Page 2 of The Spy Who Loved Her
She had offered him an education. A home. Good food to eat, books to read, and most importantly,safety. So long as he gave up the thievery and applied himself to his studies. And Neil—older than she had first expected, but so stunted from lack of nutrition that she had thought him much younger—had accepted.
Suddenly, her house had not been empty. And over time she had collected more of them, those children who desperately needed a way out of a bad situation, children whose parents could no longer afford to feed or clothe them. Kit still brought them, occasionally, whenever he found a child in need. But Neil had been the very first. The one whose presence had saved her from her loneliness.
He was with her still. Too young, really, to be a butler. But he had learned from the best, and when she had pensioned off her former butler a few years ago, Neil had stepped ably into the role. One which he took quite seriously, far more so than his age—which she had placed around two and twenty now—would suggest.
There had been so many children since. A hundred at least, and her home had never again languished in that queer silence, that yawning, churning emptiness. Except for one January night each year.
Kit accepted the glass of brandy she extended to him, letting it danglefrom his fingers as he lounged in his chair, stretching out his long legs. Strange, she thought, how closely he resembled their father. The same severe slant to his brows, the same sharp, cutting chin. The same gold hair and glacial blue eyes. He was just two or three years her senior; the product of a liaison between their father and a housemaid whom Father had turned out the moment he had learned she was expecting.
Father had had little interest in his baseborn son, except as a cudgel to wield against Emma’s mother—his lawful wife—who had failed to give him the legitimate son he had desired. And Emma had grown up always knowing that she, his only legitimate child, had fallen far short of expectations.
She would have dearly liked to have a brother. Even half of one, though she had long been aware that Kit thought their blood connection to be tenuous at best. One that thrived only beneath cover of darkness, for perhaps two or three evenings a year. Whenever he had a child to deliver to her, or—tonight.Thisnight.
In silence they watched the clock tick through its motions, the hour drawing inexorably closer to midnight. In the early years, when the grief had still been fresh, often she had cried. Kit hadn’t comforted her, per se—he was not a man who had much experience with or patience for the task of providing comfort—but still he had sat with her, weathering her grief with stalwart forbearance. The closest to a brotherly affection of which he was capable.
Midnight arrived unceremoniously, without pomp or pretension. Another year gone in the blink of an eye, swallowed into the silence like so many other things. The last, dying gasp of dreams that had been skewered years and years ago. Along with the girl who had once dreamt them.
“There,” Kit said, in a bland voice. “It’s done. Ten years now, aye?”
“Yes.” A decade now, Emma had been a widow. More than thrice the time in which she had been a wife. “Ten years.”
“‘E wasn’t a good ‘usband to ye, Em.”
No, but he hadn’t been a bad one either, per se—not that Kit had any reason to know otherwise. If Ambrose had had a mistress during their marriage, at least he had been suitably discreet in it. And he had never chided her for her failure to give him a child, though they both knew that the fault was her own, since he confessed to fathering an illegitimate child years before they had wed. But he hadn’t loved her, either. At least, not in the way that she had loved him, with all of the affection stored up from her youth that had had no other place to go, nowhere else to settle. She had poured every ounce of it out upon him, desperately in love with the very idea of love, of having someoneof her own to love her in return. And Ambrose—
Had been fond of her. Like one might value a possession. But he had never lovedher. That had been the greatest of all of her failures; that in the three years of their marriage she had never earned more than his absent affection.
With nervous fingers she smoothed at the silk folds of her lavender gown. Half-mourning, still, after all these years. Her wardrobe had remained a study in monochromatic heartache. Enough. Just—enough.
Restive and tense, she drained the last of her brandy, tasting nothing more than the burn as it coated the back of her tongue on its way down her throat. “I’ve begun clearing out his things from his study,” she said as she rose to her feet once more.
“Good.” It was a sour grunt. “‘E didn’t deserve a shrine.”
Something of a laugh tangled in her throat. “It wasn’t a shrine,” she said defensively. “It was—it was his haven.” The place where he had spent the majority of his time, locked away from her. From everyone, really, but hermost of all. There had been more of him left within it than there had been in the bedchamber adjoining her own, the one which he had occupied and had never welcomed her intrusion within.
“Get rid of the lot of it,” Kit suggested, his gold brows slashing over his eyes. “The bastard’s ‘aunted yer ‘ouse long enough. Ye don’t need it, Em, anyof it.”
But the house had been hislong before it had been hers, and for years she had not felt she had the right to disturb his private places. “Of course, I returned most of his personal effects to his family years ago, the heirlooms and such.” Since she had never been able to given him a child to whom she might have passed them down, and they rightfully belonged to the family from which they had come. “But I’ve found a few things just lately I thought I ought to keep. Things with sentimental value only to me. His pocket watch”—which she had given to him on the occasion of their first wedding anniversary, and which he had said was too fine to ever take outside of the house—“and his favorite pipe. His—his journal.”
Kit’s brows lifted in interest, dark gold spiking in a magnificent arch toward his hairline. “‘Is journal? Never would have thought ‘im the sort. What’s in it?”
Emma lifted her shoulders in a jerky shrug. “I’ve no idea. I can’t bring myself to read it.” She had found it only yesterday, wedged behind a thick stack of law books on a shelf within his study, but she had only allowedherself to crack the spine enough to peek at Ambrose’s elegant script therein before she had slammed it shut once again.
She hadn’t been able to force herself to read what he had written within, the private thoughts he never would have shared with her. She had spent ten years, now, mourning him. What a blow it would have been had she read it only to discover how little he truly had thought of her. Whether his affections might have been engaged elsewhere. Whether he might have had a mistress he had truly loved, in a way he had never loved her.
Perhaps someday she would drum up the courage. But even if Ambrose was long gone from this earth, still he existed as an open wound upon her heart. One that would have to heal before she could bear to read the words he had left behind.
A chill swept over her skin, and Emma busked the chill bumps from her arms. She’d strayed too far from the hearth, and the heat did not extend so far. The window toward which she had wandered, even guarded by curtains, did not quite keep out the bite of the January air. “I have an…indelicate question for you,” she said.
“Indelicate questions beget indelicate answers,” Kit said dryly.
“Perhaps, but I’ve no one else to ask.” At least, no one that had the potential to assist her like he could. But Kit—Kit led a different sort of life than most of those of her acquaintance. He occupied some nebulous space within the seedier echelon of society, and it was those connections she would prevail upon now. “I’ve been thinking, just recently, of acquiring a—a paramour.”
“Jesus Christ.” The heels of his boots scraped across the carpet as he slouched still further, and he rubbed at his eyes as if he’d acquired a sudden headache. “What’s that got to do wiv me? It ain’t hard, Em, to find a man to do it. Ye just find a toff ye like, bat yer lashes a bit, and fuck ‘im.”
Her ears burned at the crude word. “It’s not so simple as that.”
“As a man, I’m tellin’ ye itis.”
