The Danger of Desire (3 page)

It was a risk to draw such attention to herself, but she needed to make sure Timmy was clean away, and with the constable’s eyes glued to her bumped up titties, she’d earned herself some running room. Speaking of which.

“Lawks, the time! My missus’ll have my head. Much obliged, Constable.” And she was off, muttering and fussing, turning from the pavement and heading into the sea of people moving through Charing Cross.

And then she felt it—the icy blast from the devil’s own furnace. Meggs turned to find the eyes of the pale-eyed country man slicing into her like cold, sharp steel. That was when she abandoned all play acting and ran like hell was opening up behind her.

This time, she kept her eyes wide open.

McAlden had to admire the ploy at the very least. It was smartly done. Quick and devilishly efficient, yet seemingly spontaneous. And completely unexpected.

He had barely noticed the nondescript maidservant in her cap and apron as she scurried out of his way. He was used to women, even housemaids, avoiding him. His mother said it was because he didn’t trouble himself to smile. But he knew it was because he exuded discomfort around the fairer sex. Not that he didn’t like them; he did, but after sixteen years at sea in the almost exclusive company of men, he was deucedly uneasy around them. Even housemaids.

The poor girl had appeared as common as a housefly and just as harmless, but there was no doubt in his mind, the agile pickpocket with the shapely ankles had just relieved the Honorable Member of Parliament for Lower Wherever of his watch and purse. What was more, the stupid bastard had no idea. For all that she had landed herself right atop his crotch, the fat MP had neither
seen
her nor credited her with the brains and nerve to leave him without so much as a farthing.

And in the middle of all the textbook commotion, all Hugh could think of was something else his widowed mother had said several years ago on the occasion of her remarriage.

His mother had been more than flattered Viscount Balfour had asked for her hand—she had been astounded. “I really had no idea that he should want to marry me at my age, let alone have noticed me to begin with. A man, any man, but especially a man as handsome as Balfour can always find a younger woman. Women my age are largely invisible to the world.”

And so had that girl been—invisible even as she scrambled off the rich man’s lap. Just a maidservant or a shop girl. A nobody. Just an inconvenience in the aristocrat’s busy day.

Whoever she was, she was almost a sign from a helpful God. If he believed in God, which after sixteen years of death and destruction in His Majesty’s Royal Navy, he did not.

By his reckoning, life was a matter of happenstance and things only turned out the best for those who were prepared to make the best of the way things turned out. His was a singularly un-English philosophy, but then again he was Scots, a more fatalistic breed than these English, who like the Member for Lower Bagshot, saw only what they wanted to and thought about even less.

What Hugh thought was that the girl would do very well for him. Very well. She was clearly just as clever as any other street rat, but potentially more adaptable to his needs. Indeed, he could use her as the maidservant she was dressed up to be, planted within the traitor’s house to steal all of his secrets, not just the ones he happened to carry out of the Admiralty in his coat pockets.

All he had to do was catch her.

She was already moving quickly down the sidewalk, away from the constable. Hugh immediately crossed between traffic at Charing Cross and followed her onto the Strand, weaving his way around shoppers, beggars, and tradesmen. He was forced to pick up his pace to keep her in his sights. It was a hell of a strain on his already fatigued leg, but he was a bloody officer of the navy—the senior service—he’d be damned if he couldn’t keep up with some light-fingered slip of a girl.

She kept on, purposeful and steady, without a hint of urgency, until she glanced back at him. He instinctively tried to hide himself, shying into the doorway of a building before he was seen, but he saw the knowledge he was on to her darken her eye before she ducked immediately between buildings and disappeared into the Kings Mews.

Hugh was forced to an awkward jog to the entryway of the mews. But she was easy to spot here, and her face, pale with terror as she turned round to watch for him, was like a beacon amid the darker sea of hats and horses. He jostled his uneven way after her, dodging hoofs and weaving his way across the open yard to where she again disappeared into the back of a building.

It was a linen drapers warehouse. Bolts of cloth, arranged on racks and piled high on countertops, obscured his view and hid her from him. Hugh stopped, wary lest he should pass her by, or she should try to double back into the pell-mell of the mews. So he did what he had learned to do at sea, and searched for stillness. By concentrating on the stillness, his eye was drawn to the contrast of the least flicker of movement. And there she went, a silent wisp of worn, dark fabric, stealing swiftly down an aisle toward the front of the building. He damned his aching leg and clawed upwind after her.

He was almost at full sail now, pushing the limit of his ability, chasing after her, but she was quick as a running tide, flowing in and out of doors and around corners as surely as water racing downstream. Out onto St. Martin’s Lane and across, swinging around the far side of the church building, rushing toward the warren of streets and alleys that ran between Long Acre and Covent Garden. The strident ache in his leg intensified into a sharp, digging pain as he abandoned all caution to pelt across the churchyard and turn round the back of St. Martin’s Church just in time to see the foam of her skirts whip behind the wall of Moors Court. He accelerated and gained some ground, closing enough distance to watch her head down for New Round Court.

She, too, had abandoned all pretense and was running flat out. She must have had the bloody map of London in her head for she flitted through every narrow, obscure alley and passageway and knew every unlocked gate and twisted path, leading him on a goose chase that had him panting for breath to keep up.

But still he pushed on. She was too good a find, too perfect a match for his needs, to give up now—his bird-almost-in-hand, if he could stay with her. He was a grown man, a hardened veteran of the French Wars, a captain of His Majesty’s Navy, in the prime of his life, and even with a stiff, shrapnel-filled leg, surely he could outrun a malnourished slip of a rapscallion girl.

Damn it all to hell. He clenched his jaw over the pain throbbing from his leg and flung himself up another blind alley. And thanked his lucky stars she had finally made a mistake.

The door she had counted on at the back of the narrow alley was locked. She was trapped. Hugh slowed to a walk and began to close the remaining distance between them. She was breathing hard from the exertion, and her exhalation rose and frosted the air above her head like a net. The brick of the next building ran four stories straight up on one side, while a tall stone wall, topped with inset shards of broken glass, penned her in from the other.

The passageway was narrow—so narrow he could run his hands along both walls as he advanced on her—and eerily quiet. The only sound was the panting of their breaths, white clouds steaming into the fetid, back alley air. Her face—for some strange reason he wanted to see her face. He needed to
see
her. To make sure she became something other than just another maidservant in his mind. To fix her in his memory.

She was older than he would have guessed for one so swift. Her face, pale with animal fear, was unlined, although her dirty cheeks were hollowed with the hard look of a street rat—or perhaps hunger. She ought to have been able to feed herself off what she’d just stolen, but he had to consider it probably all went to her kidman. Or her pimp. The girl would be lucky to get cold soup.

By God, when she was with him, he would feed her.

No, her face was not particularly dirty—the smudge was a dusting of freckles across her nose. The darker shadows were circles the color of a bruise under her eyes—glittering, dark and huge, in her ashen face. The mobcap on her head obscured the color of her hair, but it looked to be dark brown from the tendrils fallen loose down her neck.

Her gaze darted around him, scanning the alley frantically and looking in vain for an escape.

“You won’t find it. You’re trapped.” The queer rush of triumphal pleasure took him mildly by surprise. It shouldn’t gratify him so to defeat this feral, scrawny, half-starved lass. But it did. She’d made him work for his little victory. She was a worthy opponent. She would be a valuable asset.

“You’re very good,” he continued more diplomatically. “That was a neat piece of work.”

She didn’t respond but gripped the ridiculous basket in front of her with tight, whitened knuckles, as if it alone could ward him off. No farcical, false denials. Hugh felt his mouth curve into a half smile. It pleased him he would not have to teach her the value of silence. Another decided mark in her favor.

She had backed up hard into the end of the passage, the impassable door flat at her back.

“I have a proposition for you.”

“I’m not a whore.”

The blunt assertion surprised him. “No, you’re a pickpocket. A clever one. And as it happens, I am in need of a clever pickpocket. I’d like you to steal for me.”

She shook her head, a frightened refusal creasing her brow with the perfect touch of false bewilderment. “I’m a seamstress. I take in sewing.” She pushed the basket out just a fraction to show him. Oh, she was good.

Hugh smiled and shook his head. “I’ll wager,” he said in the low, calm voice he employed with frightened midshipmen, “you carry that basket around all day long, and not a bit of that sewing ever gets finished. I’ll wager”—he took another step toward her—“you’ve a soft little pouch on the bottom, where you’ve stashed the gold watch of the Member of Parliament for Lower Sudbury.”

She widened her eyes in puzzlement, opened her plum lips in astonishment, and tipped the basket carefully toward her chest so the bottom was completely visible to him, and then felt along the lower rim as if afraid to find what he had just described.

There was nothing. Hugh’s head swam for a moment. Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps, like the Honorable Member for Lower Hayrick, he had been swayed by what
he
had wanted to see. He had been looking for a thief, and for some unaccountable reason he wanted it to be this comely, if scrawny, wench.

No, it could not be. His instinct, well honed by years of service, told him otherwise. So she hadn’t hidden her take on the bottom of the basket. There were plenty of other, more
personal
, places for concealing stolen bits and bobs.

The grin that hatched on his cheeks was probably not pretty. It was certainly unfamiliar.
Dangerous
had been blasting the French to splinters the last time he had felt such unbridled, unholy glee. Yet, his gaze had already swept over her body, cataloging all the likely spots. On a frame so spare, there were really only two choices.

Her bosom, with its cleverly burst pin, and rounded little breasts pushed high and visible by her stays, was his first choice. Her display of affronted modesty notwithstanding, the current rapidity of her breath, either in fear or anticipation, was serving to offer her breasts up for breakfast. In his mind’s eye, he was already delving his fingers down into the warm vee between the improbably soft-looking mounds, sliding the back of his hand against the slight pillow of her skin, slowly pulling the gold watch chain, still warm from the heat of her body, out of the crevasse.

The unwarranted base lust coursing into his veins must have communicated itself to her plainly. She thrust out a hand to forestall him.

“No!” Her voice held a real edge of panic. “I’m not a whore,” she cried again.

“Maybe not, but you’re not above using your body for your means. But I don’t need to search you—though we both know I can, and will, if I want to. I don’t need to search you for actual evidence of your light-fingered guilt. My word alone—that I saw you relieve the Honorable Mr. Penton-Thornbraith, Member of Parliament for Lower Sudbury”—he made up the name out of thin air for effect—“of his watch and purse would be enough to get you hung by your scrawny neck. Or if you were very lucky, and either the judge or the jailor decided to avail himself of your very visible offerings, you just might be kept alive in the hulks for transportation. But my experience is most convicts die on the voyage to Botany Bay.”

He let that sink into her pale face. “Or, you could work for me.”

“I’m not a whore,” she repeated stubbornly.

“So you’ve said. Repeatedly. Which I begin to find tiresome. I think the
lady
protests too much.” He took a deep breath to stave off his annoyance. He was trying to convince her of the benefits of employment, wasn’t he? Showing her the hot end of his temper wasn’t going to help negotiations. Not that she really had a choice, but it would all go so much easier if she thought she did.

“I need a thief, and you, to all appearances, fit the bill quite nicely. Now, who do you work for?”

“You got this all wrong, mister. I don’t work for no one, like that. I take in sewing.”

“Talented lass like you? Hardly likely. Some kidman must have trained you up for it. I’ll buy you off him.” Lease her was nearer to the truth, but she’d work that out, clever girl that she was. “And I’ll pay you as well. One hundred pounds.” It was a bloody fortune to someone like her, provided she didn’t drink it away, but her face didn’t bear any of the telltale signs of over-fondness for the gin.

But not even the mention of so much money changed her tune. “You got this all wrong,” she insisted with a frustrated little stamp of her foot. Her eyes began to brim with tears. “I’m a seamstress. Look.” And again she proffered her basket of sewing, thrusting it forward for his inspection.

And damn his eyes, he looked.

He looked down only for a moment, long enough for an embroidered “T” on one of the pieces of fabric to catch his eye and make him pause at the improbability of such a personal, intimate touch to her disguise. Maybe he really
did
have this all wrong.