Joanna Bourne: The Black Hawk

“Please.” She had no words. “Please. Now.”

He began to drive each stroke strongly inside her. She pulled herself to him, meeting him. Matching him.

Arched and straining, gasping for breath, plucked like a bow, she became the exultation. She convulsed around him. She felt him join her, losing control. He groaned deeply, hard and low, in triumph.

She heard that and let herself fall into red pleasure and was consumed by it.

SHE watched him through lazy and half-closed eyes, not wanting to move. He was so perfectly beautiful. He was skilled beyond measure. She felt wonderful.

He touched across the bandage on her arm, seeing that all was safe. Then he sat, his half of the blanket across his lap, gazing down at her with an unreadable expression in his eyes.

She reached to hold his hand. Even with all the intimacy between them, the straightforward holding of hand in hand was one more.

He said, “Will you marry me?”

“No.” She sat up.

“Ah. That’s your considered reply, that is?” One might spend a week with a magnifying glass and not read one iota of expression upon that face. She tried to take her hand away, and he did not let go.

“I mean, ‘No, what are you saying?’ ”

“Then you shouldn’t make it sound so much like, ‘No, we can’t get married.’”

“That is also true.” She paused. “Probably.” When he was silent, she said, “I have not thought this through.”

“Think it through.”

She would have jumped up and put more space between the breath and heat and immediacy of his body. She would have liked to become somewhat more clothed. Almost no rational thinking occurs when one is naked.

He held her hand and looked at her, quietly serious. “There is no one else for me. Never has been. The war’s been over a long time.”

“It is not a matter of our nations at war.”

“Just pointing out that that small impediment no longer exists. We’re not enemies anymore—England and France. I heard the speeches. Nobody on either side will care if we marry.” He turned her hand over to look at the palm. Stroked across it as if he brushed dust away. “Is it me being a gutter rat? Me coming from nothing at all?”

“You know that does not matter to me.”

“It should. You deserve better.” His lips quirked. “But since you haven’t picked anybody better, why not me? I have money. I came by it honestly, picking good investments. Property mostly. There’s a house in the West End I’ve never bothered to live in much. It has a Grecian foyer and an Adam fireplace in the dining room.” Startingly, suddenly, he grinned. “I have a damn butler. You can help me intimidate him.”

“I do not give one penny for your butler and your thousands of pounds and the blood you carry in your veins. I have fought all my life to make a world where such things do not matter.”

“But the answer is still no,” he said.

“How can I say yes? We have been apart for years and years. We do not know each other.”

“You know every alley in my mind, every broken bottle and rat scuttling in there. You put me in my place when I get above myself. Austria, Prussia, Italy, all up and down France—you always figured out where I was going to mount the next operation. Half the time, you blocked me. Just uncanny that way.” He hadn’t let go of her hand. “I know you pretty well too.”

“I have some familiarity with the workings of your mind. That does not mean we should get married.”

He kissed her knuckles. One, two, three, and four. She was twitching inside by the time he finished. “No, we should get married so we can go to bed together and do all these interesting things with each other and still stay respectable.”

“You, who are a paragon of respectability, always.” Never, not once, had she expected to marry. She had not considered the possibility.

Perhaps it was being naked, which befuddled her mind. Perhaps it was being wholly happy, with every inch of her body exultant. Perhaps it was merely that this was Hawker, and he could always make his mad notions seem possible. “I do not say, ‘No,’ precisely. I feel very strange about the whole idea.”

He stood and used the hand he was still holding to pull her to her feet. “Let’s go to bed—my bed—and talk about this in the morning. I want to lie beside you and soak up the warmth coming off of you.”

His bed was very nice, so much so that they made love again almost as soon as they had wriggled down into the sheets.

When she sank into sleep at the end of it, she felt Hawker pull the covers over her. He did that after they made love, however far the blankets and sheets had strayed. It was an act of most gentlemanly kindness, the sort of habit a man might follow with a cherished wife.

She could not imagine herself, married.

PAX SAT AT THE DESK IN THE LIBRARY, DRAWING the face of the Caché woman with pen and charcoal. This was his tenth copy, and they were going faster now. He’d got the face close to right. The nose and the shape of the eyes hadn’t changed from when she was a child.

The study on the ground floor of Meeks Street held a couch and armchairs. The walls were stocked with some of the books in the house, the ones that weren’t upstairs. The day’s newspapers, as always, had been opened and folded at random and left on the tables everywhere or stuffed sideways in the shelves.

Felicity had come at dark to close the curtains. She hadn’t cleaned away the dirty teacups or lighted the lamps. Back when he was doorkeeper and errand boy, he’d been more conscientious.

He’d lit the stand of candles from the mantelpiece and taken it over to the desk to give him light to work.

Doyle was in a big chair by the fire with his feet up on the andirons. He had a pile of file folders on the table at his elbow and was leafing through them, taking out reports and news clippings, leaving a strip of red paper with his name and the date behind as a marker.

A little stack was growing on the floor beside Doyle. News of men who disappeared. Men who died with a single knife stroke to the heart. Unexpected deaths in the night where men forgot how to breathe. Rumors about Cachés. Anything in the files that might touch on this business.

He’d be going through the files himself, if he weren’t busy drawing. “Are we going to pick up the ones who gave evidence to Bow Street, saying the killer looked like Hawk?”

“Three false names.” Doyle didn’t look up. “Which is not what you’d call useful, and an army captain who didn’t crack like an egg when I questioned him. He’s being watched.”

“They’ll turn out to be Cachés.”

“Likely.”

“Blackmailed into it. I may know them from Paris.” He blew charcoal dust off the portrait, studied it, and set it aside on the edge of the desk. “From when I was training to spy on the English.”

“Now you spy for the English. France’s loss. Our gain.”

“I like to think so. I’m glad Galba decided not to garrote me.” He flexed his fingers and pulled a sheet to him. “This is going slow.” He picked up the finest of the pencils, and drew the oval of the face.

It wasn’t just copying. Each time, he had to catch what made the face unique. “I’ll do two or three for Bow Street. Hawk can drop them by tomorrow.”

Hawk had come back to Meeks Street an hour before. The only sign of him was Felicity muttering her way down the hall to open the door and then muttering her way back to bed. He hadn’t poked his head into the study. There was no sound of his footsteps on the stairs. No click of a bedroom door closing. Hawk didn’t make noise moving around a house at night.

Doyle said, “I’d guess everything went smoothly with Conant.”