Page 43 of The Spy Who Loved Her
“For as long as you wish me to be there,” he said. But the words were brittle, delicate. As if he could not conceive of a possibility wherein she would want him forever.
Chapter Fourteen
Jenkins’ absence had, in fact, been noted. Possibly it had been noted the very night that Chris had made the man disappear, though they hadn’t caught any additional miscreants skulking about Emma’s home in the nearly two weeks that had passed since the incident. Probably Sir Roger had grown suspicious of a potential trap, and was even now working to slither around it.
“Ah,” Chris said, as he slipped into the chair across from Rafe’s at the tavern, with a gesture of his fingertips toward the folded paper Rafe held in his hand. “S’pose ye got one, too, then?”
“If you mean a summons from Sir Roger, yes.” The next clear move in the game. Rafe chased the words with a sip of whisky and tucked the note back into his pocket. “When?” he asked.
“Tomorrow morning,” Chris said.
“Tomorrow afternoon for me.” Rafe flexed his fingers, gripping his glass in his hand. “It’s to be divide and conquer, then.” It was a good strategy from a master of the art. It wasn’t even unusual. They were rarely called in to report together, since their association was known to relatively few, even within the Home Office.
Sir Roger’s note had arrived late in the afternoon, as they usually did. It hadn’t been suspicious in and of itself. It was what it had not arrived alongside it which was suspicious. Notably, other invitations.
They had been slowly tapering off for days now. As if there had been some unseen war waged against him, turning the tide of social acceptance until a cascade of invitations had turned into a bare trickle. An isolation of sorts, he thought. An invisible hand that had begun the process of choking him out of society.
He had expected something like this, and so he found himself less than surprised—but more than a little concerned. He had known that Sir Roger had the ear of powerful men. But so effective a campaign against him only served to prove how much damage could be done with so littleeffort.
He hadn’t been followed recently; of that much he was reasonably certain. But that meant only that he’d managed to subvert whatever suspicions Sir Roger might have held regarding the current whereabouts of Ambrose’s journal. Until the journal was recovered, and while Sir Roger harbored doubts of their loyalty, this silent war would continue. And a war,anywar, always had casualties.
Chris rubbed his jaw with his gloved hand, wiping away the last traces of the scowl that had settled there. “’E knows we’re after the same thing ‘e is,” he said. “’E wants to know what we know. ‘Ow much we’ve been keeping from ‘im.”
“I thought the same,” Rafe said.
“Ye already gave the game away, what wiv yer letting that man pickpocket Dannyboy,” Chris said. “But it worked, didn’t it? I’ve not been followed since.”
“Nor have I.” It had, at least, gotten them out of the frying pan. But now that Sir Roger knewthem to be in pursuit of the journal, it might well have landed them in the fire.
“S’pose we keep on wiv it, then,” Chris said. “We tell ‘im what ‘e already knows. Use ‘is own perfidy against ‘im.” With one hand, he gestured to a barmaid to bring him a glass. “’E knows we know about the journal. So why not tell ‘im ourselves? Make ‘im think‘eknows everything we do.”
Sacrifice a pawn to save the queen. “Lull him into a false sense of security, you mean,” Rafe said. “Tell him just enough of what we know to let him think he’s safe. To make him think we have no suspicions of him.”
“Will it work?”
“Difficult to say. We’ll have to get our stories straight. He’ll be searching for deviances, any tiny discrepancy that might hint at subterfuge.” And with so many years of experience in espionage, Sir Roger was damn good at it. “But he’s avoided even so much as a sliver of suspicion for years. He’ll want to cling to the status quo—possibly even against his better judgment.”
If they could sell the fiction well enough, toss the man just enough rope to let him imagine it a lifeline extended to him, well, then, he might just hang himself upon it.
∞∞∞
Obligation.
The word swirled around Rafe’s head as he watched Emma brush out her hair. He had, he realized, been arriving earlier and earlier each evening, as if his subconscious had been pulling him back toward her. It came with the queer sense of time moving in reverse, moments stolen from earlier in the day with each arrival. Midnight had become eleven, eleven had become ten, and so on until today, when he’d arrived just as she’d finished with dinner.
Close enough on its heels to share in the strawberry trifle that had been her dessert. To chat over shared bites and glasses of wines, like a married couple might. Of inconsequential things, the minutia that had taken up the daylight hours they had spent apart—like her intentions to visit her modiste to acquire a new wardrobe and set aside the mourning attire that she had lived in for so long. And it had been so damnedcomfortableto be there, to sit beside her and to offer up his opinions on which colors would suit her, and to know she would take them into account. As if his preferences held as much weight as her own.
If he were not careful, perhaps he’d find himself going to her in the daylight hours, the mutually-understood boundary of the hours between nightfall and dawn so thoroughly eradicated that it might well have never existed at all.
An impossible dream, no matter how compelling. It was a kind of torture, he thought, to watch the pleasure spread across her face at his arrival. A pleasure he knew was built upon a foundation of subterfuge. And yet he greedily snatched at every moment that she would spare for him, because sooner or later—sooner, no doubt—they would be lost to him forever.
And she thought he had continued to come out of obligation. Out of selfishness? Worry?Love? Yes; all of those. But never obligation; not like she imagined.
“You’re very quiet this evening,” Emma said as she gave a last flick of the brush through the silky strands of her hair, which glowed a fiery gold in the firelight.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I have much on my mind.” How most effectively to dodge whatever thrusts Sir Roger might strike out at him with tomorrow afternoon. Whether he and Chris could both manage a convincing enough performance to buy them the time they desperately needed to surmount the monumental task of deciphering the damned indecipherable. What steps they would take in the interim to secure Emma’s safety.
And most pressing, presently, how quickly he might divest her of the voluminous, gauzy nightdress she was wearing. It was modest enough, hethought—or it would have been, if the light of the fire did not shine straight through it, silhouetting the curves of her breasts, her hips, the dip of her waist.
