Page 61 of The Spy Who Loved Her
She had judged Rafe too harshly. The prospect of lying to preserve statesecrets might be an onerous and distasteful task, but it was a necessary one, and he could not have liked it any better than she. She had been incensed by the lies, humiliated—but the truth was even moredifficult to bear. A burden, just as he had said. One that had placed the weight of the world upon her shoulders.
She said, quietly, “No. But I will be.” Eventually.
Diana’s expression fractured in sympathy, and she pressed one hand to her mouth to disguise the minute tremble of her lips. “I am so afraid,” she said, “that I am going to lose you as a friend. That because of my fool of abrother—”
Emma winced despite herself. “That will not happen,” she said as she rose to her feet and took a hesitant step forward. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t face you before. I just needed...a bit of time to myself.” Time to lick her wounds. Time to sort through the mess of her feelings and determine how she ought to go on.
The snarled web of those connections she shared with Rafe was a devious one, and the threads of one aspect invariably led back to some other part that must needs be concealed from common knowledge. And now she had developed the worrying certainty that this was the sort of thing with which Rafe wrestled every day. A delicate dance of words in the constant attempt to avert suspicion.
Diana made a wretched little sound in her throat. “Oh, please don’t apologize. I’m just so glad you’ve come.” And then she was rushing across the floor, and Emma found herself swept into her embrace, comforting in its familiarity.
Whatever else had happened, this remained the same. “I am, as well. I have missed you so.”
“I gave Rafe quite a piece of my mind,” Diana confessed. “It was clear enough that he had deceived you in some fashion. I can’t believe he would do such a thing. Have you any idea why?”
Emma squeezed her eyes shut against a sudden surge of tears. “Please, I truly wish only to put it behind me. It’s quite embarrassing, you understand, to—to have formed so mistaken an impression.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
A strangled sob crept up her throat, and Emma swallowed it back down with no small amount of effort. Nothing had changed, really.Shehad not changed. She was always going to be the one who loved more, the one who made herself more vulnerable. “I don’t wish to be the cause of a rift betweenyou,” she said. “In reality, I convinced myself that there was more between us than there truly was.” Really, it was her own fault. To be always so desperate to be loved. Cursed to seek that ever-elusive love from men incapable of giving it.
Diana drew back slowly, the tiniest hint of a frown pleated between her dark brows. “Emma,” she said gently, “I could not possibly guess what has transpired between the two of you, and it is hardly my place to interfere…but I would be remiss if I did not tell you that I do not believe Rafe has fared much better than you.”
“What do you mean by that?” Emma asked.
“He looked just dreadful when last I saw him last,” Diana said. “Like death. I might have managed to drum up some sympathy for him if I hadn’t been so very angry with him.” She hesitated a moment, and her voice dropped to a murmur as if she feared she might be overstepping. “However it was that the two of you parted company, I think it must have hurt him terribly as well.”
“I don’t see how it could have done,” Emma said, and softened it with a smile. Or as much of one as she could manage. “Really, Diana, I should never have expected it to last. It’s just that it has all come out a bit messier than I might have hoped. But now it is done, and I would very much like to put it behind me.”
Diana took a deep breath and pushed her spectacles back up the bridge of her nose. “Of course,” she said. “I understand.”
But she didn’t. And Emma hoped she never would.
∞∞∞
That hope followed Emma home, into yet another long night of trying her damnedest to manipulate the workings of an indecipherable cipher, and it stayed with her long after she’d given up on the attempt to seek out her bed instead.
This wretched situation had thrust her straight into an unexpected moral dilemma. She had not, in point of fact, lied to Diana. But she had done just as Rafe had: deflecting and dodging. Concealing the truth from her closest friend, the person she ought to have trusted with it above all others.
Rafe had claimed that he had not lied to her, and in retrospect,probably he had not. He had insteaddone a great deal of obfuscation, and of letting her believe things she now knew were untrue. He had even made a point of his refusal to answer certain questions she had posed of him.
But to what benefit? He could just as easily have told her pretty lies, which she, in her eternal foolishness, would have wholeheartedly believed. Instead he had straddled the truth as closely as possible. But why should he have bothered with sticking so closely to the truth, when it had been only a ruse undertaken out of necessity?
And why had he given Diana cause to suspect him of conflicted emotions, when that last dreadful evening, he had simply walked away from her, from the consequences of his actions?
She hadn’t even questioned it. What reason would there have been for her to have done? He had proved himself a scoundrel and a liar—
But he wasn’t. Or at least he hadn’t been.
A paltryI’m sorrycould never have offered solace to the woman he had wounded to her very core. But perhaps…perhaps he had knownthat. Perhaps he had known that there had been nothing he could have said to mitigate the hurt he had caused.
Emma flopped onto her back, casting one arm over her eyes even as she squeezed them shut in consternation. This was the wreckage left in the wake of such duplicity; she did not know which version of him to believe in. The lover who had brought her the companionship and passion that she had long lacked? The cool, calculating spy who had toyed with her emotions in the service of his own ends? The ruined man Diana had claimed to have seen?
He donned these contradictory behaviors like some men might a hat or a coat. Which was real? Or were they false faces all, worn either for convenience or necessity? Like the cipher over which they had both labored without success, Rafe, too, was an unsolvable enigma. A man so enshrouded in mystery and deception that she could not reconcile the disparate parts of him she knew. But then, she never had truly known him.
Perhaps, she thought, to know a spy, one had to thinklike a spy. To sort through all of those opposing bits and place them where they belonged, separating actions taken in service of his duties from those which could not be so explained. Like separating wheat from chaff—when the veneer of duty had been stripped away from his actions, whatever was left would be only the man himself. Whoever it was that he happened to be.
A sigh drifted from her lungs, given to the empty darkness of her room, to the pervasive quiet that was again her closest companion. It hummed inher ears with the rush of her blood, and there was a part of her buried not too very deeply down that would have sacrificed a great number of things only to hear the soft, even cadence of his breaths in the darkness instead. Her feelings, at least, had been real. Even now, despite the hurt he had caused, she missed him.
