Page 42 of The Spy Who Loved Her
“Christ.” Chris rubbed at his jaw. “What ‘ave we got, then? A journal we can’t read? Suspicions we can’t prove?” He made a rough sound in his throat. “I could snatch ‘im,” he said. “Toss the bastard into the Thames and be done with ‘im.”
“You’d never get close enough,” Rafe said. “Probably even now he is shoring up his defenses. Planting seeds of suspicion, poisoning the well against us as a safeguard against a potential threat.” It was what Rafe would have done. It was what he would have donebecauseit was what Sir Roger had taught him, taught all of them. More than once, such tactics had saved him—at least temporarily. Diverting suspicion just long enough to get away clean.
Sir Roger was a master of strategy, an expert at springing a trap closed only when it was too late to avoid it. Once again Rafe had failed to see it before he’d blundered into it. This time, he would not just lose his rook—he could lose his queen.Emma. A single reckless misstep could spell the end of everything he held precious.
“So what are we meant to do, then?” Chris asked. “Just—wait?”
“Yes,” Rafe said. “We wait. Sir Roger doesn’t know what we know. Hedoesn’t know what information we have. So we wait for him to make a move.” If there was anything Sir Roger enjoyed more than winning, it was gloatingof it, reveling in it. Too often he had used his skill in chess to chase Rafe around the board, picking off pieces and prolonging the game for his own satisfaction. Perhaps his one true weakness—his hubris—might goad him into a mistake.
∞∞∞
Rafe had left before Emma had woken, before the first light of dawn had drifted over the horizon. Vaguely, she remembered a soothing stroke to her hair, down her back—but she had still been caught within that twilight state between waking and dreaming, and she hadn’t managed to rouse herself even so much as to mumble a farewell before he had been off.
She hadn’t expected him back this evening. He hadn’t sent Dannyboy with a note, hadn’t arranged in advance for another visit. But he had arrived nonetheless, earlier than she might have expected even had she known to expect him.
She had given him a key, and in turn he had made judicious use of it and had come as if…as if he were simply arriving home for the evening. As if he belonged here every bit as much as she did. He had simply walked into her bedroom as she had been brushing out her hair for bed, already shrugging out of his coat.
He asked, “How is Henry?”
Emma blinked, surprised that he had remembered. That he would think to inquire after a sick child he had never met. “Better today,” she said. “Miss Finch has prepared a tonic for him—an old family recipe that she swears by. He’s seen some improvement.” At least the cold had not settled too deeply into his chest.
“Sounds a sight better than a mustard plaster,” he said, yanking at the knot of his cravat as he sat upon the edge of her bed.
“I wouldn’t be so certain of that. Whatever was in it, it smelled just dreadful.” She laid her brush aside, swiveling upon her chair to face him and summoning up a faintly apologetic smile. “Rafe, I do hope you have not come this evening out of some misplaced sense of obligation.”
There was the tiniest twitch of a muscle in his jaw. “Obligation?” herepeated, as though he had not quite comprehended the word. “I’m afraid I don’t take your meaning.”
Emma’s hands drifted to her lap, settling onto the voluminous folds of her nightdress. The perfect ladylike posture, which she rather suspected she had learned to wear as an armor of sorts. “I mean to say that—that I am certain you must have better things to do of an evening,” she said. Specifically, an evening in which she had not requested his presence. A reprieve, as it were, from whatever loyalty it was that he owed to Kit.
“Do you want me to go?” he asked.
“No!” A nervous little laugh burst from her lips in the wake of her denial. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s not that I don’t want you here. It’s that I don’t want you here if you don’t wish to be here.”
Rafe’s brows drew together, dark slashes carving lines of displeasure above his eyes. “What has brought this on?” he asked, though the nature of the conversation had not prevented him from casting his cravat to the floor or from working the buttons of his waistcoat.
“I just…I have realized that I have rather selfishly monopolized a great deal of your time,” Emma said, curling her toes into the plush carpet beneath her feet. “It cannot be convenient for you, to come every night.” And from Soho, if Dannyboy had the right of it. At the very least, it would mean a walk of well over a mile—or the fare for the hiring of a hack.
“What has convenience got to do with anything?”
A nameless frustration seized at her throat, clamping around it like a vise. An impossible situation to find herself in; an utterly improper liaison that could live only in the shadows, only by night. Perhaps there was nothing in it any more real than fantasies entertained within dreams, but she could not continue to go on as they had without at least this much honesty between them. Without knowing if the only thing that brought him to her was his association with Kit.
“I only meant,” she said, through the thick of the clog in her throat, her voice a little more ragged, hoarser than she would have liked, “that if you would rather be elsewhere, I will not complain of it. And if Kit asks—”
“If he has any sense at all, he damned well won’t ask.” There was a sharpness to his voice, an edge she had not heard before. Something less than anger, but more than mere annoyance.
“I would tell him,” she persisted, her hands clenching wrinkles into the soft linen of her nightdress, “that we parted on friendly terms. And that he is to consider whatever debt you might owe to him fulfilled.”
A heavy sigh drifted from his lungs. With his fingers, he pinched the bridge of his nose in clear exasperation. “I don’t owe your brother a debt,” he said firmly. “If you assumed I did, you assumed incorrectly. He asked, and I accepted. Have you tired of me?”
She jerked as if the question had been delivered along with the slice of a knife. “No,” she admitted, though she thought it was perhaps half the truth at best. That the reality was something more like she would never tire of him. “No. I only wished to give you the opportunity to leave. If you have other obligations to which to attend. If you…if you wished instead to be elsewhere.”
“I don’t,” he said, blunt and direct. He shoved himself up from the bed, dragged his shirt off over his head, ruffling his dark hair with the motion. In three long strides he reached her side, and still there was a tension in his jaw, a tightness she could not quite understand. “I do have other obligations, and I will attend to them as needed. But I don’t wish to be elsewhere.”
Foolishly, her fragile heart wanted to believe he meant something more like,I am exactly where I wish to be.
His fingertips traced the line of her jaw, turned her face up to his. “Come to bed, Emma.”
“For how long?” She offered the question almost unconsciously, and he did not pretend to misunderstand the meaning of it.
