Page 55 of Lord Ramsey's Red-Headed Ruin
“I must try. I am here. By accident, yes, but so close, and I must try. He could still be looking for me.”
Ram did not blink an eye.
“Oh, I can see you think me foolish.”
“No, my darling. Too hopeful.”
“What if… What if he sends someone else to see if I appear?” She ran a hand through her hair. “Well. No. I take that back. He wouldn’t. That would mean his report would have to know it is me he sought. And the rules do not allow others to know, save those in the line.”
Ram hated to do it, but he knew what her work meant to her. And he knew that she would regret every moment that she had not gone to check if her man appeared. “We will go.”
She jumped up. “Ram!”
“We will,” he confirmed. This small thing he could do to make her happy. One of his three guards would follow them.
“At two.”
“Two o’clock. That’s when you would meet?”
“On Mondays. This is the perfect! And you will come with me.”
“I will.” He smiled. He’d not let her out of his sight.
She ran toward Ram and flung her arms around him.
He held her to him, this woman he loved beyond anyone or anything he’d ever known, and prayed that what he did today did not mean the end of his affair with her.
For if this contact of hers appeared, Ram knew deep in his guts she would leave him for this man, this phantom, this agent who had recruited her, kept her, and used her for years before Ram ever set eyes on her.
But he had to agree to this. It was indeed the last thing she could do. It was also futile.
But to love someone completely meant one had to let them fly free.
He buried his face in her shoulder and feared she would fly away from him today at two. If she did, his world would shrivel, become small and foul, done in grays and blacks without her.
And so before they did this frivolous thing, they would have the one true thing that existed—their desire for each other, a living, daring ecstasy that he would give her as long as he had breath.
*
That afternoon, Amberand Ram set out for the abbey. Their walk was brief. The weather fine. Pedestrians few.
Ram walked with her toward one door of the ancient church.
“At that bench,” she told him with a nod toward the stone garden seat, “we would meet.”
“I will remain here.” He stood by the corner of two old buildings damaged, most likely, by the same mobs that had attacked the abbey during the Terror.
Amber nodded and left him. They would remain no more than fifteen minutes. She had promised Ram that. Her hopes were high, even if her chances of success were few.
She sat on the old bench in the shade of linden trees. She inhaled the fragrance of the last blossoms mixed with the allure of flowering jasmines. She waited. The minutes ticked past. But no one came. No one stepped from behind the large evergreen. No one wore a face veil incognito or a sweeping hunter-green cape edged in red braid. No one walked with a limp of the left leg.
Her contact was not here. He would not appear.
She stood with a sigh and approached Ram. Without a word, he put his arm around her waist and drew her toward their house.
Her time as an informant was over.
Her remaining challenge was how to get word to her superior that Vaillancourt kept a list of those whom he wished to kill.
