Page 43 of A Treacherous Trade
When the provocative, guttural noises from his throat escalated, I covered my face with my hands and moaned myself.
Oh, my dear giddy aunt! Was this happening?
With a final howl, he dismounted from the bed and landed on the rug as silently as a cat, his dark skin glowing with the slightest sheen of exertion.
He looked the part of a man who’d enjoyed a boisterous tryst.
And I—I looked like the woman who’d provided him one.
Except he wasn’t sated. Even someone as inexperienced as I could see that, plain as day. Hunger rippled along his skin and crackled in the air around him. He was a lion who’d not been fed.
And would now be unleashed into the night.
Where would he go, I wondered?
“I see what you meant about sounds. About the senses,” he said blithely, striding to the foot of the bed as if he’d not just made complete chaos of the mattress. Bending, he retrieved an expensive, but well-worn pair of boots.
“I-I never would have guessed what talent you have for acting,” I said, hoping to expel some of the strange friction inside of me.
One kiss.
I’d thought it a little thing. A harmless cost in the service of a greater purpose. I’d kissed before and had been affected physically. Or sometimes not, depending on the circumstance, or the kiss.
But this…
I was so often wrong about men. I had no idea one kiss could change how I looked at an entire human. Could make me wish it would change how he looked at me.
But it didn’t.
“You’d be surprised how much deception is needed to get close to a mark,” he said, casually snapping his jacket from a hook adjacent to the headboard.
“I see…” Tucking my ruined hair behind my ear, I glanced toward the door. “Deception is uncomfortable to me. I fear I’ll never excel at it.
“But your life is one of deception,” he pointed out in a voice free of judgment or censure.
And still it cut me to the quick.
“Only because it has to be.” My voice was stronger when I answered. Harder. My knees had regained some of their strength, enough at least to no longer need the wall to hold me up. “I wouldn’t choose deceit, but it’s the deal I made for that devil we both work for.”
“The Hammer is not the Devil—he’s merely the instrument he’s named after.” Night Horse flared his jacket behind him and slid his arms into it with animalic grace. “If people didn’t give him their money for entertainment—if they didn’t create secrets in his house and ask him to keep their sins against their god or their oaths against their debtors—he’d have no power. That is not the work of your Devil as I understand him, is it?”
I stared at the bed rather than meet his gaze, wondering if that was what the bedclothes truly looked like after a proper encounter with him. “No. You’re right,” I ceded glumly. “Sometimes I just wish I weren’t drowning in lies.”
As if he remembered something, he went to the basin and took a cloth from the hook. Soaking it in the water, he wrung it out and ran it over his face. “Lies are often kind,” he said around the linen. “Lies are often essential. What is that charming saying of yours? They are a necessary evil.” After blotting his face with a dry towel, he discarded both to the floor by the bed. Now it looked as if we’d cleaned up a mess.
“I don't believe in evil anymore.” I told him.
“After all you've seen? Even after the Ripper?”
I shook my head. “I don't believe in good either. I don’t know what we are.”
What was it Oscar always said?It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
Clever, and only slightly more facetious than my actual feelings on the matter. “I think there are people who hurt others, and people who are hurt by others,” I said. “And, rarely, people who stand in between the two. Above that, who is to say what is good or evil?”
Night Horse looked at me with something very close to pity. “It is easier, Fiona, to see people for the animals that they are, driven by the baser instincts they try to ignore. Fear. Rage. Greed. Sex. Hate… revenge.”
I pretended this last word wasn’t pointed in my direction.
