“Don’t be.” And because she meant that, Diana closed the distance again to kiss him back.
She wasn’t entirely sure what sort of kiss she had intended because she had never voluntarily kissed a man in her life, but his surprised her more than the pleasant taste of the cognac that lingered on his lips.
It wasn’t passionate; nor was it chaste. It was soft but intense. Gentle but powerful. Honest and filled with longing. So lovely that it was Diana who deepened it and who was the first to wrap her arms around his neck. When he pulled her into his arms, she went willingly, savoring the moment and every delicious but alien sensation he elicited.
She ran her hands over his face, his shoulders, his chest, arching against him when his palms explored the curve of her waist and hip, smoothed down her thigh, and settled possessively on her bottom. Even then his touch was light and not intrusive, as if he understood she needed to feel in control. Needed a route of escape even though she wasn’t the least bit inclined to take it anytime soon.
As their tongues tangled, a passionate fire within her sparked then kindled for the very first time. The most unexpected surprise, and she reveled in it. Her hungry body rendered her powerless to do anything else. It came alive beneath his hands. Wanted things it had never wanted before and that want possessed her, making her bolder and more insistent as the kiss stretched. Deepened. Introducing her to a sensual, open, trusting, passionate version of herself she had never met before. Never knew existed.
She moaned when his lips found her ear and traced a lazy path down her neck, plunging her fingers in his hair when they finally returned to her mouth where they belonged.
She would have allowed him more liberties if he had not been the one to end the kiss again too soon. But he did, wrenching first his hands and then his mouth away and staring deep into her eyes breathless and stunned. His own darkened with the desire that she knew burned just as intense in hers.
He reached for her hand, then after the longest pause kissed the back of it. “I read somewhere you should never drink anything stronger or older than you are, and I suspect that potent cognac predates us both and evidently neither of us is a match for it.” He smiled with regret as he tugged her to stand. “It’s bedtime, my fierce Truth-Hunting Hornet-Kicker. You in yours and me, sadly, in mine. I want no regrets on my already overburdened and overwrought conscience tomorrow.” He kissed her fingers one last time before severing the contact completely. “Especially not yours, Diana. I could not bear that.”
Chapter Fourteen
“The company currently calls itself Edward Davis Ottoman Imports. Before that…” Dalton squinted at his pocket notebook as he sat on Diana’s desk. As thoroughly at home in the newspaper office in just two months as she had been after two years. “It was the Byzantine Trading Company and the Limehouse Persian Import Export Consortium. It changes names more often than I change my shirt, but in all cases, a Mr. Coleridge was the major shareholder and certainly the man raking in all the profits.” Profits he was currently using to buy up more unsafe and unsanitary slum tenements in the notorious Westminster rookery of Devil’s Acre so he could demand extortionate rent from the voiceless masses who lived there. If they couldn’t pay, he took their ramshackle hovels away that same day, not caring that with each callous eviction he left poor, defenseless people to the mercy of the unforgiving streets.”
“And the imports?”
“Cheap rugs and knickknacks for household decoration—or so the excise men are told. But I found this.” He pulled out a handkerchief and unwrapped it to show her the broken halves of a chalkystatuette of a miniature Venus de Milo. “They seem to dispose of a lot of breakages because there was a mountain of these outside. But look at the break and the construction…” As she picked it up Diana could see that the figurine was broken across the middle rather than at the weaker points of the arms and the legs; the inside was hollow and crusted brown, but not all the way through. “Back in my sailing days the easiest way to smuggle stuff was inside of something. The brandy runners across the Channel often hollowed out the masts of the ships to carry their booty. Others used special containers or barrels with false bottoms.” Dalton was a wealth of shady and dubious information—most of it useful.
“They wouldn’t carry much brandy in this.” Diana slotted the eight-inch statue together. “Barely a glass, in fact.”
“Brandy don’t come from the Ottoman Empire, Miss Diana—but opium does, and with opium powder a little goes a long way.” He retrieved a small bottle from his coat pocket and placed it on her desk between them in her tiny back office atThe Tribune. The innocuous brown label announced it as Smith’s Herbal Restorative. “It’s laudanum—but that stuff is three parts poppy to seven parts alcohol and not the one to ten you’d buy over the counter at the apothecary. It’s brewed strong, and probably at his warehouse, specifically for the opium eaters, and deadly as a result.”
Diana picked it up and examined it, then removed the stopper to take a sniff. A waft of sweet cinnamon enticed her nostrils; the sugary tincture stuck to the cork like honey. “Where did you get this?” The deeper she dug into Mr. Coleridge’s shady affairs, the worse his crimes became.
“I noticed one of the warehouse men liked his gin, never seemed to run out of money, and seemed to be very popular withthe ne’er-do-wells at his local pub who come there expressly to seek him out. As I suspected, he’s pocketing some of the product and selling it on the sly. I can’t say he’s careful about it, either, as he didn’t know me from Adam yet happily let me ply him with a good pint of mother’s ruin before he sold me this for tuppence.”
“Would he recognize you?”
Dalton laughed. “Not a chance. He was so pie-eyed when I left him, I doubt he’d know me again if I walked right up to him. He was already three sheets gone before I topped up his glass and facedown by the time I left.”
“Good work, Dalton.”
Diana couldn’t quite put her finger exactly on when and how Dalton became her assistant, because his role had evolved over those initial weeks after Shropshire.
She started sending him on errands to give her some peace when his constant loitering presence in her life had become annoying. Miraculously, he had proved to be more of a help than a hindrance—especially after he had worked out exactly what she did for the paper. Giles had been right on that score. There were no flies on Dalton. He had put two and two together with lightning speed, but unlike Giles, he came from her world, respected that she could look after herself, and didn’t rush in like a gun half-cocked whenever there was a whiff of danger. Instead, he watched and waited, and while he did both, he helped her dig.
Even so, his rough-and-ready appearance, surly countenance, wooden leg, and leather eye patch blended better with the flotsam and jetsam of the shadiest parts of the capital than she ever could. Even dressed in her old, patched clothes from the Merriwells’ hand-to-mouth Clerkenwell years, Diana had always attracted unwantedattention from the male of the species, whereas those same men did their level best to scurry past Dalton without making eye contact at all. Therefore, it made sense to entrust him with such aspects of an investigation to see if a story had more legs than he did. With him beside her, nobody bothered her as she probed deeper, and she could dig in blessed peace without the constant need to look over her shoulder because her intimidating new shadow took his role as her protector as seriously as he did that of her assistant.
“What’s next, Miss Diana?”
“Nothing for tonight or tomorrow. This evening I have to attend a dreary yuletide soiree at Lady Bulphan’s with my family. A night of badly sung carols, childish parlor games, and forced festive gaiety stretches before me, and tomorrow has been decreed a family day by Olivia. Apparently, working on Christmas Day is frowned upon by the aristocracy. Not that any of them work or give their servants those days off, but such is the glaring double standard they all live by.”
Dalton grinned. “It’s not our place to question our betters, Miss Diana, no matter how daft they all might be. Hopefully, somebody will disgrace themselves for you at Lady Bulphan’s so you at least get a decent story out of the ordeal, while I enjoy a lovely day off. Might even squeeze in a little courting time.” He wiggled his eyebrows.
“Is courting a euphemism for carousing?”
“I’m a reformed character since I met the woman of my dreams.” He had been waxing lyrical about this mystery woman on and off for weeks but remained annoyingly tight-lipped as to her identity. All she had managed to prize out of him was the tantalizing titbit that the woman of Dalton’s dreams was a lady andthat because of the huge gap in their stations their relations had to remain clandestine. This was always accompanied with some nose tapping as if he were leaking a state secret and would be dragged away in irons if he revealed any more. All so ridiculously and typically Dalton it never failed to make her smile. “My carousing days are done. Or at least I suspect they are as I’ve been thinking the unthinkable for a little while now.”
“The unthinkable?”
Dalton wiggled what was left of his ring finger and blushed when she gasped. “I know. I’ve surprised myself with my flowery musings. But if you want my opinion, when you meet the one, there ain’t much you can do about it, is there, beyond make things official?” He winked at her. “You can’t choose what the heart wants—no matter how much you try to tell it that it doesn’t want a charming duke with a twinkle in his eye.”
“You are as subtle as Olivia and both my sisters combined.” Nothing ever got by her older sister: Minerva had been like a dog with a bone. Probing, suggesting, and nudging her regarding Giles since she returned from Shropshire a week after Diana had. She was convinced she sensed a change in the wind in the both of them and claimed Giles had been “wistful” and “a little lost” from the moment he had waved her carriage off. While that description of him did odd things to Diana’s insides, the same accusations raised her hackles. Probably because there was a grain of truth in them.
