Page 69 of Lord Carlisle's Enticing Lure
She put a finger to his firm lips. “I am honored.”
“I love you, Giselle.”
The tears she had not yet shed now rolled down her cheeks. “I am honored even more. I love you too, Clive Davenport. You bring to me all the vibrant colors of a life of love.”
“Giselle,” he crooned, “listen to me. I want you—”
“Clive! Clive!” a man bellowed as he climbed the stairs, his boots clicking on the wood. “Clive!”
A brisk knock at their door was followed by it falling open and banging against the wall.
Langley stood there. His face white. His stance that of a dead man.
Clive shot to his feet.
Dread stopped Giselle’s heartbeat.
“What news?” Clive asked.
“Two hundred miles long,” Langley managed, breathless. “More!”
“What?” Clive grimaced. “The French armada?”
“No! No! The lines of the Grand Army!”
Giselle recoiled in horror. “How? Crossing the Channel? Where? At Dover. From Calais, the shortest route—”
“No!” Langley roared, beaming at them now. “The French go east!”
“East?” both Clive and Giselle gasped at the same time.
“Those two hundred thousand men of the Grand Army form lines hundreds of miles long! They march out of Boulogne toward Austria. Boney has declared war on them!”
Clive leaned over and gathered Giselle into his arms. “Success, my love.”
“He’s left Boulogne,” she whispered against his mouth. Then, as best she could amid her bandages and pain, she hugged him. “Bonaparte has gone.”
*
Giselle inched tothe edge of her bed. She’d been moving slowly for a few days, telling no one because everyone urged her to remain still. Reminding them all she was not porcelain, she recovered her stamina more each day. She itched—no, really, shetwitchedto move.
So here she was, eager for a glimpse of the world beyond her four bedroom walls. Clive was gone to his morning ablutions and had promised to return with her broth and tea.
Once she left this room, this house, she would never drink broth or tea ever again. She’d have roast chicken with potatoes and turnips in gravy. Beef with summer greens. Spinach and oranges, tossed with vinegar and a bit of Italian oil on olives. She’d make bread. Roll it andknead it. Shape it as she wished. Like a ball or a heart.
A heart.
She stood leaning on the windowsill and scanned the grounds. A small garden surrounded with ruby-red rhododendrons lay before her. The owner here, Lady Tracy, evidently believed in random planting. The only order was that hedge of red. Lilies of white and variegated yellows sprang up here, there, and beyond. Bluebells spread from one clump of lilies to another. The greens of the foliage ran the spectrum from the pale green of young shoots to the spring greens of new leaves and the glossy forest green of shrubs and, of course, back to the ever-present rhododendrons.
She was blossoming like those red flowers.
She had changed these past weeks, in infinitely tiny degrees, opening to the air, the sky, and a realm of different possibilities. Nearing the end of her mission, meeting Gus and Amber again, reuniting with her mentor and her mother’s best friend Madame Le Brun, had begun to conclude her recent life as a spy. They had reawakened in her a desire to create a new life. Her thought of retreating to Cornwall was the marker of that.
But meeting Clive had infused her with a new ambition. Her first thought, that she was not worthy of him—a marquis and she, the youngest daughter of a vicomte—faded quickly.
In its place came a new phenomenon. A reawakening, a birth of a new perception of herself in vibrant shades of possibilities. A foaming white the color of waves crashing on a shore wiped away, little by little, the black marks of her past. Her capture with her sister and brother by Vaillancourt. His man’s rape of Lisette and her own outrage. Her marriage, abusive and unbearable.
Those angers faded, washed as if with a soft brush into the verdant greens of a summertime romance. Delicate as a seedling thrusting through good earth, Clive’s seeming instant regard for her, his insistent attentions and his charms, had drawn her. Lured her, indeed,with lines of affection, as surely as if he drew them with bold black ink, wrapping around her, holding her near. Watching as if from afar, she had allowed his courting. She had welcomed it. She had invited it, him to her bed, to her heart. That was the celestial blue that had seeped into her consciousness and sustained her through capture. She had not feared death. She had expected Clive’s rescue.
