My Lord and Spymaster by Joanna Bourne Read Free Book Online Page B

a conscientious clerk with a misplaced invoice. It was a stubborn woman he had naked in his bed tonight. But she didn’t object when he gathered her together and laid her down on the pillows. Didn’t object when he stroked her hair and the back of her neck. He watched her thoughts dissolve like snow melting off a roof. After a while, her fingers uncurled their grip on the blanket. The gold locket slipped to nestle between her breasts. Her truly excellent breasts.

    “You have lots of women, Captain? You look like somebody who’s had lots of them.” Her voice was dreamy. She was already lost in what he was doing to her face and her neck.

    None like you. Never anyone like you. “Not so many. A sailor can go without when he needs to. I don’t grab, if that’s what you mean. I ask. Tonight I won’t even ask. Are you warm enough? I can get another blanket.”

    “What? Oh, yes. Toast. Be warm in a snowdrift with you doing that to me.”

    He leaned over her, looking down, admiring the golden woman he had, half-asleep, in his bed. She put her hand up between them, not pushing him away, just touching him with sleepy curiosity. Accepting him. Her eyelids fluttered when he touched his lips between them and kissed her forehead. She closed her eyes then, for him. It was the first in a long line of surrenders she’d make, and never realize she was making.

    He set his lips to her eyelids, breathing across skin tender as flower petals, step by step seducing his professional pickpocket.

    This was the beginning for the two of them. Strange, how sure he was of that. Two hours after plucking her out of the mist on Katherine Lane he felt an irrational sense of possession. It was as if the tide had washed her ashore at his feet. He was going to immerse himself in the slow-spun pleasure of winning and loving this woman. He could see the years he’d spend with her stretching out into the future.

    “Maybe I’ll go to sleep.” Her voice closed around him in velvet. That was how she’d feel when he was inside her. When she surrounded him. Like velvet.

    She was already his Jess, even if he was the only one who knew it. He intended to hold on to her. Tomorrow, he’d track down that careless father of hers and get her away from him. Or find her pimp. Whoever she belonged to. There’d be no more dangerous work for her, out in the cold, picking pockets for that shadowy brute with the lead pipe. Whoever it was who ran her, he’d threaten them or bargain with them or pay them off. Her price didn’t matter. He was a rich man.

    Then he’d seduce her into his bed. That would be the voyage of a lifetime, raising her sails to the wind, pulling the lines taut, one by one. She’d started out already, traveling with him.

    Within a week he’d have her sweaty under him, not a stitch on her, begging and incoherent. He promised it to himself. She’d open to him like some exotic fruit, achingly tart and sweet, and he’d worship all the length of that sleek body. When she was ready for him, he’d slip inside and explode into her.

    He had plenty of time to entice and lure her. He’d be fixed in London a while, seeing to the hanging of Josiah Whitby.

     

Four

    HE LAY BESIDE HER FOR A LONG TIME, KEEPING her covered, watching her sleep. She sprawled with a limp, defenseless abandon he found incredibly touching. He wanted her asleep beside him, like this, tonight and tomorrow and for an endless string of nights in the future. This was no girl for a quick tumble. When a man found a mistress like this, he kept her. Maybe he kept her life long.elv„

    He’d be doing her a favor, buying her and seducing her into love with him. She needed somebody to take care of her.

    “You’re a trusting fool, Jess, whatever else you are,” he went on without a pause or raising his voice, “and if men slip by my guards and try sneaking up on me, I’m likely to gut them first and regret it later.”

    “How is she?” Adrian was in the cabin, silent