The Danger of Desire Read Online Free Page A

side, while a tall stone wall, topped with inset shards of broken glass, penned her in from the other.
    The passageway was narrow—so narrow he could run his hands along both walls as he advanced on her—and eerily quiet. The only sound was the panting of their breaths, white clouds steaming into the fetid, back alley air. Her face—for some strange reason he wanted to see her face. He needed to see her. To make sure she became something other than just another maidservant in his mind. To fix her in his memory.
    She was older than he would have guessed for one so swift. Her face, pale with animal fear, was unlined, although her dirty cheeks were hollowed with the hard look of a street rat—or perhaps hunger. She ought to have been able to feed herself off what she’d just stolen, but he had to consider it probably all went to her kidman. Or her pimp. The girl would be lucky to get cold soup.
    By God, when she was with him, he would feed her.
    No, her face was not particularly dirty—the smudge was a dusting of freckles across her nose. The darker shadows were circles the color of a bruise under her eyes—glittering, dark and huge, in her ashen face. The mobcap on her head obscured the color of her hair, but it looked to be dark brown from the tendrils fallen loose down her neck.
    Her gaze darted around him, scanning the alley frantically and looking in vain for an escape.
    “You won’t find it. You’re trapped.” The queer rush of triumphal pleasure took him mildly by surprise. It shouldn’t gratify him so to defeat this feral, scrawny, half-starved lass. But it did. She’d made him work for his little victory. She was a worthy opponent. She would be a valuable asset.
    “You’re very good,” he continued more diplomatically. “That was a neat piece of work.”
    She didn’t respond but gripped the ridiculous basket in front of her with tight, whitened knuckles, as if it alone could ward him off. No farcical, false denials. Hugh felt his mouth curve into a half smile. It pleased him he would not have to teach her the value of silence. Another decided mark in her favor.
    She had backed up hard into the end of the passage, the impassable door flat at her back.
    “I have a proposition for you.”
    “I’m not a whore.”
    The blunt assertion surprised him. “No, you’re a pickpocket. A clever one. And as it happens, I am in need of a clever pickpocket. I’d like you to steal for me.”
    She shook her head, a frightened refusal creasing her brow with the perfect touch of false bewilderment. “I’m a seamstress. I take in sewing.” She pushed the basket out just a fraction to show him. Oh, she was good.
    Hugh smiled and shook his head. “I’ll wager,” he said in the low, calm voice he employed with frightened midshipmen, “you carry that basket around all day long, and not a bit of that sewing ever gets finished. I’ll wager”—he took another step toward her—“you’ve a soft little pouch on the bottom, where you’ve stashed the gold watch of the Member of Parliament for Lower Sudbury.”
    She widened her eyes in puzzlement, opened her plum lips in astonishment, and tipped the basket carefully toward her chest so the bottom was completely visible to him, and then felt along the lower rim as if afraid to find what he had just described.
    There was nothing. Hugh’s head swam for a moment. Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps, like the Honorable Member for Lower Hayrick, he had been swayed by what he had wanted to see. He had been looking for a thief, and for some unaccountable reason he wanted it to be this comely, if scrawny, wench.
    No, it could not be. His instinct, well honed by years of service, told him otherwise. So she hadn’t hidden her take on the bottom of the basket. There were plenty of other, more personal , places for concealing stolen bits and bobs.
    The grin that hatched on his cheeks was probably not pretty. It was certainly unfamiliar. Dangerous had been blasting the French to