The Danger of Desire (12 page)

“The war? On me?” Her voice rose precipitously.

“Yes, on you and on your skills. Do you understand me?”

She swallowed another saucy remark, as if she were well used to dining on nothing but her own wit. “Yes, sir.”

“Good. I appreciate your skills. You’re an admirable pickpocket, and we’ll put that to good use, but what I will also require of you may be something more than the ordinary bit of thievery you’re accustomed to. I may have to place you in certain houses, to recover documents and other objects His Majesty’s government may deem necessary.”

“Easy enough, Captain.” She was unfazed by the prospect of housebreaking. “Now about these toffs—you know them all by sight?”

“Sit down.” He gestured with impatience to a chair. She was going to tire herself out standing all day. He
was
in a hurry and he needed her to get some rest in the two days available, so she might heal as quickly as possible. “Some.”

“You know where they live?”

“Some.” She still wasn’t sitting. In another moment he was going to pick her up and put her bodily into the chair.

“Wealth of information, you are.” Her voice was dry with sarcasm. “Is there someone else from your navy portion of the govamint I can ask?”

Rawsthorne’s contemptuous face leapt to mind. That was all he needed, for her to be exposed to the likes of Major Rawsthorne. For all her wit and sharpness, she would be no match for the casual cruelty he sensed in the man. He needed to find his traitor before the major had a chance to come poking around into his methods.

“I’ll have all the necessary information by the time you’re healed enough to start, if you’ll sit your arse down long enough to begin that hand healing.”

“Oh. Don’t mind if I do.” She perched said skinny arse on the edge of the chair and came right back at him, full of business-like insistence. “Look, I know you’re a canny bloke, but you’re an officer, all straightforward and honorable-like. But I’m a professional, a prime filching mort. You leave all the dishonesty and larceny to me. You just give us their particulars and Timmy ’n me’ll take it from there. We can watch and follow ’em and see what they gets up to. See where they go and who they meet. See who’s got expensive tastes or nasty habits, so we can best decide how to get the drop on ’em.”

“I’ll take care of that. You just heal.”

“So you done this before then? You know how to tout the case?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. Rest assured, I know how to get the necessary information on my own.”

“Waste o’ time. Six eyes is better than one.”

“Than two.” But he could feel his face begin to smile at her obliviously mangled metaphors and mathematics.

“Six. You, Timmy, and me makes six eyes. I can watch toffs easy enough with a caw hand. And we’ll let the Tanner tail ’em. He can patter after ’em all day’s long, and those Lord Toffs won’t be anything the wiser. An’ another thing, you know where they’re getting hold of this information you needs?”

“Perhaps.” But her suggestion had merit. And he needed to remember what had made her so impressive, so perfect for his needs—her near invisibility in crowds. And the boy as well. Hugh hadn’t seen him in Cockspur Street until he appeared out of nowhere to divert attention from the girl. They were seen only when they chose to be. It was a lesson he would do well to learn.

“Look, Cap’n. I thought you said we was gonna trust each other. I let you look at me in me bath, and you let me know everything you know and think, and already got planned up in that big, hard head of yours.”

“I said we
were going
to trust each other.” He answered by rote as the blood stood still in his veins. For a moment. Only a moment. Then it came roaring back with the force of a rogue wave, slamming through his body in a roiling rush. “You
let
me look at you in your bath?”

CHAPTER 9

H
e was answered by total, raucous silence. It was so quiet in the room, he could identify individual sounds outside the house: a carriage harness jangling and then rumbling by in the street, a wherryman calling up business from the water steps across Cheyne Walk, and the background bird calls from the trees.

But he kept his eyes on the girl and watched her try to master the curious rush of embarrassment flaming across her face. Meggs crushed her plush lip between her teeth as if she could call back the words, and her nostrils fluttered wide as she fought to control her breathing. Hugh hoped his face was not giving away as much as hers, but there was something distinctly erotic about the fact she had known he was looking at her. To know she had, in some small way, taken part in that lovely, long perusal. But he also knew he had to tread very, very carefully. If he pushed, she could easily revert to the almost feral, ferocious reaction he’d endured yesterday when she’d come into the house.

When the girl finally spoke, it was in a small voice, stripped of her usual St. Giles bravado. “You said I had to trust you.” She gave a little half shrug, trying to be nonchalant, but her shoulders twitched unevenly as if the plain-spun work dress made her itchy. “And you didn’t do anything when you was looking at me.”

“So I did say,” he agreed quietly. He understood, too, that she had bestowed upon him an enormous act of trust, which he needed to acknowledge with one of his own. “And no, I didn’t do anything. I gave you my word.”

But her coarse, street-tutored mind had traveled down an alley of its own. She sent him a narrow look across the side of her jaw. “Don’t you like girls? Or are you a buggerer?”

God’s balls. Hugh had to laugh or he would choke on his pride. And a rapidly rising need to demonstrate for her just exactly what he did like.

“I mean, stands to reason, don’t it?” she went on. “Didn’t touch me or nothing. And you’re navy. Everyone says the navy’s all rum and buggery.”

“My God, lass. Your mind is an absolute sewer.” He tipped his head up to study the ceiling, afraid to look at her. Afraid of what he might see in her eyes and of what he thought he might be hearing in her voice. “I’m not a sodomite. I
do
like girls. Women. Very much.”

“Just not me.”

Ah. Hugh forced a long, cool breath into his lungs. Just as he suspected—this was not about him at all, was it? “Just because I didn’t force myself on you doesn’t mean I didn’t like what I saw. I did.” He risked a glance at her. “Very much.”

“Oh.”

He saw confusion, but also, he thought, some disappointment chase across her face. No, he had to be imagining that. “But you don’t like to be touched. And I’m a gentleman, despite all appearances to the contrary. I don’t force unwilling girls.”

“Oh.” She was nodding slightly, trying to understand. For all her coarse worldliness, she was still strangely vulnerable.

“I understand your aversions. I can only imagine you have been forced, in the past. Forced to do a great many things you didn’t want to.”

Color blazed up her cheeks, whereas her lips pinched down into a round little moue. It made him want to kiss the pain and regret away. To show her something of pleasure. To taste her sweetness.

But she would hardly welcome that. She had blackened his eye for so much as reaching out to take her cap off. His jaw was bruised from the force of her fear. “Is that true? You’ve been forced?”

“Aye,” she finally mumbled into her shoes.

“Well, then.” He had accomplished his aim, putting a safer, more professional distance between himself and this girl, and his infernal, unwarranted attraction to her. But her admission gave him no peace.

And she was regarding him now, staring really, as if he were some new species of animal. But he was only flattering himself to think it could be in fascination.

“You’re a rum toff, you are.”

“Am I?” He made his tone light to cover the idiotic spike of want lodged in his chest like a steel splinter. “Is that a compliment?”

She shook her head. “Never met a toff or a cove like you.”

He decided to take it as a compliment anyway. “Thank you. Now then, as I have said, I am interested in your skills as a pickpocket and your remarkable adaptability and aptitude for role playing. And since you already know how to read and write, we can move on to preparing for your next role, that of housemaid.”

“Oh, I done housemaid aplenty.”

“Well, this will be different. You will actually have to become a maid and do housemaid’s work here. Cleaning and scrubbing and such.”

“Why? Waste of my skills, mop squeezing.”

“Think of it as preparation. My plan will require you to become employed in our prime suspect’s household, as a maidservant, so while you’re there, you can intercept documents. You’ll need to truly look and act the part, perhaps even for days, until you know your way around the house well enough to find and copy documents. So no one will be the wiser that they have been intercepted.”

“Ah, so we’re to run a rig, are we?” Those black eyes narrowed in appreciation.

“How did you think we should manage it?”

She pulled a face. “Thought we’d wait ’til the time was right and just heave the case. Play the darkmen’s budge when the whole gill is safe at rug—asleep. I, myself, like to go in right after the toffs goes out of an evening and all the servants are shift of ’em, and happy to be on their own, and having as little to do as possible with their work. You’d only have to boost me through a window or some such and we’d fall to it.”

“As much as the thought of
boosting
you through a window does for me, I’ll take a pass.” He could all but feel the lovely, rounded weight of her derriere in his hand. “You’ll have a better opportunity to study and know where the right documents will be if you are employed for a time in the house. So a maidservant you will be. Here first, to learn, as well as wherever there happens to be.”

“And are
you
gonna teach me? Or your fairy man there, Jinks?” She walked over to the bookshelf and swiped her finger through the rime of accumulated dust. “That’ll be a treat. You got cobwebs here older’n Timmy.”

She had a point. But—“Timmy? Timmy Tanner—what a name.”

“Yeah, well, that’s just what I calls him.” Her smile was small, as if she was enjoying a private little joke.

“And he calls you Meg.”

“Meggs,” she corrected, her smile widening across her lips. “Tanners and meggs. Them’s coins, ’int they? Money. Meggs means golden guineas, on account I’m so good at stealing ’em. And he’s the same. Tanner’s half a crown. What you call nicknames.”

Hugh found himself smiling back. And here he had even called her
Miss
Tanner. “I see. Very good joke.
Noms du plume
as it were.”

“
Noms de guerre
more like.”

Hugh’s ears pricked up instantly and sent a cold message to his gut, like a douse of icy seawater. Oh, that was something. The pronunciation. The inflection. The “R’s” rolling from the back of her throat, like a native speaker. God’s balls. Just who had he taken into his house and into his confidence? Admiral Middleton had warned him even the Admiralty was not safe from French spies, and there she had been, on Cockspur Street, exactly what he had decided he needed, so conveniently chancing by at the very moment he needed her. Damn his eyes. He had never believed in coincidence, and yet he had stupidly accepted her appearance as just that.

He made his voice calm and even. “Funny that, you speaking French.”

She shrugged it off. “Like I said, I’ve got ears. Hear all sorts of things, I do. And old Nan were a font of gentry talk.”

Perhaps. Perhaps not. This girl had untapped, uncharted depths. And he didn’t have time to find the bottom.

He almost reached out to grab her, to haul her across his desk like a witless midshipman and shake the truth out of her. But she wasn’t a witless midshipman. She was as sharp and lethal as a handspike, and he knew if he had her under his hands, hauled up close, he’d do other things than shake her. And his jaw still hurt like hell.

He fell back on his experience and put every ounce of menace into his voice and pinned her with his stare. “You listen to me, girl.”

She went lividly, intensely still under his look, like a grenade before it goes off.

“Don’t think to try and cozen me.” He spoke in a precise, low growl. “Do not forget, I can
crush
you. If you even attempt to play me false, I will thrash you within an inch of your life. And
then
I’ll start to work on you.”

“I wouldn’t advise a thrashing,” she said matter of factly. “I don’t react well to pain. I get angry.”

He knew that well enough, given yesterday’s bruising fight. But still it rankled, the necessity for her pugilistic skills. She was hardly more than a girl, not a prizefighter.

She was a
thief,
his logical mind insistently reminded him. A housebreaker, an accomplished and heartless pickpocket and robber. She was adept at all sorts of knavery, and he would be a fool to waste any compassion on her.

“Angry,” she repeated. “It whets my appetite for violence. Nothing like a good fight.”

Something inside him kicked over, like a fuse being lit. Fuck logic. Fuck compassion. This was different. Hugh looked at her fully, at this small bundle of sinew and bone, as the metallic tang of blood suffused his mouth like an opiate. God’s balls. A girl with an
appetite,
a bloody
taste,
for violence.

He was appalled. And undeniably aroused. Because her words were like the echo to the savagery he kept latched down tight within, like black powder in his hold. Dangerous cargo.

This he understood, far too well. The taste for violence, for the heady rush of blood lust, was exactly what was suffusing his tongue at that moment. If he closed his eyes he could easily, effortlessly recall the addictive feeling of grim elation when his fist, or his sword, or his boot mashed into another. When he felt the ugly, satisfying lurch through his body as his blow slammed home. Oh, yes, he knew depravity.

Because it was all he could do to keep from kissing her, from shoving his tongue between her lips, to see if she could recognize the taste of it from his mouth.