Page 68 of The Spy Who Loved Her
Chapter Twenty Three
Lies are inconvenient and troublesome. I avoid telling them whenever possible.
And when it’s not possible?
Then I lie.
That brief snippet of conversation from the not-too-distant past floated through Emma’s head in the wake of the door closing once again. Rafe had lied to her just before he had left; she was certain of it. Not a stretching of the truth, or a dodge, or even a deflection. Alie.
“He didn’t mean it,” Kit said, though his gaze sheared away from her own. “He didn’t mean it, Em.”
There was a great, monumentalsomethingthere, hovering in the air between them. Something that had been there a long while, and which had been dangled just out of her reach. A secret to which she had never been privy, and which she suspected that Rafe had intended to go to his grave keeping.
She squeezed Kit’s fingers in hers. “No more secrets. Be honest with me, now, when it is most important.” Now, when honesty was the only thing he had left to give to her. “Please, Kit.”
“He wouldn’t want to burden you with it.”
“That isn’t his choice to make for me.” But then, Rafe had struggled through a rather long career making such difficult choices again and again and again, taking whichever burdens might have come along with them upon his own shoulders. “I would rather a hard truth, Kit, than a simple lie.”
“Simple,” he said on a disdainful little sniff, wincing at the pain it caused. “Good God, Em, none of this has ever been simple. You cannot unlearna thing once you know it. And you might well end up wishing you did not.”
“Then I will weather the consequences, whatever they may be,” she said. “Kit,please.”
His head bent, the ruffled gold of his bangs drooping over his eyes. “Rafe wanted you first,” Kit said quietly, in the way of one confessing a mortal sin. “Even before Ambrose.”
BeforeAmbrose? “Kit, Ambrose has been dead for a decade. We married thirteen years ago.” What was he saying? The words were anchorless in her brain, floating unmoored.
“Rafe wanted you before Ambrose won you, before Ambrose had even begun to court you,” he said. “Ambrose was not the only one who hung upon every word I spoke of you, Em. But Rafe was only a second son who was just making his way in the world, with nothing but a courtesy title and a modest bequest from his grandfather. And Ambrose was wealthy beyond reason. We decided—”
“Youdecided!”
A flush of embarrassment slid into Kit’s cheeks. “He had nothing to offer you,” Kit said. “We all knew it.”
Love. He could have offered herlove.
“We were so damned young,Em, Rafe and I. We thought we knew a great deal more about life, about the world, than we truly did. And once Ambrose had offered for you, you never looked elsewhere.” He gave a ragged laugh. “I thought it would kill him. But you seemed so damned happy, and that—that was enough for him, I think. He wanted that for you.”
I don’t hold it against you. You weren’t meant to notice me.
She hadn’t been happy. She had wanted to be; she had tried to be. She had lived three years in the desperate hope of winning Ambrose’s heart. But she could never have been happy without being loved. It had taken years to come to terms with the fact that she had wasted her love upon a man who had never wanted it.
“Rafe wanted you to be happy,” Kit continued, “but he was fucking miserable. And so he leapt at the opportunity to leave the country. He didn’t return until shortly before Ambrose’s death.”
But that had been ten yearsago. She’d been a widow for a decade already. An eligibleone. He could have sought out an introduction. They had shared the same social circles. His sister had become her dearest friend. “He should have—he ought to have—”
Kit gave a weary chuckle. “If I had not compelled him to go to you that night, Em, he never would have approached you. He could never tell you what he’d done. Whatwe’ddone. Secrets of state required it. Any relationship that might’ve formed between you would have been built upon a lie.” He bent his head, and a thick lock of hair tumbled over his forehead, obscuring his eyes. “He counts himself responsible for ruining your life. It was best, he said, to stay out of it.”
Always on the fringes, unnoticed. Deliberately invisible—even to her. Perhaps especiallyto her.
“It wasn’t difficult,” Kit said, “after Ambrose. The both of us had to negotiate on your behalf with the Home Office to keep you from suffering the consequences of his actions. They took ten years continued service each from us. Rafe has spent more of them out of the country than in. I think he preferred it that way.”
And when he had beenin, when they had been working together upon England’s shores, she supposed those were the occasions upon which he had brought children to her. Without recognition, without acknowledgment, without even a damned introduction.
Only because he had wanted her to be happy. Even if she would never know him.
“God, Em, don’t cry,” Kit said, and Emma swiped futilely at the helpless flow of tears with one hand. “I shouldn’t have told you. He wouldn’t have wanted me to do so. He always knew it would come to a bad end.”
Because he had always loved her, and could never have had her honestly. He’d asked her, once, what she had wanted of him. At the time, she had been too angry, too hurt and humiliated to hear the honesty within the question. She’d read only exasperation into it, when the question had been in earnest. And she’d told himnothing, which he had given her.
