The Black Hawk

Twenty

SHE CHOSE WORDS CAREFULLY, TO CLARIFY MATTERS beyond any possibility of misunderstanding. “It is my wish to spend the night with you, in your bed.”

There. She had said it. It was now too late to take it back. Her mind, which had many cowardly corners, immediately went looking for plausible ways to pretend she did not mean what she had said.

Hawker was silent. He would be this self-possessed if tribesmen of the Afghan plains burst through the door and attacked him with scimitars. The refusal to be ruffled was one of his least endearing traits.

Time stretched, very empty of comment, while she swirled the teapot gently and he was inscrutable.

Finally, he took the oil lamp from the end of the mantel and busied himself adjusting the wick, lighting it with a paper spill from the fire. “The hell you say.”

“But, yes. That is what the hell I say. You need not treat this as an inconvenient importunity. Even you do not have hordes of women proposing to share your bed.” I expected him to be stupidly pleased. Instead, he is suspicious of me. “I will pour you tea. Yes?”

“Thank you.”

“You need not thank me. It is your own tea, after all.” Once, she could have offered him an explicit choice of sexual acts. In six languages. Now she had no words. She could not even call to mind the French ones. She lifted the lid of the pot. “I will add water. The tea is a little strong.”

A nod from him, and she did the pouring of hot water into the pot. Then she poured two cups of tea.

This time, I will be in control. I will be the one with all the power. This is how I will free myself. Memory wriggled like dark worms at the edges of her mind. She pushed it away.

He took the sugar bowl from the mantel and stood, holding it. “Do you want sugar?”

“It is kind of you to offer. Yes.”

“I have sugar tongs and spoons around here. Maggie keeps putting silver tableware in here, which is an incitement to theft if I’ve ever seen one. I shove ’em out of sight and that blasted woman they send to clean goes and hides them someplace else, just to make a point.”

“It is the subtle warfare of the servant classes. I am frequently a servant, so I sympathize.” She held up both cups, resting in their saucers. “Do not go seeking sugar tongs, which are probably well concealed. Two lumps for me. You may use your fingers.”

He slid two fingers into the bowl and brought out sugar lumps scissored between first and second finger. Dropped one into his cup, clever and deft. Two into hers. He never took his eyes off her face. “You and me go to bed.”

It was impossible to say anything. She, who had mouthed so many unclean words, so many bawdy songs, poems, ditties . . . could not get that small “yes” off her tongue.

“You want to . . .” He made a gesture. A rude one.

She nodded.

“It’s a dull day that doesn’t bring some surprise.”

He walked away, taking off his coat, hooking it over a peg on the wall. Underneath, he wore a waistcoat of such vivid burgundy one blinked. His knife sheath rested between his shoulder blades, the knife hilt upward. The harness had its own peg. He rolled up his right sleeve to unbuckle another knife sheath. His shirt was full sleeved in an old-fashioned way, the better to hide weapons.

He was unarming himself. A hopeful sign.

In her teacup, the layer of dissolved sugar swirled like silk at the bottom. She drank and watched him over the rim of the cup.

When he turned, she saw that he was aroused. Very aroused. His coat had kept that hidden. A little shock ran through her, as if she had taken a step that was not there, and her pulse raced.

He did not hurry, coming toward her, but practiced the nonchalance of a bird of prey circling something in which it has developed an interest. When he was close, he leaned on the stones that surrounded the hearth. He paid no attention to the insistence in his breeches. He would not be ruled by his cock, would he? He was not apologetic, either, but seemed wholly unconcerned.

She was the one who did not know how to deal with this. She had sought this confrontation. Sought him. Now, the reality confounded her.

I should not be nervous. I have unbuttoned the breeches of many men.

She imagined herself closing her fingers gently around that bulge and his cock growing even larger and harder under her touch. She knew how to drive a man to unreason with her hands and her mouth. She had been so well trained.

That was what haunted her. Not hunger. Not humiliation. Not waiting in cold corridors, dressed in schoolgirl white, till a man called her into the parlor to hurt her. Not even pain.

She woke in the night, trembling and sweating, because of what she had done. Smiles, practiced in front of a mirror. The sly admiring lies of a whore. The clever tricks of pleasing men. She had not pretended to become a whore. She had become one.

I will never be clean of it.

“Hey.” Hawker laid the flat of his hand on her cheek. It was warm from holding the teacup. “Hey. Owl. It’s just me.”

She looked into his eyes. The moment held a perfect stillness. The rain drummed the slates of the roof, empty of judgment. The fire was harsh and hot all on one side of her body with an indifferent, inhuman intensity.

Nothing could be more masculine than that hard palm of his hand. She had become the center of a determined and focused hunger. Hawker’s hunger. It was hard in his body and his spirit. Clean-edged as one of his own knives. She read all that in the single touch on her face.

Soon, he would thrust into her and she would receive him.

A man. Inside her. She waited for the slick chill of nausea to uncoil in her belly. It did not come.

HAWKER ran the side of his thumb along her cheekbone, feeling the soft of it. Strange to know a woman like Justine DuMotier was soft to the touch. In her eyes, the pupils were contracted to tiny hard points. If she wanted a man’s hands on her, he was a caterpillar.

“Why me?” he said.

“There is not one man in a thousand who would ask such stupid questions when a woman offers herself to him.” Now she looked annoyed. That was better.

“I’m an unusual man.”

Touching her distracted him, so he stopped doing it and folded his arms. Her skin still called to his fingertips. Sort of an itch, making him want to touch her some more. “Why me? Why here? Why now?”

“Oh, then. Reasons.” She huddled into herself, hunching a shoulder, looking sulky. “I have heard rumors of you and I am curious. Is it so strange I would wish to pass a pleasant afternoon with . . . an old friend? We have been something like friends, have we not, though it is inconvenient for both of us. There is no reason we should not come together pour le plaisir.”

“For pleasure.” But she wasn’t hungry for him. Not a sign of it in her anywhere. “Do you do this much—go to bed with men?”

“You know what I am. There is nothing I do not know of the many acts of love.”

That didn’t answer his question, did it?

She raised her cup from the stones of the hearth and hid her face behind it. Hid her eyes by looking down into the tea. “It is not so surprising I wish to lie with you. You have acquired a reputation, did you know? You are said to be a young steed in bed. I stayed in an inn in Milan run by two widows. They had many interesting tales to tell about you.”

Milan. The merry widows. Oh, yes. He remembered them kindly, and not just for being warm and welcoming and what you might call educative in bed. They cooked like angels. “I offered to marry them both, but they didn’t take me up on it.”

“They admired your skill, however. You would blush to hear them speak of it. There was also the foolish young kitchen maid you sent away from your room in the night, telling her to come back when she was older. They have not forgotten that.”

“I’m a prince of a fellow.” He squatted down next to her so their eyes were level. “What are you up to, Owl?”

“Nothing evil, I promise you. A few hours of your expertise in bed. With you, I might . . .” She drank the last of the tea. “I did not come here with this intent. Now it seems inevitable, as if it were destined. I have been thinking about this for more than a year.”

“Thinking about going to bed with me?”

“Sometimes. I have imagined others, but it did not . . .” There was a little tremor in her hands where they were wrapped around the empty cup. “It did not turn out to be possible, after all, when I faced them.”

He’d made it a policy never to take on a woman with a herd of private nightmares. He broke that rule more often than he kept it, but that didn’t stop it being a good one. If he had any sense, he’d stomp off into the rain and find a bed in Doyle’s house.

But Owl was shaking. A woman like her, afraid.

And, by God, he wanted her. He kept pushing that out of his mind, but it kept coming back. She’d turned into a woman. She had breasts, for God’s sake. Nice ones, from what he could see. He could almost taste them. But he wasn’t going to play the fool for a lovely body. Not even Owl’s lovely body.

Then she said in a small, flat voice, “I am weary of being a coward,” and he was lost.

She’s leading around three thousand demons, give or take. I guess I could kill a few. “I keep hearing that. ‘Justine DuMotier, the coward.’ Battle of Arcola and you underfoot through the worst of it. They sent you into Verona, alone, and you went. Coward right to the heart.”

“Do not be stupid. That is our profession. If it terrified me, I would take up knitting.” She breathed out. The air brushed his face like she was touching him. “I wake from sleep, shaking. When I think of being with men, I am afraid and ashamed and my stomach is unwell. This will stop, when I have done this with you.”

“It might. Owl, it might not.”

“You are skilled. You have that reputation. You are known to be discreet. We will part, and our paths do not cross often.” She looked up with an absorbed and grave expression. “We will do this once. It should not take long. I know what to do to—”

“You don’t know a damn thing. You’re worse than bedding a virgin, which I will mention is something I do not do. You know too much that’s wrong.”

“I am very skilled. I am not ignorant. I—”

“You are ignorant as a clod of dirt. If I had any sense I’d just walk right out of this and go sleep in the rain.” Looked like he didn’t have any sense. “I’m not flattered, in case you’re wondering. There’s a name for men who pleasure women for a living.”

She’d gone motionless, the way you do in an alley when there’s men hunting you. Or maybe like she was afraid she’d shatter apart if she wasn’t careful. “Are you saying no?”

Not on your life. “Just pointing out some of the complexities. You’re an enemy agent, for one thing, which is a complicating factor of some magnitude.”

He settled back on his heels, digging into the knot of his neckcloth, thinking. She’d been hurt so bad.

He never understood the way some men treated women. Himself, he never got tired of the marvel of them. The sounds they made when they felt good. When you made them feel good. There was nothing in the world like it.

Maybe they could outrun her ghosts. “I should have sense enough to let you be . . . but you’re so damn beautiful.”