Dangerous Seduction: A Nemesis Unlimited Novel (25 page)

Harriet snorted. She must’ve seen the lascivious turn in Simon’s gaze. “Trust a man to take something that’s supposed to liberate women and turn it into something lewd.”

“How else would we know he’s a man?” Alyce asked.

“Give me a chance,” he said in a low voice. “You won’t be in any doubt about my masculinity.”

Though Alyce reddened, she didn’t look away. One of the many reasons he was growing more and more obsessed with her. She never yielded. They continued to gaze at each other across the narrow space of the cab’s interior.

Harriet loudly cleared her throat, breaking the thick atmosphere. “I’d rather not have this hackney burst into flames before we reach the train station.”

For his own self-preservation, Simon looked away from Alyce first.

Harriet continued. “Marco was bloody disappointed he couldn’t handle this part of the mission. You know how he loves a good confidence scheme, the scoundrel. But he’s just taken on a new case—something involving a widow being cheated out of her inheritance—so it’s up to you two, now.”

“Eva and Jack?” he asked.

“Already waiting for you in Plymouth.”

Alyce’s brows rose. “You Nemesis folk do keep yourselves busy.”

“Wish we didn’t have to,” he answered, and he fought again that sense of a mountain slowly, inexorably bearing down on them, he and Nemesis armed only with tiny shovels.

“But you’re trying,” Alyce said, “which is a damned sight more than most people do.”

He only shrugged. There had been people helped by Nemesis who’d thrown around terms like “hero” and “savior.” All of those words he pushed away like a plate of bad oysters.

“One other thing,” Harriet added, and the caution in her voice made him sit up straighter. “The last couple of weeks, there’s been a young investigator from Scotland Yard sniffing around Nemesis. Asking questions in some of the disreputable parts of the city about a secret group of, I think the words he used were, ‘Those that think themselves above the law.’”

Simon rolled his eyes. God, the very last thing Nemesis needed was a Yard man determined to make his name through some investigation concerning them. “I wager he wears a cheap checked suit and has an amply waxed mustache.”

“His suit’s black, and he’s trying so very hard to grow a mustache, but alas,” Harriet said with a pitying look at Simon’s own bare upper lip, “not all men are capable of such a masculine feat.”

Alyce glanced back and forth between Simon and Harriet. “You should be more worried about this investigator. What if he digs up the truth? It’d be a quick trip but lengthy stay in prison for the lot of you.”

“He’ll be managed,” Harriet said with easy conviction.

Though Alyce looked skeptical, she let the subject pass. In truth, Harriet’s news tied a small knot of apprehension in Simon’s belly. No one in Nemesis could afford exposure. And if they became public, the lives of those they’d helped would likely be torn open, too. Then there were those people Nemesis would be unable to help in the future because they group had been unmasked.

It was something to gnaw over. Something that would have to be handled.

But not just yet. The hackney pulled up in front of the train station, now a hive of activity, and it was time to move on to the next stage in this mission.

On the platform, Harriet gave him a nod and shook Alyce’s hand. “No need for me to wish you luck,” Harriet said.

“With your excellent tailoring,” Alyce answered, already using her more refined accent, “it’d be impossible for us to fail.”

“For a woman, a smart dress is as impervious as armor.”

“To a point,” Simon warned. “Don’t mistake this”—he gestured to her dark green traveling ensemble—“for steel and chain mail. Confidence we need, not complacency.”

“Look at me, Simon,” Alyce said. “Maybe I’m dressed like a lady, but I don’t take a single pebble for granted. Could hold ore, could be worthless deads. But I have to make sure.”

He had to agree with her on that. Standing on the platform, waiting for the train to carry them to the next and more risky stage of their plan, Alyce radiated determination. She seemed to glow with it, so much so that many men passing by gave her a second look. Simon’s glare sent the men hurrying away.

“Take my arm,” he instructed her.

“Why?” Yet even as she asked, she slipped her hand into the crook of his elbow. A sense of
rightness
flowed through him.

“Because from now on, we’re an inseparable team.”

*   *   *

Piece by piece, Alyce felt herself changing. She now rode on a train as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The clothes she wore were proper for a sophisticated city woman. She’d been inside an elegant hotel and eaten delicate, toylike sandwiches.

But these were just superficial alterations. Something within her was being reshaped, transformed. She’d entered a world of forged documents and false identities, and the shock of it, the newness and strangeness, all that began to drift away.

As she watched the countryside speed by in a dizzying blur, she said to Simon, “I feel like that other Alice, the one who stepped through a mirror to find herself in a topsy-turvy world of living chess pieces. And I’m one of the pawns.”

“A rook,” he answered. “Not a pawn. Pawns just go where they’re told.”

“Isn’t that what’s happening now? ‘Wear this, Alyce.’ ‘Travel here.’ ‘Say these words.’”

At this hour of the morning, the carriage held many more passengers. Men, women with children. The car buzzed with the chatter of daily life, almost comforting in its dullness.

She and Simon sat side by side, leaning close and speaking in low voices. They both wore soft smiles, as if they really were a newly wedded couple. But it was all part of the disguise, part of the game. It was hard to remember that, though, when she glanced up into the blue, blue, blue of his eyes, or felt the warmth of him as his shoulder pressed against hers.

“Rooks have more power than pawns. They’re valuable in the endgame. Most of the checkmates are made by rooks.”

“Now you’re just throwing words at me to keep my head spinning.”

He took her hand in his, and she was disappointed that they were now both gloved. But her gloves were of thin kidskin. His heat soaked through the leather, into her flesh.

His gaze held hers. “Whatever you believe, know this: I don’t need a pawn, and I don’t need a puppet. I need
you,
Alyce.”

Curse them both—it would be too easy to think he talked of another need. Not just of his body, but something deeper.

All of this was in service of the mine, though. For the villagers and the workers and her family.

“I’ll play my part,” she answered. “And do a damned fine job of it.”

He grinned at her, a sight that was beginning to feel like a pickaxe to her heart. “Stop stating the obvious.”

She spoke in an even rougher Cornish accent than normal. “Oh, but I can’t help it, sir. Just a simple country lass, I am.”

This made him laugh, and the words formed clearly in her mind.
I’m in trouble. Grave trouble.
Because she was liking them too much, craving them too often, his smiles and laughs, and now wasn’t the time, sod it, to start dreaming of what couldn’t be.

“Well, my simple country lass,” he said, using the same thick accent, “things are about to get awful complicated.”

They spent the rest of the trip in silence, but he continued to hold her hand. She didn’t object. Everything moved so quickly—she was speeding toward what would be the biggest challenge of her life—and he was warm and solid. She couldn’t let him be her strength. Yet it surely helped knowing that he was beside her.

After the metal grandeur of the Exeter train station, the plain wooden depot at Plymouth came as a disappointment. The machinery at Wheal Prosperity was more impressive. As Simon paid the porter and hailed a cab, Alyce laughed at herself and her newfound airs. And all of this was an illusion, anyway, not truly part of her life. In a few days, it would be as if Plymouth’s railways didn’t exist.

A few days. A lifetime between now and then, and what lay in between … she couldn’t see. For all of her twenty-four years, the shadow of the mine had fallen across her life. She’d stayed in school as long as possible, but then it’d become necessary to work, and from then until not very long ago, her patterns never altered. Wake, eat, walk to the mine, work, walk home, eat, read before exhaustion set in, sleep. Repeat. Only Sundays saw a disruption in that routine. And her forays to the managers’ office, demanding change.

God, it felt so good to break from those chains of habit. Good—and not a little frightening. But she could master that fear.

Simon helped her into the cab. “The Admiral and Anchor,” he called up to the driver. “We can’t risk meeting Jack and Eva at a hotel,” he explained to Alyce.

“If anyone saw us together…”

“Disaster. Yes.”

As soon as the hackney left the area near the train station, she smelled the heavy, briny sea. And when the cab turned a corner, and the narrow street suddenly revealed a broad vista, she fought a gasp. The bay spread out below them, the color of iron, and dotted with ships of every size. White flecks of seabirds wheeled and cried overhead. Plymouth Sound reminded her that the world was much larger than she’d ever imagined. Ships crossed the sea, going to faraway places, bringing back exotic cargo—things
and
people. Impossible not to feel a little small, when the whole of the ocean stretched endlessly toward the horizon, and brave ships skimmed back and forth from that distant line.

“Have you seen the sea before?”

“Newquay, once. But I was just a little’un. Don’t remember much except Henry putting sand down the back of my dress and my ma pulling me away from the water. I couldn’t swim.”

“That didn’t stop you from trying.”

“And getting a lungful of salt water when I finally jumped in. We went home after that. Not much of a seaside holiday.”

“I’d say we could make up for it now, but—”

“This isn’t a holiday,” she finished.

“Another time, maybe.”

“Another time.” Which they both knew would never happen. So she let herself take in as much of the view as she could, hoping her mind could work like one of those photographic cameras, and capture the image for her to return to again and again later. If she did have a photograph of that moment, she’d write on the back,
Simon and the Sea, 1886.

Two things that she’d never fully know.

The view disappeared as the cab turned down another street. Here, just as in Exeter, people of all stripes walked the avenues, including men in naval uniforms and some very grand-looking folks, indeed. Alyce tried to remember every image, all the faces young and old, clothing fine and shabby, the handsome streets and smell of the ocean—souvenirs for her mind, to take back with her to Trewyn and retell. The villagers were always starved for stories of life beyond their small town’s boundaries, and she hoped to sate their appetites with stories when she returned.

She pushed thoughts of the future and going home aside. Everything was about now, and these next few days. Simon had warned against complacency, and that included thoughts of Trewyn.

The cab pulled up outside a stately looking place that she recognized as a tavern by the painted shingle swaying on a brass post.

As Simon climbed down from the hackney, he said to the driver, “Take the trunk on to the Cormorant Hotel. Say it belongs to Mr. Shale, and they’ll know what to do with it.”

The cabman pocketed Simon’s offered coins, and tipped his hat. “Yes, sir!”

Simon helped her down from the hackney, and it seemed so strange, being put into and taken out of vehicles, as if she couldn’t manage the task perfectly well on her own two legs. She’d pushed wagons loaded with ore up hillsides, for heaven’s sake. This was a different world, however, where women didn’t have the same strength and were handled like soap bubbles. She might not pop at the slightest breeze, but in this foreign land, she’d have to follow local custom. And it didn’t upset her to feel Simon’s hand on her elbow, his hand taking hers as he guided her down to the pavement.

After the cab had rolled off, Simon pushed open the door to the tavern. Sunlight poured in through a bank of windows onto a polished dark wooden floor. The bar itself gleamed, including a well-polished brass footrail. Malty ale and lemon furniture polish scented the air. Tables were arranged neatly around the room, and there were high-backed settles lining the walls. If this tavern was a tall-masted ship with sparkling white sails billowing, the pubs at Trewyn were leaky rowboats.

Though the hour was still before noon, a few men were already at tables and lined up at the bar. They looked at Alyce with harmless curiosity as Simon, his hand on her back, guided her up to the bar. In her respectable traveling dress, and the well-mannered way Simon touched and gazed at her, nobody would mistake her for a woman of loose character. Still, her presence in the tavern was odd enough to attract a bit of attention.

“How may I serve you, sir?” the barman asked politely.

“The Dunhams are expecting us,” Simon answered.

“Right this way,” was the prompt answer. The barman stepped out from behind his counter and led them down a hallway lined with framed pictures of naval ships. He knocked lightly on a door. “Your company’s arrived, Mr. Dunham.”

“Fine,” came the response—a voice so deep and raspy it sounded as if it emerged from the lowest part of Wheal Prosperity’s deepest mine shaft.

The barman didn’t open the door. He accepted the coin Simon gave him—where did all these coins come from? Surely he didn’t have them in Trewyn—and disappeared back toward the front of the tavern.

“It’s me and company,” Simon said through the door. The way he spoke, it seemed as if he were warning someone with a large, vicious animal that he was approaching, and they’d better keep their hand on the animal’s collar.

Slowly, he opened the door, then ushered Alyce through it quickly. They stood in a small private room, also with dark wood on the floor and walls, a single window, a round table encircled by a few chairs, and a fireplace.