My Lord and Spymaster

Three

“GET THE DOOR,” SEBASTIAN ORDERED. THE CABIN boy scurried ahead, his bare feet slapping the planks.

When he laid her down on the bed, she mumbled, “Where . . . ?”

“She’s bleeding, Captain.”

“I see that, boy. Get me hot water.” The sharp tone sent Tom scrambling from the cabin.

Her braids sprawled in loops over his pillow. Hard to believe this little mite of a girl had armed men chasing her through alleys. What the devil had she got herself mixed up in?

Half-conscious, she rolled away, slapping at him feebly, trying to sit up. “Lemme be . . .”

“Softly, girl.” He was gentle when he pushed her to the mattress. “Softly. There’s no place you have to go. Lie still.”

Did she see him when she looked at him? Probably not. Her eyes were blank. “It’s dark. It . . . hurts. Hurts. I can’t get out.”

“You’re safe. Where does it hurt?”

“Don’t be stupid. Hurts everywhere.” She decided to black out for a while. Her eyes slid shut, and she went limp.

“I imagine it does.” He eased her down flat. “Let’s hope you haven’t cracked anything important in your head. I’m damned if I can fix it.” There was nothing to do for her but wait. The best doctor in London couldn’t do more.

His fault she’d been hurt. The one day in the year he let himself get drunk, this woman needed him. There didn’t seem to be enough inventive ways to call himself an idiot.

He unwrapped her from his coat and pulled her shoes off. She wasn’t bleeding much anywhere, but she was soaking wet, shivering with shock and cold. That, at least, he could fix. All that filthy, soaked clothing had to come off.

He hesitated, then drew his knife. He set the point under the gilt locket she wore and turned the back of the blade and cupped his hand to shield her skin and cut. Lace snicked apart. That was Alençon lace, seven and sixpence a handspan these days, smuggled goods and illegal. And this was a very expensive whore.

She didn’t react when he peeled away damp, clinging cotton. Her breasts slipped free. They were peaches, golden on top where the sun got to them, pale below. They swayed, stippled with goose bumps, the nipples tight.

“No damage to that pair. That’s going to make hordes of men happy, won’t it?”

Beautiful and beautiful, left and right. Unruly parts of him took note, getting hard and ready. His cock was offering suggestions on the best way to warm her up. He and his cock were just going to have to disagree about that.

“Let’s get the rest of this off.” He sawed through a bit of silk ribbon, then cut a widening vee of nakedness down her belly, getting less and less dispassionate with every inch. Devil knew how doctors managed. Maybe they were all eunuchs.

Her skin was cold against the back of his hand, smooth as water. Soon enough he brushed a feathering of curly hair. She was blonde down there, too. Blonde as summer wheat. A man never knew till he checked.

A legion of men had plowed that particular wheatfield, and that was a sin and a shame for a woman like this.

Her belly curved down from her hips to the long, soft plain with that vulnerable navel at the center, then rose in a little mound where those curls sprang up. It was territory that called out for a man to come lay his head in the cradle of her, there, and turn and kiss his way up that hill and fill his mouth with the smell of her and the taste . . .

He shouldn’t have his hand there without invitation.

He took a deep breath and moved on, cutting away the rest of her skirt and peeling it back.

What was she doing on Katherine Lane, trying to sort through his pocket change? Who left her alone, in the stink and cold of the docks, to get attacked by gangs of Irishmen? That was going to stop.

One last tug. He pulled wet cloth out from under her. She lay on the white cotton covers of his bunk, a little on her side, instinctively trying to curl against the cold, wearing nothing but a locket on a thin blue ribbon.

Naked, she looked small and breakable. She’d seemed more substantial when she was on her feet, telling him lies and kicking thugs.

He’d been wrong about that locket. It wasn’t gilt. This was gold, soft and heavy, with the design almost worn off. When he picked it up he could feel the age on it, the years that had rubbed it smooth. The clever hinge was Italian work.

“This trinket doesn’t belong on the Lane. Neither do you, sparrow. We’re going to have a long talk about that when you wake up.” He didn’t open it. He set the gold back between her breasts and left his hand there, his knuckles just touching her. “Your heart’s thumping along like clockwork. That’s good. You keep that up.”

Under his fingers, her skin was smooth and unnaturally cool, with the heart beating inside. She might have been a marble statue, just called to life, taking the first breath. He could slide over a few inches and help himself to those breasts. He’d maybe taste them fairly soon. They’d be honey and cream with a rough nub of a nipple tweaking back and forth on his tongue.

Damn. Was he really thinking that way about an unconscious woman?

Yes. Yes. Oh, yes. Let’s do that. His cock didn’t have any scruples at all.

But then, his cock wasn’t in charge. “And I’m roused up like a squad of marines on shore leave.” He pulled his hand off the girl and stomped across the cabin, feeling moderately despicable, looking for towels. “That’s uncomfortable. Let’s wring some water out of your pretty hide and get you covered up.”

Blankets were in the bottom drawer, towels beside the washstand. He brought them to the bed and sat beside her and dried her off fast, trying not to touch her skin. “We’ll discuss your very tempting wares when you’re awake. I like dealing with women who can talk.”

He wrapped her in one of the Valletta blankets he shipped, vivid blues and greens in long stripes. Wool soft as a kitten. He cocooned her, head to foot, till he couldn’t see a square inch of skin. It didn’t help as much as he’d hoped. “Where the hell has that boy got to?”

Unbelievable, the effect she had on him. Had he ever wanted a woman this much? “You’re something a man might pull up in his net one night. A mermaid, perfect and chill. Maybe you shed your scales and walked up Katherine Lane right out of the kingdom of the sea. Maybe that’s how a woman like you got there.”

Without opening her eyes, she said clearly, “It’s dark.” Whoever she was talking to, it wasn’t him.

“The lamps aren’t lit. I’ll do it soon.”

“I can’t . . .” Gradually, like a flower closing, she curled herself into a ball. When she hid her head in her arms, she smeared blood across her face. “I can’t get out.”

“I’m here.”

“Dark...”

Because her eyes were shut. “I’ll make it light in a minute.”

Loud thumps in the passageway said Tom was back. The boy slammed the door to the bulkhead, slopping water from the bucket. “Is she dead?”

So much for his private idyll with a mermaid. “She’s not going to die. She’s going to sit up and ask why I keep a lazy, half-sized baboon in my cabin. Bring that over here.”

He sat down on the bunk beside her and wet a corner of a towel in the bucket. He began to clean the scrapes on her hands. Tom, a precocious eleven, craned for a look under the blanket. “Gawd, ain’t she a beauty. An’ she sells that up on the Lane?”

“Not to the likes of you.”

The girl opened brown gold eyes. Her first sight was Tom’s face, level with her own. “I fell, Sir. I weren’t . . . careful. ” She tried to focus on him. “Who ’er you?”

“I’m Tom. I’m pleased to make yer acquaintance.”

“Tell ’im I can’t get out.”

“What? Oh, yes, miss, I’ll tell ’im. Can I get you something? Cup of tea. The fire’s lit in the galley. I could get you a cup of tea, miss.”

He could feel her shaking under the blanket. Fear and cold and confusion. “Tom.” He thumbed toward the door. “Lose yourself.”

The girl’s gaze followed Tom as he left. Slowly she blinked her way around the cabin . . . bookshelves, the chart table, a stack of crates, and finally back to him. “Where am I?”

“My ship. How many fingers am I holding up?”

“You think I hit my head.” She freed a hand from the blanket and explored into her hair. “I did.”

“How many fingers?”

“Three.”

“Does the light hurt your eyes?”

“Everything hurts.” This time, when she tried to sit up, he helped her. He kept an arm around her while she huddled, hazy-eyed, clutching the blanket to her, looking bewildered. She would have aroused protective instincts in a stone.

“Talk to me, sparrow. Who are you?”

“Jess. I’m Jess.”

When she’d been reeling in and out of consciousness, her voice had been pure East London. Now she sounded gentry. Somewhere, his cockney sparrow had picked up an education. She got more and more interesting. “Do you remember getting hit?”

She shook her head. Her face knotted in pain. “I shouldn’t do that.”

“No, you shouldn’t. Do you know what day it is?”

“No. I . . . Stop asking stupid questions.”

She’d mislaid a couple pieces of her memory. He’d seen that happen once, when his bosun took a fall from the rigging. It had been a day before the man remembered what ship he was on. He never did remember the fall.

“You’re still shivering. Let’s get you dry.” When she didn’t object, he picked up the towel and started unbraiding and untangling, blotting water out of her hair, making every move slow so he wouldn’t scare her.

She was thinking the whole time, frowning. After a while she said, “I don’t remember everything. What happened to me?”

“You fell under a wagon and got hurt.” They’d talk about it tomorrow. That was one of several discussions he had planned.

Done. He put the towel down. Her hair dried up lighter than he’d expected, the color of a new-cut spar. Lovely. A man would keep this woman just for the pleasure of taking her hair down at night.

“I got my brains scrambled up, didn’t I?”

“A little, maybe. Give it an hour or two and you’ll be fine.”

“I don’t—” She stopped abruptly and jerked away from him. She pulled the blanket loose and looked inside. Her eyes came up, accusing. “I’m not wearing any clothes. You got me naked.”

He was scaring her. He dropped the towel and backed away, holding his hands wide and empty.

THE man retreated, trying to look harmless and not succeeding to any extent at all.

He said, “You’re not naked. You’re in a blanket.”

Oh, that was reassuring, that was. She was wearing damp skin and a wooly blanket. She pulled cloth up to her chin and hid behind it. “We must know each other pretty well, whoever you are.”

“My name is Sebastian.”

“Se . . . bast . . . ian.” She tried the syllables out. She was pretty sure this was a complete stranger. A dangerous stranger. She’d known lots of dangerous men, and she could recognize one at a glance. “You’re one of the things I don’t remember, Sebastian. I don’t remember you at all.”

“You don’t know me.”

“Then I should have my clothes on, shouldn’t I?”

He kept his voice soft, talking to her like she was a scared child. “They were wet.”

There her dress was, a heap of slit-up rags on the carpet. “My dress got wet, so you cut it off. You must be a right terror in a thunderstorm.” A prudent woman in her situation wouldn’t embark upon sarcasm.

“You were soaked to the skin and freezing and bleeding at the edges. I couldn’t do anything with a bundle of muddy cloth.” He made stripping her naked sound prosaic as oatmeal. “And you were leaking mud all over my bed. I sopped a gallon of dirty water off you.”

“Mud. That explains it.” Her head pounded like a mill wheel. Every muscle in her body hurt, some of them in inventive ways. She couldn’t remember how she got here. She was naked. There was nothing good about this situation. Nothing.

She was in bed in the captain’s cabin of a good-sized merchant frigate, about a hundred seventy tons. This isn’t a Whitby ship. I’m not safe. The cut of the cabin and the neat brass fittings said it was from a shipyard in Boston. This man, though, he sounded English, not American.

Most of all . . . it was strange inside her head. Felt like somebody’d taken a big ladle and stirred her brain a few times. Nothing was where it should be. When she went asking why she was sitting frog-naked in the captain’s cabin of a merchant frigate, she couldn’t dip up a teaspoon of explanation. I am in a mort of trouble.

Captain Sebastian stood five feet away, looking large and lethal, with a worried frown. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Well, you’d say that, wouldn’t you?

He was young to be captain. Thirty, maybe. He had black hair and a big beak of a nose, and sailor skin, dark and rough, burned by suns that weren’t polite and English. Colorful splotches of blood were drying on his shirt. That would be her blood, probably.

I’ve seen him before.

A memory bobbed up, all in one piece. She was standing against the Captain, so close next to him, they were intimate as a pair of teeth. Fog swirled past. That inky hair was wet, slicked down over his forehead. He slid his fingers along my mouth, tickling. That’s all he did, and I was heat and pleasure and squirming inside like he’d kissed me for an hour.

He knew what he’d done to me. He wanted to do it.

I said, “Five shillings?” and I laughed at him.

The memory tipped sideways and sank like a stone. She had no idea what came next. She groped in the corners of her mind and couldn’t find anything.

His voice rumbled, “You’re worrying. I want you to stop that. I’ll take care of you.”

I don’t want you to take care of me. I want to have my clothes on. She huddled up close and tucked the blanket in tight under her. This is a Greek blanket. We use them for packing the fragile cargo. Papa buys a bale or two on the docks at Valletta, last thing, and we toss them on top of . . .

Then it was gone. The image of the dock at Valletta rippled into pieces and blew away, taking Papa with it. There was something she needed to do for Papa. Something important. She had to . . .

Chaos and spinning pain in her head. Nothing else. She couldn’t think.

She looked down. Her toes peeked out the bottom of the blanket, pink and defenseless and silly-looking. “I don’t remember how I got here.”

“I carried you in after the wagon hit you. Let me get you some light. It’s getting dark early.”

I got hit by a wagon? That’s a fool’s trick. Doesn’t sound like me, somehow. She watched him as he walked across the cabin, taking lanterns with him. It hurt like needles to move her eyes. They hurt when she closed them, too. Sometimes you only have bad choices. Lazarus used to say that to me.

When the Captain passed the squares of the windows, she saw him in outline against the gray outside.

That joggled loose another little moment.

He had his back to me and he was holding a knife. Men came spewing out of the Dark like demons. He put himself between me and those men . . .

“I was out . . . in that.” She looked at the rain and fog outside the window. “With you. And you killed someone.”

“There was a fight.” He set the lanterns on the chart table. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. You can sort everything out when your head doesn’t ache.”

He’s a killer, then. I know too many killers.

He’d protected her, in some shadowy fight in the fog. She was sure of it. Maybe that was why he didn’t scare her as much as he should have. She watched him make fire, sheltering the tinder with his hand. Big hands, he had. He was substantial in general, and being on shipboard made it obvious. A man his size filled up the space, bulkhead to hull, deck to overhead.

He blew on the spark and got the candle lit. All the while he was taking quick glances in her direction. Assessing. Seeing whether she was about to panic or scream or run. She might have, if her head hurt less. Easier to panic when your head didn’t hurt.

He hooked one lantern up over the chart table. It swung when he let it loose. Bright and shadow skittered around the cabin. He walked toward her, holding the other lantern, and he bulged out in his breeches, randy as a stallion.

No.

Fear ran down her like water. For the first time since she’d opened her eyes, she was crawly skinned frightened. Cold with it. Shocked and sick with it.

She darted her eyes away and pretended she didn’t see. Oh, she was looking at the chart table. She was staring at the carpet on the deck. But she didn’t fool him. He pulled up, halfway across the cabin, just stood still, and watched her.

She folded up small, hiding under the blanket.

“Stop that,” he said sharp-like.

Easing the blanket with her, she edged back farther in the bunk. No escape that way. The door was on the other side of the cabin. Past him. No escape there, either.

“Don’t be a idiot.” He looked annoyed.

A flash of memory struck. The Captain yelled, his face distorted with rage and contempt. “Run from me.”

She was in his cabin. No way out. The world got wavery at the edges. I am in so much trouble.

He started toward her, across the cabin, deliberate and slow, like piled-up thunderheads approaching at sea. She jerked the blanket and scuttled backwards on the bed, rucking up the covers till she slammed against the portside hull. Just a startling amount of useless, that was.

He came to the side of the bed. He hung up the lantern on the hook in the overhead and stood there scowling. “Would you calm down? I’m not going to lay a hand on you.”

Her memory was full of dark patches of pain and fighting and trying to run. Anything could have happened to her, and she wouldn’t remember. “Maybe you already have.”

“You think I’d do something like that in front of an eleven-year-old cabin boy, and you cold and limp as a dead mackerel? Don’t be silly.”

“I’m not being silly. I’m sitting here with my dress off, and you’re . . .”

“I’m what? This . . .” he gestured crudely, “doesn’t mean a damn thing. This is because you don’t have any clothes on and you’re female. For God’s sake, I don’t attack women every time I get a cockstand.”

She shook her head. The world went spinning. She was so bloody sick. He could grab her if he wanted to. Just reach out and do it.

“I’m not the kind of sorry bastard who rapes women.” His words would have left marks on stone. It chilled her right to the soles of her feet, that soft voice. “Hell.”

“My father has money. I can pay you . . .”

“If your father had money, you wouldn’t be on Katherine Lane.” That hawklike glare never wavered. Unreadable eyes, he had. “It doesn’t do any good to tell you not to be scared, does it? You’d be a fool if you weren’t scared. What do you want me to do about it?”

I should kick him and run. She didn’t though. Like he said, she wasn’t a fool.

“Do you want me to get out of here? I can go up on deck and let my cabin boy keep you company.”

The lantern he’d hung was swinging still, reshaping the shadows of his face. Revealing and hiding. Hiding and revealing. It was deliberate, the way he stood crowding her at the bunkside. He was showing her he could come as close as he wanted and still not lay a hand on her.

He said, “You can try leaving under your own sail. You won’t get far before you keel over, but I won’t stop you. Take the blanket, if you want.”

A minute ticked by. She said, “You didn’t do anything to me, did you? You didn’t . . . ”

“I did not. I don’t take sport with unconscious gutter-snipes. London’s full of willing women. Pretty ones.” He pushed the bed-curtains back along the railings and cupped his fingers over the bed frame. “Less grubby, too.”

You had to look into that hard face for a while before you saw he was laughing, quiet, underneath. At her. At himself, too, maybe.

“I guess . . . if you wanted to do something, you’d be doing it.”

“I would, if I wanted a woman pale as a fishbelly and listing badly to port. A real villain wouldn’t let that stop him.”

“Fishbelly.”

“Fishbelly green. You still are.”

She wouldn’t have trusted a kindly, reassuring man. This bloke, rude, impatient, and exasperated, though . . .

“Let’s make a deal, Jess. I don’t touch you, and you stop trying to dig a hole through the portside planking. Those are the terms and conditions. Shake on it.”

He wanted her to shake on it. Somehow this made sense. She was pretty sure parts of her mind weren’t working.

“I keep my contracts,” he said. “Ask anybody.”

He had his hand out. It was twice as big as hers and dark with the sun. Bands of callus crossed the palm. He got that reefing sail in high winds when the lines cut into his flesh as the ship bucked and he had to hold on.

She slipped her hand out from under the blanket, into his.

It was a shock, touching him. Made him seem bigger and closer and more real. It set off a pulse in her belly, nervous and twitchy like. A little drum, drum, drum started up between her legs. She recognized the feeling, since she wasn’t ignorant in such matters. That was her body noticing he was a fine-looking man. Her body generally had more sense than that.

He shook her hand and let go. “That’s it, then. I’ll keep you safe tonight. Safe from me, too. Your part is, you trust me. For one night.”

He was already walking away. He tossed the words at her over his shoulder and picked a wide-bottomed decanter out of the brass rack in the bookshelves. “You’re getting the better of that deal. You wouldn’t make it twenty yards if you tried to run.”

He acts like Papa. Like his handshake’s good from Dublin to Damascus, and everybody knows it. I don’t recognize his name, but I’ll bet I just struck a bargain with a master trader.

“I’ll give you a brandy to seal the deal. You’re blue as a whelk and shivering. Wrap that blanket tighter.”

She watched him pour a glass, not being stingy. He stretched up and took a wood box down from the top shelf. When he opened it, it folded to both sides, like a book, to show medicines. Bottles and jars and paper packets were strapped in, neat and shipshape.

He uncorked a blue bottle and counted drops into the brandy.

Not surreptitious, Sebastian. That meant he was daylight honest or else he was deep as a well. No way of knowing which, just at the moment. She’d assume deep as a well till proved otherwise. “I like the way you’re letting me see you doctor that up.”

“That’s to disarm suspicion.”

“You get marks for trying. What are you putting in it?”

“This and that.” He set the bottle back in its place and pulled a muslin pouch out of the box. He unwound the string and jiggled the bag open in the palm of his hand. He picked out a pinch to sprinkle over her glass. “The tincture is to dull the pain. These herbs are to stop that fever you’re about to get. The gray powder floating on top is to show you it’s serious medicine.”

“You think I’m going to drink that.”

He swirled the glass, letting everything mix. “You can toss it out a porthole. Waste of good brandy, though.”

“The fish might enjoy a brandy. It’s a cold, wet night in the Thames.”

“It’s cold up here, too, and nearly as wet.” He carried the glass across to her, being casual, like he didn’t care whether she took it or not. “Drink this and stop being a fool.” His fingers didn’t brush hers when he handed it over. “If you’re not going to trust me, I can always cart you outside and dump you back in the rain. I might even find the exact muddy puddle I picked you out of.”

Empty threats. She preferred them, actually, to the other kind.

She sniffed at the glass. Nothing to smell but brandy and something like smoke. When she took a sip, there was nothing much to taste, either. He was a man of secretive medicines. “What did you say that dusty stuff was?”

“I didn’t. That’s medicinal herbs from the mysterious Orient. Guaranteed to do everything but raise the dead. Can’t possibly hurt you.” The Captain busied himself putting his medical gear away.

Hah. But she took a sip. “I don’t trust medicine much. It’s good brandy, though. My father deals in brandy.” We smuggle it.

Rain tapped on the deck above. That was a good sound. Familiar. She’d spent a hundred nights at sea with the rain overhead. Funny how she felt quiet inside, steady, being with this man. She felt safe. He had practice taking care of his ship and his crew. That’s why his hands were leather, strong and hard. That was from handling ropes and checking cargo and holding onto what he intended to keep. It set prickles of awareness running along her skin, thinking that those hands had undressed her. He’d touched her body, doing that, even if he didn’t admit it. It made sense he wouldn’t want to talk about it.

She looked out the window, past the reflection of the cabin. Rain slapped hard on the glass and ran down in lines.

The light was going. The wharf was empty of carts and horses. Lamps in the warehouse yards cast long, greasy, rippling streaks of light on the stones of the dock. To the left, midriver in the Thames, dozens of ships anchored—schooners and frigates, lighters, barges—all with lanterns, fore and aft, bobbing in the tide. A jagged forest of masts and rigging glowed eerily against the mist.

It’s important what day the ships leave. The sailing dates are half the puzzle. The other half . . . The other half is . . .

And then she didn’t know what the other half of the puzzle was. It made sense a minute ago. Now it didn’t. Maybe this was what it was like, being mad. “I can’t think.”

“Then it’s lucky you don’t have to think.”

“One of those fortunate coincidences.” She wrapped her arms around her knees, looking at the little gray bits floating in the brandy, trying to decide whether she should drink it. It came down to trust, didn’t it? The Captain had risked his neck for her, out there in the streets of London. She’d given him nothing in return but sand and mud in his bed. And she’d made a bargain. She kept bargains. “I haven’t thanked you, have I? For saving my life. I almost remember you doing it.”

“I spend most evenings fishing women out of the deeper puddles in the port area. I consider them legitimate spoil. It doesn’t do any good in the glass, Jess.”

He’d been captain a good, long while. He gave orders like a man used to being obeyed. “I haven’t made up my mind yet.” She yawned, surprising herself.

“I suggest you do so, before you fall asleep again. Or set it aside. You don’t have to worry, you know.” Captain Sebastian’s voice rumbled through her, mild and reassuring, stroking away at the last of the frightened places in her, loosening the knots in her nerves.

He could do anything he wanted to her. Commit any evil. And he didn’t. Here and now, because he was such a dangerous man, she knew she could trust him. Paradox they called that. Looking at it from three or four different angles, she still came up with the same answer.

Wasn’t it lucky her brain worked well enough to tell her that? She took a deep drink of the brandy.

HE saw the exact moment she decided to trust him. She drank the brandy, and she stopped looking like a cat in a sinking lifeboat.

That was good. He was damn sick of scaring her. “Are you still afraid of me?”

“Some. You’re formidable as hell. I suppose you know that.” She tilted her head to one side. “I don’t know how to treat you, Sebastian. I wish you were some pudgy little chap who didn’t scare me to death.”

Alone and hurt, totally at the mercy of a stranger, she could say that and give him a little sidewise grin. Courage to burn, this woman had. “You’ll get used to me.”

He was aroused all over again, seeing that street urchin’s grin. She was going to laugh at him like this, when he had her in bed. She’d tease him and play games under the covers. He’d like that.

Since he wasn’t going to get her underneath him, squirming enthusiastically, anytime soon, he did some walking around, kicking the damp towels together in a pile, rolling up the coastal charts and putting them away in brass tubes, giving his body a chance to cool off.

After a bit, she said, “You carried oranges. I can smell them.”

“First cargo up from the hold.” The Flighty would smell of oranges for a while yet. He didn’t notice, himself. By one of God’s small mercies, the crew stopped smelling cargo after the first day or two. “I sold them on the wharf the morning we docked and was glad to get rid of them. Tricky, delicate cargo.”

“They stow forward and below the waterline, with air moving around them. Then you tear up the water heading home.”

She knew shipping. She had a father or brother or lover who was a shipping clerk or a sailor.

“We leave keel marks on the waves.”

“I can see a picture of it in my mind, how you packed the oranges in. Where they were stowed. How they unloaded. Why do I know so much about your ship?” Panic, just the edge of it, touched her voice. “If I don’t know you, why do I know this ship?”

“There’s lots of ships on the river, Jess.”

She was scaring herself again, thinking she knew Flighty and he was lying to her. So he rolled up a map of the Thames estuary and used it to point to the ships at midriver, the ones they could still see in the gloom, naming them one by one, talking cargoes and ports . . . Canton, Baltimore, the Greek isles, Constantinople. He watched fear eddy and slack inside her. But he’d sold goods all over the Mediterranean. She wasn’t a match for him. He talked and talked, and slowly she let herself be gentled into trusting him. She trusted too easily. Somebody should be taking care of her.

“Feels like I’ve been there, some of those places.” She shifted inside the blankets. He got a brief glimpse of some anatomy he’d been admiring earlier. It was even more tempting, half covered. “Valletta. Crete. Minorca. I can almost see them.”

When she belonged to him, he’d take her to sea and show her Crete and the Greek isles. Why not? She’d take to life shipboard like a seagull. It’d be fine to come on deck and see Jess at the rails, her hair blowing, her bonnet off, and her skin brown from the sun.

Or if she wanted to stay in England, he’d bring the world back to her. He’d drop anchor in London and come home to her and shuck his boots at the door. He’d find her curled up next to the fire, waiting for him. She’d be sleepy, the way she was now, and they’d talk about his trip. Everything he’d seen. He’d bring back baubles from his trading and lay them at her feet. This was a woman he’d enjoy spoiling with presents.

“My brain doesn’t work at all.” She rubbed her hand over her forehead and into her hair to badger her brain better. It was a bad idea. She winced, and her fingers came away red. “I’ve got blood on your blanket. I’m sorry.”

“I have three hundred in the hold. I won’t miss one.”

“A third of a percent. Well within normal shipping loss.”

And she’d got the number right. Mystery after mystery was wrapped around his Cockney sparrow. He was going to enjoy unwrapping them.

She yawned and leaned back against the bulkhead. “I should go home and feed Kedger. Pitney does it if he remembers. But he doesn’t like Kedger. Not really.”

Kedger would be her dog, or a cat. Women liked pets. Maybe when he came home from sea, Jess would be sitting waiting for him with a cat in her lap. Hell, if she didn’t have a cat, he’d buy her one. He liked cats. “Kedger will be fine. Stay with me.”

She was brooding, holding the glass in both hands and looking at the brandy instead of drinking it. “I hate going back to the rooms when Papa’s not there.”

When he sat down next to her, she’d already forgotten to be afraid of him. He cupped her cheek, turning her till he had her whole attention. “Stay with me, Jess. It’s cold out there, and it’s dark, and it’s raining.” In the rookeries, five or six men were waiting for her, hoping for a quiet minute to bash her over the head.

“It is raining.”

“And you’re drunk as a wheelbarrow. Getting there, anyway. ”

“I’m drunk?”

“Three sheets to the wind, as we say at sea. Let’s finish the job.” He tipped up the bottom of her glass and made her drink, hurrying her through the rest of it, getting the medicine into her before she fell asleep. “That’s right. Last drop.”

“Drunk?” She let him have the empty glass. “I can’t think anyway, so it probably doesn’t make much difference. You would not believe how strange it is inside my head.”

“Why don’t you relax and enjoy it.”

“I don’t do that sort of thing. Get drunk, I mean. I’m a very serious person.”

She was a serious person in danger of rolling off the bed in a few minutes, all boneless and relaxed.

She watched him set the glass away on the table. Her topaz-colored gaze was beginning to shift out of focus. “Papa said not to do anything daft. But I think I did.” She frowned. “You ever catch fish in a pool, Captain? The way they dart off when you go after them. It’s like that, trying to remember. There’s something I have to do.”

“Let the fish be for a while. You’ll remember in the morning. ” All that brandy in her, and she was still rummaging through her mind, worried as a conscientious clerk with a misplaced invoice. It was a stubborn woman he had naked in his bed tonight. But she didn’t object when he gathered her together and laid her down on the pillows. Didn’t object when he stroked her hair and the back of her neck. He watched her thoughts dissolve like snow melting off a roof. After a while, her fingers uncurled their grip on the blanket. The gold locket slipped to nestle between her breasts. Her truly excellent breasts.

“You have lots of women, Captain? You look like somebody who’s had lots of them.” Her voice was dreamy. She was already lost in what he was doing to her face and her neck.

None like you. Never anyone like you. “Not so many. A sailor can go without when he needs to. I don’t grab, if that’s what you mean. I ask. Tonight I won’t even ask. Are you warm enough? I can get another blanket.”

“What? Oh, yes. Toast. Be warm in a snowdrift with you doing that to me.”

He leaned over her, looking down, admiring the golden woman he had, half-asleep, in his bed. She put her hand up between them, not pushing him away, just touching him with sleepy curiosity. Accepting him. Her eyelids fluttered when he touched his lips between them and kissed her forehead. She closed her eyes then, for him. It was the first in a long line of surrenders she’d make, and never realize she was making.

He set his lips to her eyelids, breathing across skin tender as flower petals, step by step seducing his professional pickpocket.

This was the beginning for the two of them. Strange, how sure he was of that. Two hours after plucking her out of the mist on Katherine Lane he felt an irrational sense of possession. It was as if the tide had washed her ashore at his feet. He was going to immerse himself in the slow-spun pleasure of winning and loving this woman. He could see the years he’d spend with her stretching out into the future.

“Maybe I’ll go to sleep.” Her voice closed around him in velvet. That was how she’d feel when he was inside her. When she surrounded him. Like velvet.

She was already his Jess, even if he was the only one who knew it. He intended to hold on to her. Tomorrow, he’d track down that careless father of hers and get her away from him. Or find her pimp. Whoever she belonged to. There’d be no more dangerous work for her, out in the cold, picking pockets for that shadowy brute with the lead pipe. Whoever it was who ran her, he’d threaten them or bargain with them or pay them off. Her price didn’t matter. He was a rich man.

Then he’d seduce her into his bed. That would be the voyage of a lifetime, raising her sails to the wind, pulling the lines taut, one by one. She’d started out already, traveling with him.

Within a week he’d have her sweaty under him, not a stitch on her, begging and incoherent. He promised it to himself. She’d open to him like some exotic fruit, achingly tart and sweet, and he’d worship all the length of that sleek body. When she was ready for him, he’d slip inside and explode into her.

He had plenty of time to entice and lure her. He’d be fixed in London a while, seeing to the hanging of Josiah Whitby.