He didn’t so much make a decision as accept an inevitability. He might have been waiting ten years to sit across from Vérité in this pile of straw, talking about friendship and trust, the two of them a bare inch from attacking each other. He knew what he was going to do. Some part of him had planned it before he climbed in the window of Braid’s Bookshop. He said, “I can say anything to you.”
“You’re armed and I’m not. You can recite Dante in the original Italian if you want.”
That made him smile. “Or I can do this.” He kissed the hollow of her hand. Maybe it tickled.
She drew in a breath, sharply. He had her attention.
She said, “Pax?”
The inside of her wrist was filled with the pulse beat. He ran a touch up and down the side of her fingers, between one finger and the next, where it was soft. Sensitive, he thought. She’d be sensitive in lots of places.
“What are you doing?” She frowned down to where he explored her hand.
“This.”
They knelt in the straw, facing. He set two fingers under her chin, lifted her attention up to him, and considered the woman who’d grown from the child Vérité. A tilted nose. Raphael would have put that nose on an impudent cherub. Dark eyes making some realizations. The curve of her cheek that held the sensuality of a Caravaggio.
She looked startled all the long moment he leaned to her and convinced her lips open with his and went into her mouth.
“And this,” he said. He felt her surprise. Her lips were full of tiny shocks and a disbelief that held her still, and then the softening. He pursued that softening, demanded it, gave neither of them time to think or plan. He wasn’t in the mood to trade calculation with her.
“Now this.” He nuzzled across warm smoothness of cheek and forehead and the planes and valleys of her nose. Into the silly, frivolous ears lost in the ocean of her hair. He’d drawn the geography of a face a thousand times. This transformed shape, line, light and dark, all shades of color into texture. It overwhelmed thought.
He sucked her lower lip. Softness and slickness. She was . . . oh, she was remarkable. A thousand distinct complexities of her mouth came to life under his tongue. This is the way it should feel. Every discovery of shape and taste robbed his brain, tugged at his cock, wound the tension inside him tighter and tighter.
After the first surprise, she wasn’t reluctant. She licked into his mouth. Nibbled at the corners of his lips where the skin went thin. Little teeth held his lips, anchoring an instant, stretching, pulling, letting go.
She grabbed her fingers into his jacket. Stretched upward to him. Kneeling, pressed against him. Her mouth became passion incarnate. She was heat and quick breathing and her arms went around him. Under the wool she wore, her shoulders were naked. He pushed the cloak away and put his hands on her and felt her thin bones shaking. Vérité, the great schemer who planned everything, wasn’t scheming this.
He drew back. She was breathing fast, lips slack, eyes open but empty of thought.
He wondered if he looked like that. Stunned.
Awareness crept back into her gaze. He saw the absolute puzzlement, the amazement. Then she blinked and laughter welled up everywhere inside her till it spilled out into the dim air of the storeroom. Deep, husky laughing. That was pure and simple Vérité. Her unquenchable delight in all of creation.
She said, “Why did we do that?”
Because I wanted to. You wanted to. Because I’ve made my choice of betrayals. “You tell me.”
“Are we seducing information out of each other?”
“If we had all night, maybe. But we don’t. We’ll do that next time.” He got up to standing, clumsy about it. Aroused. Vulnerable to attack and knowing that he was. The brush of his trousers across his cock struck like hot lightning. “Think about this. Whatever I am, whatever I’ve done, you know I wouldn’t kiss somebody I was about to turn over to the Service.”
“I am . . . I’m bewildered.”
“We both are. We’ll learn to live with it.” His muscles were dense and heavy, roaring with the need to hold her and get inside her. Looked like his days of being in charge of his body were over. Here and now, with this woman, when he couldn’t afford to be distracted.
Just damn it. He reached his hand down to help her to her feet. It’d be nice to think she wasn’t entirely steady inside her own body right now.
She stood still beside him, cloak discarded, probably cold again, looking suspicious, radiating sensuality and competence. Beautiful.
“I’m supposed to trust you,” she said, “because you kissed me.”
“It worked. Check through your private opinions when you have a spare moment. Right now . . .” Right now, get her covered. Get her skin out of sight. Get those breasts hidden where they didn’t drive him mad.
Her clothes were shoved under the table, out of the way. He retrieved them and tossed them in her direction. He laid her weaponry out on the tabletop, bit by bit, in a line. “You get dressed. Put your arsenal back in its accustomed places. Then we sneak you past four of the best agents in the world, who are waiting outside, alert and suspicious. Don’t use your arsenal on me and don’t kill my friends.”
She burrowed into her dress and emerged. “You left me behind five or six thoughts ago. You’re letting me go. Why are you letting me go?”
“Because you’re going to give me Mr. Smith’s head on a platter. Remember?”
She ran the length of a stocking through her hand, straightening it. Then she stood on one leg and slipped it on. Her garters had fallen on the floor so she stooped to pick one up.
“Meet me tomorrow, at noon, outside Gunter’s.” He looked at the window. It was wholly dark. No sign of dawn. “Or maybe I mean today. About ten hours from now, anyway.”
“I’m a fugitive in London, armed to the teeth, engaged in desperate enterprises, pursued by the British Service. You want me to eat ices with you at Gunter’s, in Berkeley Square, in public, in the middle of London. Perhaps we will share a pot of chocolate. My bewilderment is unbounded.”
“A woman can sit alone in a confectioner’s. Same principle as a church or a public square, but with chocolate and little cakes. And you won’t get rained on.”
“I understand that much.” She sounded annoyed.
“The Service won’t be looking for you there. If I don’t show up at Gunter’s, go to the confectioner’s on Barr Street at five and wait. Tomorrow, the same.”
She wore the expression of someone thinking furiously. “Why would I do this?”
“Because you’re alone, Cami. You have a plan and you need help with it. I know a great deal about Mr. Smith that you need to hear. I’ll share it with you tomorrow, when you show up.”
No expression on her face, but he knew he’d made his point.
He said, “And if you don’t show up, there’ll be broadsides on every street corner with your face on them.”
She maneuvered into the second stocking and slowly tied the garter. “You’re persuasive.”
“But you’ll come to meet me because you trust me.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Cachés trust each other. They never betray each other. Somebody told me that recently. Let me do up the buttons in back. We’re in a hurry.”
Without hesitation, she turned and presented him the nape of her neck, the white triangle with her backbone running down into her shift, the curls above interlocked, every one with a tiny half-moon of light trapped in it. He wanted to close his teeth on her and bite down and hold her there like a tomcat on his tabby.
Her skin drew up and twitched where his fingers ran across, doing up the buttons. Seven buttons. He closed them from bottom to top, working his way upward. There were levels of hell that provided less torture.
He said, “You’ll leave by the front. There are two agents keeping an eye there. The two dangerous ones are at the back.”