Page 57 of The Spy Who Loved Her
Rafe’s neat handwriting furled across the pages, and she scanned the lines as she poured—and poured—and poured. Too much brandy, to be sure, but then she had a great number of nasty thoughts swimming about her head to banish. The brandy warmed her throat on the way down, but it did not alleviate the ache in her heart.
Another sip, but still she could practically hear his voice in her head as she read from the pages he’d sent over with Dannyboy this morning. Her mind wanted to inflect it with the teasing tenor he’d used with her on occasion, or else the low, raspy murmur that had too often sent chill bumps skittering across her skin.
Pathetic. She set aside the stack of notes aside and rubbed at her eyes, which burned with the sting of unshed tears. At least she had been saved the mortification of having told him the truth of her feelings. Perhaps he had begun to suspect, but she had nevertoldhim, and there was some small mercy in that. That she could deny it to him, even if she could not deny it to herself.
The chill of the air grew more pronounced as she stepped away from the light of the fire and closer still to the window, cooling her cheeks which felt hot and flushed with shame. Another sip of brandy, and another. She ought to have buried herself in the necessary work of deconstructing the journal, but the ghosts had not yet gone. She could feel them there, lurking behind her, just out of sight. Like if she turned, she might find Rafe sprawled out upon the couch, already shrugging out of his coat, beckoning her to join him there.
Resolutely, she gazed out the window—and found him there instead. For an impossibly long moment, she thought her tortured mind had conjured him up, placed him out there on the street, half-concealed within the clinging darkness of midnight. Not so close that she could see his face, but then she didn’t have to. She recognized well enough the breadth of his shoulders, the curve of his jaw, that sleek, dark hair.
Not her imagination at all. And she had seen him there, in that very spot, once before. She simply hadn’t known it at the time. She hadn’t known him, then. Weeks ago, she had seen him standing in that exact place.
So had Kit. Dear God—thathad been the moment that Kit had decided to send him to her. Her heart gave a painful kick in her chest, racing through a succession of harried beats as a shiver slid down her spine. What had brought him here at this hour of the night? What had caused him to stop just there, some distance away, as if the boundaries of her property constituted aninviolable barrier? Why now, when he hadn’t sent so much as a single word to her since that last night?
No. Enough of this. It was not his damned privilege to waft in and out of her life at his leisure, to avoid her in the daylight hours and then to skulk about her house at night. She turned away from the window, downed the rest of her brandy in one long swallow, and discarded the glass as she made for the door.
Her purposeful stride morphed into a run, her slippers skidding across the marble floors. Her dressing gown was hardly an appropriate garment in which to leave the house, but this deep in the night, there was no one about to see it.
Just Rafe. And he’d seen her in less.
A burst of wind swept over her as she turned the lock and threw open the door, the thin fabric of her dressing gown no match for the lingering chill in the air. New buds had begun to sprout upon the naked tree branches for the approach of spring, but still they were bare enough to rattle in the wind above her head as she proceeded through the shelter of them toward the street.
If he had not seen her in the window, then he had certainly seen her emerge from the house. Already he had turned to leave, heading back in the direction he must have come.
“Rafe,” she said, her voice roughened with the burn of the brandy she had swallowed. “Rafe.”
He stopped, some twenty feet distant from her. Stopped, but did not turn, and his hands flexed at his sides. Still he did not speak.
Her throat ached. Herheartached. She folded her arms over her chest, and asked, “Why have you come?”
“Go back inside, Emma.” The words hardly reached her ears, uttered in a careful monotone. Still he did not face her—did not, orcouldnot? “You need not warn me away; I am going of my own accord. Old habits die hard, it seems.” His hands slid into his pockets, and in the cold air his breath emerged in a puff of white. “You will not see me again.”
Why did it sound as if he had answered a question she had not asked? Why had he avoided answering the one she had? But she could not force him to explain himself, and he was disinclined to do so. He resumed walking, slow, even strides offering little more than a whisper upon the pavement as he retreated. Her lips pursed against a host of words left unsaid.
The wind whipped at her hair, peeled at the thin fabric of her dressinggown, and chilled the heat of her instinctive ire to be so summarily dismissed.You will not see me again—such a strange turn of phrase. He’d claimed he’d not lied to her, but he was a spy; a master of deception. He could tell a truth and still mislead with it.
She turned, stared at her house, and found the window of the green salon there through the cover of the trees. He’d found here a perfect vantage point; one which provided an adequate view while also offering significant cover. The sort of place one might seek out if one wished to remain unnoticed.
Old habits, he’d said. As if his feet had brought him here against his will. A rote action taken unconsciously. Somewhere in the vicinity of her heart, that ache that had been her constant companion lately turned bittersweet. He had only been watching over her. From a discreet distance, inconspicuous and unobtrusive. And she—she had never once noticed him.
∞∞∞
Saturday—the second in a row Rafe had been summarily refused at Diana’s door. His standing invitation to breakfast had been revoked, it seemed. He’d returned to his own house, but had been unable to dredge up any enthusiasm for the simple breakfast that Mrs. Morris had prepared for him out of sheer pity.
The rapid patter of footsteps upon the stairs heralded Dannyboy’s return, and Rafe fished in his pocket for his coin purse. The boy had amassed a tidy collection of the coins at this point, though he continued to arrive every day to add to his stockpile.
Mostly, Rafe sent the boy on to Emma’s for breakfast, and perhaps a few hours of lessons, which Dannyboy patiently sat through, though Rafe thought he had little interest in actually learning. Occasionally he’d been tasked with carrying a message on to Chris, or sent out on a minor errand that Rafe had devised just to make the lad feel as if he’d earned his coin fairly.
Dannyboy burst into the room without so much as a knock, his expression thunderous—and his face not half so streaked with dirt as it had been when Rafe had sent him on his way perhaps three hours earlier. His clothing, too, had been replaced. Simple garments, not particularly fine, but in much better repair than his own and a sight cleaner. Probably, he thought, they hadbeen scavenged from among whatever garments the boys presently in Emma’s care had outgrown.
Peevish and surly, Dannyboy cast himself into a chair, letting his legs dangle as he heaved a longsuffering sigh. Even his ragged shoes had been replaced with good boots, notably lacking holes in the soles.
“Well,” Rafe said as he plucked free a half-crown coin from his purse and tossed it to the boy. “You look…clean.”
“That nasty womanbathedme,” Dannyboy seethed, as if this had been some crime of monumental proportions. “Said I smelled o’ the sewer an’ I couldn’t eat at the table until I’d washed.”
An exaggeration, but only a slight one. “Is that all?”
“I told‘er,” the boy snarled, “I ‘ad a bath last month!”
