The Danger of Desire (10 page)

God’s balls. This was no time to go soft. He had a traitor to catch. He turned away. “Cover yourself.”

She jolted back to awareness and curved her left arm across her breasts in a protective gesture. He all but threw the last pitcher of water on her hair to rinse it.

Then he pointed to the clothes Jinks had scoured up from God knew where, stacked neatly on a chair. There were all the necessary bits and parts, but he was in no state to point out small clothes and stays to her. “These should do for now. They’re serviceable enough, but at least they’re clean, unlike your present attire. Put them on when you’re done washing. I’ll leave you to dry yourself off.” God help him if she would need help fastening them on.

He scooped up the dirty pile of clothing at his feet.

“Hey, where you going with those?” She reached out her uninjured hand, quick and acquisitive as a magpie. “Them’s mine.”

“
They
are filthy.”

“Give
them
back.” She made a grabby motion with her fingers. “I can get money for ’em.”

Avaricious little sprite. To her everything had monetary value, even him. He would do well to remember that. “I’ll pay you for them myself.”

“Will you?” Her arm went still but didn’t fall.

“I’ll give you a shilling, if you promise never to wear them again.”

“Done. But not all of ’em. A girl needs a thing or two, you understand.” She still held out her hand, and when he offered them back to her, she rifled through the bundle and pulled some filthy linen strips aside. “Pockets,” she explained. “Can’t be a proper thief without good pockets under your outers.”

He didn’t want to think about unders or outers. That way lay terrifyingly certain madness. He balled the clothes into his fists. “May I take these now?”

“Take ’em away.” She arched her brow as disdainfully as a queen and made a dismissive little flicking motion with her hand. “For all I care, you can even burn ’em.”

“I’d like nothing more.” Hugh pitched the bundle into the fire and stalked to the door. “Now get yourself bloody dressed.”

CHAPTER 7

M
eggs opened the door at his knock. Something like surprise registered on his face—the barest flicker of his brow and a quick downward movement at the corners of his mouth. Then those pale blue eyes were alight, skimming over her figure, making a catalog of her faults.

But all he said was, “You clean up surprisingly well. You were hiding quite a lot behind that grime.”

Meggs tugged the drawstring on the simple neckline higher. “Never you mind what I was ’iding. I told you I knew how to wash.”

“So you did. Do you also know how to eat?”

She made a rude sound.

“Yes. Well, let’s hope you do better than your brother. Come back to the kitchen.”

Timmy was still sound asleep on his pallet, and Meggs was relieved to see a second set of blankets lay on the floor next to him. The captain really did appear to be on the up and up.

Himself turned back from the hob and set a stout bowl of broth on the table next to a board full of thick-sliced bread and cheese. It smelled good, the broth, full of chicken and herbs she had forgotten the names of. And butter. There was a crock of butter. Her stomach made a sound of boisterous entreaty at the prospect of such plenty.

But she couldn’t allow herself to fall to it like a stupid beast. She’d colic up as fast as Timmy if she did. And there was pride to be considered. Even old Nan had insisted on a sort of decorum at her plain table. But the captain was looking at her all queer.

“You gonna eat?” she asked to cover the strange heat in her face.

“No. I’ve already eaten. Go ahead, before it gets cold.”

“How do I know it’s not poisoned?”

“Because you’re not stupid. Because I’d hardly spend hours getting the poison out of your hand just to put it into your belly.” But in another moment he reached over, took the bowl in one hand, and drank down a gulp of the soup. Then he ripped off a piece of bread, picked up a chunk of cheese, and stowed it down as well. “There. Not poison. Now eat.”

There was no room for disagreement in that voice. All commanding ship’s captain. And she wasn’t stupid. She sat and hooked the bowl up with her left hand and drank, and cautiously fed piece after piece of bread into her mouth. All the while, watching him watch her.

“When was the last time you ate?”

She shrugged. No sense inviting the lecture he seemed primed to give. “Now and again.”

“Well, you’ll eat here. Regularly. Consider it a perquisite. For you and the boy.”

“Perquisite, is it?” Thought she was too stupid to even feed herself, let alone know what he was talking about, didn’t he? Like some dumb beast, fit only for the dub. As if she didn’t have ears or a brain in her head.

“It means an extra benefit arising from the situation we’ve agreed to.”

“Do tell. I knew someone who would have liked that word, just the sort she would have used. Quite a collector of words, she was, old Nan.” Do him good to hear he wasn’t the only one knew how to talk. And she felt like talking. Must be the food in her stomach making her all garrulous. “Old Nan, my kidwoman. Loved words. Like ‘garrulous’ and ‘exquisite.’ ‘That was an exquisite piece of work, my girl,’ she’d say. Or, ‘delicate.’ ‘You’ll want a delicate hand with that lock, my girl.’ Used to say good locks were like old maiden aunties—knew how to keep their secrets—so you had to cozen up to them sweetly. A great Kate was Nan. A picklock.”

“Remarkable, a common picklock and kidwoman talking like that.” He leaned back in his chair and regarded her steadily across the top of the glass lantern, his icy blue eyes probing and relentless.

“Nothing common about picklocks. Talent, that takes, skills and dedication. And she weren’t always a Kate. Old Nan’d been a governess a long time before, afore she fell afoul of some toff’s plans for her.”

“Plans that turned her to a life of crime?”

She could hear that cold judgment in his voice, see it in the set of his jaw. Toffs like him never had it so hard as old Nan. Had no right to pass judgment on them that did for themselves what they could. But it would hardly be to her benefit to say so to him while he was feeding her up. And it would be foolish to tell him old Nan had taught herself to pick her employer’s desk with a hairpin and take his ready lour, in desperation to escape being forced into his bed. Talk of beds wouldn’t do. Despite the captain keeping his hands to himself in the bath, it wouldn’t pay to wave a red flag under the nose of a bull.

She shrugged. “Plans that turned her to keeping food in her belly, regular-like.”

“And how do you feel, now you’ve got food in your belly?”

She felt warm and, truth be told, a bit muzzy, but not quite all to rights. “Like a hammer’s still at my head.”

He gave a short, dissatisfied grunt. “How’s the hand?”

“
I can number all my bones
. The breadbasket’s aching, but not so bad as before.”

He seemed to debate what to do next, but finally, he nodded and tossed his head in the general direction of Tanner and the blankets. “See if you can sleep.” He got up and headed for the stairs. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“All right, then, Captain,” She returned his nod, all professional-like. “Good night.”

She was asleep before Hugh had even returned from his study to douse the lantern and bank the kitchen fire. But he didn’t leave her to her dreams and seek his own bed, as he ought to have done.

No. He pulled a chair up next to the fire and watched her sleep.

He told himself he stayed only because he ought not leave them. They were his responsibility now, the girl and her brother. Her brain might still be disordered from the blow to her head, and if he didn’t watch her, she might, if she woke in the middle of the night, be foolish enough to run. She was, under all of her bravado, strangely, intensely shy of people. The years of hard living, of always looking over her shoulder, had broken her trust with the rest of humanity.

Not that he was any great example of trusting optimism. His experience had taught him most people were unworthy of trust in any form—even the illustrious, bloody Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty. But here he was, trusting a great deal of his future, not to mention a knighthood, to a pair of wary thieves who would take him for all they could and leave him flat at the first chance. So, he would watch them. Carefully.

But right now, they slept the sleep of the innocent, or at least the exhausted.

What was it she had said?
I can number all my bones
. Where had he heard that before?

He reached over very quietly and put the back of his fingers to her forehead—to check on her temperature. She was only mildly warm, not alarmingly so, and breathing evenly. He let his hands linger, sliding the backs of his knuckles across her high cheekbones and tracing the elegant arch of her eyebrow. Strange to think of her, this coarse creature of the streets, as elegant in any way, yet here, up close, there was an elegance, a delicacy to her features he would have denied a mere few hours ago.

She twitched and moved under his hand a little, uncomfortable—no, unaccustomed—to the simple touch of another human being.

And all he wanted to do, all he craved, was to be able to touch her, this strange, unfathomable girl. She had more faces than the surface of the sea, changeable and volatile. Pickpocket, housebreaker, and now, by her casual admission, a picklock to boot. His luck in finding her had been remarkable. She was very nearly perfect for his uses.

Too perfect. The vision of her bare skin and her white and pink breasts blew across his mind’s eye. She was living, breathing temptation. And he would have to resist.

Hugh returned to the chair next to the stove and settled himself as comfortably as possible with a bum leg and a stiff cock. It was going to be a very long night.

Hugh came awake to the sound of the girl stirring from her pallet of blankets, the line between sleeping and waking abrupt and instantaneous. He still slept in naval watches, used to only four hours of sleep at a time, and so had checked on her often during the long night. He was relieved to see she sat up easily, sleepily pushing her hair out of her face and yawning wide.

She looked almost young, soft and innocent, reaching over to check on her brother first before she looked around the room, accustoming herself to her new surroundings until her eyes lit upon Hugh. She bolted up from the wool pallet of blankets, her face first scarlet and then an alarming, stark white.

“Handsomely, now.” He surged to his feet. The last thing he needed was for her to keel over from dizziness.

But she was on her feet and steady, though wrapping herself protectively in one of the wool blankets. As if a piece of coarse wool would stop the direction of his thoughts. But he hauled his gaze from the sight of her tousled hair and flushed face. From her warm skin. From the idea of wrapping his hands around her messy braid and pulling her to him, up against his chest and ...

“Morning, Captain.” Her voice was quiet and froggy.

“Good morning. Let the boy sleep. How do you feel?”

“Like I been kicked by a horse.” She rubbed her face with the back of her hand and pushed her hair off her forehead. “Where’s the privy?”

Hugh’s gaze automatically shifted to look through the high kitchen window, out to the dripping back garden gauging the height of the fence. Damaged hand and all, she could probably still make it over in a trice. “There’s a chamber pot in the laundry.”

“I’d rather go outside, if it’s all the same to you.” Then, as he stood there eyeing her dubiously, she read his thoughts perfectly and added with studied boldness, “You needn’t take on. The boy’s still here, right? I’d hardly pull a runner and leave him behind, now would I?”

“Wouldn’t you? Isn’t that what you did when you planned to come here without him? Or did you think you could just sneak out once you’d gotten your three hundred pounds?”

She didn’t bat an eye. “What happened to ‘we’ve got to trust one another’?”

The girl was clever. He’d give her that, damn her eyes. “Go on out to the privy then, though you may wish you hadn’t. And mind that blanket on the wet grass. But come right back and come upstairs to my room. To my study,” he amended, wanting no misinterpretation of his intentions. She would probably think the worst of him. “We have things to settle between us, you and I, and there’s no time to waste before we need to get to work.”

Hugh stayed in the kitchens, trying to keep himself from watching her walk to the back of the garden, until Jinks appeared to relieve his watch of the boy.

“See I wasted laying a fire in your room,” the old tar groused.

“Aye. It’ll still be there tonight.” Hugh was in no humor for his former steward’s pointed remarks. “I’ll take my shaving water up myself, if you’ll see to something mild for the boy when he wakes. But let him sleep if he can. And I’ve told the girl she’s to come to my study directly she returns. I’ll see her before breakfast.”

Jinks tried to put a warning shot across his bow. “And how wise would that be now, sir?”

“Just the water, Jinks, without the dubious strategic advice.”

But Jinks was too long familiar with his ways to be properly intimidated. “Don’t know why you need a couple of scrappy bantlings, anyways. They’ll only muck about my business.”

“I need them because, much as I would prefer, I can’t allow you to pulverize the Lords Commissioners into revealing their secrets without giving ourselves very much away. While a sound thrashing would be altogether more straightforward than mucking about with bantlings, Admiral Sir Charles Middleton has asked for discretion, and I aim to give it to him. We’ve set our course, now we’ll sail by it. Thank you.” Hugh took the ewer of hot water. “I’ll breakfast in an hour.”

“Aye, sir.”

Hugh couldn’t have taken any more than eight minutes to shave away his night’s beard and change into a fresh set of clothes, but the girl was already waiting for him, standing in the middle of his study with her dress and hair set to rights, hands clasped demurely behind her back—the very picture of innocence. As though she hadn’t a thought in the world of swiping whatever valuable she had probably already stowed down her bodice.