The Water Nymph Read Online Free

interesting evening, Don Alfonso, and I can only console myself for the loss of your company with the knowledge that we shall meet again soon. I look forward to that pleasure.” He bowed low and stepped across the threshold.
    “Pleasure,” Sophie repeated after him, pronouncing the word as if it might grow scales on her tongue. She could not remember having spent a less pleasant quarter of an hour in many, many years. If she had her way, she would never set eyes on that arrogant, horrible, shallow, annoying, conniving, tricky, handsome, dimpled, asset-rich, upsetting, lousy louse ever again.
    As soon as she had the thought, she knew she was wrong. Indeed, she saw that she was reacting exactly as he had hoped she would. His plan had obviously been to annoy and antagonize her so efficiently that she would tell him anything and then let him wander off unhampered, with her fate in his hands. And she had fallen for it entirely, even giving up the name of her shoemaker. As she thought about this, thought about how docilely she had walked into his trap, her anger at him was transmuted into cold, hard rage against herself. She had behaved like an idiot. No, she was an idiot.
    What made it worse was that she did not know into whose hands she had actually fallen. The man was just the messenger, he had said, and she needed to learn for whom he was working. His questions suggested that he believed she knew something or, rather, that she had taken something from Richard Tottle. Something important. Probably important enough to require that he report to his employer right away. Before she had even finished the thought, she was closing the door of the smoking chamber behind her and making for the servants’ door of the Unicorn.
    She had only been lingering in the shadows in front of the club for a minute when she saw the louse come out and turn right. Never having pursued a man on foot through London before, Sophie was too preoccupied with following unobtrusively to notice the old beggar woman camped inside the doorway of the building opposite the Unicorn, or the curtain in the club’s second-floor window flutter slightly as she and the man went past. The thunderclouds that had blanketed the city earlier in the day were gone now, and a bright moon shone, making it easy for Sophie to keep the man in view but hard for her to stay in the shadows.
    It became even harder after they had turned out of Hanging Sword Court and on to Fleet Street, because the entire road was thronged with people, most of them barely clad and very sociable women. Sophie was astonished by their careless comfort and confidence in their bodies, but astonishment turned into something much less clear when she saw the louse approach one of them, a blonde, whisper a few words to her, and then disappear through a doorway with his arm entwined in hers. Suddenly concerned that the meeting might be taking place within those doors, Sophie crossed the street and entered.
    It looked like a tavern, but instead of food, each table was topped by a completely naked woman, extended to her full length here, sitting cross-legged there, all of them joking with and teasing the male patrons who surrounded them. As Sophie watched, a plump brunette brought her lips to the ear of a well-dressed young man, allowing her breasts to brush his chin as she whispered something to him. Her skills as an orator must have been quite over whelming, for the man was so moved that he lifted her from the table and accompanied her up a ramshackle set of stairs, apparently wishing to pursue the subject in more private quarters. Sophie then watched as another woman stood atop a table, slowly rotating her hips in front of an increasingly large group of spectators, using a long string of pearls to do something that she indicated loudly was very pleasurable. Before the climax of the performance, however, Sophie saw the man from the Unicorn descending the stairs. When he reached the bottom, he turned and blew a