“I’m here to see my father, not you.”
“Do what I say and you’ll see him a lot quicker.”
The Captain was going to be a stone wall when it came to reasoned argument, so she went over and sat, tame and polite, in the chair he’d picked out for her and let him take her wet cloak and bonnet and throw them over the arm of the sofa.
He went down on one knee to toss coal on the stingy, midget fire in the grate and poke at it like a demon on duty in hell. Oh, he was in a champion snit, he was.
The fire, what there was of it, felt good on her face. “You were right about the weather, now that I think of it. You said it was going to rain today.”
“You could have killed yourself, getting to my damned account books. Don’t do that again. Don’t do anything like that again.”
So they weren’t going to talk about the weather. “Fine. Next time I’ll sneak in at night and tie up the guards and ransack the place. That’s the way it’s done. And I’ll steal the boiled sweets.”
The fire wasn’t going to get her warm, not if he poked at it till doomsday. She leaned her head against the back of the scratchy, red velvet chair and closed her eyes. She was always cold and tired these days, and she’d been up since dawn. The glow she’d brought back from milling Eaton’s had worn off. The joke didn’t seem funny anymore—just desperate and scary and moderately pointless. “You’d think it’d put a crimp in this rash of housebreaking we’ve been having, the amount of rain that falls in this town.”
“Don’t fall asleep on me.”
When she opened her eyes, sure enough, he was standing over her with his let’s-keelhaul-another-hapless- seaman expression, trying to intimidate her with his size and his muscles and being enraged. Old tricks, but they worked fine.
“You sneaked out the back of Whitby’s. You dodged the men I put there to take care of you. You crawled up Eaton’s like a damned monkey. You’re shivering. You’re filthy.” He reached out and found a spot of grime she hadn’t scrubbed off her cheek. “I could sink a barge in the circles under your eyes. You actually think I’m Cinq.”
“You could be.” She shouldn’t have said that, not straight out. She was too tired for this.
“You think I’m Cinq.” He grabbed the back of the chair she was sitting in. She jerked awake. “You think I’m a murderer and a traitor, and you don’t have sense enough to get out of my house.”
“Nodcock, that’s me. You would not believe how many people have pointed that out.”
That hatchet face was close, jaw clenched. If half the rumors were true, he’d flattened men with those efficient, sledgehammer fists in every port around the Mediterranean. The other thing they said about him was true, too. He was soft with women. He never thought of touching her when he was like this. In the years that lay between that boy in the cold mud of the Thames and the man he’d become, he’d changed into someone who couldn’t lay angry hands on a woman. The chair was having a hard time, though.
“Did you find anything, Miss Whitby? Did you find one solitary jot of proof worth risking your neck up among the chimney pots?” She had a furious, just fit to be tied, angry Captain here. “How is it you’ve survived in the world as long as you have?”
“One of life’s mysteries. I—”
“Did you find one word that says I’m a traitor? One syllable? One line in a ledger?”
There were twenty thousand thoughts in back of his eyes. “You’re talking about the evidence we have against your father. You’ve seen—”
“I’ve seen what your tame forgers planted. You couldn’t nick Papa for smuggling, so—”
“This isn’t about smuggling.”
“You think not? Papa used to thumb his nose at the Customs cutters and sail home with bullet holes through the hull. He’s been an itch in the breeches of His Majesty’s government for twenty years. Now they’re scratching him.”
“The British Service doesn’t play cat’s-paw for Customs.”
“They work for the Foreign Office.”
“Bilge.”
“You arrested Papa on
“Don’t call me a liar, Jess.” An inch from her cheek, his hands bunched and strained. His tendons hardened into iron.
But it wasn’t just anger. Anger wasn’t the half of it. All this time he was yelling at her, he wanted her so much he was shaking. He kept his hands clenched on the chair so they wouldn’t get loose and drag her over to that cold, lumpy red sofa. That was how much he wanted her. The force of his self-control crashed on her like high tide on a breakwater.
“You should back away,” she whispered. They both knew what was going on. There wasn’t enough ignorance in this room to cover the palm of her hand. “You don’t want to do this.”
“You’re talking to a bastard sea captain, Jess. Let me tell you exactly what I want to do.” Soft words. Soft words. He didn’t move an inch. “I want to haul you over to the nearest flat surface and flip your skirts up. I want to climb on top and lace my fingers right down into the marrow of your bones and cast off and fly. I want to sail you like a kite in the sky. I want you holding on to me for dear life.”
“Oh. Well.” A kite. Flying in the sky like a kite. It might be like that with him. Everything south of her brain wanted to go tumbling through the sky with him.
He said, “I spent the last three hours waiting for somebody to knock at that door and tell me you were dead.”
She could see him, waiting out the hours while she’d been enjoying herself on the roof. Him, pulling back those thin curtains upstairs every time a carriage came down the street. Him, pacing the room. Plenty of time to get angry. She’d walked into all that anger. “You don’t plan to actually try any of that, do you? The flying part. I thought you were leaving it up to me. I don’t like the looks of that sofa.”
“Hell.” He lowered his great dark head. “Bloody hell.” His hair fell forward over his face, shiny and black as poured ink. She wanted to reach out and slide her fingers right into that. A shiver ran through her, everywhere under her skin, when she thought of stroking his hair, smooth as water and warm from the fire. She was a fool.
He let go of the chair, deliberately, finger by finger, and pushed away from her. Everything about him was leashed power. Everything disciplined. “Go see your father.”
He stomped across the room. His shoulders and the back of his neck kept right on being expressive. When he ended up in front of the ugly sideboard next to the parlor door, he looked in the mirror and their eyes met. Lord, but he was hungry. He could have been a wolf howling down the whole length of the cold night sky and she was the moon or something. Not paltry, the Captain’s appetite.
Time to get out of here, before he came up with new ideas. A kite. Hah.
She had to pass him to get to the door that locked off the rest of the house. She wasn’t surprised when he put out his arm to block her path. Part of her had been waiting for that. Maybe she’d walked by him this near so he’d stop her. The little jar of touching him, light as a leaf falling, shocked her breath away.
He said, “One more thing.”
The fine, white Irish linen of his sleeve stretched out in front of her. She stared past him, at the door, barely breathing. But he didn’t move. Of course, he was too canny to touch her, here, where the Service might be listening and Papa was locked up down the hall. That was why Sebastian Kennett was so good at destroying her peace of mind. All that cleverness.
He might be Cinq. Or he might be a reasonably honest man who just wanted to hang her father. No way to tell. Being this close to him felt like running along a dark coast at night, five or six miles out at sea, and not knowing whether that line of land was friendly or about to reach out with cannon and grappling hooks and claw the ship down into the sea.
