The Danger of Desire (19 page)

“He’ll be a breeze to finish investigating with all the names—his bankers and other appointments in the city. I don’t see any names here that give me pause.”

Meggs looked over his shoulder. “We should ask Mr. Levy. Save you time. He knows everyone there is to know in the city. You should ask him about all your list of toffs. Or I could ask him for you, seeing as you don’t know him. Likes me, he does. Says I’m enterprising.”

There it was again, that angry pang at the thought that other men might admire Meggs—for any reason. Why should Mr. Levy not admire her? She brought him business and she was very clearly enterprising. It was an admirable trait by any standards other than that of aristocratic society. He pushed the ridiculous pang of jealousy aside.

“Thank you, but I already have my own firm of brokers and men of business who have already conducted such inquiries on my behalf.” But conscious of her need for praise, he added, “But I thank you. It was a very good suggestion.”

Meggs nodded, but she still looked unhappy, frowning at the pocketbook.

“Meggs? Did you have another suggestion?”

“No. Not really. Poor man. All neat and tidy. Won’t be able to function without his little book, I shouldn’t wonder. Makes me feel bad for taking it.”

“Morality from a thief?” He was only teasing, but his words set her off like a spark put to priming powder.

“Don’t you condescend to me. Yes, I’m a thief, because I’d neither face nor fortune, and I needed—we needed—to live,” she said with cutting precision. “And being a thief is a damn sight harder than just lying on your back and spreading your legs like a whore, so don’t you think if I
could
have, I’d have done that sooner rather than waste years learning how to steal proper and fast? I’ve got all the morals I need. And I know once you copy all those names down, you can take that book back down to White’s Club, so he can have it back and get on with his life. It’s only right.”

He’d not thought of it at all. For all his jealousy about her past, he’d never thought about what might have brought her to thievery at all. That to become a thief had been a difficult choice. He had supposed, now that it was put in front of him so baldly, that she had been raised to it from infancy, as were all of London’s thriving pickpockets, with no thought as to other or less criminal careers. But it did take skill and a nimbleness that took years of training.

She was different from all the rest, however. Hugh had a hard time believing all of London’s pickpockets could be as accomplished as she. She could be almost anything she chose. Certainly, when she was working, she
was
any number of characters, hardworking and honest. He couldn’t forget how she had almost made him believe she
was
a seamstress. He was counting on the idea that she could
be
a housemaid.

So why did he get the feeling she
chose
to play Meggs the thief, just like she chose her other roles? Why did she choose to remain a vile-mouthed, hard-talking guttersnipe, when she didn’t have to? “Let’s talk about your accent.”

There was that stillness, that pause, that told him she’d gone instantly wary. “Why?”

“Because you dropped it this afternoon.”

“Captain. I’m a prime filching mort. I never drop nothing.”

Exactly, he wanted to shout. There it was—she rolled out “Meggs” the way he would cast loose the guns to keep his enemies at bay. “You put on a respectable accent as easily as you put on your respectable clothes today. Can you do it all the time?”

“Different accents?”

“Yes.”

“That is easily enough accomplished.” The well-modulated tones rolled off her tongue as if she were a Mayfair governess giving a lesson in elocution. “Will that be all, Captain McAlden?”

“Can you do others?”

Oh, God. There was that smile, pert and saucy and delicious.

“Perha’ps yew’d prefer a bit of a burr, or then again”—she switching to an Irish lilt—“something with a bit of a brougue? I used to be able to do a bit of a Frenchwoman, but that was Nan’s specialty—the émigrée she used to call it. I’d have to practice for that.”

“Your Nan taught you all that?”

“Some. Got a ear for it.” There was the shrug. “It’s fun.”

“So why do you still talk like you’re from St. Giles when you don’t have to?”

“Dunno,” she lied. “Wouldn’t get no respect on the streets talking like a nob.”

“But you’re not on the streets now, are you?”

“Perhaps. But I will be again, won’t I—when we’ve served our purpose here and you’re done with us. Isn’t that so, Captain?” She waited a long, long moment, waiting for his confirmation, daring him to lie to her face.

When he didn’t do it, she simply nodded and rose. “Good night, Captain.”

“Good night, Meggs.”

But he still didn’t know the answer to her question.

CHAPTER 14

T
he first week of Advent brought not comfort and joy, but a cold, raw wind, ripping sideways through clothing. Meggs hugged her hands round her middle and thanked God the captain wasn’t a stingy man with his lour. The new cloak was warm as toast. With her shawls wrapped round her tight, she could keep out the worst of the biting cold.

The captain wasn’t happy to be sniffing after this toff today. It went against his grain to suspect a navy man.

“Nathaniel Phillips is a political appointee to the Admiralty Board, but he’s a naval man through and through. Started as a clerk in the Victualling Office before he moved to the Admiralty as assistant secretary to the First Lord. He’s lost a brother and two nephews, killed at sea in this war. He’s been with the Admiralty upwards of thirty years, though he sat for Parliament as well. Doesn’t stand to reason he’d sell the Admiralty’s secrets,” he’d groused.

She didn’t have the heart to tell him a man, or a woman or child for that matter, would sell just about anything if they felt they had to. And only a friend would know enough to betray a body. The captain already knew all that well enough. And he was a thorough, fair man. If he had to investigate a man he considered a friend, then so be it. He was going to do whatever the job took, no matter if it was personally distasteful to him.

Had to admire a man like that, a man with principles.

So when the older gentleman in question made his unhurried way out of the Admiralty onto Whitehall, they fell in behind with nary a wrinkle. She sidled herself closer to the sheltering bulk of the captain, delighting that for the first time she was not ashamed of the way she looked next to him. Today the captain was wearing what he called his “under-gardener’s rig.” He was dressed in old nankeen breeches and a leather journeyman’s jerkin, covered by a long, disreputable coat and topped by a wide-brimmed, dark felt hat.

At first glance, he looked like the kind of man a prudent person would leave alone, but to her, he looked most like his real self. A natural leader among men. Capable and commanding, without the need for any sort of rank. All the layers of civilization peeled back, leaving nothing but the man himself.

But she couldn’t moon about thinking how fine the captain looked, she needed to keep her peepers open and fixed on their toff. She had reckoned he’d be making for his town house in Mayfair. Perhaps she’d do a bit of pocket work as they made their way among the travelers from the inns along Haymarket, just to shock and amuse the captain when she passed him a thimble or two. But the old nob stymied her by heading in a different direction, up Whitcomb Street.

She glanced at the captain to see what he made of that, but he just soldiered on, marching with his stiff gait and keeping his hat low and his eyes on the geezer. They worked their steady way from Whitcomb across the warren of small, angular blocks to Leicester Square, where the toff nipped into a florist shop. In order to watch him through the windows from a safe distance, Meggs found a quiet passageway between two buildings across the square and pulled the captain into it, so he might lean against the wall and rest his leg. Must be a powerful hurt to make a man that big and that strong take to limping.

But the passageway was narrow and they had to squeeze up together a fair bit to stay out of sight. The captain leaned one shoulder into the wall and turned his back a bit to the street, to block the worst of the wind. His body made a momentary cove of warmth and calm around her, a respite from the hurly-burly of the sidewalks.

He was so near, so big and masculine. She swallowed her jim-jams. “I suppose we ought to make it look like you’re chatting me up. Like we had private things to say to one another.”

“Oh, aye, that should work.” He smiled down briefly. “It would be the most expected thing in the world, to see a man and his lass looking for a quiet corner.”

His lass. Along with the rough clothing, he let the rough Scots burr come out in his voice. Oh, Lord, the way he said it made her wish with all her heart she could be that lass. When he was so himself like this, it made her want
not
to be herself, not to be Meggs the prime filching mort. It made her want something else, something clean and free from all the burdens of the past. It made her want to be better.

It made her want to do
something
. “Yes, well, but you can’t keep track of your toff, turned as you are, and I can’t see over you, so it might be best if I stand in front of you like so.” She eased herself around the front of his chest, so her back was to the street. “So’s people think you’re looking at me, instead of eyeing his Lordship, there.”

Oh, that was harder still. Her eyes were level with his chest, and as he shifted to stand straight, so she could move by, his chest seemed to expand and radiate heat like a warm stove. How nice would it be to lay her head there? How sweet would it be to be the lass who got to do that? She edged closer as if she were in his embrace, and his hands did come up to her arms. He rubbed absently along her upper arms, as natural as could be, chafing his hands along the wool, against the cold.

“You shouldn’t be looking at me, of course. You should keep your eyes on the shopfront. This is just a cover.”

“Just a cover,” he repeated, but his eyes flicked down to hers, icy hot and penetrating. And there went her insides, all to quivering like a Christmas pudding. When he looked down at her, his mouth and his lips were just there, right there, in front of her, so that all she had to do, all she needed to do, was rise up on her tiptoes and she would meet his mouth, and solve this strange dilemma that had brewed inside her.

“He’s bought a posy. And he’s moving again. Come on.” He turned her by the shoulders and they were off, across the square and headed north again through oddly angled streets, dog-legging it around to Hays Court and cutting through the mean little wedges of pavement over to Crown Street.

Here on the edges of St. Giles, the neighborhood deteriorated into dingy tenements, and as the streets became meaner, she felt herself become so, too. Here, in such a place, she didn’t bother to hide the quickness of her eyes or temper her walk to portray a timid housemaid. Timidity and temperance had no place in St. Giles. Here, she put up her chin and dared people to look her in the eye.

The captain felt it, too, the difference. He kept pace with her, even with the limp, although he couldn’t mask it completely; it seemed to her his stride took on a rangy, hungry quality that earned them some extra walking room on the pavement. Most people saw a cove like him bearing down on them and just faded out of the way. Even the drunks had the little sense God could still give them to keep well clear. Except of course the ones who were too far gone to notice where they were.

They passed one such place, where a gin shop’s patrons had spilled out from under a meagre awning, into the street. Some patrons were so drunk, they sat out on the curbing heedless of the cold ground, stupefied against the raw weather from the blue ruin.

He caught her arm to pull her out of the way of one man who reeked of vomit and gin. She could see disgust, the abhorrence of this class of people, in the lines etched around the captain’s mouth.

“They’ll kill themselves, drinking that.” Hugh hated to think that could have been her. If she’d lost the use of her hand and couldn’t steal, if she hadn’t possessed the force of character to keep herself away from blue ruin, or any other kind of deadly spirits. If life had dealt her just one more misfortunate twist, she might be the one strung out and insensate in the doorway. “They’re nearly dead from it.”

“Well that’s the point, innit?” She was impervious to his pity, wearing her armor of cheek and guile. “And who can blame ’em? A day out in this misery makes them want to die, so they can go straight to hell and finally get warm.” She was grinning up at him to show that was her idea of a joke. Gallows humor.
“Both the innocent and the wicked he destroys
. Might as well get what you want, if that’s to be the way of it.”

“Isn’t that from the Bible? Did you ever drink at a place like this?”

“Not my style. A lot of kidmen do give their kiddies beer or gin of an evening to keep them quiet, but Nan didn’t stand for that sort of thing. Dulls the senses. You have to be sharp to stay alive as a pick or a Kate. Just like this rig.”

She was smiling at him in a way that felt very much like camaraderie, something he had only ever felt with his brother officers. But she was no brother. He could never forget she was a woman. Every part of her, each and every part that made up her whole, called out to him. The urge to touch her was so strong it lodged firmly in his chest, heated and burning away at his breath, until he had to shove his hands deep into his pocket to stifle it sufficiently.

But she didn’t notice. Just forged on, keeping Phillips well within her sight, staying professional. “Real question is,” she mused, “what’s a toff like him doing in this part of town? And walking? This far? Nob geezer like him takes his carriage—unless he’s doing something or going somewhere he don’t want anybody to see. Maybe he’s got nasty habits?”

The area held an opium den or two, and there were brothels and prostitutes littering the byway. Even a man like Phillips might be tempted. “Perhaps.”