Written on Your Skin

  “I’m not trying to prove anything.” Was she? It was true that she wondered how hot a flame his feelings might manage to withstand. But she did not want to hold his hand to the stove. She had no desire to hear him cry uncle. “It’s only—if this is what your love means—if we are not to be equals, if you can’t believe in me…” Then I can’t accept it.

  Did she mean that? If she did, surely she would be able to bring herself to speak the words. But they lodged in her throat, a solid pressure difficult to breathe around. “I expect nothing from so many people,” she said haltingly. “But from you, I find myself expecting…so much.”

  His face shuttered. “And I fail to deliver it, you mean.”

  “No, I—”

  “Yes, let’s be honest here.” His voice had sharpened into a jibe. “Of course you can’t leave it to me. I’ve failed you. You’ve never forgiven me for Hong Kong. Those scars you wear—they’re what stands between us.”

  “No.” His idiocy astonished her. “Why won’t you listen to me?”

  “Oh, I’ve been listening. And it all seems very clear to me, suddenly. I ran out on you, yellow as a dog. You have no cause to depend on me.” His laughter hurt her ears. “And you are wise for it, no doubt. I’m the fool here. If my father—”

  She raised the gun to his heart, and he fell silent. Her hand was shaking with the force of her revelation. “Coward,” she said. “At least I own up to my fears. I vowed never to make my mother’s mistakes. But you? You’re rationalizing your actions on the assumption that you will make his mistakes. You think I’m testing you? What is the opium but a test for yourself?”

  His mouth thinned. “Mina. If something were to happen to you—”

  “What? Do you think you would turn into him? That the demon inside you would take hold? That you would turn to the drug every night?” Her laughter sounded ragged. “I take it back. It’s not me you need to trust, Phin. It’s yourself. You’re right. I would make myself bait only because I trust you. And damn you,” she added fiercely. “I am not wrong to do so.”

  Slowly, very slowly, he raised his hand. His fingers closed over her wrist, steering the gun away, toward the wall.

  She loosened her grip, letting him pull away the weapon, watching as he crouched to set it on the floor. As he straightened, long-limbed, loose, and rangy, she whispered, “I know you. You know I’m right.”

  He stared at her, expressionless. And then all at once he moved. His fingers plunged through her hair, painfully hard, hairpins springing free. He dragged her head to his. He was trying to prove his own blackness, perhaps; the kiss was hot, punishing almost. She kissed him back just as hard; she was not afraid.

  He stepped into her, making her stumble over her skirts. Her palms came up to his hands where they gripped her, her nails cutting into his flesh, digging in for balance as he walked her backward out of the sitting room. Her calves hit the bed. Down she fell, and he came down atop her, his lips fierce, brooking no objection.

  If he thought to ravish her, he was in for a disappointment. She closed her eyes to block out the sight of this room like a jewelry box; she closed her mind to the objections she’d entertained so successfully for two weeks now in denying herself this pleasure. She would take it again; she would ravish him.

  The sunlight felt warm on her face, but his lips were hotter; beneath her roaming hands the muscles of his arms bulged stubbornly, immovable. Their mouths made soft sucking noises of communion, belying the rough scrape of his teeth. Her skirts rustled as he yanked them up, and the starched sheets protested as he came down fully atop her; the rub of cloth sounded like shocked whispers from a distantly observing crowd.

  But the moment held no scope for subtleties or demurral. She reached down to help him, to yank her skirts all the way to her waist, spreading her legs for him without hesitation. She felt his surprise in the brief pause of his body, but then his hand was delving between her legs, stroking without hesitance, drawing a crude design between her lips. She thrust against his hand and he pushed a finger inside her, and then another, widening them to stretch her, as if he was the one who wanted to test limits. Which, of course, he was.

  “Open your eyes,” he growled into her ear.

  His lips looked unexpectedly soft in the light, glossed by their kisses, but his exhausted eyes demanded things of her. She craned up to press her mouth to the cleft in his chin, running her tongue along it as his hand set a steady, hard rhythm below. Slipping under the hem of his shirt, up the hard, ridged plain of his belly to the slight rise of his nipples, her fingers traveled him. She set her nails into his flesh and raked them down to his navel, and he shuddered and cursed beneath his breath and bit her on the shoulder through the thin silk of her gown.

  None of this was civilized. She scratched him again, even harder, and bit him on the neck. If he had a demon, so did she. He removed his hand to lick his thumb before laying it back atop her slit, and she arched beneath him, her back coming off the bed. She had learned from the cat that moving away from a touch could be as provocative as moving into it, but perhaps Ashmore had known this all along; he had walked away from her in Hong Kong, and she had chased after him because of it.

  She moaned beneath his insistent strokes, and he laughed, his hot breath moving like a flame down her décolletage. A wild sound; it made her nape prickle, and from a stranger it would have made her run scrambling for safety. But the danger he presented came all from within. She gasped as his teeth closed around the fabric over her nipple. She opened her mouth on his shoulder and laid her hand against his cock, holding the length of him through his trousers.

  And suddenly, a strange pause overtook them. Their bodies fell still by some silent accord, his hand inside her, his mouth pressed to her breast and hers to his shoulder, their ragged breathing warming each other’s skin, her fingers cupped around him, the birdsong outside. Stray motes of dust floated in the sunlight, and his hair rippled in waves from his scalp, shining dark.

  Peace came over her in a long, loosening wave. She did not want to leave him. She wanted to wake up beside him in the mornings.

  When he lifted his head, the unguarded look on his face made her breath catch. It triggered grief, always near the surface these days. Tears pricked her eyes, and he leaned up to kiss her, very softly, on the mouth. He drew back, then returned once more, his tongue slipping across hers, sipping from her lightly but deeply, as his hand between her legs adopted a gentler and more specific focus. Her muscles tightened, but everything else in her melted; her fingers moved to the fly of his trousers, and then, as his flesh made hot contact with her fingers, she rubbed him gently, his tongue and his cock both.

  A small noise broke from his throat, curiously soft, almost lost; she did not want him to feel lost. She was with him. She lifted her arms and wrapped them around his back very tightly, pulling him up against her, squeezing his hips with her thighs, enveloping him as fully and tightly as she was able. His hardness brushed against her, and she tilted her pelvis to bring herself into fuller contact. “Come,” she whispered.

  He pushed inside her little by little, easing her open to him. As he hilted himself, they both sighed. The coincidence made her smile a little. If only it were all so easy as this. The slow rocking movement he set up made her feel dreamy, at once everything fleshly and also free of flesh, unbounded and limitless, adrift like a dust mote, illuminated as fully.

  Behind her eyes even the darkness looked soft, soft as his hair against her cheek; she stroked the stubble on his jaw as they moved together. The rhythm itself was dependent on repetition, but it moved one forward anyway; she sensed her oncoming crisis as her senses expanded in every direction. The sheets smelled of lemon and a faint trace of vinegar; the salt on her lips was from him. Dim distant noises from the street: the rumble of a carriage, the happy cry of a child, the scrape of a broom over dusty bricks. She felt capable of knowing and absorbing everything. He moved within her and she was the world.

  “Mina,” he whis
pered.

  “Yes,” she murmured back, and broke apart, so simply and comfortably in his arms, trembling with it.

  He went still over her, the veins on his arms corded, as though the force of his pleasure strained his ability to contain it. And then, with a short, gusting breath, he leaned down to kiss her again, and she felt the slight ache and twinge of his withdrawal, the stickiness between her thighs.

  Risk. Objectively unnecessary. Her instincts had demanded it.

  When he rolled off her, she followed, coming up on her elbow to look at him. His lashes were long, curved sweetly as a child’s; his lips pouted, full as a boy’s. She ran a finger over his bottom lip, then down his chin. He stared at the ceiling, and his chest lifted and fell on a long breath. The light falling through the lace curtains laid a gold filigree over his face, and the delicate pattern touched off a stray thought. It made so much sense, now: what the men last night must have been looking for, and why Collins had kidnapped Mama.

  She leaned forward to kiss his ear, intending it to be a brief project. But the softness of his lobe intrigued her startled lips; she ran her tongue along the edge, and now he exhaled a longer breath, as though finally his lungs could rest. “I will trust you,” she whispered. “I’ll do as you ask. But only if you trust yourself.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Trust yourself. Her edict stayed with him after he left her rooms, the locket safe in his pocket. It echoed in his head as he wrote the note to Ridland, whose men would circulate word of his proposed trade: the locket for Harriet Collins. With a hairpin, he and Mina had bared the secret of the necklace that Collins had given his wife, so many years ago. Beneath the miniature painting of roses in bloom lay a cipher disk, a set of tiny circular scales that, when spun, would help to unlock a code. No doubt, for a man with so many enemies, a woman’s neck had seemed the safest place to store it.

  Trust yourself. The words continued to puzzle him as he dressed for the evening. He wanted to keep Mina safe from a goddamned criminal; surely that was not an unusual urge for a man in love. He could not understand, then, why she insisted on connecting that desire to the question of his own trust in himself.

  But as he contemplated the matter, his rising anger gave him pause. It suggested that his confusion concealed some deeper knowledge that he did not wish to face.

  He was not accustomed to thinking of himself as willfully ignorant. As Fretgoose arranged his necktie, he stared into the mirror, watching his own eyes. Even he could not read them. He had no idea how she managed to do it so well. Alas, his own insight into her seemed equally clear. She was speaking the truth to him. If Bonham didn’t take the bait tonight, he would need to enlist her aid. Otherwise, he had no hope of keeping her.

  He dismissed Fretgoose and went to fetch his pipe. In the small, railed area outside the kitchen, he smashed it to pieces. Afterward, he dusted the fragrant ash off his hands and watched the flakes flutter away, dissolving in the breeze like stray regrets.

  His plan was to spend the evening with Sanburne’s circle. He had told Ridland to advertise his plan to visit the Empire; the music hall would be crowded and raucous, an excellent place for Ridland’s men to position themselves unnoticed. Sanburne had responded to the proposition of an outing quite enthusiastically; apparently, one of his friends had just come into money and required a celebration.

  Sanburne came for him at nine o’clock, Dalton and Tilney in tow. The carriage already smelled like a gin palace on payday, Tilney flushed as red from booze as Dalton’s hair. Sanburne’s mood seemed strangely muted, but when Tilney held out a bottle, he took it rapidly enough and downed half of it in one go before handing it back. Tilney then turned toward Phin, extending the bottle just as the coach thudded into motion. Wine splashed over Phin’s knees.

  “Brilliant,” said Sanburne. He snatched the bottle and upended it on Tilney’s trousers. As the man shrieked, he raised his voice. “No need to cry like a girl, there’s another around here somewhere.”

  Tilney rummaged around by Sanburne’s feet. He came up with a new bottle, which he tried to present to Phin.

  “Doesn’t drink,” said Sanburne.

  “What!” Tilney gawked at him. Dalton leaned forward, squinting, as though to inspect a sea creature brought up from the deep.

  “Occasionally,” Phin said. “But only to anesthetize my boredom with the company.”

  The Empire was bustling, its cream-and-gilt facade brightly lit, the curb packed with carriages. Swells in tall hats, ladies in gaudy satins and feathered headdresses, porters in their red-banded caps, match women and urchins pleading for coins, helmeted policemen attempting futilely to disperse the throng—the hubbub of the crowd trailed them inside, up the red-carpeted stairs, until it faded to a muted roar not unlike the sweep of wind on a winter’s night.

  Their box sat high above the stage, at one end of the U-shaped balcony next to the fall of the blue velvet curtains. It gave Phin a good panorama.

  Drinks were ordered. Phin, with a pointed glance at Tilney, called for a whiskey. Sanburne looked approving. Phin took a sip, then waited for the act to start before pouring the liquid onto the carpet. At the next round, he demanded another. Now Sanburne looked puzzled. The viscount was a very curious alcoholic, wasn’t he? By the third drink, Sanburne was watching him narrowly. You’re right, Phin thought, I can’t do it so well as you can. Tilney disappeared and returned with a ballet dancer, who batted her lashes at Phin and complimented his cuff links. Dalton said something loud and eager, and the men laughed, an ugly, sharp sound that made the dancer flinch. She looked very young. Did they not notice that their boisterousness scared her? She was clearly new to this routine. He would not wish it on her; he would wish it on no woman, but all too often they had no choice in the matter.

  He closed his eyes, breathing deeply. Bonham was not going to show. He felt this in his gut. He was going to have to let her play a role. He was not a praying man; he had no idea how the hell he was going to get through it.

  Dalton leaned over to harass him, complaining that he was not being properly celebratory. And then Sanburne, pursuing a new line of investigation, leaned forward and gave Phin a sniff. “Opium?” He sat back. “Even gin would be sweeter to you. Arsenic would be softer on your brain.”

  Lectured by Sanburne on matters of health and clean living—here was rich irony, indeed. A man could mine it for months and not tap out the vein. “No doubt,” he said evenly. “Thank you for your concern.”

  “I’m worried for you,” the viscount said.

  Apparently, Phin was not the only one who required a look in the mirror. “You needn’t worry,” he said.

  “The hell I don’t.”

  “Have you a mirror, James?”

  Sanburne recoiled. He looked as if he wanted to say something else, but all at once his mouth twisted, and he stood. “More drinks, then,” he said to the box. “Anyone?”

  He disappeared for a good deal of time. Phin was growing restless now. Bonham’s absence made the night a pointless exercise, and he did not like to leave Mina alone. Tilney and Dalton addressed him; he had no interest in responding. She was right, he thought. There was no use pretending to be one of these people, or attempting a life like theirs. He had no use for this mask.

  When Sanburne returned, nudging his shoulder and asking him to step outside, he was glad to oblige. They stepped into the snug little hallway that curved behind the boxes, all dark red velvet and the faint smell of smoke. “I need your help,” the viscount said. He looked surprisingly grim in the smothered light. “Are you sober?”

  Phin propped his shoulder against the wall. “Sufficiently. What is it?”

  “I need you to put out an ear for underground rumors.” Sanburne paused. “To be brief, some boy has been writing me about curses and tears and whatnot, and just now he popped up on the stairs and tried to gut me.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Phin said, thrown off by the delivery of such tidings in this casual manner.

 
The viscount shifted impatiently. “You heard me right. And I want him found. He’s delivering the notes somehow; perhaps a watch on my house would work.” His brow arched; the pregnant pause lent his next words a deeper significance. “Can you do that?”

  “I could arrange for it,” Phin said carefully. What fresh mess had James gotten himself into now? “Tears, you say. And a curse.”

  “Yes.” Sanburne’s gray eyes narrowed in study of him. “Perhaps some information as well. I expect you must have friends who play in that part of the world.”

  By habit, an evasive reply sprang to Phin’s lips. But he hesitated. He had no pride in his dark connections, or in the fact that he was still privy, through them, to strange and dangerous knowledge. His past did not do him proud; he had stumbled into his occupation out of idiocy, and survived through sheer will and native talent, the sort that might allow a mule to pull a cart up a mountain. For almost six months now, he had tried to forget it, to be someone different.

  But the silences required by his routine had led to this. He looked at Sanburne now and saw a stranger, and a stranger looked back at him warily, asking for help with no confidence at all that he’d receive it. “I’d appreciate it,” Sanburne added. It was as close as he would ever come to saying please.

  And why should he have to say please? They had known each other since boyhood. Phin ran a hand over his eyes. Did his skills so diminish him? He would always regret the applications to which they’d been put, the pain he had inflicted and the death he had dealt. He would carry that regret to his grave. But he had also aided people in his time. And last night, he had saved a life more precious to him than his own. When she had called that a talent worth having, nothing in him had been able to disagree.

  Surely regret could exist side by side with hope. An unsheathed knife was not dangerous so long as it was wielded justly, and put to a deserving target. There was no shame in being able to help, and he excelled at what he did. He was a natural. Didn’t she realize that? Why didn’t she trust him?