Chad jerked to look at the man who wielded him fixed.
"For God's sake, you are not going to put me in her possession, are you?"
"Would you instead dry out under the supervision of a Bow Street goalkeeper?" Marvyne inquired politely.
"He would be a damn sight more merciful."
Grunting, Chad staggered toward the wagon with Marvyne's assistance
Jenny twirled to Caven Smith, whose face was inscrutable.
"May we carry you back to Jenner's, sir? It will be rigid quarters in the wagon, but I guess we can manage."
"No, thank you." Smith strolled around the wagon with her.
"It is not far. I will go on foot."
"I can not leave you abandoned in a London rookery."
Smith halted with her at the back of the wagon, where they were somewhat secluded from view.
"I will be fine. The city wields no fears for me. Hold still."
Smith twirled her face up again, one hand holding her jaw while the other descended to her cheek. His thumb stroked gently under her left eye, and with awe, she felt a smear of wetness there.
"The wind makes my eyes moist," she heeds herself swaying unsteadily.
"There is no wind tonight." His hand waved at her jaw, the polished band of the thumb ring squeezing lightly against her skin. Her heart had begun to flutter until she could barely heed through the blood surge in her ears.
The uproar of the tavern was muffled, the darkness solidifying around them. His fingers slipped over her throat with incredible delicacy, finding secreted courage and caressing gently.
His stares were above hers, and she saw that the golden-hazel irises were fringed with black.
"Miss Anderson ... you are entirely certain fate had no hand in our togetherness tonight?"
She could not appear to breathe properly. "Qu-quite certain."
His head leaned low.
"And in all likelihood, we will never encounter again?"
"Never." He was too vast, too near.
Nervously Jenny attempted to mobilize her impressions, but they dispersed like spilt matchsticks ... and then he set fire to them as his puff brushed her cheek.
"I hope you are exact. God enable me if I should perpetually have to face the consequences."
"Of what?" Her voice was vague.
"This." His hand slipped to the rear of her neck and his mouth concealed hers.
Jenny had been smooched before. Not for a very long time, as a matter of fact, by a man she had fallen in love with. The trauma of his deception had cut so deep, she had vowed never to permit any man close to her again.
But Caven Smith had not asked her permission or bestowed her any opportunity to protest. She froze and took her hands to his chest, exercising strength against the hard texture.
He appeared not to witness her displeasure, his mouth was subtle and insistent. One of his arms cupped around her, thrusting barely as he grabbed her against the strong structures of his body.
With each whiff, she drew in a thicker fragrance of him, the sweetness of beeswax soap, the indication of salt on his skin. The flexible power of his body was all around her, and she could not resist soothing it, letting him assist her.
More kisses, one starting up before another had finished, moist and inseparable caresses, secret strokes of satisfaction and promise.
With a whisper—foreign words that drop pleasantly on her ears—Smith snatched his mouth from hers. His lips roamed along the flushed arc of her neck, lasting on the most accessible spots.
Her body felt puffy inside her clothes, the corset cinching around the frantic ramp of her lungs.
She shivered as he touched a place of rare emotion and stroked it with the tip of his tongue. As if the taste of her were some foreign spice.
A palpitation aroused in her stomach and breasts and between her thighs. She was crammed with a dreadful desire to press against him, she needed to protest free of the sheets and sheets of suffocating material that made up her skirts. He was so cautious, so gentle—
The collision of a bottle on the pavement jerked her from the haze. "No," she huffed, now striving.
Smith discharged her, his hands steadying her as she protested for stability. Jenny twirled blindly and strumbled toward the open entrance of the carriage.
Everywhere he had stroked, her spirits stung with the longing for more. She kept her head downward, thankful for the covering of her bonnet.
Despairing for departure, Jenny climbed to the carriage stride. Before she could climb in, however, she felt Smith's hands at her waist. He grabbed her from behind, imprisoning her long enough to utter closely to her ear,
"Latcho drom."
The Romany good-bye. Jenny acknowledged it from the handful of words Marvyne had enlightened the Andersons.
A familiar panic went through her as the flush of his puff compiled in her ear. She did not, could not, answer, only ascended into the wagon and awkwardly pulled the number of her petticoats away from the open entrance.
The door was shut firmly, and the truck launched onward as the horse followed Marvyne's direction. The two Andersons acquired their respective nooks of the seat, one of them intoxicated, the other gaped.
After a minute Jenny lunged to unfasten her bonnet with shivering hands, and found out the souvenirs were dangling relaxed.
One souvenir, certainly. The other...
Discarding her bonnet, Jenny considered it with a confused scowl. One of the red silk souvenirs was moved except for the little residue at the inside rim.
It had been neatly sliced.
He had snatched it.
And staking one sharp peek from the covering of the pillar, she saw that Smith has taken off.
A week later, all five Anderson siblings and their possessions had withdrawn from London to their new residence in Winchester. Despite the problems that were ahead of them, Jenny was strongly optimistic their current predicament would profit them all.
The building in Primrose Place wielded too many memories. Things had never been indiscernible since both Anderson's parents had deceased, her father of heart disease, and her mother of misery a few months thereafter.
It looked like the walls had consumed the family's sadness until it had evolved part of the paint and wood and paper.
Jenny could not glance at the abode of the main room without knowing her mother relaxing there with her sewing basket, or tour the garden without deliberation of her father trimming his precious Apothecary's Roses.
Jenny had recently auctioned the house without reservation, not for lack of emotionalism but somewhat a remnant.
Too much emotion, too much sorrow. And it was difficult to look onward when one was continual being reminded of unbearable loss.