Joanna Bourne: My Lord and Spymaster

Her eyes spasmed shut with the poignancy of it. She was shaking now, continually. “It’s not being able to . . . stop. I don’t belong to myself when you do that.” She lay panting. She hadn’t known she’d have no control at all.

She wasn’t the only one. He was gasping for air. Shaking. He kept his hand cupped over her there, at the center of all that pleasure, all that urgency, and looked down at her. She saw it in his eyes. He was caught, too. Famished. Fascinated.

But he was the one who knew what happened next. That made him so damned powerful. He could do anything to her when he touched her there.

“It’s just me,” he whispered. “Just me. I like luring you along till you can’t think anymore. No harm in it, between the two of us, here in bed.” Another kiss. He had a thousand different kinds of kisses. This was the brush of lips on the inside of her thigh. “Let me pull your sails into the wind. There’s nothing you have to take charge of.”

She couldn’t have taken charge of a folded napkin. She felt him, warm as water, licking her between her legs. Madness was what she felt. Oceans of madness.

He didn’t stop till she was gasping out his name. Till she was shaking.

He propped himself on his forearms, above her, looking down. “Do you know, Jess, a while back I swore to myself I’d have you like this, underneath me, with not a stitch on you, begging and incoherent. It’s as good as I thought it would be.”

“Not quite incoherent yet.”

“We will arrange that. Open your eyes. I want to see in.”

He lay his length upon her and came into her. She didn’t know what he saw in her eyes when he entered her. Surprise maybe.

What she saw was Sebastian filling up the whole world above her and then filling up the whole world inside of her, too. He was exactly what she needed—strong and powerful and not gentle at all. Her pleasure started with the first thrust and kept on as he thrust into her again and again and again.

“STAY with me,” he said.

Sebastian lay in bed and watched Jess slip the cotton nightgown on over her head with that same simple grace he’d seen when she was taking it off. In the first light, her hair was a fall of tawny silk. Her body was alert as a tiger, happy, suave muscle gliding easily under her skin. The way she was meant to look. But her eyes were so sad.

“Stay,” he said.

“The maids are up. I’m not going to make a scandal in your aunt’s house. I know better than that.”

“I need to tell you what’s going to happen—”

“I can’t.” She was already at the door. “Let me go do what I have to do. We’ll talk about it later.”

She was going to her father. She needed to do that alone. There was nothing anyone on earth could do to make that easy for her.

He’d met with Adrian, hurriedly, last night. Between the two of them they could save Whitby from the hangman. Whitby would spend the rest of his years as a convict in New South Wales. Not easy for an old man. He’d suffer. Maybe that would be enough.

Her father’s life would be his wedding gift to Jess. He’d set aside his vengeance. Josiah Whitby, damn his soul, was right. That was the only way he could have a life with Jess.

He said, “Marry me, Jess.”

For an instant, she stopped. She laid her forehead to the wood of the door. “Sebastian . . .” She didn’t look at him. “Ask me tomorrow.” Then she fumbled with the doorknob, those clever hands of hers clumsy as paws.

HER NAME WAS BRIDGET AND SHE CAME FROM County Mayo in the west of Ireland. She was a whore, a good one, and as shrewd and grasping as a magpie. Even respectably dressed, she looked like three pence against the nearest wall or ten pence upstairs in a bed.

She drank ale from a large pewter tankard and wiped her mouth. “She’s gone. Girl slipped out at first light and left those lumbering fools behind.”

“Alone, then.” The Irishman set his elbows on the sticky table. “Was she carrying a bag?”

“You think I pranced up and asked her? Jaysus.” She drank again. “And you bastards owe me a pound, even.”

“Later.”

Next to him on the bench, the other man said, “If she’s leaving England, we know where she’ll be.” He shoved to his feet. “Let’s go. Out the back way.”

“You could pay for me drink,” the woman muttered. “Pigs.”

PITNEY wasn’t at his house. His housekeeper, all flustered, said he’d come in late last night and packed a bag and left. He wasn’t at the warehouse either. When Jess checked the safe, the ready money was missing, so he’d been there and gone. But he wouldn’t have been fast enough to sail out on last night’s tide. He was still in London.

She took a hackney to Commercial Road, which was as far as the jarvey wanted to venture into these waters. A sensible man. She counted coins for him while her bodyguard assembled at a discreet distance.

She’d dodged Sebastian’s men, but not the Service. That was the next item on her agenda. Cutting loose the Service.

She slipped around the corner and down the alley, listening to heavy boots hurrying after her. At the end of Goose Lane she climbed a rain barrel and went over the palings into the narrow, crooked pathways nobody ever got around to naming. They were in her part of town now.

CLAUDIA sat in the ugly front parlor at Meeks Street, red-eyed, clutching her reticule in her lap.

“. . . his clothing gone from his room. All his things. The door to your study was open.” She swallowed and went on. “The drawers of your desk have been pried out. The miniatures are missing from the upstairs hallway, and some of the other paintings. My jewel case . . .” She kept her face averted from them while she talked. Her eyes stayed fixed on some knob or curlicue on the hideous sideboard to the left of the door. “My jewel case was extracted from my room last night, while I slept. I found it in your office, on the floor, broken open and emptied. Eunice’s jewels were—”

“He’s run for it.” Sebastian stopped her. There was no need to make her count through the whole wretched list of what was stolen. He felt sick. “It was Quentin all along. Quentin and Whitby. It adds up.”

“Quentin.” Adrian was doing some adding of his own. “But not Josiah.”

Doyle didn’t move from his position near the window. “It’s Pitney.” Doyle met his eye, soberly. “Your cousin knows Pitney, not Josiah Whitby. It’s Pitney who carries paperwork to the Board of Trade.”

“A conspiracy of small fishes,” Adrian said. “That’s why we missed it. Sebastian, I’m sorry.”

Service agents were silent at the edges of the room, watching.

Adrian said, “Your cousin had access to secrets. Pitney could use Whitby company ships any way he wanted. Josiah wouldn’t question him.”

Quentin had done treason. Quentin lived in his house. He’d sat beside him, eating dinner every night. He’d offered sympathy, damp-eyed, when the Neptune Dancer went down. His cousin had been playing a part for years. “Quentin is in charge. His ideas. He needed a man with access to ships, so he pulled Pitney into it somehow.”

Adrian was up, pacing off the room. “Jess knows it’s Pitney. ” After a minute. “She knew it when she left last night. She warned him.”

“Pitney was waiting at the gate when we left the Admiralty. ” He remembered what Jess had said. He remembered their faces—Jess resolute and frozen, Pitney gray as death. “She told him right under my nose. I watched her do it.”

“Mr. Pitney.” Claudia’s voice was tight. Her hands twitched in her lap. “From the Whitby company. When he came, they’d leave the house and walk along the street, to talk. Quentin made certain they wouldn’t be overheard. I knew something was wrong. I saw Quentin, once, hand money to him.”