Page 108 of The Siren of Sussex

Good lord.

His arm was around her. It was practically an embrace. And . . . it didn’t feel wrong.

Quite the reverse. It felt profoundly, unsettlingly, gloriously right.

His throat spasmed on a swallow.

This was getting ridiculous. This ungodly connection between them, taut as a wire stretched to its breaking point.

“Do you really believe all of that?” she asked.

He managed a wry smile. “Obviously. I’ve latched onto you myself, haven’t I?”

A frown shadowed her brow. “It’s not the same at all.”

His smiled faded. He couldn’t maintain a pretense of humor. Not about this. Not about her. “No,” he said. “I don’t suppose it is.”

The brougham slowed. Noise rose from outside its curtained windows—the swell of coarse voices, inebriated revelry, and a hornpipe playing a raucous tune. It was the music of the docks. An all-too-familiar sound.

Ahmad’s muscles tensed. He removed his arm from the back of the seat. “Draw up your hood. We’re nearly there.”

Evelyn pulled the hood of her cloak over her head, shrouding her face and hair, as the brougham came to a clattering halt.

Beside her, Ahmad attended to his own clothing, drawing up the collar of his coat and settling his hat low over his brow. He was dressed in unrelieved black—tall, commanding, and capable of vanishing into the shadows at a moment’s notice. A fallen angel, indeed.

She felt a frisson of nervous excitement as he opened the door of the brougham. She wasn’t afraid. Not when he was with her.

His large gloved hand held tight to hers as he helped her down.

She was at once assailed by the unmistakable stench of the Thames. It was an unpleasant fragrance at the best of times, but here—so close to the water—it was positively overpowering.

And it didn’t exist in isolation.

It was accompanied by the perfume of tobacco and rum, mingled with the pungent black smoke emitted from the neighborhood’s tall chimneys.

The docks were at once both awake and asleep. Warehouses stood silent, while the streets teemed with life, filled with swaggering men of every stripe. She felt them looking at her with varying levels of interest. They were sailors, most of them.

At least, Evelyn thought they must be.

Among the ruddy-faced Englishmen were figures of every ethnicity and description.

A group of fair-haired men chattered loudly together in German. A Chinese gentleman leaned against the wall of a storage building, smoking a long pipe. And a black sailor, with a brightly colored handkerchief knotted at his neck, walked arm in arm with a woman in a cheap satin dress.

The woman gave Ahmad a lewd wink as they passed.

Evelyn stiffened. “Do you know that person?”

“No.”

“She seemed to know you.”

“It’s her business to know men.”

“Oh!” Evelyn glanced back over her shoulder. The only courtesans she’d ever seen were the Pretty Horsebreakers. This female was of another class entirely, heavily rouged and powdered, with false hair arranged in a disordered pile.

A working woman, isn’t that the phrase Ahmad had used once? There had been no judgment in it.

He tucked Evelyn’s hand in his arm as he led her across the busy street to the entrance of the inn. It was a weather-beaten building, the wooden slats buckled and faded from salt and wind. A battered sign hung over the door, proclaiming the establishment’s name: The Jolly Tar.