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“You’re thinking something,” he murmured.

Carefully, she hung her hat on one of the hooks in the wall, lingering a beat too long. With a sharp breath, she faced him. Two steps, and she launched into his arms. The impact knocked him back against the door, which held, thank God, and both of her gloved hands pressed hard on his nape. She dragged his head down, thrusting up onto her toes. Her lips crushed against his, slightly off-center, wet heat at the corner of his mouth, and then she corrected, her tongue stroking inside. It was the clumsiest, most arousing kiss of his life. He half laughed, half groaned, and let her plunder him. She seeped into all his senses, the taste and the feel of her inseparable from the breathy sounds, the indefinably sweet scent. He kept his need leashed, until her teeth scraped his bottom lip, and he reacted, pushing forward, fusing their mouths.

The atmosphere changed around them. The heat thickened. Time slowed. His fingertips glided over her silky cheekbones, her sweat-glazed throat. Her convulsive gasp shuddered something loose inside him. He dropped onto one of the changing benches, pulling her down, gripping her bottom as she straddled his thighs, skirts bunching.

“You’re thinking something,” she gasped. Her eyes were wide and dazed, her mouth glistening.

“I’m thinking I’m glad I’m not thirteen,” he said, and hitched her higher. A little cry escaped her, and he knew she could feel the bulge of his rolled gloves between her legs. He could feel it too, rubbing his groin as she rocked her hips.

“What is that?” she panted.

“Something to please us.” He flexed, driving up, and she moaned and ground harder against him. “Do you feel pleased?”

“I could be more pleased.” She struggled for breath, twining her arms around his neck, a smile stealing across her lips.

“Is that a challenge?” He bloody well hoped so. “What if I please you more?” He flexed again, muscles hard as adamant. She sighed, eyes fluttering closed. “And more?”

She kissed him, a voluptuous, open-mouthed kiss.

He broke away. “And more?”

Her forehead fell onto his shoulder, and she bore down, stroking herself back and forth, the friction between them discharging sparks. They both shuddered with it. He imagined tearing her bodice like paper, baring her completely and luxuriating in her flesh. Every contour. Every texture. But here, now, the layers of silk and cotton and woolen twill added to the pleasure. Seams and buttons bit at them, and that pleasing leather dragged sensation from him to her, and her to him. His climax hit him like a storm. He jolted and gave a guttural shout, and she stiffened, inner thighs clamping hard enough to bruise. When she’d shivered and slumped, he lazed with her on his lap, arm under her skirt, fingers caressing the downy skin above her garters. The pad of his thumb traveled up and circled, moving in time with her slow, extravagant pulses.

Clouds of lust still billowed in his brain. He let his eyelids droop, memorizing her shape, the feel and weight of her. He’d sat up half the night at the table, looking at her, and looking at his sketchbook—the paper dry despite the sodden clothing at the top of his knapsack, which he’d laid out by the fire. The marks he’d finally made were depressingly inadequate. The room had been low-lit, and he’d tried to rely on shading. He’d focused on her hair spread in shining ripples on the pillow—to no avail. He’d thrummed with the urge—the old urge—to draw, to paint, to express what he saw and felt in the visual language he’d studied for more than half his life. She was naked in the bed, all lines and curves and rich tones, her strong features languid, and he knew exactly how to translate the dreamlike moment, how to compose it, how to give it depth.

And he could not. He could not.

He’d guided them to Castle Beach, steeled for another confrontation with the page. He wasn’t sorry that it would wait for another day.

She seemed to sense that his mood had shifted. She brushed her lips across his neck, and then her tongue coaxed his attention back to the present.

—

By the harbor, Falmouth bustled, streets choked with sailors. The inn was a dingy building sandwiched between an ironmonger’s and a ship chandler’s, the windows of the latter papered with advertisements in half a dozen languages. He locked their bicycles in the back courtyard, then they entered the inn itself, a warren of darkly paneled corridors and dusty rooms that gave off the warm, yeasty smell of old beer. As Muriel inspected the display of model boats, he rang the ship’s bell by the desk and inquired after rooms. The proprietor didn’t have their names in his register. Deighton actually presumed they’d thrown in the sponge. With a suppressed snort, Kit made a reservation—two rooms, for appearance’s sake. One last rotation through the inn confirmed that the wheelmen were elsewhere.

Elsewhere seemed a good place to be. He and Muriel wandered back out into the town. They ate pilau at a curry house near the quay, then wound their way to the shops. Muriel found a drapery that sold dresses off the rack and stopped to make a purchase. He bought Valencia oranges from a grocer, and they continued on with their parcels, circling back toward the harbor, or so he surmised from the increasingly potent odor of tar and rotten fish.

When the water came into view, Deighton came into view as well. He was a head taller than the men surrounding him, and so Kit had ample opportunity to observe his darkening expression as their gazes clashed.

“Oh dear,” murmured Muriel.

A small crowd had gathered around a post upon which two men had planted their elbows. One was Kemble. The other was a thickset sailor in a scarlet cap. It took a moment to realize the wrestling had begun, they were both so still and silent. Kemble’s veins made a bulging map on his forehead. The sailor’s lips had peeled back.

Deighton cracked his neck as Kit and Muriel approached.

“Here you are, then,” he said.

“Here we are.” Kit smiled.

“Use your legs!” shouted Butterfield. “Damn it all, use your legs!”

“I don’t know that you rode all the way south.” Deighton’s blue eyes looked hard as glass. “You might have cut east early.”

“Orange?” asked Kit, plucking one from the bag.

“Yes, please,” said Egg, reaching around from behind Deighton.

“Mrs. Pendrake!” Prescott had turned from the combatants. “Mr. Griffith,” he added, in a more subdued tone.