Revealed (12 page)

But she didn’t. Suddenly, the gap closed between them, and his lips were on hers.

This was new.

This was different.

Because this kiss she felt to her toes. This kiss hit every single one of her senses with its delicate force. And this kiss made her forget that she shouldn’t be kissing him.

Whereas Broughton had felt the need to press her back, Marcus Worth did not overpower her. In fact, he didn’t touch her, except for his mouth on hers. But she could feel everything. His strength, his warmth. His arms remained at his sides, in his pockets, but she knew that had he touched her, his hands would run through her hair, graze her jaw, follow the length of her collarbone.

A shiver raced down her spine. Unknowningly, she parted her lips, let him inside. As his tongue danced with hers, she leaned into him, put her silk-covered length against his wool. Her hand found its way to his hair, ran through it, the other grazed his jaw, followed the length of his collarbone—and all Phillippa wanted was to feel more.

But just as surprisingly, as suddenly as the kiss had begun, it ended.

He pulled away, slowly. Phillippa followed, at first, until he broke their connection, the cool air filling the space between them. She opened her eyes, slightly bewildered, her heart beating at an alarming rate. His face reflected her wonder, as he let out a long, slow breath. But then that corner of his mouth slid up, arrogant and taunting, letting her know that he knew every single feeling that had coursed through her body in those last few moments.

Want.

Need.

Desire.

So, considering the time, the place, and position she found herself in, Phillippa did the only thing she could think of as situationally appropriate.

She hauled back and slapped him.

W
ELL to be fair, he’d deserved it. Marcus didn’t know what had come over him. They had just been talking—flirting, really, as he turned the conversation away from her ridiculous plan, and suddenly, her voice had become a siren’s call, the candlelight played off her skin, and he was thinking about things he shouldn’t.

And then he acted on those thoughts. Impulsively. And Marcus Worth was many things, but he was never, ever impulsive.

But Phillippa was such a different person than he expected, Marcus thought, as he shivered against the cold, standing in a narrow winding alleyway in one of the less desirable sections of Whitechapel, a patched and threadbare coat his only protection from the unseasonable chill. He was waiting for the signal from the broken slit of a window across the street, and until he got it, he was unfortunately apt to let his mind wander. And it was unfortunately apt to wander to his activities the previous evening.

Phillippa Benning looked, from afar and within the constraints of Society, like one of the meaner, slyer women with lucky advantages of birth and fortune to propel them to their current status and allow them to be provocative. Women who wouldn’t normally give him the time of day, and he wouldn’t normally give a second thought to. But then their conversation let out her surprising sense of humor, and her wit proved . . . seductive. Oh, he couldn’t deny she was a singularly beautiful young lady, but he had thought her beauty a bit hard around the edges, as if polished to a point. But some of his opinion had been chipped away during their interlude in a sarcophagus, and the rest fell free when she had, without intending it, leaned into him and opened her mouth to his.

He smiled at the memory—until it was quickly replaced by the memory of a well-placed slap across the face.

Well, as he’d said, he’d deserved that.

After he restored Phillippa Benning back to the ladies, she stayed another few minutes before taking her leave, giving excuses that she and Mrs. Tottendale were late for another engagement, leaving Mariah to go into raptures of Mrs. Benning’s grace and dress and manners, and fearful aspersions regarding how she herself acted and if she gave any reason to offend and wonder if her orphanage would benefit. Marcus, meanwhile, was left to determine his next course of action. That led him here, standing outside in this unnaturally cold spring day and waiting for a bloody lamp in a window in a part of town no respectable person cared to venture.

Overloaded carts carrying the skinned carcasses of fatted lambs trundled down the street, their blood dripping off the back, bleeding red into the groves between the cobblestones. Women lost to liquor and time plied whatever was left of their wares in broad daylight, taken up by men who used them for mere minutes to forget their own lack in life. Marcus could have stood in this alley for the first time or for the thousandth, but the view would never change. Absentmindedly he rubbed his thigh. That damn desk they gave him at the Home Office—he kept bumping his knees against it most painfully. No matter what Fieldstone said, he was not hard up for adventure. He did not crave this life. He would like nothing better than to lay it all down and rest.

But just when they thought they could stop looking over their shoulders . . .

Johnny Dicks had sent him a message. Said the Frenchy had ambled in again. And maybe Johnny could provide a better description this time.

Marcus needed confirmation; he need to know who he was dealing with and reassurance from his contacts that the information they had given him was solid, because he was too far out on a limb to be boxing at shadows. He’d lose his balance, if that was the case. So here he was, having signaled Johnny Dicks in the Bull and Whisker to meet, waiting for the all clear. Waiting. And waiting.

He shook his head, stretched out his stiff legs. Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flicker of movement from the window across the way. It wasn’t the signal he was waiting for—that was the lamp in the window—but it set Marcus’s spine tingling.

In an affected, loping walk, Marcus shuffled across the alley, dodging carts and drunks, and into the building across the way. Climbing the creaking, narrow steps to the third floor, Marcus quietly removed the dagger from the under his long coat. Approaching the door of Johnny Dicks’s rented room, dread trickled down his stomach to find it not only open but the latch busted and lying in pieces on the floor.

Moving swiftly now, silently, Marcus swept into the cramped room. Careful to keep his back to the walls, he gripped his dagger as he peered around corners and found nothing.

Nothing but Johnny Dicks.

He was a burly man, no more than thirty, who looked like he earned extra money pummeling teeth out of men’s heads in amateur tournaments, and he did on occasion. He’d enjoyed being out of the army and had added a layer of padding to his gut—the effects of solid meals and less necessary marching. He’d always been an affable chap with a keen eye and better brains than some officers.

But now he lay at odd angles on the dirty cot, his fingers mangled and bloody, blood pooled beneath him, running from the long, clean gash across his neck.

Marcus stared for what felt like an eternity into those cold, lifeless eyes, left open and horrified by whatever had ended him.

“Damn and blast,” he whispered, lowering his dagger.

A sound from the staircase jolted Marcus into movement. Footsteps, light and quick, running down the stairs. Marcus darted out into the hall. He looked up, then down, only managing to catch a glimpse of a mud-colored cloak before it disappeared out the door.

Bounding down the stairs, four at a time, threatening to break the spindly structure with the force of his running, Marcus reached the bottom in record time and bolted out the front door.

Looking left and right down the street, Marcus searched in vain for the cloak he saw, only to be confronted by the sight of dozens on the backs of every man, and sometimes woman, in the street.

“Look out, ye nit!” A barrel-chested man cried, startling Marcus just before he was run over by a horse drawing a fish cart. It whinnied and went up on its hind legs as the driver of the cart cursed at him.

“Watch it, ye blind geek. Feckin’ fool!”

“Sorry! Sorry!” Marcus said, backing off the thoroughfare.

Damn. Damn and blast.

Johnny Dicks, his main contact, was dead. And his killer was gone.

Going to the constable proved useless, but Marcus did it anyway. He did not mention his association with the government, but he wanted it recorded somewhere that Johnny Dicks had died by means of foul play, even if the Whitechapel constables didn’t see it that way.

“Maybe the bloke cut hisself, coulda been accidental,” the reed-thin patrolman said. He was missing three teeth, and the rest were black. It was better that the man didn’t smile; it would have been like looking into a cavern to hell.

“Cut himself? How? Whilst shaving? Then what? Bled out, died, and only then got rid of the knife?” Marcus crossed his arms over his chest.

“Listen, bub,” Constable Black-Mouth said with a sneer. “Moren’ like he got hisself knifed by a doxy looking to take more than she earned. I got a dozen people died today, in ways worse than this. I got too much to do without some swell comin’ down to my turf and tellin’ me which dead body is more important than the next. Now, I’ll ask around, but you got no weapon, and my guess is, nobody seen nothin’.” With that, the officer tipped his cap to Marcus and trolled his way down toward a group of young prostitutes who would either likely be run off by the presence of the law or bribe him to remain. Marcus didn’t wait to find out which. To his mind, he had far more solid evidence than anticipated that Johnny Dicks’s information had been correct—and worth killing for.

Marcus walked into the Home Office of the War Department, his massive, determined stride making pounding footfalls that could be heard from the other end of the fastidious building in Whitehall. He was so direct in his movements that he nearly knocked over two uniforms in his path, both too young and too well bred to do anything other than get out of Marcus’s way. He wound his way through the labyrinth of offices and hallways of the different sections of the War Department—Strategy, Planning, Defense—before walking through the door affixed with the nameplate Security. It was an innocuous enough title, the Security section of the War Department—seemingly used to secure locations for meetings of the other section leaders, official state visits, treaty signings, etc.—but little did most people know—including the higher echelons of Parliament—that the Security section chief’s office connected directly to the director of the War Department’s.

Any time someone from the Security section needed to speak to the director, Lord Fieldstone, he could, without having to make an official appointment. They simply needed clearance from the section chief, which Marcus hoped to bypass if he could, but if he couldn’t, he would lie his way in. There was no time anymore for subterfuge. No time to arrange a chance meeting at a ball.

The offices beyond the door labeled Security were rather nondescript. A large room with a number of desks, all in neat rows, the section chief’s office door beyond. Only the keen-eyed would notice that every desk was fitted with heavy locks, and the main door had a core of iron.

Since the end of the war, more and more of those desks had become empty, as men who had worked so diligently for their cause found there was not enough cause to go around anymore. Papers sat in neat stacks on those desks that were still occupied, booklets neatly ordered on the shelves. A few men looked up as Marcus marched past, mumbled greetings, and then returned to the draining occupation of doing nothing. He subconsciously rubbed his thigh as he passed his own too-short desk—the only somewhat cluttered one in the room—and headed straight for the section chief’s door.

“Hold on, Worth!” the squeaky voice of Leslie Farmapple, Section Chief Sterling’s secretary—and indeed, the tiny dictator who ran the entire Security section with ruthless order and efficency—stopped Marcus midstride.

“Worth, I need to speak with you about your monthly ink allotment.”