Your Scandalous Ways (Fallen Women 1)

“Vai al diavolo!” she gasped.

Go to the devil, in Italian with an amusing English accent.

“That,” he said in English, “is both rude and ungrateful, after I have spoiled my best trousers on your account. Or perhaps you’ve reason to be ungrateful?” He pushed dripping black curls back from his face. “Did I mistake the situation, and interrupt a bout of lovemaking? Like it rough, do you?”

She scrambled up to a sitting position, tugging her skirts down over long, shapely legs. In the dim lamplight her face was ghostly pale, her eyes great, dark hollows in her face.

“Rough?” she said blankly. “Rough?” She shook her head, like one waking from a dream. “You’re English?”

He was real. This was real.

She was cold and shaking and bile was rising in her throat. She was going to be sick.

Eyes fixed on the apparition before her, Francesca dragged in air and tried to make her mind work.

He couldn’t be real.

Greek and Roman statues looked like that, not living men. Mythical gods and demigods looked like that, not mortal men.

But he was breathing. Hard. She watched his big chest rise and fall under his sopping shirt. The sodden linen was merely a veil clinging to his skin, hiding nothing. She could discern every taut line of muscle in his powerful shoulders and arms and torso. The wet trousers hugged a narrow waist and hips and long, muscled legs.

Very long legs. Had she ever met a man, a living man, as tall as this? Or did he simply seem so, towering over her as she lay sprawled in the cabin’s seat?

Her first impression was of a handsome, strong-featured face, its expression so cold that it might have been chiseled in marble. The forbidding countenance was at odds with the mop of wet curls falling over his forehead.

She felt a wash of cold, then potent heat, a chill again, and heat again. All the while her head spun, trying to make sense of a world turned wildly awry and trying to make sense of him, while he shifted so easily from one language to another. At one moment he was indisputably Italian, in the next, incurably English.

She let her gaze drop to the hand he’d stretched out to her. Now it hung at his side, a long, strong hand that, only a moment before, had reduced a great barrel of a man to a rag doll. He’d thrown the big villain’s body over the side as casually as he might have flung a rat.

Who are you?

What are you?

She forced her gaze upward, back to his face, so hard and pitiless a moment ago. It was still without warmth, though he’d laughed, and the smile yet lingered at his mouth.

She wanted him to dive back into the water. He wasn’t human. He was a merman, part of a nightmare she wanted desperately to wake up from. Let him go back to his native element, let him vanish like the apparition he had to be.

But he’d saved her life.

Whoever, whatever he was, he’d saved her life.

In all her seven and twenty years, no man had ever come to her rescue before.

Who are you? she wanted to scream. What are you?

But what came out was the silliest question of all: “You’re English?”

James had already decided how to play it, though he hadn’t planned for this scenario.

“To a point,” he said.

She gazed dazedly about her. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Who were they? Why?”

Her voice was hoarse, and he knew that in better light, he’d see the imprint of her attacker’s thick fingers on her throat.

He felt the rage rebuilding—the lunatic fury he’d felt a moment ago.

Lunatic, indeed.

He had a temper: He was half Italian, after all.

But temper—emotion of any kind—had no place in his work. Hotheads failed. Hotheads got their comrades tortured and killed. Hotheads ended up with missing digits, missing limbs. They were left to rot in rat-infested holes or buried alive or staked under the desert sun. Hotheads came to a thousand bad ends, and the end rarely came quickly and painlessly.

Settle down, he told himself. Think.

She, clearly, hadn’t dreamt she was in danger. He, clearly, hadn’t dreamt it, either. His superiors had offered no hint. She didn’t understand. Neither did he.

Not that this would be the first time he’d been told only part of the story.

They always made it sound so simple—Get the letters—and it always turned into un mare di merda, a sea of excrement.

He scanned the immediate vicinity. “No sign of the would-be killers or rapists or thieves or whatever they were,” he said. “No sign of their boat, either. With any luck, they’ve drowned.”

He didn’t tell her it wasn’t good luck.

He didn’t tell her he should have taken more care.

He should have used another method to immobilize the one he’d pulled off her. He should have made sure to keep him alive, to hold onto him and question him. James would have enjoyed the interrogation.

But there was the swine, chortling while he tortured her, choking her slowly and grinding his groin—doubtless crawling with vermin and disease—against her.

James had charged in like a mad bull.

So that one had got away—or, equally likely, was dead—and the other was either sinking to the bottom of the canal or had got away, too.

Clumsy work. Not setting a good example for Zeggio, going off half-cocked like that, a bloody damned Sir Baconhead, saving fair maidens from dragons.

Still, it was done and couldn’t be undone.

James tensed as two heads popped out of the water. Then he recognized Uliva.

“Ah, here are your fellows,” he said. “I guessed they’d be along soon enough.”

The episode had taken a minute or two, start to finish.

He’d sized up her gondoliers the other night, and understood they were men to be reckoned with. The attackers probably hadn’t known that.

Whatever the villains knew or didn’t know, James couldn’t leave it to the gondoliers to rescue her.

As it was, he might have reached her too late. It took no time at all to kill somebody, as he well knew.

He watched her two stalwart boatmen climb into the gondola. “Get the lady into the house, quickly,” he told them in I

talian. “Make sure to pour some brandy into her.”

He moved to the side of the boat. It had drifted a ways from their respective domiciles, but not so very far, and this was not the Grand Canal but a rio, a smaller side canal. He was already wet. He’d a short, easy swim home ahead of him. The cold water would do him good.

He needed to get away. He wasn’t happy with his performance this night. He’d had everything planned: their meeting and how he’d manage it.

He prepared to dive.

“Where are you going?” she cried. “Where’s your boat? You’re not going to swim, surely? Wait! I don’t even know who you are.”

He turned and gazed into her white, frightened face. He remembered the arrogant sway of her backside as she’d abandoned him in the Florian. He remembered the laughter, promising sin, and the smile, the devil’s own smile.

He felt a stab, as of loss, though he’d lost nothing, though he had nothing to lose. Yet he turned away from the water and, with wry resignation, toward her.

“I’m the fellow across the way,” he said.

An hour later

Francesca’s neighbor was taller than she’d estimated, based on glimpses of a silhouette in a window. She could not have guessed how splendidly made he was.

At the moment, the leanly muscled body was not so plainly on display as it had been a short while ago. The recollection, however, was burned into her mind, and it made her go hot and cold again as, clean and dry and freshly clothed, he sauntered into the small parlor she reserved, usually, for her close friends.

He wore a curious combination of articles borrowed from the largest of her servants. The shirt and coat were too short in the sleeves, the waistcoat was too loose, and the breeches too baggy. The shoes were neither too large nor too small, but her discerning eye told her they did not shape properly to his feet. Yet he wore the ill-fitting hodgepodge with the same cool assurance he’d displayed as he stood in her gondola, half-naked and dripping.

Francesca could have changed into a dressing gown over one of her naughty negligees. She might have made herself more comfortable in dishabille. She was a harlot, after all, and need not play the modest lady.