Joanna Bourne - Rogue Spy

It would be easier to chat with the Merchant than to face these smug women who knew the secrets of Pax’s body. She would be very cool and—

“I don’t use whores.” He interrupted her imaginary conversation with several dazzlingly beautiful courtesans. She was being polite to them. “Not the ones upstairs. Not the ones on the street.”

“They know you here.” Before she finished saying that, her brain had raced ahead to various logical conclusions and she knew. “You draw them. You go to brothels to sketch nude women.”

“Only because women don’t walk around the streets nude in this climate.”

She considered whether she wanted to walk upstairs and meet the women Pax had studied in great detail, nude. Then she decided that, yes, after all, she would.

He untied the string that held her cloak and tossed it behind him, over the stair railing. “It’s not that different from drawing flowers, Cami.” Her bonnet was held by a simple slipknot, easy to loose. He removed it and let it fall to the smooth wood of the table, beside a vase of flowers.

“You used to draw me, when we were in the Coach House. You drew my face all the time and then you burned the sketches, because the Tuteurs would have taken them.”

“You had an interesting face. You still do.” His hand was on her face, his thumb, blunt, rough skinned, and gentle, slid across her lips. “Why did you tell the Baldoni you’d go with me?”

“Because I’m a grown woman and they have no control over where I will go or who I’ll see. Because I want to be with you.” The sands run out between my fingers. I have a day and a little more. Not quite two days. I am very afraid. She said, “Could you hold me. Next to you, I mean. In your arms.”

“Just what I was going to suggest.”

She went toward him and folded herself into him as she would have pulled a large, warm blanket around her. His chest was the right height to lay her head upon. His shirt was soft. His coat, rough textured under her cheek. His sternum had no padding on it at all. When he put his arms around her, she felt straightforward bones and hard muscle. The knife sheath on his left forearm was bumpy and obvious. Had she ever embraced a man carrying weapons? She didn’t think so. Her lovers had been comfortable country gentlemen. Unarmed.

Pax said, “For that four minutes when we were all discussing whether you were going to stay with the Baldoni or go off with me, I was wondering where to take you.”

“I know a good bookshop,” she said against his chest.

“I would have brought you to Daisy’s. I don’t have any better place to take you.”

“I like to try new things. Life is a vast banquet.”

“That’s more of your family wisdom, isn’t it? But I don’t think they mean taking you to whorehouses.”

“They might. We lead adventurous lives.” The living presence of him, breathing and solid, was intensely real. He wore the simplest of cravats and the trailing ends of the tie hung down to press into her forehead.

Pax said, “Daisy’s is a sanctuary of sorts. A neutral place. The Service hides people at Daisy’s every once in a while. Lazarus does, too. The Foreign Office isn’t above dropping some tricky Polish exile in here for a while. Nobody bothers anybody else. Dangerous men visit this house and they like it quiet.”

“An interesting establishment.”

“You’d be safe here if you don’t want to go back to the Baldoni. Hawker owns part of the place. He calls himself a sleeping partner.”

He took a while and kissed into her hair, again and again, as if he planned to start there and kiss every inch of her body. He was aroused. She felt that as a hard warm thrust against her belly. A demand. A promise of sorts. When they were naked together he would be unyielding and very strong. She very much wanted to carve out a time and place to be naked with him.

Her lovers, both of them, had been country gentry, strong from hunting and husbandry. Pax was strong from fighting for his life and surviving in dangerous places. It was the difference between the hound that lives in the manor and the lean wolf that prowls the woods.

One feels very safe in the arms of a wolf. Or at least, she did.

“Your relatives are right not to trust me,” he said. “I would have ignored every decency and brought you to a whorehouse. I’d have wanted to take you upstairs and make love with you.”

She would have agreed. She would have taken his hand and led him upstairs herself. “You’re about to say that isn’t going to happen. I can read that in your tone of voice. Or maybe it’s the fact we’re not racing upstairs at this minute.”

He said, “I won’t sleep with you under a roof where women sell their bodies.”

“You have scruples.”

“I have none,” he said flatly. “Don’t misjudge me. There’s no crime I haven’t committed. Your uncle was right about that.”

“We’re graduates of the Coach House. We—”

“I was lost before I ever set foot in the place. Cami, my mother was a whore.”

She couldn’t see his face. He held her, breathing down into her hair, tense as strung wires. “Tell me.”

“She didn’t work in a brothel or get paid in coin.” He’d already decided what he’d say, she thought. Already prepared the words in his mind, the way a cook gathers her ingredients out on the table before she starts mixing and chopping. “The man she lived with gave her to his friends and to men he had a use for. He was . . . frightening when she didn’t do what he wanted.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Sometimes he hurt her. I think she wanted him to hurt her.” He’d become so still she couldn’t feel his breath going in and out, only the iron control that locked every muscle. “He destroyed her, bit by bit. I watched him do it.”

“You were a child. What—ten? Twelve?”

“Younger than that.”

Pax, who’d been the strong one for all of them at the Coach House, had been a child who couldn’t protect his mother. “Then you couldn’t have changed anything.”

“He abandoned her in Paris, in the riots of the Revolution. I kept her in the house when I could, but she’d get out and go looking for him. After a while she just stopped, like a clock that isn’t wound. Didn’t sleep. Didn’t eat. Didn’t move. I sent a message to Denmark and her family came and took her away.”

“But not you?” She tried to say it neutrally.

“They had no place in their house for her bastard.” His arms closed tighter and tighter around her. She felt no part of him that wasn’t stone. “I don’t use whores. I don’t care whether they’ve chosen the life or been forced into it or do it for money.”

She said, “Your father—”

“He’s not my father!”

His anger cracked like a lightning strike. Scorched like fire.

Breathing hard, leaving not an inch between them, holding on to her as if he’d press her into his skin itself, Pax said, “He lived with my mother. He’s nothing to me. I am no part of him.”

She was no trained artist, like Pax, but she could see the likeness of blood, the resemblance between Pax and her blackmailer. There was no escaping that bond. Even the vehement denial, the rage, told her that man was, indeed, Pax’s father.

The blackmailer and Pax, bound together inextricably. “The man who lived with your mother is the Merchant.”

“That’s one of his names.” Pax didn’t let go. She heard his breath rasp in and out of his chest. “The Merchant of Shadows. For what he did to my mother, I’m going to kill him.”

A house like Daisy’s didn’t attract much general notice. The neighbors deplored it and were avidly curious, but did no more than grumble. Daisy did her shopping for the house up and down these streets close by and confined the noise in the evening to a dull roar. When they weren’t working, her women looked like anyone else. They didn’t go onto the streets without hat and gloves, respectably dressed. The watchman and the beadle got their accustomed bribes. Lazarus collected his pence. Everyone knew she had powerful protectors. The house was tolerated.

Hawker followed Daisy up the stairs to the second floor, along walls painted pale yellow. There was soft carpet underfoot and a statue of goddesses getting up to some naughtiness at the turn of the stairs.

“I’ll show the sketches to the rest of the girls, but they haven’t been here,” Daisy said.

“Wouldn’t think so. They’re what we might call unappreciative of the finer things in life. Not your style.”

“Which is an excellent style, these days.” Daisy ran her hand along the banister. “Véronique will ask here and there, with the sketches. The Frenchwomen in the trade have their own little society, close as inkle weavers.”

“That’s companionable.” He climbed a bit more. “You got a new girl.”

“Sally. She’s going to be Selene in the house.”

“Who left?”

“Annie. She’s gone back to the wilds of Ireland to marry into the gentry. ‘To marry above myself,’ as she put it.” At the turning of the stair, Daisy looked over her shoulder to grin. “God help the man she has in her sights.”

“Poor cove don’t ’ave a chance.”

He checked for worn carpet, for handprints on the wall, chips in the mopboard, the smell of cabbage or stale perfume. Not that he needed to worry. Everything at Daisy’s, from door knocker to attic, was prime, clean, orderly, and sweet. The whores, too.

“She’ll make a good wife,” Daisy said.

“She’s had lots of practice, anyway.”

“I like the woman Paxton brought. Interesting to talk to. She said she’d send us her cousins, which is not what we hear from most of the guests.”

He made one of those noises that don’t mean anything in particular. He didn’t want to talk about Cami Leyland. She was another of those deadly women who could turn on a man at any moment. Pax wasn’t seeing that.

Daisy’s room was at the end of the hall and locked, because she wasn’t an idiot. She found the key, opened it. When they were inside and less apt to be overheard, she said, “You move like something’s broken. Your ribs? Or something wrong with your arm?”

Trust Daisy to see that. “Nothing much.” He eased his coat off and let it drop on the table beside the door, the way he always did. There was a pair of those fussy china dogs she set such store by on the table, yapping at each other for all time to come.

She said, “Show me.”

“I’ve cut myself worse shaving.”

“Then stop using those black knives of yours to shave. Show me.”

“It’s practically healed.” Because she wouldn’t let him be till she saw the wound, he untied his cravat and began unwinding.

“Let me do that.” She brushed his hands away and took over. She didn’t stop at the cravat. The waistcoat was next to go, unbuttoned down from the top. Took only a second and she was pulling that off. Daisy had lots of practice undressing men.

Three buttons at the neck and she had his shirt open. Push the shirt aside and the bullet wound was revealed in all its ugly glory.

Not a sound from her, but her face froze.

“I told you it weren’t much. A professional hazard, you might say. And it’s healing.” He’d taken a long inspection in the mirror this morning when he unbandaged and tossed out the wrappings for good. The swelling and pinkness on his chest was about gone. There was none of that disgusting exudate everybody kept deploring. Its absence was fine with him. He owned a coin-sized red mark with some scar radiating out, like a little red sun. “I feel very manly and professional. All my cohorts have impressive scars. Now I do, too.”

Daisy left her hand on his collarbone, not touching the wound but lifting the shirt away from his skin so she could see. “I can see it hurts you from the way you move.”

“Tortures of the damned, that’s what I’m suffering. I’m just being stoical.”

As usual, Daisy ignored most of what he said. “Is this all?”

“You don’t think this is enough? I come back with an actual bullet wound—this is me first bullet wound, by the way. It’s a good one, as these things go. Something I can show off without being indelicate. I like to think it’s artistic.” It was an identifying mark he could have done without.

“What happened?”

“Well, I got shot, diddin I? One bullet. Lost a piece of skin and a couple pints of blood. Oh, and a waistcoat. I’ve been having bad luck with my wardrobe lately.”

“What happened?” She held his shoulder lightly and waited.