Wicked Temptation (Nemesis Unlimited) (22 page)

The waiter came with more dome-covered plates. He uncovered two beautifully cooked steaks, pepper-crusted and sizzling, and jewel-like miniature vegetables glossed in butter. Two hungers lived side by side within her. At least she could eat the steak.

As she cut into her meat with an ebony-handled knife, she asked, “If you couldn’t work for Nemesis, or follow … your other line of employment … what would you do?”

His movements with his own knife were deft and precise. He took a bite and chewed. “This for your dossier about me?”

“The most dangerous crime syndicate is hot on our heels. If I’m on the run with someone, I like knowing about them. You weren’t so circumspect when you kissed me.” She was proud of herself for not blushing.

But his own cheeks darkened. “I did. And stopped. This thing between us can’t go any further. Not while we’re on the mission.”

An interesting distinction. One she wanted to explore further. But later. Right now, she was beginning to have other plans. Things shifted inside her. Fear continued in edged angles, but there was something else, a sense of her own capability—she’d helped get them out of Paris. She could use her skills for something that she wanted.

Horrific as Devere’s death had been, it showed her how quickly a life could be snuffed out, and how she had to seize experience wherever she could.

He wasn’t the only one with guile.

She ate a gilded coin of carrot. “You’ve been evading my question. What would you do with yourself if not this?” She gestured with her wine glass at the dining car, encompassing the whole of everything that had happened to them.

“Impressive persistence.”

“Thank you, but you’re still evading.”

Instead of trying to dismiss her, or come up with another distraction, he actually seemed to think over her question, his gaze turned to the mirror of the train window that, in the darkness, reflected back the dining car more than revealed the passing countryside.

“I used to think about being an engineer,” he said at last, turning his gaze back to her. “Or an architect.”

She mulled this. “Makes sense. You obviously enjoy crafting intricate plans. Taking diverse pieces and fitting them together into a unified whole. Start with a small element—a cornerstone, a support beam—and build from there. Until it all comes together.”

He lifted his brows. “You’ll be after my job, next.”

“I don’t want your job,” she replied. “I want to know you.”

Frowning, he asked, “Why?”

“Because I’ve never met a man who carried a knife in his lapel. Because you murmur beautiful curses in Italian. Because you fascinate me.” Her own candor came as a surprise.

“I’m just a means to an end.”

She stared at him. “Not to me, you aren’t.” The words sprang from her, and she only realized after she’d spoken them how true they were.

“Is that how you see yourself?” she pressed.

He gave the tiniest of rueful smiles. “
Dio,
you could teach the boys at headquarters a few things about interrogation. None of them have big eyes and long lashes that turn a man to melted wax.”

“I’m not even batting my eyelashes. But if it makes you feel better, here—” She fluttered her lashes in her best imitation of a coquette.

Shockingly, his cheeks darkened even more. It actually worked.

“You’re right,” he said gruffly. “It’s appealing—the idea of putting something together. A bridge, a building. Takes just a single brick or a rivet to start. Then, months later, the river can be crossed. Sick people have a new hospital to help cure them.”

She took a fortifying drink of wine. “I was correct. You could’ve been an actor. The way you pretend that you’ve got ice in your veins. ‘I’m just a means to an end.’ You know your way around a disguise; that much I know.”

He scowled. “Don’t pretend I’m something I’m not.”

“Don’t pretend you’re less than you are,” she fired back. “If there’s anything this whole misadventure has taught me, it’s that very few things are what they appear.” She felt the angles and contours of a different identity forming within her. “Including me.”

“Bronwyn?” a woman’s voice asked. “Bronwyn Parrish?”

She glanced up in alarm as a man and a woman approached their table. The man wore a brown tweed suit, and the woman had on a blue wool traveling costume—both indisputably English in their tailoring.

“Merde,”
Bronwyn muttered under her breath.

“You know them?” Marco asked lowly.

“Friends of Hugh’s,” she said quietly, then, more loudly as the two newcomers came to stand beside the table. “Charles, Lydia. What a surprise.”

“I should say,” Lydia answered, glancing at Bronwyn’s decided lack of weeds. She shot an even more censorious look at Marco. “And this is…?”

“Paolo,” he answered, his voice now heavily accented with Italian. He rose up from his seat and shook an astonished Charles’s hand, then took Lydia’s in his own and pressed a kiss to her knuckles with an unctuous solicitousness. “I am …
come si chiamo
? I am friend of Signora Parrish.” The emphasis he gave to the word
friend
left no doubt in anyone’s mind what kind of friendship he offered.

For half a moment, Bronwyn thought to deny Marco’s scandalous assertion. But a voice inside her whispered,
You’re already in it. Nothing to do but go along.
She’d cast off her widow’s weeds, traveled across the Channel, been to a brothel and the bohemian cafés of Montmartre, where women lived almost as freely as men. She’d seen a man murdered.

What difference did scandal make? Charles and Lydia might carry stories of her misbehavior back to England, but Bronwyn wasn’t entirely certain that, if she should retrieve her lost fortune, she wanted to stay in London. Even if she did, she’d learned things about the world. There were far worse things than the censure of London society.

The world around her spun like a globe whirling on its axis, but she could find her footing.

This time is yours,
that voice whispered.
Revel in it.

NINE

“Paolo,” she drawled, pulling out several centimes from her reticule, “do be a dear and get us more wine.”

“Si, mi amore.”
With a sleek bow, Marco took the coins and ambled over to the bar situated at the end of the dining car, then gave her the most outrageous wink. Bronwyn was surprised the train didn’t derail.

“Won’t you join us?” she asked Charles and Lydia.

Perhaps it was the English sense of politeness, but Charles stammered, “If … if you like.”

“Please.” She waved at two empty chairs nearby.

Charles pulled the chairs close to their table, and he and Lydia perched awkwardly in them as they waited for Marco to return.

When he did, he poured them all glasses of wine. “My
dolce amore,
she is generous,
no
? With more than just her
denaro
.” He took her gloveless hand between his and pressed kisses across her fingers. His lips were firm, warm, the whiskers of his goatee both soft and bristly against her skin. Then he turned her hand over and kissed her palm. His tongue darted out briefly to touch the delicate webbing between her fingers.

She fought the urge to close her eyes. Heat washed through her like a flood in a summer storm. Heaven help her, if this was how he kissed her
hand,
imagine what it must be like if he did the same to her lips, her mouth. And other parts, just like in those postcards.

“Paolo, please,” she said breathlessly. “You’ll shock our English friends.” Yet she didn’t tug her hand away.

“We’re not shocked,” said Lydia weakly.

“It’s just so … unexpected,” Charles said, tugging on his collar, “running into you here.”

“I must admit,” Bronwyn answered, “coming to France wasn’t part of my plans. But Paolo was so persuasive.”

“I tell her,” Marco said, “‘
Cara mia,
you
must
go to France. This English air cannot breathe. We go to France and breathe.’” He traced patterns on her wrist with his blunt-tipped fingers, patterns of heat echoing through her in elaborate arabesques.

“I always breathe well when Paolo is around,” she said with a slow smile.

“Because of the exertions.” He turned to the English couple. “So good, she is, at the exertions. I think, she is so good, she cannot be just made widow. A bit of a
putana,
aren’t you,
cara
?” Then he gave Charles one of those magnificently vulgar winks. “Good to have a
principessa
in the street but a
putana
in the bed, no?”

Lydia gasped. “Don’t
dare
answer him, Charles!”

“Ah,” Marco said sadly. “Your woman, she is no
putana
.”

Lydia pushed back from the table, and both her husband and Marco got to their feet. “I won’t sit here and listen to this … this filth.” She marched away from the table, with Charles rushing to keep up.

Once they had gone, Bronwyn forced out a laugh. Yet Marco still didn’t let go of her hand, and she didn’t try to snatch it back.

“If your other careers don’t prove fulfilling enough,” she said on a strained chuckle, “you can always try being a genuine gigolo.”

Slowly, as though with great reluctance, he released her hand. His olive complexion had darkened, and he took a long swallow of wine.

“Money and making love are poor colleagues,” he said. Then, “I, ah, apologize. It seemed the wisest strategy.”

“We both participated in the ruse,” she answered.

“And excelled in it, too.”

No judgment edged his words. More than admiration gleamed in his eyes. She wasn’t a girl. She knew desire when she saw it. Doubtless it shone in her gaze, as well.

*   *   *

Too late, Marco realized he’d trapped himself. He’d booked only one sleeping compartment, instead of two. It had been his idea to play the part of Bronwyn’s gigolo—and now he paid for both choices. Just as he’d paid the price after kissing her.

Why her gigolo? Couldn’t he have been her Italian cousin? No—he’d wanted it, wanted her. He kept discovering more and more about her, beyond easy categorization. She was much more than he’d first supposed. Now he needed to taste a desire that already burned him, though he tried to smother that flame. And here he’d gone and thrown further kindling on the fire.

Even before Charles and Lydia had shown up, dinner had been an exercise in exquisite torture. The oysters, of course, had been a mistake. He ought to have refused them or claimed an allergy. Instead, like a ruddy idiot, he’d swallowed the slick, sea-tinged morsels, all the while watching Bronwyn and thinking of that slick place between her legs. A place he wanted to savor much more than the oysters.

The rest of the meal had been by turns a delight and a torment. She was changing before his very eyes. He’d once thought her sheltered. Kinder than the other women of her class, but one of them, just the same. But he saw her evolving into a woman of boldness, who tested the measure of her own strength. She’d been shocked by both his violence against Devere, and the man’s murder. Yet despite her shock, she hadn’t collapsed into a swooning, useless heap. She’d gathered herself up. Moved on.

And she’d cut into him deeply with that clever mind, seeing things about him that no other Nemesis agent had ever discovered. She was far more dangerous than Les Grillons. She was capable of doing him a much greater injury. A knife wound or bullet hole could heal within weeks or months. Bronwyn could hurt him in a far more vulnerable place—a place he’d always kept well guarded. Until her.

As they now made their way from the dining carriage to the sleeping compartment, he watched her sway gently with the motion of the train, and every now and then, her hand reach out to lightly brace herself against the wall.

He tensed when someone opened a door to a private room. He could have his knife in his hand in less than a second, ready to protect her. But the threat wasn’t a threat—only a man ambling to the dining car.

Something was stirring to life inside him, something more than desire. What the hell was this feeling? He’d protected other Nemesis clients before, yet the idea of anything happening to Bronwyn filled him with ice-edged rage.

His hands clenched into fists. Anyone tried to
touch
her, let alone hurt her, and they’d meet a very ugly death.

“This is us.” He stopped outside one of the sleeping compartments and fished the key from his waistcoat pocket.
Maledizione,
his hands were actually shaking a little.

Bronwyn watched him with heavy-lidded eyes as he unlocked the door. The same look she’d been giving him all through their meal after the English man and woman had stormed off. The look that had left him hard and aching, barely able to eat for wanting her.

He’d thought the job would be too complicated if they became lovers. Now … now being near her felt impossible. Not without knowing the feel of her around him.

She stepped into the compartment, and he followed, locking the door behind them. For the first time since they’d boarded the train, they were now truly alone.

The compartment wasn’t large, despite the fact that it was first class. Wood and brass fixtures gleamed richly in the lamplight. A rather narrow bed was bolted to one wall, and an even more narrow chair sat in one corner, making the whole space somewhat cramped. A porter had already been through and turned the sheets down, and thoughtfully pulled the blinds.

She stood in front of the window, and, as he watched, reached up to slowly pull the pins from her hair. They dropped to the carpet, and with each one, more of her hair uncurled around her shoulders, until it was loose.

Was he supposed to stop her? Was he to play the honorable gentleman and sleep in the armchair nestled in the corner? He’d no desire to do either.

Words felt cumbersome and unnecessary. They both knew what they wanted, all moments—from the kiss to the ruse in the dining car—leading to this one.

He crossed the small compartment with a single stride, until he stood only inches from her. Her breath came shallowly as she stared up at him. He wasn’t feeling particularly calm, either.