Page 55 of The Spy Who Loved Her
“It was wrong,” Kit admitted. “Iwas wrong. We both were, Rafe and I. We wanted only to protect you—”
“That is not protection. It is condescension. It is patronization.”
Kit winced, a flicker of guilt crossing his face—odd in and of itself,because she could not recall ever having seen it before. “You’re…not wrong,” he said in a low voice. “But you didn’t deserve to suffer for what Ambrose had done. I’m not sorry, Em, for protecting you from the consequences of it. But Iamsorry that I hurt you in the process. I know that must not mean a great deal to you now.”
It didn’t. “I’m not certain you understand,” she said, “just how many decisions you have made forme without my consent. How very little of my life has been my own.” He’d selected her husband, and then her lover, all while letting her believe the choices had been hers. A spider web of deceit that she had never known she had blundered into.
“I doknow that, Em,” he said. “And I wish…I wish I had behaved differently. I can’t unmake the choices I’ve made, but I can begin making better ones. And so I thought I would start with this.” He reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a little silver case, from which he selected a small white card.
She took it as he extended it to her, looking down at the neatly-printed lettering upon it. A calling card. Kit had calling cards. “What is this?” she asked.
“My home address.”
Another surge of anger, so sharp and bright that she bit her lower lip until she was certain she could speak again without letting it loose in a feral shout. “I have been writing to you for years. Where, exactly, have my letters been going?”
Kit scratched at the back of his neck, abashed. “We’ll call it my office,” he said. “I thought it…safer, for you, if none knew we corresponded personally. Those in my employ passed your notes along to me as needed.” He heaved a sigh. “But I amyour brother, and you—you should have the choice of it. To write. Or to pay a call, if you wish.”
To pay a call. As if they were truly family. Her breath whistled through her teeth. “You never wanted that,” she accused.
“You’re my only family,” he said fiercely. “My little sister. I never wanted the repercussions of a public association for you, Em. It can only lower you in the esteem of your peers. You might very well lose friends, find certain doors closed to you. Do you think I wish to be responsible for that?” He gestured to indicate the card held in her hand as he rose to his feet. “But it is your decision,” he said. “How much of a brother you wish me to be.”
Nowhe offered it to her, that long-coveted connection which she had tried to forge for years.
“I will go,” he said, and started for the door. “And I will not fault you for it, whatever you decide. But my door is open to you, always.”
Yes, she thought bitterly, as she stared down at the card in her hand. The door of his house in Mayfair. Just a few streets away, all this time. And she hadn’t even known it.
∞∞∞
It seemed a difficult thing to believe that so innocuous an item as a journal could have been the cause of so much chaos in Emma’s life. Already she had spent too many hours bent over it in the waning light of day or in the dim light of a lamp, struggling to force it to make some sort of sense.
It didn’t. Whatever she tried, however much she had wracked her brain for possibilities, still it resisted her efforts. What had possessed her to take it? As if she might have held some sort of knowledge that two seasoned spies did not, some sort of long-latent acumen for deciphering the indecipherable.
Kit had, to his credit, explained the workings of the cipher as he understood them. It was just that she didn’t think he held much more understanding of it than she did—by his own admission, he had left the work of it to Rafe, who had more of a natural proficiency for the task. Or at least he had the patience for it. And patience was a resource of which Emma had grown increasingly short in supply.
Worse yet, there was no one to whom she could speak of it. Those that knew already had betrayed her, and those that didn’t—well, matters of national security necessitated a certain secrecy. As much as it had hurt to be sacrificed upon that altar, a pawn in a game of spies and traitors, she could not say that her tender feelings ought to have won out over matters of state. In whom could she have confided? Those who were, as she had been, blissfully ignorant of such affairs? Those without any reason to suspect that there lurked a traitor among their ranks? Those who had, absent any such knowledge, the security of sleeping peacefully in their beds whilst others managed the worry for them, routing out villains before their perfidy had a chance to bear fruit? No; she could not have burdened Diana with such knowledge, nor Phoebe, nor Lydia. What was there for them to do for it anyway, beyond senseless worrying?
An uncomfortable sort of dissonance roused there in the far reaches ofher mind; a sort of begrudging acknowledgment of her present predicament contrasted with Rafe’s. In whom had heconfided all these years? No one, she suspected. There had been no one for him, no confidant besides Kit, who was every bit as embroiled in these intrigues as was he.
I am lonely when I leave you.
God, it hurt. Like a slow poison slipping through her veins, coloring every word he’d said to her in shades of duplicity. Even if he had not lied to her directly, still she had ascribed meaning to acts undertaken only to ferret out information. How much, exactly, had she read into thetruthshe’d told her? How much had been only words spoken to gain her confidence, to put her at ease, to pretend at an intimacy that had never truly existed between them?
And still—shewas lonely without him. Somehow she had grown accustomed to his presence, had learned to miss him when he was gone. Her bed was so much colder without him, the nights longer, emptier. She missed the man she thought he had been.
But she had never truly known the man he was.
∞∞∞
“Sir Roger has been in high spirits lately,” Chris said over his drink. “To all accounts, anyway.”
“I suppose that’s good news,” Rafe replied. “I’ve begun receiving invitations again. Though largely to events that he wishes me to attend for the purpose of gathering information.” Another subtle sign that Sir Roger had begun to relax his guard. It meant that the man wanted to accept the fiction they had sold him, to believe that he would remain undiscovered for what he truly was.
“A test of loyalty, do you think?” Chris asked.
“Most likely.” For the foreseeable future, they would have to give a passable impression of it, because Sir Roger was too experienced, too damned cannynot to be watching for a slip of some sort. “Probably he’ll expect me to return with information already known to him. You should do the same, if asked.”
“He doesn’t expect me to attendTonevents,” Chris said. “He never has.”
