The Lure of the Moonflower Read online

  Jane turned onto her side, her full skirts tangling around her legs, hay crunching beneath her cloak. “What did he say?”

  Jack settled back down on the cloak beside her. “He politely reminded us that other people might be attempting to sleep.”

  Jane’s face was only inches from his, her cheek resting on one hand. “I’m guessing that wasn’t quite it.”

  It hadn’t been. “I didn’t want to singe your tender ears.”

  Jane’s lips quirked ruefully. “I’ve most likely heard worse.”

  Because she was posing as a man, Jack imagined she had. It was hard to reconcile the two; even though he had seen her in the role, even though he had seen her pretending to piss against a wall, there was something that seemed to set her apart, untouchable, in the world but not of it.

  Jack lifted a finger to her lips. Not porcelain after all, but red and warm. They parted slightly as his finger touched the delicate skin.

  “Not from my lips,” he said softly.

  Jane’s eyes dropped to Jack’s lips. “No,” was all she said, but there was something in her voice that made Jack go hot and cold and hot again.

  His finger moved from her lip to her cheek, sliding up her cheekbone, smoothing a fine strand of hair back behind her ear. The room was dim, lit only by the embers of the peat fire, making sensation all the more intense. He could hear the soft sound of her breath, feel her waiting tension.

  One movement. That was all it would take. Just the whisper of a movement and those lips would be against his, her body pressed against his, trembling. There was hay beneath Jane’s cloak, prickly, perhaps, but soft enough. They could sink down together on the cloak in the warm darkness and—

  “What the . . . ?” The donkey butted Jack hard in the backside. He sat up abruptly, glowering at the donkey. “What do you think you are, a goat?”

  Jane sat up too, removing a wisp of straw from her hair with fingers that weren’t entirely steady. “A chaperone,” she said, in a subdued voice. “And a rather effective one.”

  He was an idiot. A thousand times an idiot. One didn’t kiss fellow agents.

  Particularly not a fellow agent who might once have been—might, in fact, still be—mistress of the Gardener.

  “We should get some sleep,” Jack said brusquely. He gave the donkey a gratuitous shove. “You mind your manners and I’ll mind mine.”

  The donkey released a blast of foul breath right into Jack’s face. In the familial bed, the baby began to wail. A sheep took up the cry, bleating its opinion of everyone concerned.

  “Good night,” said Jane softly. Over the scents of peat and donkey, Jack caught just the faintest whiff of lavender, and the soft rustle of hay as Jane burrowed deeper into the folds of her cloak.

  It was going to be a long night.

  • • •

  They were on their way again at dawn, Jane moving gingerly as she rose from her pallet. There was straw in her hair and clinging to the bodice of her dress. She looked, thought Jack grumpily, as though she’d been thoroughly ravished.

  “Is there water for washing?” she asked hopefully, making an attempt to coil her braid back into place. The heavy tail of hair flopped promptly back down her shoulder.

  “Why? Do you have an appointment at court?” Jack retorted, and then felt like the worst sort of cad. “You’re fine as you are.”

  Jane regarded him skeptically. “I have soot on my face.”

  “Consider it the latest fashion.” Jack felt a glimmer of sympathy as she very carefully wrapped her cloak around her shoulders. She wasn’t used to this sort of travel, but she had soldiered on all the same. “This isn’t Lisbon, princess. You’re going to get dirty.”

  Jane grimaced at her hands, once so white and smooth, the nails now cracked and dirty. “Truer words . . . ,” she murmured. She glanced up at Jack. “When in Rome?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Jack blandly. “I’ve never been.”

  Jane rolled her eyes, but he saw her shoulders relax.

  “Here.” Jack handed Jane a chunk of coarse black bread, redolent of garlic and olive oil. “Breakfast.”

  He half expected her to balk at it, but she didn’t. It left him feeling oddly frustrated. It was easier when she lived down to his preconceptions of her.

  “We have a decision to make before we leave.” Jane took a dainty bite of her bread. Jack watched, transfixed, as her white teeth sank into the dark bread. “Do we make for Porto or Alcobaça?”

  Jack swallowed a bite of bread with a throat gone dry. There was something very wrong with him if he found her eating bread erotic.

  “Do you really want my advice?” he challenged her. “Or was that just a rhetorical question?”

  Jane cast him a wry, sideways glance. “I thought we had both agreed that it would have gone better for us had I heeded your advice before.”

  Jack opened his mouth to utter a ringing I told you so, but the words turned to ash on his tongue. Instead he said grudgingly, “You did the best you could with the resources at your disposal.”

  “You were the resource at my disposal, Mr. Reid.” Jane sat with her back very straight, every inch the lady, even with straw in her hair and soot on her chin. “It was my duty to use you properly.”

  Jack choked on his bread.

  “Alcobaça,” he said desperately. The word came out like a cough. Jack cleared his throat and tried again. “I would make for Alcobaça. Even if the statue was just a statue, it’s not far out of our way. And,” he added, “you’ll have a wash and a proper bed.”

  Jane plucked a piece of straw from her bodice and regarded it with an arched brow. “I’m not sure I’d know what to do with one, it’s been so long.”

  I can tell you what to do with one.

  What in the devil was wrong with him? Clumsily, Jack lurched to his feet. “We’d best go. Time’s wasting.”

  Without waiting to see if Jane followed, Jack hoisted his haversack on his shoulder and strode across the hut to Cristina, who had a baby in her lap and a toddler clinging to her skirts.

  “Thank you for your hospitality,” he said, and dropped a handful of reis into her palm. “My companion and I are very grateful for the food and shelter.”

  “But this is too much,” Cristina protested. The protest was, Jack knew, for her husband’s benefit. The pay was for the information as much as the lodging, and for that he had paid fairly.

  Jack waved her protests aside. “The pay is commensurate with the inconvenience.” He grinned at her. “I would make amends for our donkey.”

  A hint of amusement showed in Cristina’s dark eyes. “It was not the donkey. I wish you luck, Rodrigo.”

  If he had been a younger man, he would have squirmed. As it was, all Jack could say was, “Muito agradecidos.”

  There was a shadow at his elbow. Jane, not wanting to be left out. She bowed her head to their hostess. Slowly and carefully, she echoed, “Muito agradecidos.”

  Jack opened his mouth to correct her—she had used the male form—and then closed it again.

  Cristina tucked the coin away in her bodice. “Vai com Deus, senhor, senhora.”

  It had been a long time since Jack had believed in any sort of gods, but it never hurt to have insurance. “Fica com Deus,” he replied politely.

  “Go with God?” murmured Jane, as they led the donkey from the hut into a gray dawn that seemed nonetheless very bright after the dark interior of the hut.

  “And stay with God.” Jack took the donkey’s lead from Jane, putting his hands around her waist to boost her onto the donkey’s back. “It’s customary.”

  “Somewhat more heartfelt than that, I think.” They walked in silence for a few yards before Jane added quietly, “That was generous payment you made them.”

  Jack wasn’t sure which was worse: being caught out in an act of char
ity, or being caught out in what only seemed like an act of charity. Jack kept his attention on his feet, navigating the uncertain terrain. “These people have little enough. And they’ll have less when Bonaparte’s men come through.”

  “So you try to right the balance?”

  He could feel her gaze like a knife between his shoulder blades. “Everyone needs a hobby,” Jack said flippantly. “It would be boring to be entirely a villain.”

  He could have told her that he knew what it was to be hungry. He could have told her that he knew what it was to scrounge for coin. Only, in his case, he had brought it on himself. His father might not have been wealthy, but they’d always had enough.

  No, it had been Jack’s own bloody-mindedness that had sent him out into the streets, on a quest that turned out, in the end, to be as pointless as any of Don Quixote’s windmills.

  Even then, even when Jack was at his most alone, his most miserable, there had been a home waiting for him, if only he had been willing to swallow his pride and play the prodigal. If he had found pride a sour dish, well, that was his own doing and no one else’s. He wasn’t going to bow his head and crave his father’s pardon, return to a nest in which he had always been the cuckoo.

  Even now, the thought of it made his back stiffen and his jaw tense. Nearly ten years and he was still angry, even if sometimes he had a difficult time recalling just what it was he’d been quite so angry about.

  Jane’s voice broke into his reverie. “Why did you take those jewels?” Jack turned to find her looking at him with serious gray eyes, her fingers knotted in the donkey’s mane. “Don’t tell me it was for the money.”

  “Isn’t that the most obvious reason?” Jack deliberately kept his voice neutral. Thief, she had called him, and there was no debating that it was true. He had stolen those jewels as surely as any cutpurse that ever picked a pocket.

  “Mr. Reid,” said Jane with some asperity, “if there is anything I have learned, it is that nothing about you is obvious.”

  Jack knew how she felt. He’d been a lot happier when she’d been a society lady in a flounced dress.

  And she was that lady still, he reminded himself. Once this mission was over, she would wash her face and put up her hair and be that lady again. They would go off their separate ways, in their own separate worlds.

  But for now, they existed outside of time, no one but themselves. And Jack found, as absurd as it was, that he wanted her to think well of him. Even if it was only for now, even if they never saw each other again after Porto. For some absurd reason, her good opinion mattered.

  The air was cold and pure, the only sounds the crunch of their progress on the pebbles of the path. Slowly, Jack said, “It’s not untrue. I did want the money.”

  Jane’s gray eyes were altogether too keen. “But not for yourself?”

  Jack glanced at her from under the brim of his hat. “Has anyone ever told you that omniscience isn’t an attractive habit?”

  A shadow crossed Jane’s face. “Yes,” she quietly.

  He’d meant it as a joke, not as a jibe. Jack wondered just who had put that bruised look behind her eyes, and found himself inexplicably very much wanting to deliver a fist to that person’s nose.

  “I wanted the money for my sister.” The words came out too loud in the still landscape. “My younger sister, Lizzy.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s—” Jack foundered on the words he’d never tried to frame, not even to himself. “She’s a half-caste, like me. Her mother was my nurse.”

  He’d loved Piyali, or thought he had. She was everything his mother wasn’t. She’d been soft and warm and tender where his mother had a hawklike beauty, angular and proud. Piyali had sung him to sleep at night, cuddled him through his nightmares.

  But apparently he wasn’t the only one into whose bed Piyali had climbed at night. George had come first, born two years after Jack’s mother had died. And then Lizzy.

  As a man, Jack couldn’t begrudge his father his consolation. One couldn’t say he’d taken advantage of Piyali; theirs had been a comfortable domestic relationship, mutually satisfying. But the boy in him still felt betrayed. Piyali had been his nurse; she was supposed to love him the most.

  But it was impossible to hate either George or Lizzy. George was a sunny-natured boy, one of life’s innocents. Scowl at him and he’d toddle up to you offering a sweet.

  And Lizzy—Lizzy was a rogue, like Jack. A rogue with copper curls and, when Jack had last seen her, a deceptively endearing lisp that hid a brain as calculating as the Emperor Aurangzeb’s.

  Jack’s older brother, Alex, was infuriatingly earnest. Well-meaning, but maddening all the same. And it had always been open war between Jack and his older sister, Kat. George was too good for his own good. But Lizzy—she was kin. They were two of a kind.

  And Lizzy was vulnerable in a way the others weren’t.

  Jack cleared his throat. “I wanted Lizzy to have choices. My older sister, Kat—she’s full-blood English, and legitimate. But Lizzy— There are men who prey on unprotected girls.”

  He was making a hash of it, the words clumsy on his tongue. How to explain to someone who’d never seen it just what happened to the half-caste daughters of men who didn’t have the power or influence to protect them? Jack had known enough of those men. He’d taken his revenge, in his own way, by bilking them of their coin by overcharging them for the opiates with which they whetted their jaded palates.

  But the only sure way to guarantee Lizzy’s safety was money. Money meant choices. It meant power.

  Jane frowned down at him. “But surely,” she said, “your father—”

  Jack permitted himself a twisted smile. “My father always means well. Provided it doesn’t pose too much inconvenience to himself. He put my sisters on a ship and considered his duty done.”

  It was Jack who had arranged a place for Lizzy at a young ladies’ academy in Bath, and paid for it out of his own pocket. Anonymously, of course.

  “But the jewels . . .” Jane didn’t look nearly as impressed as Jack had expected. “They aren’t the most comfortable thing to possess. You didn’t worry about putting your sister in danger?”

  “You don’t believe all that rot about a curse, do you? There’s more danger in being poor. With a handful of rubies in her pocket, Lizzy can do what she likes. She can marry where she chooses. Or not, if she chooses. But she’ll be her own mistress.” Jack looked fiercely at Jane. “Can you, of all people, deny the power of that?”

  “No.” Jane’s face was as still as the frost-blasted landscape. “I had that . . . once. Or thought I had.”

  “What happened?”

  “How far to Alcobaça?” Jane made as if to spur her mount forward, which didn’t work very well when one was sitting on a donkey. Rather than speeding up, the donkey slowed its pace.

  “Not far. We should be there within the hour.” So much for confidences. It wasn’t exactly that he’d expected her to be impressed by his nobility of motive. Except that he had, a little. Jack slapped the donkey on the rump, summoning a jocularity he didn’t feel. “If Buttercup here behaves.”

  Jane raised a brow. “Buttercup?”

  “You’re the one who wanted to name him.” It felt as though a cloud had fallen over the sun, but for the fact that it had already been cloudy when they started out. A gray morning had given way to a gray afternoon. The difference wasn’t in the sky; it was in Jane.

  “Yes,” she said, “but not Buttercup.”

  Jack yanked on the lead. “You said you were your own mistress once. What happened?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Clearly it does.” There was nothing so infuriating as haughty silence. Jack couldn’t resist a jibe. “Did your father cut off your allowance?”

  “If you must know, yes.” Jack had never heard anything like the controlled rage
in her voice. “I was disinherited. Disowned. Cast out. Is that what you wanted to know, Mr. Reid?”

  No, he wanted to say. It wasn’t. But the words seemed to have frozen in his mouth.

  The Pink Carnation regarded him with an expression of contempt. But that wasn’t what cut to the bone. It was the quiver of her mouth, the glitter of tears in her eyes.

  But her voice was utterly controlled as she delivered the coup de grâce. “Thanks to you, Mr. Reid, my family declared me dead.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Thanks to me?”

  That, thought Jane, caught between tears and laughter, was the trouble with staging grand scenes on a donkey. One couldn’t ride nobly off into the sunset. High drama turned to low comedy.

  “Never mind,” she said.

  “Never mind?” Jack and the donkey both came to a jolting halt. “You tell me I ruined your life and then you tell me ‘never mind’?”

  Stupid, stupid. She’d always prided herself on holding her tongue and keeping her counsel. It was what kept her—and those who depended on her—alive. Jane made a helpless gesture. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “But you did.” Jack wasn’t yielding an inch. He planted one hand on the donkey’s neck, the other on its rump, his nose an inch from Jane’s. “Tell me how I forced your family to disown you. I never set eyes on you until three weeks ago.”

  Jane pressed her eyes closed, feeling suddenly very weary. “No, but you sent the jewels of Berar back to England.”

  “What has that to do with anything?” Frustration rang through Jack’s voice.

  “Fate works in strange ways.” Jane met Jack’s clear amber eyes and felt, for the first time, a twinge of doubt. She took refuge in trivia. “They say Fortune is a wheel, you know. One person goes up; another goes down.”

  “Yes.” Jack’s voice was clipped. “I did have a classical education. Such as it was. Is there a point to this exposition?”

  “When you sent the jewels to your sister, you provided her the prospect of freedom. And you took mine away.” Jane attempted a smile. “It’s really a classic example of Fortune’s wheel.”