Page 71 of A Night of Secret Surrender
‘I have come with a warning. Guy Bernard is on his way here to kill you.’
‘You had no need to come. De la Tomber has given me the very same news only this evening, Celeste.’ He said her name without any warmth. He said it as though the very sound pained him.
His eyes glanced across her clothing and she was comforted for the hat which covered much of her face and all of her hair.
He did not want her here, she could tell.
‘I did not realise Aurelian de la Tomber still maintained such good contacts in Paris.’
‘He is in Paris often and has kept abreast of all the happenings to aid his family. It is just as well you waited until he was gone for I am not certain he would wish to see you either.’
‘He was there when the Dubois family were murdered. I thought he was involved in it, too.’
‘Yet you slipped him a knife after he was taken.’
‘He told you of that?’ When he nodded she continued, ‘By then I understood the true nature of Mattieu Benet.’
‘Which was?’
‘He had accrued a fortune privately through the blackmail of others, so his scruples were compromised.’
‘God in Heaven.’
She frowned. She did not recall him as a man who’d sworn much at all, but, with his face dim and indistinct against the low light he felt like a stranger, like someone she did not know well any more.
‘Take off your hat.’
She swallowed, toying with the idea of refusing him completely and then discarding such a wasted emotion.
‘I want to see at least just who you have become.’
‘I doubt such knowledge could be so easily purchased, Major.’ She threw this back at him, even as she reached up for the felt beret.
* * *
Her hair was longer now, the same honeyed brown he remembered from her youth, but curlier. It grazed her shoulder blades, thick and glossy, a woman emerging from the plain clothes of a lad. So very beautiful. That thought angered him, as did the fact that his body warmed to her presence like a moth to flame. He knew she had seen his hand shake, but her unexpected reappearance had reignited inside him everything that he had thought dead.
‘You never wrote to say that you were safe.’
‘Perhaps it was because I wasn’t.’ Scorn and fury threaded each of her words.
He remembered this so distinctly. This fight and conflict. This anger that had kept him at a distance until she’d wound her body around his own in the darkness and taken every piece of him; poles apart like north and south, yet drawn together by gravity and emotion.
‘You must have expected some retribution when you meted out your accusations in Paris.’
‘You are right. I thought I would die. I thought that they would kill me quickly and then it would all be over.’
She sat on the floor suddenly, leaning her head against the wall behind her so that a slice of moonlight illuminated her face. This action reminded him so forcibly of their time in her father’s rooms high above Paris that he felt displaced and uprooted.
‘What stopped you from welcoming death after you escaped, then?’
An expression he did not recognise lay in her eyes, guarded, protective, fierce.
New secrets, he thought. Layers upon layers of them.
‘And so you headed south?’
She nodded. ‘To Rome. Caroline Debussy has good contacts there. It was comfortable and warm.’
