My Lord and Spymaster

off over his head, gritting his teeth. He’d gotten himself hit with a crowbar, protecting the girl.

“Need that strapped up?”

He rotated his shoulder, letting loose slashes of pain. “It’ll do.” The water in the bucket was still warm. He slopped it into the basin. The dried blood washed off, disconcertingly red, as if he were still bleeding. He took a towel from the floor, the one he’d used to dry her hair. It smelled like spices when he washed with it.

He poured the last clean water over his head, getting some of it in the basin, some on the floor.

Jess slept with her hand tucked at her cheek, like a child. The curl of her fingers was as beautiful as a seashell. I wouldn’t have touched her if I’d known what she was. But, holy God, I would have wanted to. He’d been gut-deep certain this woman belonged to him. He couldn’t remember the last time his instincts had betrayed him. “Your brilliant Jess is a fool if she thinks she can play that game with me. She has no idea the kind of man I am.”

“She has plans,” Adrian murmured. “What? Probably something that involves risking her neck. I’ve got the only man who can stop her locked up. Even Doyle can’t do it. How very much I wish she and I were on speaking terms.”

“Save it. Listen.” Under the clank and rattle of the Flighty and the racket of rain hitting the deck, he heard wheels on the wharf. “Someone’s here.”

Adrian cocked his head. “That’ll be Doyle with the hackney. ” He studied the girl on the bed with a remote intensity. “You won’t ever forgive me for arresting Josiah, will you? I don’t generally betray my friends. But then, my dealings with you Whitbys have always been exceedingly complex.” He touched her cheek. Her head rolled to the side, completely lax. “Out of the hunt. She never did have a head for liquor.”

“A concussion is more to the point.”

“How right you are. Between the knock on her head and the potent powders of the East, she won’t even remember being here. When I take her away, she won’t remember you at all, mon vieux.”

Adrian always thought he was being subtle.

Jess Whitby had got herself wound up in his blankets. Her leg was bare to the thigh, long, with a down of golden hair. Erotic images started rolling around his mind like badly stowed lumber.

He pulled on a clean shirt. The linen was salty from being washed at sea, a good, familiar smell. Nothing exotic and woman-scented. “Get her off my ship.”

“Oh, I will. I will. Carry her for me, will you? I threw my knee out, fighting.” Adrian wrapped the blanket around Jess with a proprietary air. “And no clothes at all. You are so . . . thorough. It always complicates matters when they don’t have any clothes.”

You’re not funny, Adrian. “Where are you taking her?”

Adrian found her shoes. “I’m in the process of deciding that. Let’s proceed, shall we? I want her out of here before more gentlemen with knives show up.”

It was mostly blanket he felt when he picked her up. But a bundle of blankets wouldn’t have shaped itself to fit his arms or leaned, confident and accepting, against his shoulder. Her hair blew back in his face when he pushed through the companionway door and the outside cold rolled over them. He recognized the spice on her now. She smelled of cardamom.

She won’t remember me. He wanted to shake her and wake her up and make her look at him so he’d be sure she wouldn’t forget him. He wanted to see her eyes dilated, huge and dark, with his image inside. Most of all, he wanted her gone.

The dock was empty. Adrian pulled his throwing knife and went first. They crossed the gangway and headed toward the coach that waited in the drizzle, side lamps lit. If Adrian’s knee was playing up on him, it didn’t show in the way he leaped up into the coach. He reached down impatiently. “I’ll take her from here. Hand her up to me.”

All he had to do was hoist her up and walk away. You abandon damaged ware. You mark it off the inventory, and toss it away, and forget it.

He couldn’t do it. Adrian, damn him, knew that.

It should have been awkward, climbing into the coach, carrying a girl snuggled against him. But she didn’t weigh much. He set her in his lap, wrapped in his coat, keeping her steady when the coach lurched forward. “What are you going to do with her?”

“If I said it’s not your concern . . . ?”

“Don’t try my patience.”

“I can’t take her to Meeks Street.” Adrian stretched his boots out casually across the strawed floor. “I might as well turn her over to the Foreign Office, neatly trussed. They’ve hatched several asinine schemes that involve her.”

Sebastian wasn’t going to ask why the Foreign Office wanted Jess Whitby.

“They don’t quite dare to arrest her openly—they are so very discreet, our diplomats—and I’ve been refusing to do it for them. I am unpopular with the Foreign Office at the moment. ” Adrian stashed the knife in his sleeve. “Colonel Reams at Military Intelligence is also full of plans for Jess. We’re agreed, are we not, that Colonel Reams will not get his hands on Jess?”

“Fine. Forget Meeks Street.” He already knew where they were going. He wondered how long it would take Adrian to admit it.

“There’s the hotel in Bloomsbury. That’s where the Whitbys live when they’re in London. I could take her there, I suppose.”

“So she can be kidnapped more conveniently.”

“Unfortunately, true.” Adrian lifted the leather curtain on the window. They were already away from the alleys and warehouses of the docks. Ahead, in the distance, a necklace of tiny bright dots marked Westminster Bridge. “I’m sending her home with you.”

It was the logical choice. “I don’t want her.”

He was cold, except where he was wrapped around the girl. He’d been in the Mediterranean too long. Jess would be cold, too, in this gray fog. He pulled his coat more tightly around her. Strange how distinctly he could feel her breathing.

So much bright, nonchalant courage in this small package. She let herself be her father’s tool for betraying England. God alone knew how much damage she’d done.

Adrian pretended to watch the street. “Eunice will coddle her cracked head, and that motley crew of pirates you call footmen can guard her. Even Military Intelligence won’t touch her if she’s under Eunice’s wing.” He let the curtain fall. “I need someone I can trust to take care of her. You’ll do.”

“Do you think I’ll change my mind about Whitby because you toss his nubile daughter in my lap?”

“Toss her in your lap? My dear Sebastian, I—”

“It’s not going to work.”

Five

Meeks Street

JOSIAH WHITBY LAID COAL ON THE FIRE. A POOR-HEARTED, stinking fire coal made, but they didn’t put firewood in this study they’d set aside for him. You could scrape and strop a scrap of wood to make a weapon, if you were desperate and determined and didn’t have much else to do with your time. They didn’t underestimate their guests here at Meeks Street.

That was what Jess wouldn’t see. She’d never admit Josiah Whitby was a fine candidate to be this traitor. She’d never admit any possibility of it. The Service knew what kind of man he was. Jess had never seen it.

He was cold in the mornings, nowadays. A man got old without noticing it.

He didn’t concern himself greatly with his own hanging. He’d been in the East long enough to know a man couldn’t dodge his fate by so much as a hair. But he didn’t want to leave Jess alone. Not now, when Cinq was taking an interest in the Whitbys. Not in England, where the carrion crows were already circling.

So he worried. There wasn’t much else to do here. Oh, Jess brought him manifests and cargo lists to keep