Written on Your Skin Page 12

His hand lifted, resettling on her arm; with impersonal thoroughness, it skated over her breasts and waist, then down to her hips, sliding briefly between her thighs, moving away too quickly for her to get out a protest. He was looking, she realized, for a weapon. “You already took my gun,” she said breathlessly.

  He grabbed her arm and pulled her upright. Not letting go of her, he leaned away toward the wall. Light rose. His square jaw was clean-shaven now, the white shirt a startling contrast against his golden skin. His cold regard seemed no more reassuring for the new clarity with which she viewed it. “I should have known when I saw your nails.” An unpleasant smile tipped up the corners of his mouth. “He always did have an eye for beauty.” He flicked a finger at the trailing ends of her hair where it fell past her breast.

  Such a small touch. But the hairs lifted on her skin, and a shiver broke over her. Even in this terrible moment, her body was attuned to him. She loathed it.

  He noticed. His brow lifted, and he made a low, interested noise. With two fingers he caught up the lock of hair, winding it around his knuckles, until the pull at her scalp forced her to step toward him, her lips coming within a hand’s width of his chest. “Miss Masters,” he mused. He spoke her name as though testing a new interpretation of the syllables. “Mina Masters, damsel in distress. How sweetly you do play that role.”

  Hearing her own phrase from his lips made her feel horribly obvious. She was glad for the return of her anger. “You’re wrong,” she said. “You think you’re being clever here, but you’re mistaken.”

  “That makes two of us, then. What did he tell you? That I’m clawless now?” The idea seemed to amuse him; his gaze unfocused, looking through her, and he laughed beneath his breath. His eyes were such a dark brown that they bordered on black. Shadows for eyes, made deeper and more mesmerizing by those long, almost girlish lashes, which lured one into trusting them against one’s better judgment; she should have known better than to try to enlist his aid, or to mention him to Ridland. “No,” he said, and his attention dropped down her body. “He chose badly for this job. Unless the task was to seduce me? What did he tell you, that I’d inherited my father’s taste for trollops?”

  “No one told me anything,” she said stonily.

  He did not seem to hear this. His eyes lifted now to her face, roaming across her cheeks and lips. “Well, and perhaps you could have managed it. I’ve always thought you a sweet little package.” His hand lowered, pulling down her hair and her head along with it, so she had no choice but to watch as his knuckles skated across the upper slope of her breast. “You can still give it a go, if you like. All this hair…” He laughed again, a low, distinctly sexual sound. “I could tie you up with it.”

  The vision formed with startling clarity in her brain. The day she let a man tie her down was the day she died. She would bite his throat out if he tried it.

  It seemed unwise to share that intention. Besides, if he thought she was a blushing virgin, then the advantage was all hers. She pitched her voice very low. “Let go of me, and I’ll do my best.”

  Now his hand rose, to nudge up her chin and force her eyes to his. His regard narrowed on her. In the silence, she heard the distant chimes of the clock again. Only a quarter hour. It felt like a century. “Oh, I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t leave knives unsheathed.”

  Silence fell. She did not know how to break it, but she could see the calculations working through his expression, and it came to her, strongly, that it was better he not be allowed to finish them. Heart drumming, she leaned forward and pressed her lips to his.

  He held perfectly still. It disconcerted her. She ran her tongue along his upper lip, and he exhaled, his breath coasting across her mouth. His lips were much softer than they appeared. She set her teeth onto the bottom one, very lightly. If he did something dislikable, she could bite it clean off him.

  His fingers brushed against her neck. The gentle touch startled her; she let go of his lip and he spoke against her mouth. “You’re going to have to do better than that, Mina.”

  Her face prickled. She could not believe she was flushing, that some base part of her was suddenly warming to this charade. Bodies were so stupid. “Let go of my hair and I will.”

  He leaned forward and kissed her. His tongue opened her lips and forced itself inside, touching and tangling with hers as his hand loosed her hair and came around her waist. He bent over her and knocked her off balance so she fell backward, relying on his arm alone for support.

  He tasted hot and dark, and his kiss was like the onset of a fever; the angle, the stroke of his tongue, and the dig of his fist into her back left no role for her but submission. He held her in such a way that her instincts kept telling her she was about to fall. She found herself grabbing his shoulders to offset her dizziness, and his mouth pressed harder into hers, forcing her to a new awareness of his knuckles digging into her spine, the solid density and thickness of his shoulders, how easily he was overwhelming her.

  Nothing in her should have responded to it, save that his strength was somehow not hurting her. His grip on her was brutal in its absoluteness, but it caused her no discomfort, and his kiss pulled her into pleasure despite herself. He kissed as gracefully as he moved; she could not predict it. His mouth sucked at hers, his teeth caught her lip. He spoke into her mouth. “What were you meant to find?”

  “Nothing,” she gasped.

  Abruptly, she was standing on her feet again; he had set her away and stepped back. His chest was moving more rapidly than normal, but as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, she realized it was not arousal that made his eyes so heavy-lidded. A muscle ticked at his temple as he stared at her. Why, he was not enjoying himself at all.

  All at once, she felt a weird urge to laugh. His action said everything: he had no intention of hurting her, or of ravishing her, either. How badly he’d scared her—and for what? “You’ve cooked up this drama yourself.” Her voice sounded only a little unsteady. He kissed as well as she’d remembered. “Yes, I was an idiot to come in here. But you took me from that cellar in the rudest manner possible. You can’t blame me for trying to figure out if I’m safe with you. Locked up here, at your mercy—what would you do in my situation?”

  His brow lifted. “The same thing, perhaps. But not so clumsily.”

  Stupid to feel stung by his criticism. “Yes, well, I have little experience in spying, and not much interest in acquiring it, I must confess.”

  His mouth thinned. “One thing you will remember,” he said. “I am not, and have never been, a spy.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, “you are a tycoon, I forgot. You trade in coca, when you’re not jumping out windows.”

  “I am a mapmaker,” he said sharply. “Raised ludicrously high, which is cause enough for interest, believe me. Once you leave this place, your imagination will be counted as running wild if you claim anything more extraordinary.”

  That he mentioned her departure as an inevitability moved her to smile. Maybe they could get along, after all. “Oh, I’m no more imaginative than you,” she said. “Perfectly boring, really.”

  He sighed as if she had disappointed him. But then he rubbed his eyes, and she wondered if he wasn’t simply tired. “Would that were the case, Miss Masters.” He ran his hand through his hair, setting it into furrows; if he’d had a gold ring in his ear, he might have played the pirate right now, with his wild mane and billowing shirtsleeves and suntanned skin. He had not looked nearly so handsome in Hong Kong. “I will ask you one more time,” he said as he dropped his hand. “How long have you worked for Ridland?”

  She was stubborn and refused to admit anything. But why the hell else would a pampered American girl know how—or care—to pick a lock and go rifling through his private documents? Phin set a footman outside her door that night, a brawny, weathered fellow he’d found at one of the pubs Sanburne liked to frequent for boxing. Gompers, his name was, and he showed no sign of curiosity or concern when Phin informed him that Mis
s Masters was not to be let out of her rooms, making him just the man for the job.

  The next morning, Phin had the locks replaced on her apartments. Unless she had the hands of a virtuoso, she’d be going nowhere now unless he willed it. And the hell of it was, he could permit her to go nowhere, not even back to Ridland’s, until he knew her aim, and his own role in it. Ridland’s rot had invaded his own home; he was helpless to expunge it. And thus, he thought, I add jailkeeper to my long list of accomplishments.

  He should not be so angry. He told himself this over breakfast, and again during a very unrewarding meeting with the Oxford trustees. At first, they balked at the proposal to name the chair in cartography for Sheldrake, and to his own surprise, he lifted his voice. It worked to alter their attitude, though; they left amidst a shower of gratitude and apologies, no doubt fearing that otherwise he might revoke his endowment. His father had often gotten his way by yelling, but Phin had never needed to stoop to it. Thus did one day of Miss Masters’s company erode his control.

  He could not say for whom his frustration was larger, himself or her. He had been an idiot, all right, believing that the repayment of his debt would be simple. An unexpected epilogue to an already-closed book, he’d told himself, as if anything were simple where Ridland was involved. But there was the rub: Some part of him had known this. Some part of him had craved it. He felt more clearheaded than he had in weeks. Scaling the cliffs at Dover, stroking an eight across the Channel, rubbing shoulders with the royal family—realizing these boyhood dreams, nursed for so long in a heart made ambitious by disappointment, had left him strangely numb. But a letter from Ridland set his heart drumming. A trollop sent to raid his study, who spoke lies more easily than a false oracle—she could made his skin flush.

  He put it down to the fact that he hadn’t touched a woman in months. He had no taste for the sorts of arrangements, or the diseases, that his father had contracted with whores, and mastering his new responsibilities had left him little time to find and woo some agreeable widow. With Mina Masters laid out like a feast on his desk, her eyes flashing defiance, he had simply discovered the cost of his abstinence.

  But the explanation did not quell his disquiet. Her lips against his had conjured dark possibilities, all the various fleshly punishments a beautiful woman could expect for poking her nose into other people’s business. His imagination proved fecund and disturbingly depraved. She roused in him capacities that he had tried to forget he possessed; she reminded him that, for a decade, he’d done very well as a villain.

  Worse, she had kissed him back as though she had a taste for depravity. The flavor of her mouth still lingered on his tongue.

  He did not want her in his house.

  After the trustees’ departure, a note arrived from the Sheldrakes, stiffly worded and ingratiating. They asked permission to call tomorrow to deliver their thanks in person. He almost wrote them to stay away. My house is unfit for you; keep clear of this tangle. But of course he could not refuse them; they would take it as an insult, and reinterpret his generosity as condescension.

  A note came from Sanburne in the early afternoon, inviting him to the club for what he assumed would be lunch. But when he arrived, the majordomo escorted him past the dining room, down the hall into the shooting gallery. Sanburne was lounging on a bench, a bottle and a pair of protective earpieces by his boots. He was watching a slim blond man take aim at the painted figure on the wall. A shot rang out. The resulting hole, a good foot from the figure, suggested that the man was nearsighted or nervous.

  “Deuced bad luck,” the gunman said as he turned around. Neither nervous nor nearsighted, then, but a waste of breath all the same. Phin had known Tilney since Eton, and time had not improved him; he was still prettier than a girl, and as bad with wagers and wine as he was with a gun. Sanburne was keeping bad company these days.

  The man broke into a grin as he spotted Phin. “What ho, Granville! You’ve cost me five quid.”

  “Ah,” said Sanburne, turning and lifting his chin in welcome. “That’s right, he told me you’d never be pried from your maps.”

  “Glad to enrich you,” Phin said.

  Tilney lifted the pistol. “Newest model from Webley. Have a go?”

  Phin glanced to Sanburne, who shrugged. “Just had my turn.”

  That accounted for the hole in the figure’s arm. Not the place to shoot a man if you meant to stop him from coming at you; Phin had seen rage that numbed a man’s pain more effectively than morphine. But such skill would prove sufficient for a society darling whose main concern was making a good show at the summer hunting balls. I’ve grown into a mean bastard, he thought as he walked forward.

  “Oh, cheers,” said Tilney as he held out the pistol. His grip was three-fingered, a damned foolish way to hold a loaded gun. “Say, you didn’t stop by after the Derby. We had a nice little rout.”

  The revolver nestled in his palm. Nice balance, good proportion, enough weight to focus the mind. “I was busy.”

  Tilney’s smile now looked strained. “Yes, well, it got me thinking. I do hope you’re not still grudged about the piss on the pillowcases. Told the lads you weren’t Irish, but you know how boys can be.”

  “Oh, third form,” said Sanburne easily. “Decades ago.”

  Phin shifted his grip. “Old hat,” he agreed with a smile. “So long as you’re not still sulking over being dumped into the latrine. And thrashed,” he added thoughtfully. With a glance toward the painted figure, he arched one brow. “I hope your vision recovered? I never did remember to ask.”

  Tilney looked a little more uneasily now at the gun. “Brilliantly, thanks.” He cleared his throat. “Quite a growth spurt you had there, Granville.”

  “It’s Ashmore now.” Phin lifted the gun and took aim. The sound of the shot exploded through the room. They were doing themselves no favors by forgoing the earpieces. “And, yes,” he said as he lowered his arm. “I quite enjoyed it.”

  Sanburne was applauding. “Straight through the eyes. This calls for celebration.”

  He felt an increasing sense of unreality. “Celebration, yes. Good to know I could kill you both quite easily.”

  “I’ve got to beg off,” Tilney said. “Prior engagement, what?”

  In the dining room, Sanburne was full of light, amusing news. An artifact he’d bought had been denounced as a fake last week at some public event, and he seemed delighted by the sympathy flowing to him from all corners of society. “I’ve dined out on it for five nights,” he said. “I may arrange to buy another forgery tomorrow.”

  The Cornish hen was tough, the wine sour. Phin attended to the conversation with half a mind; the other half wondered what the hell was wrong with him. This was his life now. Sanburne was genuinely witty. Phin should not be laughing mechanically at these jokes.

  He realized silence had fallen when Sanburne broke it with a poke at his arm. “Are you in love, then?”

  “Good God, no.” He was in something, all right, but it was the furthest thing from love. In fact, he rather suspected it to be a great pile of shit. “Why do you ask?”

  “You’ve got that dreamy, idiotic look about you.”

  He considered this for a moment. “Perhaps I’ve formed an interest,” he said. “Sheldrake’s daughter is coming to town tomorrow. She’s turned out quite well.”

  Sanburne’s brows lifted to his hairline. “Sheldrake’s daughter! Bit long in the tooth by now, surely.” He paused, a smile creeping over his mouth. “Not that there’s a thing wrong with a spinster. They accrue a bit of flavor on the shelf. Well, well. Phin and old Sheldrake’s daughter. I think this calls for a real drink.” He lifted three fingers to the bearer, who showed no sign of surprise at this stiff order. “For you?” he asked.

  Phin shook his head. “Coffee.” He’d halt the deterioration where he could; liquor had smoothed his parents’ road to hell, but he would feel every bump, if he had to.

  “Ah? Gone the glory years, then? I remember when no residen
t of Oxford could count on a night’s sleep without being regaled by your fine, drunken baritone.”

  He laughed. “Oh, I’ll sing for you. Like a canary in a goddamned mine shaft. But best you keep drinking; you won’t like it so much if you’re sober.”

  “Hmm.” Sanburne gave him an irritatingly thoughtful inspection. “I expect your sleepier toxins don’t inspire much song,” he said. “Thanks to you, I spent a good deal of my own party last week talking to the bloody flagstones.”

  Phin sat back as his coffee was delivered. “Yes, the ether was a bad choice.” He’d heard it lauded for its sedative properties, but it had been the furthest thing from soothing. Perhaps he would try chloral next. He needed something to alternate with the opium, lest he end up enslaved to the substance.

  “No harm done.” Sanburne took up his drink, tossing back nearly half at one go. “It called my attention to a pressing philosophical riddle. A man comes to a crossroads. Down one road lies everything loathsome and dutiful—”

  “Are they one and the same?”

  “—obligations he never asked for, a life of comfort and empty honors. Yes, I think they are one and the same. They both lead to the same end, anyway: a slow suffocation by way of doing the done thing.”

  Suffocation was an apt word. Phin thought of his fit in Sheldrake’s study. A touch of that feeling had come upon him in the shooting gallery, which worried him. Generally, these fits came farther apart. Well, it had ebbed fast enough when Tilney departed. “Better a slow suffocation than a quick beheading,” he said. He was not sure he privately agreed, but for Sanburne, at least, the wisdom was sound.

  “Indeed, no. A quick and glorious end is always preferable to a slow and painful one. And it makes a hell of a show for those left behind.” Sanburne’s smile looked calculated. “Even those who don’t wish to watch.”

  Phin repressed a stir of impatience. This crusade Sanburne had launched against his father kept London entertained, but it seemed the height of childishness to him. Sanburne’s sister Stella was no victim; she’d put a knife through her husband’s throat. If their father thought her better kept in an asylum, the men of London certainly breathed more easily for it. “And what lies down the other road?”