Page 48 of The Spy Who Loved Her
“You owe me an explanation,” Emma said in a furious whisper.
“You’ll have it.” His hand had already curled around the door handle, and the icy gust of the winter air in his face felt balmy in comparison to the frigid blast of her antipathy. “You’ll have it. But I can’t stay and—”And watch your love turn to hate. He couldn’t even bring himself to voice the words aloud. It would kill him. It was going to kill him anyway, but at least it would a slow sort of death. A lingering one. A consumption of the heart he had lost so long ago. “I’m sorry,” he said. At last. The very words that had been stuck in his throat these last ten years, aching to be spoken. So paltry, so inadequate. They could not hope to scratch the surface of his regret, could not convey even the smallest fraction of his remorse.
The door closed behind him as he walked out into the night.
So damned sorry, Emma.
Chapter Sixteen
He didn’t want to do it.”
Emma blinked at the clear, precisely enunciated syllables, such a rarity from Kit that she could almost believe she was in the company of someone else entirely. Oddly, Rafe’s sudden departure had left her feeling both bereft and furious all over again. He had earned the upbraiding she had meant to give him, and he had deprived her of the opportunity.
“He didn’t want to do it,” Kit repeated, more firmly this time. “So if you wish to place blame, it belongs to me.”
Emma’s stomach roiled. “He didn’t want to bed me?” The very thought sickened her, that she might have been party to something far more sordid than she had ever imagined, even if unintentionally.
A hoarse bark of laughter eked from Kit’s throat. “No, the poor bastard always wanted that,” he said, as if it ought to have been somehow elucidating. “He didn’t want to deceive you.”
“Then why did he? Why didyou? I had thought—” She cleared her throat to speak around the lump of pain that had risen in it. “I had thought you had at least a little more respect for me than that.”
“To protect a different lie,” he said. “That’s the thing about lies. Keeping them straight is a dreadful business. The first one—the first lie was to protect you. And it happened ten years ago.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, though that vaguely sick feeling within her stomach only grew.
Wordlessly, he set the book that Rafe had given him into her hands, and she stepped out of the shadows and into the thin sliver of moonlight that shone through the window, the better to see it. A fresh surge of fury coursed through her at the sight of it; the leather cover, stiff with age and disuse. “He—he stole this from me?” she asked, in a fragile little voice. “He stole my husband’s journal?”
“I asked him to,” Chris said. “Hell. I toldhim to.”
“Why?” It was as if there was something hanging there in the air between them, a horrible thought dangling just above her head. Just waiting for her grasp it. “Why would you ever?”
“Open it,” he said. “I know you haven’t. But you need to understand.”
With a sense of trepidation, she turned the leather cover, saw the familiar slant of Ambrose’s handwriting. At first she thought it a trick of the lingering darkness, but even when she squinted and pulled the little book closer to her face, still she could not read it. “It’s nonsense,” she said, baffled. “It’s—it’s just gibberish. Why would he have written something so utterly unintelligible?”
“It’s not nonsense,” he said. “It’s a cipher. One that has thus far resisted all of our efforts to break.”
“But why would…” The words faded into the dead silence between them, trailing off as that horrible thought drew nearer and nearer. Until at last she had it there in the palm of her hand, wrapped within the clutch of her fingers. “Oh, lord. You’re spies,” she said. “You, and Rafe—and my husband?”
“Yes,” he said. “But Ambrose was more than a spy, Em. He was a damned traitor.”
Traitor.
It didn’t sound like aword, really, so much as a death knell. It knocked about within Emma’s mind; a cruel, noxious sound.Traitor. It felt like the stick of a knife through her ribs, the puncture of her lungs, until every breath she drew was flavored with pain, with shame.
“Em.” The word pierced the strange fog that had clouded her mind. Distant, quiet. Struggling to reach her through her shock, which had enshrouded her like deeply piled layers of quilts. “Em. It’s years past, now.”
But it wasn’t—it wasn’t. Perhaps they had known for years, but for her it wasnowand it was freshand horrifying.
The deep breath that slid down her throat and into lungs that felt collapsed beneath the weight of what she had learned was cold and heavy. “How?” she asked. “Why?” Such a frail-sounding thing, her voice. Weak and battered. A shrill whistle through the torn sails of a storm-tossed ship.
Kit did not answer directly, and Emma wasn’t even certain what it was, exactly, she had asked. She felt the pressure of his arm at her back, leading her deeper into the house. There was the softwhiskof a door opening in the darkness, the press of his hands on her shoulders as he urged her to sit. Then, at last, the lighting of a fire, and a strong, swift flare of light beating back thegloom.
He lit a lamp and set it on the low table, taking up a seat opposite her, the journal balanced upon his knee. A few moments passed in a strange silence that was filled only with the secrets he had let pile up between them. And at last he said, “When we met—Rafe, Ambrose, and I—I was all of twenty years of age and facing down the distinct possibility of transportation.”
“What?”Transportation? “What did you do? Why did you never tell me? I could have—”
“No, you damned well could not have. What would you have done?” Kit splayed out his fingers, as if he were offering up the truth to her at last. “Let’s just say that a man whom some would call a gentlemanwas less than gentlemanly with a woman I considered to be beneath my protection. I gave him the consequences he was due, and the man’s family took offense to it.”
