Kate Moore by To Kiss a Thief Page B

she prompted.
    “Would have found you less honest now,” he concluded.
    “Me, less honest? When you . . .” She could not finish.
    “Do you wish to call me names again, Meg? Did I tell more lies in Dorset than you did in London?” The bitter tone of this remark made her wish she could see his face, and yet she was grateful he could not see hers.
    “I did not lie,” she protested.
    “Ah, then you cannot have had a very successful season.”
    “It’s true.”
    “Forgive me,” he said, “I had no cause to abuse you with such a comment. You must have attracted your share of admirers?”
    “Not one. I was quite unnoticed, I assure you. My mother . . .” She fell silent, remembering her parents’ disappointment in her. Her companion did not press her. After a time she asked, “Who are you?”
    “You know my name, Meg.”
    Again she wished she could see his face. “I know the name your friend called you.”
    “And you will not use it. You prefer thief and traitor ?” His voice was cold.
    At the harsh words, she blushed in the darkness. She remembered the flash of something in his eyes each time she had reviled him. He was those things; he deserved her contempt and the contempt of all loyal Englishmen, and yet she wished to go on talking to him in the close darkness, did not dislike him as she should.
    “I shall not revile you again,” she promised, but she did not say she would use his name. “Croisset believes you to be a London dandy, a peer; that is who you pretend to be among these men.”
    “You think I am something else?” He sounded amused now.
    “Yes, but did you not say that we see what we expect? Perhaps I am deceived as well,” she admitted.
    “If you have learned that lesson, then I am afraid I shall not be able to deceive you long, Meg.” He laughed. “Best sleep now; we reach Portugal tomorrow.”
    “You mean to sleep here, with me?”
    “With you?” he asked. “Is that an invitation?”
    “No,” she said at once. Although his voice had been teasing, she clutched the blanket around her.
    “Then I must continue to make a bed of this floor, for I have no other place, and our companions believe me to have very good reason to sleep in this cabin.”
    She knew he was grinning. All the puzzling circumstances of her nights and mornings were suddenly explained—his coat, her shoes.
    “One last word,” she pleaded. “If you wish me to call you by name, you must tell me your family name.”
    There was silence for such a long moment that she doubted he was there at all. “I have no name,” he said at last. “I am no man’s son.”
    “Forgive me,” she whispered, understanding not at all, knowing only that she had touched upon some profound sorrow.
    “Go to sleep, Meg,” was all he said.
    On the floor of the cabin the young man who called himself Drew lay still until he heard the girl’s even breathing. Though he had slept little in three nights, he found it impossible to do so now. For some time he told himself that it was the discomforts of his cold, rocking bed that kept him awake; but when he had lodged one shoulder against the base of the berth and one booted foot against the chest, he acknowledged that he had suffered worse discomforts. The truth was that the novelty of sleeping so near a young woman whose beauty and courage he admired and yet not sleeping with her was a bit unsettling. He had cause now to regret all the touches of that first evening.
    He had avoided her for most of three days. She had much to complain of in his treatment of her, and the worst of it was he meant to expose her to greater dangers yet. He had entered the library with a reckless disdain for what might become of him and a fierce desire to check his enemy, and she had stopped him cold with her honesty. Her gaze, clear and uncompromising, had been like no other woman’s gaze. There had been nothing of seduction and everything of herself. And he had seized her. He had not considered his