The Danger of Desire (20 page)

Ahead, Phillips came to the crossing at Greek Street and paused. Meggs took the opportunity to slip a shawl out from under the cloak and lay it over her shoulders, on top. She answered his unspoken question with one of her shrugs. “Any bit of a disguise helps. Just a bit of something different. Makes it hard to keep trace.”

He took her advice and pulled his hat off and stowed it in his pocket. “Different it is.” And he saw to his chagrin his hand had thoughts of its own, had reached out to pull off the mob cap she was wearing and touch the pretty, dark brown silk of her hair. He curbed the impulse ruthlessly, lest she react badly and violently to his touch, and it came off as a light, friendly cuff across the head. And that way he did get to touch her hair, after all. Soft and smooth as running water.

He turned away and ran his hand carelessly over his own head, just to feel the contrast. Just to exhaust the impulse to touch her and peel away the layers of hardened street to find the girl beneath.

She didn’t shy away. She was nodding. “Suppose we might could try and look like ... well, sorta like sweethearts. You know—people who look like they only got eyes for each other, don’t make nobody suspicious. And a person could still see a lot with someone’s arm around their neck, looking all innocent.”

“Anybody
suspicious,” he corrected automatically. But his mind was sailing ahead, unresponsive to his helm. She was giving him the perfect excuse to touch her. His body immediately heated a degree or two hotter. He was both thrilled and then jealous—with whom had she run this rig, as she called it, before? In how many of these doorways had she been kissed? “And you never looked innocent a day in your life.”

“Ha. Try me.”

Oh, he wanted to do more than try. “All right.” He slung his arm casually around her shoulder and felt her shiver beneath him, as if she were uncomfortable at his touch, despite her bravado in suggesting it. No. That wasn’t it, for she had reached up with a cold hand to hang on to his wrist where it fell across her shoulder, the very image of a pleased sweetheart. The shivering was because she was cold, even with the new cloak. She still didn’t have enough meat on her bones. “God’s balls. Here.”

He swung his rough, old sea coat off his shoulders and around hers, completely enveloping her. He put his arm back around her shoulders and moored her up tight alongside. “A fellow out with his lass would keep her close then, would he?”

“Aye, I suppose.” There wasn’t a lot of encouragement in her voice, but neither was it discouraging.

“And touch her a little?” He casually smoothed the loose hair away from from her face. “As if he’d earned the right to?”

“Oh. Aye, I suppose that, too.”

“And he’d probably smile at her, too, now and again.”

“He might,” she agreed quietly, ducking her head down to hide a small smile.

When she didn’t object, he became emboldened with his success. “Might he also want to take her hand in his?” He did so, catching her hand up and towing her across Oxford Street at an ungainly run, heading for where he’d let Phillips disappear up Rathbone Place.

She was laughing and breathless, but she shook her head in disagreement. “Not a man looks like you. Holding hands is for kiddies. Man like you’d never.”

But, he was pleased to notice, her fingers remained interlaced with his. “A man like me?”

“Too sharp by half for that kind of love play. Look like you know your business, you do.”

God help him. Her frankly assessing look had him instantly as hard as a loaded cannonade. “But if you were my lass, it would be my business to keep you happy.”

She laughed outright. God help him, the sound of her unbridled delight hit him like a broadside. He tensed his gut to withstand the blow her simple happiness inflicted upon him.

She let go of his hand, though he tried not to let her. “We’re in St. Pancreas—that’s three parishes he’s crossed now.” She hitched the lapels of his coat closer.

“You warm enough?”

She nodded. “You?” Her eyes shifted to his leg, where his limp was growing more pronounced. “Why don’t we bung him now and have done? Save ourselves the trouble of this parade.”

He didn’t want her to think he was weak. “I want to find out where he’s going first. He may stop if we dip him now.”

Her smile widened. “Starting to think like me now, you are.”

He felt like kissing her. Right there on that cheeky, plush mouth. “Don’t worry—he won’t walk all the way to Hamp-stead.” And indeed, Phillips turned off at Percy Street to clew up at a neat little doorway of Number Four Little Charlotte Street, where he was greeted at the door with an enthusiastic kiss from a woman half his age. Hugh slouched into the side of the building on the corner and pulled Meggs up next to him.

“Well.” She cast her gaze at the surrounding neighborhood. “Didn’t think a toff like him would live here.”

Could she really be that naive? Her? “He doesn’t live here. Not for long anyway. That is undoubtedly the home of his mistress.”

“His mistress? Geezer like him? Right out in the open in the doorway like that? In the middle of the day?” Her face had gone three colors of red. “And him walking here like he was all proper and buying a posy and holding his head up, easy as you please.”

He was surprised to find her so judgmental. “If it makes you feel better, his wife has been dead for years. It’s rather an accepted thing for a man in his position to keep a mistress.”

“Maybe toffs and aristos,” she conjectured. “But if Mr. Tupper ever tried to do a thing like that”—she pointed at the doorway—“I think Mrs. Tupper would put him to bed with a fry pan.”

It was such a vivid image, he laughed and caught her back against his chest. “That she would, but I can assure you Mr. Tupper would never do such a thing.”

She tensed against him, but when he made no other move, she slowly accepted the casual intimacy. “Well, I suppose it’s not so bad if his wife’s dead. But I don’t see why a toff would want to have a mistress when they could have a beautiful wife, all clean, and pretty and lovely. With beautiful, clean clothes.”

He could hear the wistfulness in her voice. Somewhere under all that brass and cheek, and larceny, was a girl who wanted to believe in fairy tales, and happily ever after, even if she knew better. “Men want different things from a mistress than they could ask of a wife.”

“Like what?”

God’s balls. The possibilities boggled his mind. But how could they be having this conversation? Was this some sort of ham-fisted attempt at flirting? If so, she was even worse at it than he was. “Wives are ladies.”

“So?”

“Ladies don’t do ... certain things.”

“Oh.” She stewed that around in the pot that was her brain. “Oh. Gotcha. That the way it’s gonna be for you then, when you get a wife?”

This was an easy answer. “I’m not going to get a wife—naval men shouldn’t have wives. It would condemn her to a life of either hardship or loneliness.”

“Oh. Then you’ll get a mistress? You got one now?”

Hugh wasn’t sure what he heard in her voice. “Why do you want to know?”

“Dunno. Just asking. None of my business, I suppose.” She looked away at the house and didn’t ask again.

He leaned down close and tightened his arms around her ever so slightly. “Meggs,” he said, just so she knew he was talking to
her
and not playing pretend. Not simply flirting. “I don’t have a mistress. And you should know, it’s not all force and coercion. It can be very nice. It’s
supposed
to be very nice.”

She went instantly still, in that aware, wary way of hers. “Is it?”

“Yes. It’s a lot like this, being up close with no bad feelings, no one doing anything the other doesn’t like. Do you like it with my arms around you, like this? Do you like it when I touch you like that?” He gently brushed that wayward skein of hair away from her nape.

She nodded infinitesimally.

“Remember that, Meggs. And know, if you want it to happen, when it happens, between us, it will be very, very nice.”

She must not have believed him. After his comment, she kept unnaturally quiet for the remainder of the afternoon as they followed their quarry back south toward the park, silently emptying both Phillips’s pockets and his mistress’s reticule with ruthless efficiency and a noticeable lack of cheek.

Once home in Chelsea and ensconced in his study, his examination of the evidence turned up nothing of interest. Hugh was glad. It had gone sorely against his grain to have to suspect Phillips. But now that left only two men, Lord Stoval and the Earl Spencer himself. Neither prospect pleased him very much, but with Admiral Middleton’s clock ticking away the days, while the Admiralty leaked secrets like a rotten bilge, he was going to have to choose. The best he could do was trust Spencer couldn’t have ordered an investigation into himself and concentrate on Stoval in the hopes Meggs was right and he was the traitor.

And preliminary reports from his various contacts were not in Stoval’s favor. Despite a sterling reputation within the
ton,
whispers from the City and among the men on Change was that Stoval’s pockets were to let. He had dealings with a surprising high number of different banks and at least one disreputable moneylender. There was the large house in Mayfair, at the corner of Grosvenor and Park Lane, and a wife who entertained lavishly.

And Hugh had to send Meggs there. The prospect gave him no ease. Neither did his leg, stiff and aching from the long walk. He reached out and absently massaged his thigh muscle, pressing out the knots of pain.

“Does it hurt often?”

Hugh looked up to find Meggs studying him, instead of her codes. Not surprising, because she almost always solved the exercises quickly. She had a knack for patterns and picked them out easily enough. When he didn’t answer her, she abandoned the desk and came around behind his chair, slowly, tentatively, as if for once she wasn’t sure of what she was doing.

“If you like ...” she began, “I can rub some of the stiffness out.” She set her hands to his shoulders and began to massage the tense muscles in his neck. “Used to do this for Nan all the time. And her hands, when she got the rheumatism in her finger joints.”

Her agile fingers were digging deep, searching out the tension along his shoulders. Hugh searched for something normal, something innocuous to say to cover the astonishing sensation of her hands on his body. “Your hands are strong.”

“Have to be, don’t they? Old Nan used to insist I give her shoulders a rub every night so my hands would get stronger.”

He could hear the smile in her voice and thought he could see it in the reflection of the dark window. “How old were you when you first began to steal?”

Her hands stilled for a moment. “Twelve. Nearly thirteen.”

“As old as that?” “Prime filching morts” of her caliber were usually trained to their art from the cradle.

She gave no reply, only kept up the steady, rhythmic massage. God help him, it felt beyond good. “And your Nan taught you? Why did she wait so long?”

“Only met her after I’d already begun.”

“What do you mean? Did you work for a different kidman?” He didn’t like this jealous hunger he had for information about her past, and the people who had influenced her, but he couldn’t seem to stop it.

“Nope. Only ever had Nan. Began on my own, I did.”

“How?”

A long silence was interrupted only by the popping and hissing of the fire while she decided what she wanted to tell him. And then she let out a sigh. “I didn’t mean to be a thief, actually, but we were hungry and cold, and we were nearly out of money.”

She must have had parents. And yet they were curiously absent from her tales. “Your parents?”

“Dead.”

Of course. What else made a child of the streets? “So you just started stealing?”

“No, I started whoring.”

It was if she had kicked him in the jaw. Again. Every time he thought he knew or understood her, she overthrew all his ideas. It was such a complete reversal of everything she had said, he didn’t know what to believe. He felt the faint stirring of anger in his gut, but whether it was aimed at her or at whomever had turned her to prostitution, he couldn’t tell. He turned and tried to focus on her reflection in the window. She stood behind him, partially obscured by the back of the chair.

“But I never could. I was twelve. Couldn’t attract anyone. Not even in Covent Garden.” She gave a little self-deprecating laugh. “And Annie—she was a blowen used to work the Garden—felt sorry for me, so she gave me a particularly nice flat of hers. Young. And clean. He was roaring drunk, but obviously wealthy. So I went with him, but he was just so drunk, he couldn’t even manage his clothes. His purse fell right out of his pocket and he didn’t even notice. So I took the purse and left him propped in the doorway.” She pushed up her shoulder and shrugged, the way she did when she was trying to prove it didn’t matter. But it did.

A doorway. She hadn’t even had enough money for a room, a bed to ... God’s balls. At twelve years old. Hardly old enough to be left on her own, let alone left to whore for food. The tight feeling deep in his gut was anger. Black anger, eating away at him. Because he’d seen a hundred such girls before and walked past, dismissing them from his mind as soon as he was across the street, or in his house, or back on board his ship. He had done so that very morning.

Her hands kept up their steady, relentless assault and she spoke matter of factly, with her head tilted to the side, as if she hadn’t thought of it in a long time.

“It was a really fat purse, enough to keep Timmy and me for a fortnight, but it made me bold. So I went begging. Actually, I was only pretending to be begging. I was looking for more drunk young peers. I went down to St. James’s, where we were just yesterday, and watched them slip and slide out of their clubs late at night, and I just followed one or two, and gave them a bit of a bump in the dark and said, “Sorry gov-’ner,” and made off with their purses. And that’s how it started. I only did drunks for about a year, until I got more proficient. And then Nan found me. But I still like drunks best.”