Page 76 of The Spy Who Loved Her
“Late,” he said. “Then early. Now late again. Emma, you’ve slept for nearly a day and a half.”
“What?” She couldn’t have done. “You’re joking.”
“I am not. Diana tells me you did not sleep these last days. That you hardly ate.” There was just the faintest hint of recrimination in his voice, as if displeased with her recklessness—even though she had judged it a necessary evil, even despite the outcome.
Her fingers curled into the soft velvet counterpane. “I cannot imagine you have fared much better yourself,” she said quietly. She had hardly let herself think of it, after all. He had been battered already when first she had seen him at Whitehall all those days ago, and it turned her stomach to consider what he and Kit might have suffered since. “Have you slept?”
“No. But I am accustomed to such things—”
“That’s enough.” The clear, crisp intonation was the same one she had long learned to use on recalcitrant children, and it brooked no argument, offered no avenue of dissent. With one hand she patted the space beside her. “Here,” she said. “Now.”
He hesitated. She could almost hear the clench of his teeth in the darkness, the cogs inside his mind wrenching to a grinding halt. Shedidhear the sweet tinge of longing in his voice when he spoke again. “Emma, I—”
“It wasn’t a request. I will prevail upon your guilty conscience if I must.” Though she suspected she weighed upon it a bit too heavily already. But it had worked, and she felt the tremble of his arms as he braced them upon the bed, and she eased to the side to permit him a bit more room only seconds before he collapsed upon the mattress beside her. An odd sound—not quite a sigh of relief, but more a grand releasing of tension—tore itself from his lungs. Perhaps he, too, had reached his limit, though he had borne it all somewhat more steadfastly than she had managed.
“Have you been in that chair all this time?” she asked as she settled herself beside him, tucking her head against his shoulder.
“Not all of it. I did have a bath. Diana found my odor offensive.”
So had she, but less due to the sour stench of sweat that had clung to his skin and his clothes and more because it had been an olfactory reminder of what he had suffered, where he had been, how close he had come to the very brink of death. Now he smelled clean and fresh. Probably someone had fetched him a new set of clothing at some point.
“You were never left alone,” he said. “Diana sat with you for a time. And Phoebe. Lydia and Marcus, as well. And Chris, though he swiftly lost patience with Dannyboy and Hannah, whom he judged too rambunctious for his liking—”
“Kit was here? I thought I might’ve dreamt it.”
“He is still,” Rafe said. “Your butler has had him housed in a room somewhere down the hall. He meant to recover in his own home, but I didn’t give him much of a choice in the matter. It would be unwise to move him, for a while.”
Because of the state of his knee, she guessed he meant to imply. Probably she had seen less than the half of it. “He willrecover?”
“He’ll heal,” he said, in a dull voice. “In time. But the damage is extensive. He’ll walk again, but not comfortably. It’s likely he’ll always have a limp.”
That would rankle, she knew. And it would necessitate certain changes to his life that would ill-suit the devil-may-care one he had led prior. But what was a limp when weighed against the value of the life he had regained? “I suppose I shall have to purchase him a cane,” she said. “They’re really quite fashionable at the moment.” And no one would dare utter a scathing word against him in her hearing.
Beneath her head, she could feel the slow loosening of muscles, hear the evening of his breath. “He won’t like it,” Rafe said. Already there was the blurry mumble of encroaching sleep within his voice.
No, Kit wouldn’t. He would attribute the use of it—fashionable or not—to a sort of weakness he was loath to let anyone see. But he would use it nonetheless, because he was her brother and he loved her. And that was worth all the complaints she would no doubt suffer.
Rafe’s shoulder jerked, as if he had sensed himself falling into sleep and pulled himself back from it. “I have to tell you,” he said, in a strange note of urgency.
“Later,” she soothed. Much later, when they had both rested. When the weight of the stress they both had endured had passed.
“I need you to know how very sorry—”
“Later,” she said again. Because now therewouldbe a later. Time, which she had only too recently measured in mere hours, had unfurled itself once more, stretching into a distant future. “We’ll do a great deal of talking, the two of us. Later.”
With a regretful sigh, he gave up the ghost at last, everything he had meant to say lost for the moment, smothered beneath the shroud of much-needed sleep. The desperation held within those final few words he had spoken had pulled upon the strings of her heart, and she had the sense that he had been holding them back a good long while.
Probably for ten years, she supposed, more or less. Every action, every conversation, every night he had spent with her—that apology had always been hiding there within them. An apology he had never been able to give to her in truth, because he had been bound by duty and honor toward his country to secrecy. But it had been there just the same. She had simply been unable to see past her hurt to the truth of it, to the man who had always loved her, even when she had scarcely been aware of his existence.
The soft, even cadence of his breath edged slowly toward a snore, the low drone of it coaxing a smile from her, and she thought it the most beautiful sound she’d ever heard. Only because it was one more breath he drew, one more moment of a life no longer destined to be cut tragically short.
And she would never again take a single one of those precious breaths, nor even one tiny, inconsequential moment for granted.
Chapter Twenty Seven
Emma had hoped that, under the strict supervision of the staff and within the privacy of the wing dedicated to their use, the children would have had little cause to be bothered by the furor that had been ongoing at the other end of the house these last few days.
And largely, they hadn’t been. But they had noticed her absence, and had been relying upon Dannyboy to carry news of what had transpired within it. He had been down early to gobble up a bit of breakfast and to bask in the praise of his peers for having been entrusted with such a weighty task as Emma had given him for their audience with the King—but he had slipped out of the house again even before Emma had made it down to breakfast.
