Page 122 of The Bastard's Iberian Bride
“You’ll have more than one wee pistol on you, Fil. Perhaps we shall let the Gibsons go on their way, and you and I will go inside and chat.”
“How lovely. Shall we have a fine English breakfast? Some elderberry jam on a point of toast?”
“Perhaps.”
Now the battle had subsided, a throbbing started behind Bink’s eyes.
He knew her. He’d seen her in Portugal or Spain, lurking about a camp, delivering intelligence, visiting an officer’s bed—one of those, perhaps all of those.
A fog thickened around the memory but couldn’t hide the sharpness of those grim eyes.
“I think not. I’ve come for something and then I shall leave.”
She turned on Paulette. “I want the letter from your father these men have given you.”
Her mouth dropped. “What?”
His Paulette was too confounded to even attempt a lie.
“The letter. Pah, do not pretend. He told me he sent a message that would be kept in trust for you. I want it.”
Paulette looked back at Tellingford. He shook his head. “You’ve broken into my office twice, Fil. You know there’s no such message.”
Her lips wriggled in a frown that turned into a smile, and then a laugh. “That was me only the once. But I don’t think Dickson found it either, else he would not still be looking.” She turned cold eyes on Paulette. “Where is it, then,querida corazón?”
“There was no message,” Kincaid said. “If he sent it, it didn’t arrive.”
Paulette’s eyes widened and she looked up at Bink, her gaze tearing at his heart.
Kincaid was wrong. Heardwyn had sent not one message but two, and neither was important, was it? Neither was worth Paulette’s life.
A chill slithered through him—in the library, Agruen had said he was keeping Paulette’s ring to solve a puzzle, and this woman wanted a letter, a letter Kincaid didn’t know about.
Kincaid and the late Lord Shaldon didn’t have the key to thispuzzleeither. What the devil was everyone looking for?
He studied the dark eyes of the woman and their halos of crows’ feet. Since Heardwyn’s death, the French in Spain had been vanquished. She wasn’t after a cypher or a state secret.
His head pounded. His lungs squeezed like a cart had rolled over on him. And her eyes burned into him, clouding his vision.
“Who are you?” he asked.
She laughed, a stark, evil, croaking, her eyes glittering. A spy’s eyes, abandoning the lie. “You do not recognize me? Though you thought once to rescue me from the girl’s father.”
At his side Paulette froze.
“Alas, I could not dissuade you because here” she pulled at her collar “Dickson, while he raped me, squeezed me so tightly I could not speak for a month. It was Paul who pulled him off of me. And this one,” she pointed at him but glared hard at Paulette, “this is the one who beat your father to death on the word of a rapist.”
Paulette’s eyes widened and her mouth opened but no words came. The shock on her face sent Bink spiraling.
His world crashing should make more noise than the soft breath of his bride. The darkness descending should shut out her face. He shouldn’t be able to see the words settling into her heart.
He mustered some breath in the grey calm and said, “He was not dead when I left him.”
But he might as well have been so. And he wouldn’t explain to Paulette on a public street, with Kincaid and his men looking on.
The eyes his bride turned on him were hollow.
My love, she had called him, not one hour ago. All the incipient promise of love had drained away. A woman could not love the man she thought killed her beloved father, could she? Not even for a manor and four thousand a year.
