Almost a Scandal (27 page)

He could run his thumb across the delicate skin on the back of her hand. He could stroke the softness at the inside of her wrist. It seemed little enough, but there was a world of feeling in each and every exploration into the unknown depths that were her.

He took another misstep and even as he gritted his teeth and leaned on her to right himself, and would have forced himself to carry on, she simply sat, pulling him down next to her in the shelter of a hedgerow, and it seemed sensible to sit for a while and get their bearings. They had been moving across the fields unseen and unmolested, until they were past the villages of Lanfeust and Trébabu. The moon came out from behind the clouds at intervals, but in the mostly open farmland of Finistère, the darkness wasn’t as impenetrable as it had first seemed under the canopy in the woods.

In the next spate of moonlight, Kent took out her compass to take a reading, and he took advantage of her stillness to exercise his compulsion to touch her, to steady himself with her soft vitality. To depend upon her.

How remarkable. He had prided himself on being a man who never stopped. Who never let down his guard. Who, unless he was dead asleep—and even then he woke up at the slightest provocation—was always watching, seeing, thinking, and planning. Always alert. Always checking his bearings, or the set of his sails.

Just as Kent was doing now. She was the reason he wasn’t panicking. He didn’t have to fight the nausea tooth and nail because he knew he could rely upon her to see what needed to be seen. He could rely upon her to understand what she saw correctly.

Remarkable.

And all the more reason for him to kiss her again. But at that moment, a dull echo of a huge concussion rumbled across the fields from the north. The sound of the first battery being detonated. Bringing him back to their purpose.

“Come. Let’s move on.” This time he took her hand, already too accustomed to the pleasure of her intimate company to give it up for the empty triumph of pride.

They kept to the covering shelter of the hedgerows, well away from the roads. They made uneven but steady progress over the course of the next three hours, stopping from time to time as needed.

She gleaned some apples from an orchard as they passed, but when they had quietly skirted a dilapidated inn, at the edge of someplace Kent told him was called Plouzané, Kent touched him lightly on the arm and said, “I’ll be right back.”

“What are you—” But she had slipped over a stone wall. The thought occurred to him that she might need to answer the call of nature, so he let her go and settled down to wait. They were hidden on a slight hill beyond the inn, and Col could see down into the courtyard.

A flash of movement at the edge of the courtyard caught his eye, but it was Kent, damn her eyes, stealing soundlessly across the deserted stableyard and slipping around the back of the building.

Col nearly stood up. As it was, he drew his pistol and held it at the ready. Ready for he knew not what, but prepared—tense, and hunkered down behind the tumbledown stone wall, waiting for any eventuality. His gut hammered away each second that she was gone, counting out the moments she was out of his sight and inexplicably courting this unnecessary danger.

And then she was flying up the incline toward him, grinning from ear to ear, her imp’s face shining with happy mischief. “Here.” She handed Col a nearly full wheel of cheese, and a squashed, narrow loaf of peasant’s bread that looked more like a cudgel than a loaf.

“Bugger all, Kent. Don’t you ever do that again. Don’t endanger yourself, or us, or this mission for food. We can do well enough without for one bloody night.”

“The food was an afterthought, although you really ought to eat something. I’m sure it would help. I really went for the laundry.” Her coat was stuffed with a roll of clothing—dashes of green quilting and red wool. “So perhaps we can move through the city without being noticed overmuch.”

With Kent there was always a plan ticking away in that devilish little head. A
bad
plan, by his reckoning, but a plan nonetheless.

“Are you mad?” His words sounded like they had been ground through his teeth, like grist from a mill. But the ebbing of the worry—the sudden fear for her—left him ready to pulverize something, and the only available choice was his words. “Firstly, we are naval officers. We don’t take the uniform off. Ever. If we’re captured, we will be imprisoned but potentially, eventually, exchanged so we might remain useful to our king and country and Admiralty. But if we are out of uniform, we will undoubtedly be taken for spies and shot out of hand.”

The bloody imp was undaunted. She smiled at him. A long, slow smile of mischievous intent, a happy, knowing curve of her plush mouth. “But I’m not a naval officer really, am I? Tonight, I can be just a girl. I can be out of uniform, because I shouldn’t be in one at all. Isn’t that what you really think?” The blithe mischief shone from her serene owl’s face. “You have to admit that it makes better sense.”

He did not have to admit to anything. And he wouldn’t.

“I know,” she said, before he could blast her plan out of the water. “It is a great risk. But a cap and sash can be easily discarded. And they will give you a better chance to get into the city, and to the arsenal and its magazines more easily.”

Damn her for being so insightful. “And what’s that?” He pointed to several other items of clothing that were definitely not a cap and a sash.

The mischief in her dimmed, and she looked self-conscious—self-aware and even embarrassed, in a way he’d never thought to see her. “Nothing.” Her voice became small. “I helped myself to some clean linen.”

“It looks like a petticoat. And a shift.”

“A chemise,” she corrected.

“Kent?” He put a world of warning into his voice.

Even in the moonlight, she colored such an interesting shade of coral. “I thought … I thought perhaps I could move more easily through the streets if I were dressed as a woman. The Préfecture de Marine is in the center of the city, as are the magazines of the arsenal. It will be easier if we don’t have to stay out of sight when someone passes. We can still be as quiet and stealthy as you like, but hiding in plain sight. Much more effective. And expedient.”

Expediency would have to give way to honor, despite the temptations. “No. I don’t like it. I should be embarrassed to have to report such trickery to Captain McAlden.”

“Then don’t report it. My father used to say the law of the Admiralty is, ‘If you succeed, no question will be asked, but if you fail, no explanation will ever be enough.’ All we have to do is succeed, and I know we can. I know we will.”

Such surety. Such confidence in the rightness of her thoughts. He had to admit the idea was slowly acquiring merit. And the phrase “Tonight, I can be just a girl” echoed in his head, and sent a rush of pleasure so raw, it rumbled through his bones like the thunder of distant cannon fire.

He was tempted. More than tempted. But the embers of his need for her had already been stirred. It would take nothing more than the slightest breeze of a petticoat to fan his desire into flame. “I don’t like it,” he repeated, more to convince himself than her. But as the captain had told her the first day she had come aboard
Audacious,
he didn’t have to like it, he just had to do it.

And the image of her clad in women’s clothing had risen like an opium dream in his mind and would not go away, and he began to work out a way to make it possible. “We need to find a place to shelter for the day and stay out of sight.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “And you can fully recover.”

He didn’t like to think of himself as an invalid, but whenever he was sure the disorienting movement within his body had finally stopped, the road would rise up to meet him in disagreeable ways. But as always, Kent was there to catch him. And it felt good to sling his arm across her shoulder and snug her up tight. It felt better than good. It felt perfectly right. Thank God she was a strong little thing. Thank God she was as tough and determined as she was useful.

About a mile ahead, across a field to the southeast, at the top of a gentle rise, Col made out the ruins of an old stone barn in the graying light of early dawn. About half of the original building appeared to still be standing—one end was crumbled into disrepair—and it appeared fully abandoned.

“There.” He directed her with a gesture of his chin, and together they turned through the hedgerow and up the rise.

They approached the tumbled building cautiously, with their pistols drawn, but it had long ago been abandoned. Weeds grew tall between the cobbles of the yard, and the air held no trace of the scent of animals. Above, the loft was still intact, with an empty window from which they could keep watch over the surrounding countryside and hopefully, when it was light, the harbor, which Col reckoned was near—the breeze brought them the familiar mud-salt smell of the sea.

Kent looked satisfied. “It seems a safe enough place to stay.”

The scattered remnants of a pile of hay were strewn in a corner. He slouched against the wall where there was a good prospect down the hill toward the road. “Why don’t you see if you can get some sleep?”

She didn’t answer, but knelt down on the floor on the opposite side of the window, and unburdened herself of her stolen parcels of clothing and food, setting out the apples, bread, and cheese on a square of fabric. And then she simply looked at him and said, “Col.”

Her use of his familiar name resonated through him like a bell, clear and strong.

“You’re safe with me,” she said. “Just as I’ve been safe with you.”

The truth of her words rose in him slowly, like the tide, inexorable and inescapable.

“You’ve had a bad night,” she went on, “and you need rest more than I do. For a little while, anyway. But you should try to eat first. It will settle your gut and make it easier to sleep.” She handed him a wedge of cheese and a slice of apple.

“Is this what you do at home? Order everyone about and tend after them?”

Some of the sureness ebbed from her, leaving her quiet and perhaps a little sad. “No. Not now. There’s no one left to tend to. Richard keeps to himself.”

“I begin to see why you liked the orlop cockpit so well, even with Gamage’s dampening presence.”

She smiled. “I do so like those boys. And that’s all sorted now, isn’t it? Though I do hope nothing goes wrong with Gamage while I’m away. If he tries anything, I shouldn’t put it past Will to dose him with Scotch bonnet powder again.” A little frown pleated itself between her gingersnap eyebrows, as if she could still solve all the problems at such a distance, if only she concentrated enough.

“So you admit you poisoned him?”

Her smile dawned again over a bite of the apple. “Why not? Though it wasn’t poisoning per se—I ate it, too. Although I will admit that the heavy dose of pepper powder did make the ragout, in the immortal words of Ian Worth, ‘taste like arse.’”

He smiled, and ate while dawn lightened the sky over the silent fallow fields. The harvest had long since been taken in, and the fields remained empty—Bonaparte’s insatiable hunger for soldiers for his Grand Army had likely robbed Finistère of the greater part of its working farmers.

Within minutes he slept, but for only a few hours, his body accustomed to the regular change of four-hour watches. He awoke to find the sun high, and the air still but for the occasional drone of a bee moving through the old farmyard in search of the last of the renegade wildflowers. The sun had warmed the fall crispness out of the day, and heat of its rays pressed warmth into the stone walls.

Kent had fallen asleep as well, drifting off against the wall by the open window, with her head tipped back against the stones and her mouth open with the softness of sleep. Her hand was lax on the handle of the pistol in her lap, and he eased it carefully from her grip.

It was her hair that started it. It shone like dark, spilled honey in the sunlight, glistening and shining, and calling for the touch of his hand—living silk between his fingers. And then, when she did not stir, and he was safe from the truth he would see in her eyes, he turned his hand and let the backs of his fingers graze across the broad speckled planes of her cheekbones, so liberally painted with freckles, vivid and warm dashed across the pale cream of her skin.

Would they be everywhere on her body, in as glorious a profusion as on her face? He imagined again what her skin might look like under the armor of her clothes—pale and painted with the dark landmarks of her freckles. Would they draw him in, the freckles marking her body, and make him want to kiss her, the way the dark spot just on the edge of her pink lip constantly drew his regard?

Just a kiss, he lied to himself. Just one. A moment, no more, while she was here, and they were away from all the eyes, and the ship, and the needy call of duty. While he had the chance to snatch something sweet and forbidden for his own.

He knew he shouldn’t. He knew almost everything about his own need to kiss her was wrong—she was a subordinate, they were at war behind enemy lines with a dangerous mission to complete, and she was Matthew Kent’s little sister, for God’s sake.

But she was Matthew Kent’s sister Sally, and he had wanted and waited so very long for her. For years and years. Forever.

And she looked so soft and appealing, attempting to guard him, asleep in her rumpled clothes. Most of the junior officers were happy to move about the gunroom or the orlop compartment in only their shirtsleeves, but she, who had secrets to protect, kept herself assiduously hidden beneath layers of clothing.

He had kept her secret, but he could no longer keep himself from the soft lure of her honeyed skin. He could no longer resist. And furthermore, he didn’t want to.

He kissed the corner of her mouth, where the smooth cream of her cheek gave way to the crushed berry of her lips. Her lips were not exactly soft—they were as chapped and windburned as his own—but they were plush and giving in the relaxation of her sleep.

With his lips upon her, she awoke. Her eyes fluttered open—such an incongruously, deeply feminine movement—and she smiled at him. A smile of such welcoming warmth—sleepy and rumpled, and happy—that all his good intentions were incinerated in an instant.