn’t thought to look.
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