Touch of a Thief (17 page)

Viola yanked the ruby from her bare palm with her protected hand. Gasping, she blinked up at Quinn. She was still on her feet, waiting for the sick headache to smack the base of her skull.

The blow didn’t come.

Sanjay’s jet and silver must have offered her some protection, after all. She could almost kiss the Indian prince.

“Viola, what do you mean the resonance is off?”

The way Quinn asked the question assured her he hadn’t noticed that anything unusual had happened. The vision must have lasted only a blink. Her secret might still be safe from him.

“I just meant this is not a red diamond,” she said with conviction. “It’s a ruby. A very precious one at that, but it’s not the stone you’re looking for.”

She secreted the ruby in the small space where the stiff busk slid into the front of her corset, but Quinn’s fingers went in after it. Her nipples tingled at his nearness, but he wasn’t in pursuit of her charms.

“No, you don’t, my Lady Light-Fingers.” He came up with the stone, popped it back into its velvet setting and stowed the box in the diplomatic pouch. “We’re not stealing anything but what we came for.”

“But Quinn, a ruby that size is worth a great deal—not as much as a red diamond, of course, but still . . .”

“We’re not simple thieves.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “Speak for yourself.”

He put the pouch back in the safe and closed it. The click of the latch sounded unnaturally loud. And was followed by the sound of heels on the marble hallway floor.

“Someone’s coming!” she hissed.

“We’re going to be caught,” Quinn said calmly as he turned down the gas lamp. “There’s no place to hide here, but I have an idea. Do you trust me?”

“When did you give me a choice?”

He took her hand and pulled her behind the ambassador’s desk. Then he pushed her forward so her upper body was resting on the elegant burled walnut. Quinn pulled up her hem, and yards of her gown and petticoats layered over her back.

“Quinn!”

“We’re going to be caught in any case.” He leaned over her and whispered in her ear, “We may as well be caught doing something that explains our presence here and will knock any suspicion of burglary from the guard’s mind—Why, Viola!”

She heard a wicked smile in his voice.

“You’re not wearing any drawers.”

“I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I tell you they spoil the line of the gown. If it’s good enough for you and Brummel, it’s good enough for me.” In truth, she simply loved the naughty sense of freedom going without them gave her.

She bit her lip as his hands smoothed over her bare bum and reached between her legs to tease the small hairs covering her sex. Moist warmth eased out of her. When he ran a finger along the length of her cleft, he found her wet and ready.

“Good,” he said as she felt him fumble with the front of his trousers. Then his engorged tip pressed against the soft welcome of her sex. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

Too late.

He wouldn’t hurt her physically, but she was bound to be hurt in every other way that counted. Everything was such a muddle—the tatters her reputation would be in once she returned home, the vision of the horrific events at that lake, the phantom red diamond’s evil eye boring through her—it was all too much. She couldn’t think.

She could only feel.

Despite everything, joining her body to Quinn’s was the only touchstone of sanity in her lunatic world.

She tilted her pelvis and he slid his hard cock into her with the rightness of a homecoming.

Quinn murmured a soft cursing endearment and withdrew to ram into her again and again. His ballocks slapped against her thighs.

God, yes. Punish me. If you’re gentle, I’ll think too much and I need not to think.

“Harder,” she said through clenched teeth. She gripped the far edge of the ambassador’s desk. “For God’s sake, harder.”

Quinn shuddered into her again, filling her, stoking her sensitive spots, both her sickness and her cure.

Her insides coiled, tensed for release.

She didn’t even hear the door creak when the guard opened it. The extra light from his lantern made her raise her head, but her eyes were passion-blind.

Quinn stopped mid-stroke.

A sob escaped her throat. Only a little longer. One stroke more would have sent her over the edge.

The door partially closed and the guard’s voice curled around it, tentative and apologetic. “Beggin’ your pardon, milord, but you and the lady can’t be in there.”

“Give us a moment,” Quinn said, his voice ragged. He withdrew from her, pulled down her skirts, and buttoned his pants. She was boneless when he raised her from the desktop to stand upright.

“Quinn.” His name shuddered out of her, equal parts prayer and curse. He’d used her passionate nature as a distraction for larceny. “I hate you for this.”

“Hate me later,” he whispered. “Now we need to get out of here.”

Viola’s whole body thrummed with need and frustration. She leaned on Quinn’s chest and somehow her legs carried her along as he led her around the desk and out the door, keeping her on the side of him most sheltered from the guard—a different one from before.

“No one’s in the library, your lordship,” the guard said helpfully. “Third door on the right.”

Quinn mumbled his thanks and a coin flipped between him and the guard, sparkling for an instant in the lamplight before disappearing into the man’s pocket.

As they neared the third door, aching need overwhelmed her and she reached up and pulled his head down to kiss him. She drew all the breath from his lungs in a surprised rush.

He gasped when she released his lips. “I thought you hate me.”

“I do.” She cupped his genitals. “I hate you very much.”

His mouth descended on hers for another bruising kiss.

She’d thought him so unaffected in the ambassador’s office, so resolute to pull out of her as if it were nothing, but clearly she’d been wrong. He was shaking with need. They turned together, a stylized dance of lust, barely clearing the library door.

Quinn kicked it shut behind them.

He picked her up and carried her toward the big library table. He set her down and pushed aside the books stacked on either side of her hips in two long sweeps. Spines cracking, they tumbled to the floor, pounding one after the other in a rumble like thunder.

“Careful,” she warned, “you’ll bring the guard down on us again.”

“I suspect he’s too busy checking the ambassador’s office, making sure nothing’s amiss there.” He bent and reached under her skirts, running his palms up her legs all the way to the apex of her thighs.

Viola leaned back on her elbows and let her head loll as he caressed her needy flesh. The ache was building again fast. When he brushed his thumbs over her most sensitive spot, she cried out, so near release, but not yet at that place of unraveling madness.

“That’s it,” he encouraged as he unfastened his trousers again and teased her cleft with the tip of him. “Sing for me, love.”

He drove himself into her and she hooked her heels around his waist.

Love, he’d said.

No, she wouldn’t think about that. She’d think of this carnal adventure as a man would. It was only a wet, hot joining. A good hard swive.

Quinn feathered his fingertips over her face. She caught two of them in her mouth and sucked. He slid his other hand between their bodies and rubbed her little spot in time with her suckles. When she sucked harder, he stroked harder. If she went faster, he did too.

She was in control and feeling positively wicked. It was as if she were touching herself and could end her torment at any time with the right speed and pressure.

She opened her eyes and met Quinn’s gaze. No, it was only the illusion of control. He watched her intently, feeding on her need, turning it any way that suited him.

And it suited him to drive her to completion. Her insides tightened, coiled in on themselves. Her breath came in shallow pants. He arched into her and thumbed her spot in a maddening slow circle.

She flew off in a dozen directions at once, losing control of her limbs as her inner walls contracted around the hard length of him. Someone was speaking in other tongues, the garbled language of lust. The voice sounded like hers. She collapsed back on the table, not sure when or if she’d regain control of her body.

Or if she even wanted to.

Once her pumping subsided, his began.

He came inside her in strong, hot pulses. A throaty growl escaped him as he emptied himself into her. When he was finished, he laid his head down between her breasts, his spent breath streaming hotly over the mounds revealed above her bodice.

So much for using a French letter
, she thought absently as her body answered his with a few more gentle spasms, a primal attempt to ease the last bit of his essence into her.

She almost didn’t care that she’d risked pregnancy once again. Well-being flooded her body. She ran her hand over Quinn’s dark head, ruffling his hair and running her fingertip around the shell of his ear.

“Viola,” he gasped, still out of breath from his exertions, “if I ask nicely, will you hate me again sometime?”

“It’s a distinct possibility.”

“Then I’ll live in eager expectation.” He raised himself up slightly to look at her, a wicked grin on his face. “Well, Lady Ashford, we’ve had quite an evening. Perhaps we should be saying our good-byes to the ambassador and heading back to our hotel suite. Should you feel hateful again, no doubt you’d prefer a bed.”

She arched a brow at him. He sounded so calm, so collected. “You knew the evening would end like this, didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t.” He straightened and refastened his trousers. “But you can’t blame a fellow for hoping.”

“We
discussed this possibility before we left Bombay, sahib. You feared there might be a decoy. But if the real Baaghh kaa kkhuun is not in Paris,” Sanjay asked, “then where can it be?”

“Anywhere,” Quinn answered with a grim frown.

“I don’t know about that,” Viola said as she unfastened the jet and silver jewelry and returned it to Sanjay with a smile of thanks. It was wonderful to have used her gift for an extended vision without the accompanying blinding headache. She had no idea why the wristlet seemed to work. The silver kept the black stones from touching her skin directly. Perhaps the jet absorbed the psychic emanations of other gems as black cloth absorbs light. She wondered if any silver and jet jewelry would do the trick or if Sanjay’s set had particular properties. “There are a limited number of travel routes from India the diamond might take. What are they?”

It was a measure of his faith in her ability to identify gemstones that Quinn hadn’t questioned the fact that the jewel in the ambassador’s office was not the diamond he sought.

She resisted telling Quinn about her new vision and certainly wouldn’t divulge the one she’d received from his signet ring. She didn’t feel it was safe to tell him about that part of her gift. Not until she knew what had really happened to his brother.

What she’d Seen varied enough from Lord Wimbly’s account to raise questions in her mind. She was cautiously hopeful her version of Reginald Quinn’s drowning wasn’t as accurate as it seemed.

Maybe it was only her body getting in the way of her reason. She simply couldn’t bear for Greydon to be a monster. If there was any other explanation for what she’d Seen, she clutched at it with the desperation of a drowning victim herself.

“I suppose the courier bearing Baaghh kaa kkhuun could stay aboard a sailing ship all the way around the Horn of Africa and straight on to London,” Quinn said sullenly.

She caught the tip of her right glove in her teeth and pulled it off. “Is it likely something that precious would be risked on a long ocean voyage?”

“No.”

“Overland, then.” She removed the serpent ring, peeled off her other glove and rolled the pair together.

“Through a progression of royal residences perhaps,” Sanjay suggested. “Does your Queen Victoria have a string of summer palaces someplace away from the dampness of England?”

Viola laughed. “No, we English enjoy our soggy weather and wouldn’t dream of leaving our dreary little island on that account.” She saw a way to turn Quinn’s thoughts in the right direction without revealing how she’d hit upon the correct route.

“But come to think of it, Prince Albert is from the Kingdom of Hanover. The Royal House has many holdings there, so no doubt there’s a drafty castle or two on the continent to which the royal couple can escape. Do you suppose the diamond might be routed through there?”

Quinn sank into one of the wing chairs. “I don’t know. It might just as easily have gone round the Horn. Perhaps we should return to London and wait for the diamond to arrive.”

“In case it’s escaped your notice,” she said dryly, “the Royal Collection is not as easy to break into as the ambassador’s office.”

Not to mention the fact that the Beefeaters who guarded the royal jewels wouldn’t be as bemused by finding a couple in flagrante delicto in the vault as the embassy guard had been. Viola had never seen Quinn so discouraged, but she had to discourage him a bit more in order to move him toward seeking the jewel in Hanover. “Once the red diamond is in the queen’s possession, it’s as good as gone.”

“She is right,” Sanjay said.

Quinn stared into the dead fireplace for a moment. “I suppose it would make sense to send the diamond into a region controlled by those bound to the English throne.”

“Hanover is bound by blood to its past monarchs and by marriage to our queen,” she agreed quickly. “Oh! Lord Wimbly said something about hearing that Prince Albert was sending a contingent of his people there this spring for some unknown reason,” she extemporized.

“Did he? Well, the old fellow always keeps an ear to the ground, or at least his wife does and he can’t help knowing what she hears. If there is a contingent of the Prince’s entourage descending on Hanover, the chances the diamond is coming through there are increased.” Quinn stood. “I’ll arrange a coach for us tomorrow.”

“Lord Ashford rides again. No doubt your title will help wangle another invitation for us in Hanover.” Viola smiled in satisfaction. She only hoped they arrived in the northern city before the diamond came and went.

And that she had another set of silver and jet jewelry to protect her other hand before she touched the benighted thing in truth, instead of sensing the red diamond in a vision.