"Where are you taking me this time?" She twisted her face away from his hand. She had no clear sense of where she was, and she probably had less than a quarter of an hour to convince him to let her go.

"Going about London alone, you’ve been headed only one place all along--a man’s bed." His voice was grim. "Mine."

The word was an unmistakable claim. His voice had the timbre she’d first heard in the brothel. She turned to judge the intent in those dark eyes. "You won’t . . . rape me." She made herself say the word.

"I won’t read you Fordyce’s sermons on The Character and Conduct of the Female Sex."

Flickering shadows in the interior of the hack revealed only fragments of his appearance, the hard-edged profile, the gleam in his dark eyes. She had not properly understood him in the brothel. She had believed him preparing to bed her, and his languid air as a Frenchman had made her think she could overpower him and escape. But outside the brothel, the fastidious vicomte did not exist.

"I don’t know who you are. Yesterday you wore a cravat and silks, today a Belcher neckerchief and corduroy."

"Neighborhoods change. Depravity . . . remains the same."

"Do you have a name?"

His grin flashed briefly in the dark. "Will Jones. Descended on both sides from a distinguished line of fornicators back to the Conqueror himself."

"You didn’t have to hunt me down. I told you I would repay you."

"Was that going to be before, or after your arrest for stealing and fencing the goods?"

"I know exactly where those candlesticks are."

"I doubt it."

She took a calming breath. "You are interfering with my plan."

"Which was going so well."

"There were setbacks, I grant you." She’d lost three days. Her mother was three days closer to disaster.

"Setbacks, sweetheart? First Leary, then Wilde—both quite willing to sell you, though to Leary’s credit, he had a much higher appreciation of your value. How long did you expect to pass as a boy in a boys’ school?"

"I was only going to stay the night." Her missteps accumulated moment by wearying moment.

"What kept you?"

She wasn’t going to tell him about Robin. The little boy had followed her about the school all day, and leaving him behind with his vain hope that a phantom hero would come over the rooftops to save him struck her as the one true crime she’d committed. Stealing from Will Jones didn’t count. "Did you come after me for the candlesticks or the clothes?"

"Ah, Helen, for all your experience in Troy, how little you know of men."

There was a teasing note in his voice. "It was only one man, you know, Paris, endlessly Paris, and a woman can hardly judge others by such a man. Really the rest of the time, I was among the Trojan women. Imagine a room full of women, fifty looms and tongues going at once, and old queen’s stern eye on us every minute."

"Good at weaving, were you?" He laughed. The hack came to a halt. Leaning close he told her, "You undid my first efforts on your behalf, and when I do a thing, I like it to stay done."

"Please, don’t trouble yourself further on my account. I’m sure you have other business to attend to."

"I do, Helen, but you see, as I go about my business, you keep turning up in suspicious places." Will extracted his prisoner, unwound her from the fragrant blanket, paid the hack driver, and led her through the usual passageways to his door. "Home," he announced.

"I’ll be leaving in the morning."

"You are an ungrateful baggage, you know. You were unable to get yourself out of either the brothel or the boys school without my aid and my money."

"With which you are quite free for a man from your neighborhood."

Argos in the shadows thumped his tale in welcome. "Argos knows you already." Will made her sit two stairs above him on the long staircase.

"What are you doing?"

"Removing my ruined boots from your feet. Harding will take it ill if you track mud on the rugs."

"Harding?"

He could hear the weariness in her voice. He doubted she’d slept much in three days. "You met Harding on the ledge last night. A good man in at tight spot."

"You’ve been in tight spots with him before?"

"Dozens." The stockings she’d stolen from him stuck to her feet in dark coins of dried blood. Bleeding determined chit. He swung her over his shoulder and carried her through the door.

She lay where he put her on the bed and her eyes fell closed. "I warn you, whatever you mean to do to me, I’ll be asleep."

"Oh I doubt that."

Her eyes opened at once as he secured her left arm to a bedpost with a silken scarf. A red streak marked her wrist where he had dangled her from the brothel window two nights before.

"Do you mean to torture me?"

"Definitely."