Wicked as They Come (30 page)

Criminy leaped onto the roof and began to turn a brass wheel. It creaked and creaked, and then, with a pop, the door opened. I could see a strip of crimson velvet around the edge, and it made me think of a cat’s mouth.

I did not want to go down there, get swallowed up by the ship, and ride underwater, where we were vulnerable and trapped. I wanted to take a nice, breezy ship with sails and lifeboats and emergency vests. But for someone who couldn’t swim in the sea, like Criminy, I supposed this vehicle was safer. We both had to take risks.

He disappeared down the ladder, and I scanned the docks until he returned. Nervously, I stepped onto the brass hull and then followed him down into the ship. The crimson velvet continued inside and coated the walls and ceilings. The floor was dark wood, with Turkish carpets running down the middle.

“I can’t smell a living thing on the ship,” Criminy assured me, “but keep your wits about you, just the same. Can’t be too careful about stowaways on a submarine.”

The sub was more like an apartment than a boat. The walls had paintings, odd sepia-toned photographs, and
shadow boxes of bizarre insects, all firmly screwed to the velvet walls. We were in the sitting room, and a little damask sofa with tasseled pillows beckoned my aching bottom. The hours riding bareback were taking their toll on a body that had been through more than its share of fear and pain in the last few days.

Just before I collapsed on the sofa, I stopped. The Nana in my head chided me, and I sighed. I was sopping wet. I couldn’t leave a mark on someone else’s good furniture.

“Criminy?” I called. He had disappeared further into the ship. “I need a change of clothes.”

His head popped around the corner. “I’m setting our course, love,” he said. “Poke around and see what you can find. I’m afraid I lost our bag going over the wall when they started shooting at me. My apologies. The bedroom’s down the other way. ”

I squelched down the narrow hallway, passing the tiny kitchen and bathroom. The bedroom was at the back, in the rounded end of the pill. The bed was approximately six feet square, and the room wasn’t much bigger. I slid aside a panel in the dark wood wall to find a gentleman’s wardrobe. It was rich and new and a bit big. But it would do.

I slid the bedroom door shut behind me, curious to know if the smell of my naked skin would draw Criminy out. I wondered if it bothered him at all, whether it was nagging, like smelling a hamburger when you were starving. Or if it was more like showing a teenage boy a half-clothed woman. Was it hunger, lust, curiosity? An animal instinct or a human longing?

It didn’t really matter. He was at the opposite end of the ship, busy, and I had to change. I couldn’t infiltrate Jonah Goodwill’s lair half-naked.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and heard a whirring purr behind me as the engine started. It was surprisingly quiet, not at all the unsophisticated grinding I had expected. The ship shuddered and began to move. I slid a little sideways as it changed course. We were under way.

The wet boots were off first, although it was hard to get the swollen laces undone. Then the sopping stockings, thank goodness. Then the shreds of the dress, peeled off like a second skin. Then the corset, after I had used my knife to slash the laces, which involved more than a little gleeful revenge. Then Uro and the gloves, cold and moist as frog fingers, one whole and one shredded and bloody. Finally, I was completely naked.

I lay back and exhaled, my eyes shut in bliss. When I opened them again, I was gazing straight up into a mirror set in the ceiling over the bed. Seeing myself there, laid out naked on some strange rich man’s red velvet coverlet, I let out a little shriek and scrambled back to the foot of the bed, away from the mirror and toward the dry clothes in the closet. I couldn’t help looking again, and that’s when I noticed the brass rings set into the ceiling around the mirror. And a leather whip on hooks set in the wall.

Whoever owned this bed was a sex fiend. We had stolen a real
Love Boat.
The red velvet everywhere suddenly made sense.

“Letitia! Love, are you all right?” Criminy called from the other side of the flimsy wooden door. Panicking, I wrapped myself in the scarlet coverlet, the tassels tickling my damp skin.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I just startled myself.”

“What happened?” he said, and the air suddenly seemed very thick and very still. The thin sliding panel between us
bent in a little bit, and I could imagine Criminy on the other side, his hand and face pressed against the black wood, his sharp eyebrows drawn down in concern. His nostrils flaring wide, catching my scent.

I heard him inhale and sigh.

I clutched the blanket more tightly around me.

“Nothing happened,” I said nervously. “I just saw something that surprised me. And shouldn’t you be steering the boat?”

“I’ve programmed it already,” he said, his voice low and soft. “It’ll take us to the open water around the islands and stop. If anything shows up on the sonar, we’ll hear an alarm.”

He inhaled again, then exhaled with a soft hum.

“So we’re alone. Love.”

Despite myself, I felt drawn to the door. My determination to resist Criminy and Sang itself was crumbling.

I felt as if he were pulling an invisible string, as if there were a golden hook around my spine leading me forward. I stepped lightly off the bed, trailing the red coverlet behind me. It was over my shoulders and crossed in front of me with both arms, like wings wrapped possessively around my fragile skin.

I pressed myself against the door, feeling the tension of his body pressing back through the flimsy wood. I breathed in. I could smell him, too, his scent rising sharp above the brass and new-cloth odors of the sub. Raspberries and blackberries, sweet and sun-warm, but with a fierce herbal undertone, crushed weeds and thorns. Burgundy and wine and the green of shadows. Eyes shut, velvet coverlet drawn up to my chin, I was taking in the scent with such deep breaths that I was starting to get a little light-headed.

The wood bent in against me a little more. I took a step back.

The door slid to the side, and there he was.

We studied each other in stillness. He leaned against the door frame, at ease but focused. He wasn’t much bigger than I, but I suddenly felt quite small. The painting of him in the locket had so cunningly captured the intensity of his gaze and the single-mindedness of his will.

His eyes were dark now, as gray and stormy as the sea through the portholes, captured and infinite at once. The eyebrows that had at first seemed cruel now seemed elegant, speaking volumes with the smallest angle. His mouth was just a little open, and I wanted to kiss it.

No, I wanted to bite it, worry it.

I wanted to bite it? That was strange.

But it didn’t matter. I inhaled deeply, taking in more of the scent. My eyes were drawn to the open neck of his shirt, so rebellious in its carelessness. His hair had fluttered loose, drifting over his shoulders. It was smooth and fine and dark, and my hand untangled itself from the blanket to reach out and brush it back. He closed his eyes as my naked skin brushed his jaw.

I half-expected a jolt, but none came. The electricity between us had nothing to do with foresight. I didn’t need a glance to tell me what would happen next.

My breath caught in my throat as the blanket fell around me, and his hand snatched it just in time. We both stopped, my hand barely touching his face, his hand holding the blanket, the air between us humming like a plucked string.

I looked down and reached to take the blanket back from him. He didn’t let go. I tugged a little, still refusing
to meet his eyes. And then he tugged back, pulling me to his chest as he let go of the blanket and wrapped his arms around me. I was caught.

My head was tucked under his chin, and as my nose brushed his throat, I found myself nuzzling his neck. I felt drunk, woozy, swooning. As I rubbed my cheek on his collarbone in a daze, he swallowed hard, and I felt his muscles tense. He was like an animal held in check, barely contained.

Then he stepped back a little, his gloved hands lifting my face to his, cradling my jaw. I shivered, but I kept my eyes closed.

“Look at me,” he said, his voice husky and low, compelling.

I exhaled, steeled myself, and opened my eyes.

He was gazing down at me, and his eyes were endless, deep pools of pleading and fire and barely restrained something or other, and they were magnetic, like black holes, but full of flames, and yet gray, and yet full of colors and see-through and dancing with little flecks of glitter, and I couldn’t look away, and what pretty eyelashes he had, as long and dark as a woman’s, as a kitten’s, as a panther’s, and the smell, oh, the smell, like crushed heather and berries and springtime in the morning and bodies rolling over and over in the grass and everything covered with dew like cobwebs making mandalas of raindrops, and I couldn’t stand it, couldn’t hold back for one more second.

But I had to know first.

“Are you doing this?” I whispered, head tilted up and lips so close to brushing his that I imagined our molecules dancing in the air together. “Are you doing something to me? Is this a spell or some sort of glamour?”

“I don’t have this kind of power alone,” he whispered back.

“Is it inevitable?”

My words hung there, suspended, trapped in the spangled amber of the moment. I couldn’t see it, but somehow I knew that he smiled, sharp teeth glinting.

“Only if you want it to be,” he said.

And then the cool suede of his glove stroked over my lips, and they felt full to bursting and ripe, and I shivered and breathed out, and the blanket slithered off my shoulders and puddled on the floor at my feet as his lips crashed into mine.

I wrapped my arms around his neck, my skin rippling with goose bumps as his hair brushed over my collarbone. The kiss was hungry and determined, and I barely registered the heat of his skin as his tongue slipped past my lips. He tilted his head, and a tiny sigh escaped me as the kiss grew deeper. As I had hoped, as I had expected, he tasted of berries, like wine, dark and deep.

His gloves stroked down my shoulders and back like an artist’s brush, skimming every bone and curve with tender force. I pressed against him shamelessly, and the smooth linen of his shirt rubbing over my nipples made my eyes roll back. He shrugged off his heavy coat, and I could feel the imprint of his hands where they had touched me.

I wanted them back. I wanted them lower.

I squirmed closer, rubbing against him, begging for his touch, and he withdrew from the kiss, licking my lips and chuckling low in the back of his throat. He tossed his vest to the floor and drew the shirt over his head, saying, “Fair’s fair. Now, come back to me, beauty.”

My body was bereft without his touch, and I suddenly
realized that I was completely naked. I was overcome with shyness. I’d never been aggressive in the bedroom, and I hadn’t been with anyone but Jeff in years. I had never felt this passion, this fire—not with Jeff, not with anyone.

What did he want from me? What did he expect?

“Come here,” he whispered.

I crossed my arms in front of my stomach and muttered, “Why should I?”

He grinned at me, the corner of his mouth quirking up in the way that made me melt. “Because you want to,” he said. “Because you must.”

“I don’t have to do anything,” I said, stubborn to the last.

“Of course not,” he said, and he reached out to cup my face tenderly. I looked down, because I couldn’t meet his eyes. Now I was facing the elegant, muscled skin of his chest and, even lower, the spare, beautiful curves where flat stomach met hipbones. The scent rising from his warm skin was doing strange things to me.

He lifted my face, caught my eyes with his own. I was stuck, struck, hypnotized. Again, his thumb rubbed over my lips, which were now swollen and tender from his kisses. Then it moved down, tracing over my chin and down my throat, where it rested for a moment in the hollow.

“Your heart is beating fast,” he said. “I can feel it, just there.”

I couldn’t deny it. I couldn’t stop my heart from beating any more than I could still my breathing or make myself quit aching for his touch.

The hand traveled farther downward, spreading over my chest and lightly skimming over one breast, pressing
gently over the nipple. My body surged toward that hand without thought, and I gasped and blinked and pulled back, unsure. His eyes seemed to go a shade darker, and his head tilted toward me as he licked his lips.

Lower still the hand traveled, too slowly for my liking. When it found my arms crossed tightly over my stomach, wrist grasping wrist, it stopped, and he raised his eyebrows and waited. I didn’t budge. I had to keep some sort of power from him, had to feel that I had a choice in what I was doing, if not what I was feeling.

One dark eyebrow arched up in challenge. I shook my head, just the tiniest gesture. I smiled slyly.

Then, swiftly but gently, his hands tugged my arms apart and spun me around. I ended up facing the bed, my wrists held together behind my back in one gloved hand as the other continued right where it had left off, stroking my hip, causing tingles to race over my bare skin.

I took a deep breath and tugged my arms, but he stepped closer, pinning them between us. My captured hands were pressed between our bodies, and a little thrill ran down my spine when I realized how badly he wanted me. I felt the warmth of his breath on the tender hollow behind my ear.