Suzanne Robinson Read Online Free Page B

she recognized the black-haired ruffian.
    “Oh, heaven!” She picked up a lobster and smacked Badger on the head with it.
    Badger cried out as the creature locked a claw onto his nose. He let Prim go, grabbed the lobster, and stumbled backward into Nightshade, who in turn fell against a man bearing a hamper. The three tangled together and fell beneath the hamper, which spilled turbot onto the floor. Prim was already scampering between aisles offish. She didn’t dare look behind her as she cleared the market. Her heart pounded, and she dodged customers and groups of people huddled together to divide their purchases.
    Breaking free of a knot of women carrying pails of fish, she began to run. This wasn’t Whitechapel,where she knew some of the streets. They would catch her and throw her in the river! Prim had always feared drowning. The feel of water in her nose, her throat and lungs, suffocating. They would tie her up so that she couldn’t swim, so that she would be unable to save herself.
    Horror gave her speed. Prim raced through the streets, taking back alleys, crossing through mews and abandoned warehouses, always heading north toward Whitechapel. Finally she ran out of breath and was forced to stop. She ducked into a doorway situated well away from any streetlight.
    While she fled, the night had grown black. Clouds obscured the moon with a yellow-green haze, and their cousin, the dirty mist, returned to the streets of London. Prim’s chest heaved. She wiped her damp face with a kerchief, and it came away begrimed with the soot that seemed always suspended in the air. She was parched; her hair was limp and damp, and she shivered, although more from fear than the cold. Someone was coming!
    Prim shrank back until she pressed against the door. A carriage came down the street, and she didn’t breathe until it had gone by. Then a man stumbled around the corner. He took a swig from a bottle in his hand and wove his way across the street. Prim watched him, ready to bolt should he suddenly come at her. The man steadied himself by placing his free hand against the walls of the buildings he passed.
    She was still watching him when the door at her back opened and she fell. Arms grabbed her, lifted her off her feet, and she was trapped in a relentless grip asfrightening as being bound by ropes and drowned. A hand covered her mouth before she could scream. She kicked hard, hitting a leg and provoking a curse, and she kept kicking. She heard a light, amused voice over her head.
    “You’re a precious sly and deceitful creature, and if you kick me again I’ll give you a tap worse than you gave poor old Badger.”
    Prim stopped kicking. She could feel his hand rubbing her ribs.
    “That’s better. Choke me dead if you’re not the damnedest old maid that ever was.”

3

    He hadn’t expected this at all. Nightshade tightened his hold on Miss Dane while he waited for Badger and Prigg to bring the hansom cab they’d borrowed. He’d been asked to find a gently reared spinster lost in the East End of London, and he’d been put to more trouble than if he’d crossed his old enemy Mortimer Fleet. She squirmed in his grasp, and he hissed a curse under his breath. Plain she might be, but feeling her against him scraped across his desire like a file against glass.
    “Rot Badger and Prigg,” he whispered to himself. “They’re late.”
    There was no response from his captive. Not that she could speak with his hand over her mouth—her warm, soft, pink mouth. What was he thinking? Old maids didn’t have warm, soft mouths. For certain theydidn’t have pink ones with gently rounded lower lips and a habit of allowing the tip of a rosy tongue to peek out from it when thinking.
    Rot her! She was the cause of him coming back to a place he wanted to forget. And she’d got away from him. Nobody got away from Nightshade. Big Maudie and her crew would laugh if they knew this little creature had led him a dance over the roofs of