Hello Stranger (The Ravenels #4)(53)

“I’m too set in my ways.”

“At your age?” Her brows lifted.

Ethan was simultaneously amused and offended by the way she spoke to him, as if he were some cocksure lad who considered himself more worldly-wise than his experience merited. “I’m nine and twenty,” he said.

“There,” she said, as if that had proved something. “You can’t be such a hardened case as all that.”

“Age has nothing to do with it.” The conversation was a thin veneer over the real discussion taking place between them. Ethan felt his insides tighten with yearning and dread as he let himself think of what she might ask of him, what he might promise in a moment of insanity. “Garrett,” he said brusquely, “I’ll never fit into a conventional life.”

A curious smile edged her lips. “Do you think my life is conventional?”

“Compared to mine.”

She seemed to look inside him, taking his measure. Ethan stood there helplessly, more bound by those green eyes than by forty fathoms of ship’s chain. He was filled with regret for all the moments he would never have with her. God, his desire for her was intolerable. But there was an inescapable reckoning laid up for men like him.

“Then I’m to have nothing of you?” she asked. “A few pressed violets in a book and a new front-door lock—that’s all I’ll have to remember you by?”

“What would you like?” he asked readily. “Name it. I’ll steal one of the crown jewels for you.”

Garrett’s eyes softened, and she reached up to stroke his cheek. “I’d rather have the monkey picture.”

Ethan looked at her in bewilderment, thinking he hadn’t heard right.

“I would like you to bring it to me after you’ve taken care of your other business,” she said. “Please.”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

Ethan was thunderstruck. She looked so innocent, as if she weren’t proposing something that went against every social and moral principle. “Acushla,” he managed to say, “I can’t spend the night with you. That right belongs to the man you’ll marry.”

Garrett leveled that direct, disarming stare at him. “My body is my own, to be shared or withheld as I choose.” Standing on her toes, she pressed a soft kiss to his lips. Her slim hands framed the sides of his face, her thumbs on his taut jaw. “Show me what you can do,” she whispered. “I think I might like to try a few of those one hundred and twenty positions.”

Ethan was almost too aroused to stand upright. His head lowered until his forehead rested against hers. That was the only place he could touch her—if he let his hands take hold of her, he would lose control entirely.

His voice was scratchy. “They’re not for virgins.”

“Then show me how you make love to a virgin.”

“Damn you, Garrett,” he muttered. There were things about her he didn’t want to know: the curve of her naked back, the secret scents and textures of her skin. The intimate colors of her. The rush of her breath against his neck as he entered her, the quickening pleasure-rhythms of their joined bodies. Knowing such things would turn the pain of leaving her into agony. It would turn living without her into something worse than death.

On the other hand, chances were he’d end up in a weighted sack in the Thames before the week was out.

Garrett stared up at him, her eyes bright with challenge. “My bedroom is on the second floor, to the right of the stairs. I’ll keep a lamp burning.” Her lips curved slightly. “I would leave the front door unlocked . . . but since it’s you, there’s no need.”





Chapter 14




Ethan went directly from the soiree to the upper-class Belgravia address belonging to Fred Felbrigg, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Taking the stolen evidence to Felbrigg was a logical choice, since he had both the authority and incentive to bring the Home Office conspirators to justice.

When Tatham’s and Jenkyn’s crimes were brought to light, a great deal of unpleasantness would ensue: arrests, resignations, select committees, hearings, and trials. But if anyone could be trusted to do the right thing, it was Felbrigg, a devoutly religious man who prized order and routine. On top of that, the police commissioner despised Jenkyn. It was no secret at Scotland Yard that Felbrigg was appalled by the spymaster’s unauthorized position at the Home Office, and the unsavory intelligence-gathering methods of his handpicked agents.

Disgruntled at having to leave his bed in the middle of the night, Felbrigg came down to his study with a dressing robe thrown over his nightclothes. With his ginger whiskers, short, spindly build, and the flaccid nightcap with a tasseled end dangling over the back of his head, he looked like an elf. An irate elf.

“What’s this?” he asked, scowling down at the pages Ethan had set on the desk of his study.

“Proof of an operational link between the Home Office and the Guildhall bombers,” Ethan said quietly.

As Felbrigg had sat there in shocked silence, Ethan proceeded to tell him about the Home Secretary’s safe and the records of secret government funds diverted to known hostiles and radicals.

“Here’s an entry concerning the missing shipment of explosives from Le Havre,” Ethan said, nudging one of the pages closer. “The dynamite has been supplied to a group of London-based Fenian activists. They were also given cash money, and an order for admission to the visitors’ gallery at the House of Commons.”