The Danger of Desire (11 page)

But he was keeping his thoughts, and his hands, well away from her bodice, wasn’t he? She was here, at his insistent invitation, because she was good at swiping things. It only remained for him to learn how to manage her, this volatile little Kate.

The girl was perusing the bookshelves, and Hugh tried to imagine what the room, and indeed the whole house, might look like through her eyes. The book room was a study of light and shadow, with the gray morning light filtering in from the large front windows, leaving the dark mahogany paneling and bookshelves only dimly illuminated.

Without a fire and candles to warm the place, and bring the richness of the mahogany, and the brightness of the leather book spines to life, the room was hardly inviting. And yet, he was most comfortable here, in the only room besides his bedchamber that held his own personal possessions. His books, his telescopic glass, and sextant were out, on the desk and shelves—reminders of his other life, the naval career to which he was trying to return.

He’d been in London since early summer, recovering from his wounds, and he’d taken the lease on the house fully furnished so he might have the temporary comforts of land, without burdening himself with the more lasting attachment of permanent acquisition. He had planned to be there only long enough to recover his full strength, and now to complete the admiral’s assignment and collect his knighthood.

But she would most likely be intimidated by this room. She was smart as a whip, but the room was everything she was not—refined and well educated. Comfortable. It’s oak-paneled walls spoke of learning, tradition, and privilege.

“That’s a powerful lot of books,” she said by way of greeting.

“Aye.” There was something about the way her eager eye swept covetously across the leather spines—no it wasn’t simple avarice. It looked damn close to yearning. “Would you like to learn how to read?”

“Learn?”

“Yes. We will commence the actual work of emptying our suspects’ pockets as soon as your hand has healed enough to allow it, but until that time, I have decided you will engage in a course of study designed to make you more useful to me.” What was he saying? Teaching an illiterate girl to read might take months. He meant to be long gone once this assignment was complete. He meant to be aboard his own ship, not minding this lass’s education. But his mouth seemed not to have consulted his head. “Being able to read will be an asset to you as well, afterward.”

“Afterward,” she echoed. And then a slightly crooked smile brewed itself on her mobile lips, as if she were amused. “Sorry to disappoint your low expectations, Cap’n, but I already know how to read.”

“You do? Books?”

“Well enough. Told you old Nan were a governess once.”

“
Was
a governess. Here,”—he reached for the volume closest to hand—“read this.”

She flipped open to the frontispiece. “ ‘The New Practical Navigator, being a complete epitome’—that’s another of Nan’s favorites—‘of navigation, to which are added all the tables requisite for determining the latitude and longitude at sea.’ Nice, light readin’, that?”

“No. It’s full of errors.” He took the book back and tossed it on the desk. “Can you write?”

“Not well enough to pass queer screens, but I’ll do.”

“You’ve tried to forge banknotes? My God, lass.”

“Old Nan liked to see what her kiddies had an ‘aptitude’ for. That was another of her words, aptitude. But screens wasn’t my cup of gin. Had better
aptitude,
” she pronounced the word with relish, “as a Kate. And a pick. And of course, also, a dab hand as a cracksman.”

She was just full of unexpected talents and skills. Remarkable. “Can you do sums, as well?”

“Please, Captain,” she said, as if he were embarrassing himself. “I’m a prime filching mort—a devilish good thief. I’d be an embarrassment if I couldn’t add two and two and come up with five.”

“Two and two are four.”

“Aye.” Her slightly crooked smile made dimples appear in her cheeks. “But I knows how to make ’em into five.”

Every time he challenged her, she revealed another dimension, another facet of her talents and personality. And managed at the same time to knock his preconceived notions flat.

“Only if your hand heals. May I see it, please?” He held out his hand, already impatient to feel the touch of her skin.

She was reluctant, covering the bandaged hand with the other and holding it close to her body. “I kept it dry.”

“Good. You will also endeavor to keep it clean. May I see it, please? How does your hand feel? Is it stiff? Or your arm? Pervis put in a number of stitches. Come over to the window, to the light.” He walked over himself and pulled the curtains back farther, letting even more of the flat morning light flood the room. He needed to see her in the harsh light of day so he could banish his more ludicrous fantasies with practicalities. So he would think of ugly, black stitches instead of bare skin and soft pink breasts.

CHAPTER 8

“
A
little,” Meggs answered as her feet were somehow “moving all on their own, without a word of say-so from her brain, across the floor toward him. When she fetched up next to him, she felt again, as she had in the timber yard, the full size and strength of him. She was a tall, lathy girl, as girls went, but still, he towered over her like a treetop, with arms and shoulders all carved of oak.

He was back into his gentleman’s rig this morning, coat, waistcoat, and cravat all in place, all clean and shipshape. Civilized. All that cagey power battened down under his hatches. He took her outstretched hand carefully, half turning away to hold it again tucked under his arm, steady against his side, as he plucked the tied linen strip free.

She pulled back awkwardly to keep from being hauled up against his backside with her chest plastered against his coat. He said he wanted them to be professional, so she kept her left hand fisted up in her skirts to keep from touching him.

But she couldn’t do it, could she? Because she
was
a professional and he was making it so easy for her fingers to make business-like with his waistcoat pockets.

The captain was unwinding the bandage, and she found herself craning her neck around to see the surgeon’s handiwork. There, across her palm, was a row of stitches, bristling black against her skin like an uneven quilt edge. Eight in all, she counted. Lucky eight. Jesus God.

“It looks good. Can you wiggle your fingers? Handsomely, now.”

“What does that mean, ‘handsomely’?” she asked his back. His broad, tall back that near blocked out the light. “It don’t look handsome to me.”

“
Doesn’t
. Means carefully, with thought and deliberation. It’s a naval expression.”

“Do tell. I like it. The naval expression,” she clarified, because he was touching each of her fingers in turn, running his own strong fingers across the tips and knuckles, sending soft waves of something nice lapping up inside her.

“Your hands are cold, but that’s good, I think, or at least better than hot and septic.” He sent a tight smile back toward her. “Flex your fingers again. Good. It looks good,” he finished as he began to rewrap her dipper. “Pervis left a salve, to help in the healing and keep the scar soft once we take the stitches out.”

“When’s that?”

“Pervis said ten days.” But there was tension and displeasure in his voice. And in his face. His jaw had got that hard look again.

“But you want me to get to your work sooner.”

He shot a quick, perceptive glance at her over his shoulder. “Yes. I can only afford to give you a few days’ grace.”

“Right enough. We can get to planning your job straightaway.” When he kept mum, and only kept on with the bandages, she prompted, “You gonna tell me what the job is, or is it some great ghastly secret?”

He turned, presented her with her hand, and took a long look at her with those probing, relentless, pale eyes. Didn’t give much away. Played his cards close, the captain did. “The less you know the better.”

If she was going to come through this job in one piece, she needed to assert herself with this formidable man. “Well, here’s the thing. Seeing as you’re new to larceny, you ought to take some advice to help you get rolling. It’s best if you tell me everything about who we’re going to dip, and why.”

“If you should be taken up by the constables,” he countered, “the less you know, the less you can give away. Safer for all of us.”

What bloody effrontery. “I’d never peach. Never ’ave, never will. And I thought you said the traps couldn’t bone me?”

His face colored strangely at her words, and his voice when he answered was strangely choked. “Should you be taken up by the constabulary, rest assured I will get you out. You’d be let off quietly, never fear.”

“Ah. Tiptoeing through the hallowed halls of justice, are we? Right. But you leave me in the dark and I’ll be like a grave digger—up to my arse in the business with nowhere to turn. That’s no good for either one of us. So the more I know, the better. I plan as much as I can for every job—every last one.”

“Even the MP on Cockspur Street? To my eye that looked entirely spontaneous.”

“That one was,” she admitted, “and look where it got me. Chased all over half of London, ruined me hand, and wound up here, contemplating unspecified felonious activities on behalf of His Fat Majesty, German Georgie. Something can always go bad. Planning is definitely better. So just what are we stealing?”

He took a long stroll behind his desk, where he sat in his chair and nailed that icy gaze to hers, sharp, like an axe. Weighing her out like an undertaker. Finally he said, “Information.”

“Hmm. Tangible evidence, you mean, not just like hearing word of a deed? Hardest thing to get, that. Too many ways to keep it, too many ways to store it. That’s why I like money. Only a few places for a man to keep his lour and easy enough to find. But ‘information’ it is. Who’re we going to start with?”

“A lord or two. Or seven.”

“Seven,” she repeated. “Lovely. Nothing like a challenge, is there? But I’m glad it’s toffs—I likes stealing from the toffs. As a rule, they smell better and they have more lour. They are all toffs, aren’t they?”

He was instantly all naval captain, all absolute command. “In all of these instances you are to take only the papers, if there are any. You are not to steal any watches or purses. Is that clear?” Oh, he was working himself into a fine glower.

“Depends.”

“It does not
depend
.”

She couldn’t imagine how his jaw could set any harder. “It’s like this—you’re letting your honor get all in the way of the business. You just think on what happens if you relieve this lord of this information you want and nothing else. He’d know it were gone, and that someone was especially after
it
, and nothing else. He’d be wary and take a lam and blow the ken right away, see? But, if he thought he’d been cleaned of
all
his portable chattels, so to speak, like someone was only after his lour and took the papers by chance as well, he might be more inclined to wait and see. And when no one from the guvamint come after him, why he’d not be near as chary. D’you see? And then you can bone him for the drop, easy.”

He looked away, all immovable, granite concentration. He didn’t give away much, the captain. “I do see,” he said finally. But he was unhappy about her logic, his lips ironed out to a hard line. “But you’re not going to keep it. Neither the money nor the watches.”

“What’re
you
gonna do with ’em? Can’t keep ’em around. Someone got wise to you, all that lour’d give you away, sure as a noose. You’re gonna hafta fence it, and I’m yer mort there. I know my way around a few kens what won’t cheat you blind.”

“What
are
you going to do with
them
? There will be no illicit filching or fencing of
portable chattels,
” he rumbled like thunder. “You will turn in each and every single piece of property you filch. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

“Perfectly,” she answered, arranging her face into compliant lines. And as sweetly as a vicar’s daughter, laid his gold, pair case, openface, pocket chronometer on the wide expanse of desk between them.

Hugh had everything to do, to try to keep his mouth from gaping open and his hands from automatically patting down his waistcoat pocket. He knew very well what his watch looked like, though he stared at it laid out on the desk as though he’d never seen it before. As if he had not consulted it just before he came downstairs. Damn his eyes and her nimble fingers.

And he’d never felt a thing. He’d been too busy doing some feeling of his own, even if it had only been her hand. And yet he’d gotten lost there, amongst her nimble fingers. Fingers that would never be soft. But his mind had wandered happily off, imagining what other things such not-soft, agile hands might be capable of doing. To him.

Damn his eyes, he was a pig. She was trying to be useful and helpful and engage in the practicalities, and all he could think was how he’d like to “bone” her.

He cleared his throat. “Well done. Are there any other objects that do not belong to you, which you would like to return?”

She fished her left hand down her bodice and came up, one by one, with his letter opener, a small candle of sealing wax, and a Morocco leather bookmark. Her explanation was as casual as her shrug. “Just keeping my hand in.”

He restrained himself from touching the four objects laid out on this desk just to feel the heat of her skin still radiating from them. “With just your left hand? Are you trying to tell me you think you’re capable of going out in your current state, with your hand full of stitches, to take on this work?”

“You seemed like you was in a powerful hurry, yesterday. And you said you didn’t like idlers. So I wasn’t idle.”

He leaned back in his chair to give himself a modicum of distance, both figurative and literal. To decide just why he was so loath to toss her out into the street to begin the work he so desperately needed completed. “As you so sagely pointed out, we’ll only get one clear shot at this, then our suspects will become wary and make this task all the more difficult. I need you hale and hearty and able to function at one hundred percent of your ability. Or as near to it as possible. I can afford a day or two of grace, but no more. And you won’t be idle. So, I don’t mind you making an ass out of me, by keeping your
hand in,
in fact I’m all for it, but I will have you understand, this job is not a joke. This job cannot be attempted casually. A very great deal is riding on the success or failure of this mission, and on the job you’re going to do. People’s lives are riding on it. This war is riding on it.”