Page 23 of A Night of Secret Surrender
She shrugged and looked away, feeling as though a ghost had run across her skin, dancing slowly. ‘I am as replaceable as the next agent. They will kill me on sight, though I don’t plan to make it easy.’
‘Then we will have to make certain that they don’t recognise us at all.’
‘If I come with you.’
‘You will.’
She liked his certainty and smiled. To place, even for a small while, the responsibility of her safety into someone else’s hands was a liberating—and terrifying—thing.
‘Did you tell the person you met last night where you were staying?’
‘No.’
‘Good. When everyone is scrambling to guard their back it always pays to keep your counsel. Even with friends.’
‘You’ve done that?’
‘For years,’ he returned. ‘The quality of good intelligence is too important to squander on some personal vanity.’
When his eyes met her own, Celeste felt something shift inside her, some primal lurch of desire. Today his irises were a dark amber, soaked in pain, but beneath that lay other emotions, deep and quiet but ready to strike.
He had been hurt like her, she could see that, a hidden sadness that spawned from inside and set the edges of his eyes burning into her own.
He was a different man now from the one she had known.
The innocence they’d both lost made her turn away. It was said that he had that particular ability to read people’s faces like books and she did not want him to know anything more of her story.
If she had any sense, she would get up and leave him now. He was stronger than he had been and the fever had waned. Perhaps the inflammation had subsided, too. She did not offer to look at his leg again, because tending to the wounds of a former lover brought up thoughts she had no right to be thinking.
And therein lay all the trouble, a familiarity that was both welcome and dangerous.
It was dangerous to cross a line again that she had still barely recovered from the last time. Through all the years of not seeing him, she had nevertheless kept a firm grip on his movements and successes. He had been so very heroic, his bravery spoken of from one edge of Europe to the other.
Wellesley’s magical master of intelligence who could escape from any trap set for him, the wily cleverness and the ability to camouflage himself leading even the most jaded of partisans to offer him help as he passed between armies and through towns and cities ransacked by his enemies.
An unrivalled chameleon. It would be wise to tread carefully around a man who was this sort of legend.
Leaning forward, she dragged out a small pistol from her bag. She had two of them and knew that whatever weapons he must have carried before meeting Guy Bernard would be long disposed of.
‘This is for you. It’s loaded and there are more bullets and dry powder in the double-leather pouch.’
He looked at what she was offering him, but did not reach out. ‘I seldom carry a weapon. But thank you, anyway.’
The shocking truth of what he had just admitted sunk in. He would use his wits instead of a bullet.
‘Another difference between us, then, Major?’
He frowned.
‘A stranger’s blood on one’s hands has a stench to it. It is a dividing line. Even the most slow-witted might know it as such.’
He took her fingers into his own at the words, uncurling the anger and tracing the marks on her palm. Such a touch kept her silent, the heat of him burning into desire.
‘Then write a kinder story across what has been, Celeste,’ he said finally.
‘Fairy tales have that certain ring of untruth to them. A sleeping beauty. A poisoned apple. An unstable mama who loved one daughter a lot more than she did the other.’
The words came from the pit of her stomach, unexpected, furious, desolate. She’d never disclosed such a grief to anyone before.
