They sat for a while, and he stroked her arm the way a man might pet a cat, not thinking about it. A buzz slid under her skin. Not quite innocent, not quite sensual. Building bit by bit. Just a little heat. She let herself enjoy it, because he wasn’t noticing.
She wasn’t an expert on gardens, but this one looked neglected. There was a pair of matching bushes at the back garden gate with something overgrown and exuberant running wild next to them and a scraggly row of roses against the wall. Somebody’d left a garden rake leaning there.
“A clear night.” That was the Captain, taking in the sky. “There’ll be rain tomorrow, late in the day.”
“That’s going to amaze the populace. Rain.”
“See over there.” He drew his free hand across the sky and showed her a swipe of thin cloud, red in the sunset. “The mare’s tail. The rain’s following that, coming in from the north. Heading our way at about fifteen knots.”
“I’d like to do that. Predict the weather. I have weather records from all over Europe in a storeroom at the warehouse. I play with the numbers and try to make sense of it, but I never can. They’ll have books of weather tables, someday, the way they have tide tables.”
“Maybe. Then we won’t have to set our wits against it.”
She watched his face while he watched the sky. He and the weather were honorable adversaries, looked like. A lot of sailors felt that way about the weather. He smiled, liking the challenge.
And she was lost. She could feel the twist inside her as it happened. The stark, masculine beauty of his mouth reached out and grabbed at her chest. Her breath caught with a chirrup in her throat.
Lazily, he turned to her. “There’s a witch down in Portsmouth who keeps the wind in her sock. The sailors bribe her to give them good weather.”
There could have been a bell inside her that struck little soft chimes when he talked. Every feature of his face stood out exact and distinct, like he was the only thing lit up with the last of the day’s light. She wanted to move close and lick the corner of his mouth with her tongue. She wanted to suck on him there and taste him. The shudder that gripped her had nothing flowery and soft and girlish about it. It was a roar and a buzz and an ache between her legs, vulgar and explicit as hell.
She knew what it was to enjoy a man, flesh on flesh. She hadn’t forgotten what it felt like to kiss from lips to eyelids and along his ear, and down to his mouth again. She wanted to suck and lick everywhere on the Captain’s face till she knew him with her mouth. Till he was part of her.
She was so bloody unwise sometimes. It didn’t need Papa to tell her that. She was in Sebastian Kennett’s house, with what she’d call dire intent. He might be deadly and dangerous—beyond the obvious deadly and dangerous he wore like a jacket for everybody to see. He was no one she should be licking the cheekbones of.
She squirmed toward her side of the bench. “About Eunice. I wanted you to know. It wasn’t stupid, what she did.”
He eased her right back next to him, casually, without making a fuss about it. “No, she’s not stupid.”
That was from being at sea so much, that gesture. He was used to being where everything shifted around him all the time and needed to be nudged back where it belonged. She did that kind of thing herself. He was keeping her warm as the evening cooled down. Just that. She was the one with the vivid imagination. “Some people walk up to danger and pat it on the snout because they’re dead ignorant. Your aunt’s not like that. She knew what could happen to her when she stood in front of that girl. I didn’t expect to find a woman like her in a house in the West End.”
“You won’t find a woman like her anywhere.” The Captain ran his fingers in a smooth line on her arm, up and back, casual about it. He dragged every particle of her mind along with it.
I don’t want to like you, and I’m beginning to. I don’t want my body to go jumpy and soft where you’re touching. I don’t want to feel anything at all for you.
“I’ll tell you a story.” He shifted and tucked her head against his shoulder and pulled her in close, taking back the two inches she was absconding with. “Stop jumping around like a rabbit. Lean back and relax. I was seven. I was standing in mud, next to the Thames.”
“I’m not really—”
The muscles of his arm had gone unyielding, like tree roots or hawser rope. He was casually strong and immensely careful with her, and she wasn’t going to get loose easily. “Quiet, or I won’t tell you. You came to Katherine Lane because you want to know about me. This is your chance.”
“Are you leading up to something, holding on to me like this?”
“Maybe.”
“Because the last time we talked, you were going to wait till I ambled down to your bedroom one night. I think you called it inevitable.”
She didn’t recognize it just at once. That rumble in his chest was him laughing. “Give me some credit. Nothing’s going to happen on a hard bench in the night air. And I’m busy tonight.” Suddenly, startlingly, he put his lips to the top of her head and kissed her there, on the part of her hair. He was too fast to stop. Just there and gone before she could think.
“Look, Captain—”
“Damn, but I want you. I should be getting used to that. Now listen. This is interesting.” His deep voice flowed across her. “I was seven and it was in the winter. December. Maybe January. I don’t remember after all this time. The riverbank wasn’t frozen. It’s the worst time, when the bank isn’t iced hard and the mud seeps with water so cold it burns. You never get warm, not day or night. All the boys who are going to die, that’s when they do it. That and the spring.”
Unwillingly, she saw the picture he was painting. She remembered that kind of cold. The year Papa left for France and didn’t come back and there was no money at all, she’d been out in the cold at all hours, stealing a living. But even then, she hadn’t been a scavenger on the Thames, picking up what fell off the barges. A mudlark. Even at the worst, it hadn’t been that bad. I don’t want to feel sorry for the boy you were.
“My basket was about half full of coal. I’d hit on a good spot—picked up a dozen pieces within a foot of each other—and I was looking around for more. A carriage pulled up on the road. A lady got out and began walking down the bank to the river. Mad thing to do. She had a wool cloak on. I remember thinking that if I were bigger I’d go knock her on the head and take that cloak from her. Not to sell. I’d keep it to roll myself up in and sleep warm. If I could have got away with it, I’d have killed her for one night of sleeping warm. That’s what I was.”
He didn’t say anything for a long time. This close to him, she felt every breath moving in and out of him. Maybe he was thinking about what he could have become. She had thoughts like that herself, sometimes. “That was Eunice?”
“That was Eunice. She walked right out onto the mud flats, sinking in and getting filthy. She staggered her way up to me and said, ‘Are you Molly Kennett’s son?’ And I said, ‘What if I am?’ She said, ‘You’re to come with me. I’ve been looking for you for a long, long time.’ ”
The last sunlight had leached out of the sky and the strongest of the stars were showing through. He had his head back, looking at them. The profile of his face was like the outline of some mountain. Granite and cliffs. But he wasn’t rock hard inside. She would have been able to deal with him if he’d been simple and hard inside.
“The lady undid the tie on her cloak and took it off and put it around me. Then she just slopped her way back to the carriage in her wet dress, not even looking behind to make sure I followed.”
She’d known Kennett was abandoned by his father after his mother died. Thrown out like garbage. She hadn’t known the rest of it. That earl, the man who was his father, should have been knocked on the head and drowned, quiet like. “Why are you telling me this? It sounds private. You’re telling me because I helped Eunice?”