The Black Hawk

Forty-four

HE HAD REARRANGED HIMSELF TO ENCLOSE HER, supporting her against his knee so she did not have to lean upon her wound. He stroked down her side as one would caress a lazy cat that had come to curl in the lap. There was a combination of deep appreciation and slight wariness. She found both of those arousing.

He had taken upon himself the smell of smoke when he laid the fire and played with it. He also smelled of brandy. She said, “You had good brandy for dinner.”

“Nathaniel likes the best. It’s wasted on me. I think I prefer gin.”

Nathaniel Conant, the chief magistrate of Bow Street, would not serve gin with his dinners. “You do not know if you prefer gin? That is strange.”

“When I’m Hawker, I like gin. Sir Adrian Hawkhurst drinks brandy.”

“And you are both of them. Both Hawker and Sir Adrian. You must find it confusing.”

“Moderately.”

It was pleasant to be stroked through the red silk. It would be pleasant also to encounter his skin. She pulled the robe away from her legs and let it slither down beside her thighs. She raised her knee and invited him to touch.

“When I’m Sir Adrian and I do this . . .” He cupped his hand on her knee. She was open to him, thigh and belly and the light brown curls between her legs. “I’m appreciating art.”

“You are a connoisseur, in fact.”

“It’s a pretty knee. Strong. Interesting. A couple of scars. And here, I’m sliding down an arch the color of sunrise and finding a friendly, silky little animal. A rabbit, they call it in English. Coney.”

“In French, as you know, it is chatte. The little cat.”

“Stroking the little cat. Did you know . . . in the middle there you’re the color of one of those shells you find on the coast of Italy.”

He trailed a fingertip across her there, playing with the hair, smoothing it apart. Her breath caught in her chest. Her senses jerked madly, pulling at her body to do something. Anything. She was breathing quickly when he returned on his slow way back up to her knee. He applied great concentration to the task.

He said, “When I’m Sir Adrian, I love to look at you. When I’m Hawker, I just want to lay you back and get inside you and make us both happy.” The path of his hand upon her was iron and honey. “God, but it feels good to touch you. I’m never easy having dinner with Nathaniel, fine fellow though he is. I got tried at Bow Street, once. For theft.”

Hawker lived an interesting life. “You did not hang, obviously.”

“There was what you might call a miscarriage of justice. I was guilty as charged, but my old master—he was the King Thief of London—bribed me some witnesses. That was my first brush with the magistrates at Bow Street. The beginning of a long, interesting association, as it turned out.” He said, “Sit up. We got a hard piece of floor under us.” He was gone for an instant.

Her back felt cold where he had left her. Then there were pillows and blankets behind her. He slipped the last of the crimson silk from her shoulders, being gentle along the bandage of her arm. At some point he had divested himself of the last of his clothes.

“We could get into bed,” she said. “Many people do. Every night.” But she did not want to leave the circle of light cast by the fire. It was a small world of their own. The rest of the room was dark.

“I like the color of you in the firelight,” he said. “Let’s lie down so I can get to you better.” He leaned over and kissed her knee.

“That is good,” she whispered. “I like that.”

“I like it too.” He kissed the inside of her knee several times. Lingeringly.

Little strikes of lighting played over every soft place between her legs. They were skin to skin. More than naked. Stripped to the soul. Her longing for his body was fire and need and a distraction beyond bearing. She said, “I have wanted you. For three years I have gone about London, and every day I have thought of you.”

His hand was possessive on her thigh. “I’d walk down Exeter Street, casual-like, and look in the windows of your shop. I could have stepped inside any day and said, ‘Remember me? We used to be lovers.’ Sometimes I thought you knew I was there.”

“Sometimes I did.” He laid himself defenseless against her with such truths. And she . . . What could she do but speak the truth back to him? She was vulnerable to him, undefended as an open oyster. “I saw you once, six months ago. You were on Jermyn Street.”

She had stopped in the road and watched him. Perhaps some part of him had sensed her attention. He had raised his head suddenly, as if he sniffed the air. She’d slipped away. A moment longer, and he would have turned around to see her.

She whispered, “We have lost so much time.”

“And now?”

She rolled to face him, to kneel beside him. His hand stayed upon her the whole time, sliding over her skin to end up resting on her back. She was glad to be connected to him. Glad her thigh rested next to his.

“And now . . . this.” She kissed his lips. Men need simple answers—even Hawker, who was the most wise of his species.

His lips were filled with complicated response, heavy with meaning. She was enmeshed in the taste and smell of him. Along his jaw and his neck he tasted like soap when she licked him.

The persuasion of his hands was infinite. Hands that loosened every muscle of her back as they ran up and down her spine. He leaned to kiss her breasts, to murmur at their beauty and kiss them again. She was urged toward him, lifted as if she had no weight. She was upon him, upon his lap, and she wrapped her legs around him so they were even closer.

He kissed one breast. Then the other. “Here’s my old friends. Pretty girls. How have you two been?” He teased her nipple between his fingers. “And look at this. You’re glad to see me too.”

He was altogether foolish. But, oh, her body delighted in his games. She plunged into his nonsense and let him take her where he would.

“Your turn.” He went from breast to breast. “Now yours. Just no choice between you.”

He nibbled where her breasts were drawn up and sensitive. Played his tongue fast across her there. Her heart expanded into joy. She filled her senses with him, drowned in him, dug her fingers into his shoulder, and lost herself in the smell of his hair.

He entered her. Hard and overwhelming and so good.

“I have missed this,” he said.

She felt herself tipped backward, down to the blankets. He never left her. Never parted from her. She held him to her tightly, with arms, with thighs.

“Please.” She had no words. “Please. Now.”

He began to drive each stroke strongly inside her. She pulled herself to him, meeting him. Matching him.

Arched and straining, gasping for breath, plucked like a bow, she became the exultation. She convulsed around him. She felt him join her, losing control. He groaned deeply, hard and low, in triumph.

She heard that and let herself fall into red pleasure and was consumed by it.

SHE watched him through lazy and half-closed eyes, not wanting to move. He was so perfectly beautiful. He was skilled beyond measure. She felt wonderful.

He touched across the bandage on her arm, seeing that all was safe. Then he sat, his half of the blanket across his lap, gazing down at her with an unreadable expression in his eyes.

She reached to hold his hand. Even with all the intimacy between them, the straightforward holding of hand in hand was one more.

He said, “Will you marry me?”

“No.” She sat up.

“Ah. That’s your considered reply, that is?” One might spend a week with a magnifying glass and not read one iota of expression upon that face. She tried to take her hand away, and he did not let go.

“I mean, ‘No, what are you saying?’ ”

“Then you shouldn’t make it sound so much like, ‘No, we can’t get married.’”

“That is also true.” She paused. “Probably.” When he was silent, she said, “I have not thought this through.”

“Think it through.”

She would have jumped up and put more space between the breath and heat and immediacy of his body. She would have liked to become somewhat more clothed. Almost no rational thinking occurs when one is naked.

He held her hand and looked at her, quietly serious. “There is no one else for me. Never has been. The war’s been over a long time.”

“It is not a matter of our nations at war.”

“Just pointing out that that small impediment no longer exists. We’re not enemies anymore—England and France. I heard the speeches. Nobody on either side will care if we marry.” He turned her hand over to look at the palm. Stroked across it as if he brushed dust away. “Is it me being a gutter rat? Me coming from nothing at all?”

“You know that does not matter to me.”

“It should. You deserve better.” His lips quirked. “But since you haven’t picked anybody better, why not me? I have money. I came by it honestly, picking good investments. Property mostly. There’s a house in the West End I’ve never bothered to live in much. It has a Grecian foyer and an Adam fireplace in the dining room.” Startingly, suddenly, he grinned. “I have a damn butler. You can help me intimidate him.”

“I do not give one penny for your butler and your thousands of pounds and the blood you carry in your veins. I have fought all my life to make a world where such things do not matter.”

“But the answer is still no,” he said.

“How can I say yes? We have been apart for years and years. We do not know each other.”

“You know every alley in my mind, every broken bottle and rat scuttling in there. You put me in my place when I get above myself. Austria, Prussia, Italy, all up and down France—you always figured out where I was going to mount the next operation. Half the time, you blocked me. Just uncanny that way.” He hadn’t let go of her hand. “I know you pretty well too.”

“I have some familiarity with the workings of your mind. That does not mean we should get married.”

He kissed her knuckles. One, two, three, and four. She was twitching inside by the time he finished. “No, we should get married so we can go to bed together and do all these interesting things with each other and still stay respectable.”

“You, who are a paragon of respectability, always.” Never, not once, had she expected to marry. She had not considered the possibility.

Perhaps it was being naked, which befuddled her mind. Perhaps it was being wholly happy, with every inch of her body exultant. Perhaps it was merely that this was Hawker, and he could always make his mad notions seem possible. “I do not say, ‘No,’ precisely. I feel very strange about the whole idea.”

He stood and used the hand he was still holding to pull her to her feet. “Let’s go to bed—my bed—and talk about this in the morning. I want to lie beside you and soak up the warmth coming off of you.”

His bed was very nice, so much so that they made love again almost as soon as they had wriggled down into the sheets.

When she sank into sleep at the end of it, she felt Hawker pull the covers over her. He did that after they made love, however far the blankets and sheets had strayed. It was an act of most gentlemanly kindness, the sort of habit a man might follow with a cherished wife.

She could not imagine herself, married.