Читать книгу The Complete Regency Bestsellers And One Winters Collection - Rebecca Winters - Страница 74

Chapter Three

Cassandra smoothed down the wool of her pantaloons and pulled up the generous collar of her jacket. It was cold in the London wind and it had already begun to spit.

Damn, she cursed, for the sound of the rain would dull her hearing and she knew that dawn wasn’t far off.

Lord Nathaniel Lindsay had returned to his town house a quarter of an hour ago, and by his gait as he descended from the carriage she knew he had been drinking.

Perfect.

The thick line of trees in the garden surprised her. She would not have imagined him to sanction such a shelter, for intruders could easily use the screen to hide behind. Making her way through the green-tinged darkness, she sidled along the undergrowth until she came to the windows.

The first sash was rock solid. The next one moved. Unsheathing her knife, she pressed it into the crack and shifted the lock. One second and it was rendered useless, clicking into access. With an intake of breath she lifted the wood, and when she perceived no threat she raised it farther.

Waiting, she listened to the sounds of the room. A single last fall of wood in the grate as the warm air greeted her, a clock in the corner marking out the hour.

She was over the barrier in a whisper, turning to the chamber and waiting as her eyes accustomed themselves.

* * *

‘Shut the window and join me.’

He knew she would come for he had seen a shadow that was not normally there against the stone wall on the opposite side of the street. This window had always been loose, a trick of wet wood or poor craftsmanship, he knew not which.

To give her credit she barely acknowledged the shock. A slight hesitation, one less certain step. He wondered if she held a knife in her hand and thought perhaps he should have bothered to arm himself. But he would not have harmed her. He knew that without a doubt.

‘Lord Nathaniel Lindsay, the heir to the title of St Auburn?’ Her voice was tight, tinged with more than a hint of question.

‘At your service, Mademoiselle Mercier. And now you are all grown up.’

‘A fact that you hate?’

He laughed at that because her surprising honesty had always appealed to him, though the sound held little humour. ‘I survived, but others did not. The names I presume you gave to Lebansart made it easy for him to mark them off as English agents. Didier and Gilbert Desrosiers were like lambs to the slaughter. Good men. Men who had never wronged you in any way. Men with allegiances to England and who had only ever wanted to serve this country.’

The blood seemed to disappear from her face. One moment her cheeks were rosy from the outside cold and in the next second they were as pale as snow.

‘You were a spy, too? My God, that explains why you were there in France and in Nay in particular.’

‘They call them intelligence officers now.’

‘You were a spy for the English army?’

‘The British Service.’

‘Not just the army then, but the quiet and hidden corridors of a clandestine and covert agency. Are you still?’

He did not answer.

‘I will take that as a yes, then.’ The blood had returned to her face, and she did not waver as she went on. ‘I didn’t come to offer excuses for what I did at Perpignan, my lord, nor for exoneration.’

‘Then why did you come?’

‘To give you this.’

She took a ring from her pocket and he recognised it immediately. His mother’s, the emerald as green as it had been all those years before.

‘I took it and I should not have. For all the other things that I was, I was never a thief.’

‘God.’ Thief of hearts, he thought. Thief of lives. Thief of the futures of two good Englishmen caught in the crossfire of politics.

‘Celeste died for nothing. At least those agents of England that you speak of perished for a cause they believed in. A righteous cause. A cause to take them into Heaven and be pardoned by our Lord for it.’

‘You came tonight to tell me this?’ His voice shook with bitterness.

‘No. I came to say that nothing is as black and as white as it seems, and the documents I saw were there for others to see as well.’

‘Yet you memorised them and gave the information back to the one person you should not have.’

‘Guy Lebansart was only one man who might have wanted them dead. France was seething with those who would harm anyone with loyalties to England. Perhaps they held your name, too?’

‘I doubt I was on any index of names.’

‘Then you doubt wrong,’ she said and turned to the window. ‘From the moment you rescued me there was danger.’

And then he understood. ‘So you traded our freedom for intelligence? Hell.’ So many questions and so few answers. Yet something was not quite right. And then the penny dropped.

‘I was the one you bargained for?’

The nod she gave him was almost imperceptible. ‘Indeed, that was a part of the story, but now I need a favour, Lord Lindsay. I need the right to go on with my life without having to look behind at the chaos, waiting for it to catch up.’

‘And nothing else?’

‘Nothing.’

Her voice was measured. No extra emotion. No telltale sign of weakness or feeling. She had sacrificed the lives of others for his and she knew there was no honour in any of it. It was not thanks she had come for. Neither was it a penance. Celeste was probably more of a part of it than anyone, for Sandrine had always been like a mother lioness over any perceived tarnishing of her cousin’s memory and she might have been fearful about the recount of his knowledge of her.

The complex layers of guilt and shame mixed in strangely with integrity. She had not needed to come. He hadn’t further want for the ring and no explanation could absolve murder.

‘You whored in exchange for my life?’

She shook away the words. ‘You know nothing, Colbert.’

‘Lindsay,’ he corrected her with a cold and hard fury.

‘If I had not traded the information, you would have been dead.’

‘And instead...?’

‘You lived.’

Her eyes flickered to the scar that ran across his jaw on the right side.

‘Death might have been kinder.’

She raised her fist at that, the hand of ruined and knotted skin. ‘You think I did not wish that, too, many times after I left you, the blood of those I’d named wrapped about the heart of my guilt? But there is no book written on the rules of war, my lord, and I was a young girl trying to exist in a world that had forsaken me. Anton Baudoin had taken the documents from a man he had murdered a few days before you came to Nay. I had no idea as to who those mentioned within it were.’

Silence filled the space between them for the time it took the clock in the corner to chime out the hour of two. It was why he had come to find the Baudoins in the first place, pointed in the direction by intelligence garnered after the agent’s murder. Then she spoke again.

‘You think I should have trusted you enough to make a run for it at Perpignan and believed that the impossible might be probable there with a hundred enemies at our heels and many more behind? You believed in that option of faith?’

‘Yes.’ Simple. Heartfelt.

Her unexpected smile was a sad one. ‘On reflection you may have been correct because what happened afterwards took away all my right of choice.’ There was a new note in her words now. Resignation and acceptance mixed with an undercurrent of shame.

‘Merde.’ The French word echoed through the dark like a gunshot. One moment a history just guessed at and the next known exactly.

‘But I have made a new life here, a good life, a life that helps those whom all others have forgotten.’

‘The Daughters of the Poor?’

She nodded, but in the depths of her eyes he saw the truth of what they had each found out about the other shimmering. Unspoken. The lump in his throat hitched in memory and it rested in the spaces after midnight, the weight of such knowledge making him turn away, pain lapping at all they could never say.

‘I help ruined girls like me.’

He hated that pretence was no longer possible.

‘Get out.’ Usually he was more urbane and polished, but with her he had never been quite himself.

‘Not until you agree to what I have asked.’

He did not speak because he did not trust in what he might say, but when he nodded she was gone, the whisper of the velvet curtains as they fell against the sash and a faint eddy of wind. Placing his head against the wall, he closed his eyes and cursed.

No one can get back what is lost.

That is what she had whispered then, that last time, as she had untwined his shaking fingers from around her wrist and gone with the French spymaster, her laughter on the air as rough hands wormed into the young promise of girlhood.

The sacking shield had come down as her footsteps receded, the twine it was held in place with tight at his throat. He remembered the sharp blade of a knife pressed into his ribs just below his heart.

‘Sandrine, the whore.’ Someone had drawled the words behind him as he had been pushed into midair and then he could remember nothing.

* * *

Cassandra was shaking so much she could barely untie her trousers and unbuckle her boots. Two good men had died because of her disclosure and Nathaniel Lindsay hated her now as easily as she had loved him, then. A young girl of shattered dreams and endless guilt. The hero in Nathanael Colbert had beckoned like a flame and she had been burnt to a cinder.

She was so utterly aware of Lindsay; that was the problem. Even now, safe in her room, the thrum of her want for him made her body vibrate. She forced stillness and crossed to the mirror above the hearth, its rim of gold leaf scratched by age. The woman who stared back was not the one she felt inside. This woman still held on to promise and hope, her eyes dancing with passion, heated skin sending rose into pale cheeks.

He had no reason to assent to all that she asked, no obligation to the betrayal and deceit lingering beyond the limits of honour. And yet he had assented.

She thrust her hand instinctively against one breast and squeezed it hard. No joy in this, no pleasure. No reward of the flesh, but the broken promises of men.

Turning away, she swallowed, the anger of her life forming strength. It was all she had, all she could hold on to. Once, other oaths had held her spellbound in the safety of Celeste’s bedroom in Perpignan, and under the light of a candle that threw the flame of curiosity on to two young faces.

‘Papa said that we can all go to Barages. It has been so long since we have been anywhere, Sandrine, and taking in the waters would be something we can all enjoy.’

‘Will David come, too?’

‘If you are going he is bound to want to for I have seen the way my father’s godson looks at you. But be warned, although he is eighteen he is also far too boring.’

Cassie blushed, hating the red that often rose in her cheeks at the mention of anything personal. She had arrived in France four months earlier, travelling from London by boat into Marseilles in the company of her mother’s brother and her cousin, and the warmth of the south had seeped into her bones like a tonic.

‘I want to meet someone who will take my breath away. A rich man, a good-looking man, a dangerous man.’ Celeste’s voice held that thread of wishfulness that Cassandra had often heard her use. ‘I am so very tired of the milksop sons of my father’s friends.’

‘But what of Jules Durand?’ Her cousin’s latest swain had been at the door most days, professing his love and his intentions, a strange mix of shyness and gall.

‘He is not...manly enough. He tells me too much before I want him to. He kissed my hand yesterday and all I could think of was to pull away from the wet limpness of his lips.’

All of a sudden the conversation had gone to places Cassandra did not understand, the edge of virtue tarnished by a feeling that seemed...bruised. Celeste had grown up in the year since she had seen her, the lines of her body curvy and fuller. Tonight under the bedcovers some other feeling lingered, something wrong and false.

Her cousin’s blue eyes flashed. ‘Do you never wish for a man’s hands upon your body, finding the places that feel only magic? Do you not want to know the wonderment that all the great books talk of?’

‘No.’ Cassie pulled the collar of her nightgown full around her throat. Her own bedroom was down the corridor amongst the shadows and she had been scared to stay there, but this room suddenly held a fear that she could not comprehend.

‘You are no longer in boring stuffy old England. Here women know the dance of love and they flaunt it.’ Rising from her bed, Celeste simply pulled off her gown, standing against the flame of her lamp like a goddess.

‘I want to know what it is to be passionate and wanton and brave. Only dull wits shall be for ever stuck with one boring husband for the rest of their lives and I certainly shall not be that. When we are young we should be able to know...everything.’

Cassie’s eyes ran across the fat abundance of her cousin’s breasts, breasts that were so different from her own. Celeste’s waist had slimmed and her hips had spread and the hair between her legs had been trimmed back into the shape of a heart.

‘You look beautiful.’ The words came from the very depth of admiration.

‘Too beautiful to be wasted on the boys that I am forever annoyed by here.’ One hand cupped her breast and the other fell to the soft place between her legs. ‘There is no power more durable than that of womanhood. No influence over men as strong as the desire for sex. Remember that, Cassandra, when you do finally grow up, and use it wisely.’

Draping a blanket around herself then, she smiled, turning again into the more-known cousin, the girl who would push the boundaries, but was kinder with it.

‘You look shocked, Sandrine.’ She began to laugh in earnest now. ‘Shocked and stiff. I do not think you are made for such confessions.’

All the words fell across Cassandra. Words she had not heard before or thought of. Ideas that had been a part of a world far from her own, lost in the corruption of love. She wished she were home in England, Maureen in the chamber next door and her father not far away either. Rodney was too young to think much of right now, but even his presence would have been a relief.

‘Come, let us sleep, cousin, and I promise I shall behave myself entirely. You have been ill, after all, and I should not tease you.’

* * *

In her bedroom in London all those years later Cassandra dashed away the tears that came so readily whenever she thought of Celeste. Her cousin’s promise had been fulfilled in blood and in pain, the danger of Baudoin’s brother Louis and the wildness within him no match for a slightly wayward French virgin steeped in the potential of adventure and romance.

‘Romance.’ She whispered the word into the room, and it curled into sin. Some losses were beyond comprehension and this was one of those. Some truths, too, were made mute by their sheer and utter horror.

Her truths.

No, she could never let Lord Nathaniel Lindsay know the exact depth of any of them and after discovering today that he worked for the British Service she knew she would have to be more than careful. Just another gulf of difference between them that could never be bridged.

* * *

Lady Acacia Bellowes-Browne hung on to his arm at the Smithson ball and laughed, a soft musical sound that ran through tenseness and made Nathaniel relax.

‘You said that you would come down to Bellamy for the hunting, Nat. I have held that promise for some weeks now’

‘And indeed I shall,’ he answered, liking the feel of her fingers on his skin, the many rings she wore decorative and colourful. He was about to speak again when Lydia Forsythe came across to the group.

‘I am sorry to disturb you, Lord Lindsay, but I want to thank you for your help the other week. Mama said you were most kind in ensuring that I did not bleed to death.’

‘I rather think that you would not have.’

‘Well, Miss Cassandra Northrup said that I might and she is thought to be most proficient of all in the arts of medicine. When I visited her to give her my thanks she barely allowed my gratitude. Instead, she has asked for my help with her charity. Mama, of course, does not approve, but I think it is important...to remember about the plight of others, I mean...’ She petered off as Acacia began to speak.

‘Cassandra Northrup has lobbied us all in her pursuit of supporting those less fortunate.’

Interest sparked his question. ‘You think she is too assertive in her search for patrons?’

‘No, not that. She is known to delve into the shady corners of London when locating all the broken women and I think she understands neither the dangers nor the gossip associated with such an occupation. She looks as if butter would not melt in her mouth, but I have it on all accounts that she is well versed in the art of self-defence.’

‘Isn’t she just wonderful?’ Lydia Forsythe’s eyes were alight with hero worship, and the woman standing with Hawk, who Nat had not met before, also nodded her head.

A paragon and model of charitable benevolence. What would these people say if they were cognizant of the truth as he knew it? He had not told a soul about the names she had given to Lebansart. A questionable protection? A foolish guardianship? Even for England he had not betrayed her.

‘She will never marry again, of course. She has made that quite plain.’ Acacia’s voice drifted into his thoughts.

‘She won’t?’

‘No, my lord. The love of her life was lost in a terrible accident in Paris and she has no want to ever offer her heart to another.’

Nat’s mind scrambled. Paris?

‘Well, I think that it is romantic to tender thoughts for a husband long dead.’ Lydia Forsythe for all her youth was most outspoken in her opinions. ‘I have asked the Northrup sisters to my ball and they have promised to attend.’

‘An inducement of money for the cause would no doubt bring them running,’ Acacia was quick to add. ‘The Daughters of the Poor is a worthwhile charity, however. I have a maid acquired from that very organisation and she has been a godsend. Cassandra Northrup’s benevolent society is both efficient and organised.’

‘She has a school somewhere?’ Nathaniel could not believe what he was hearing.

‘In Holborn. When the girl was sent to me she was well equipped with clothes and books. Miss Maureen Northrup is apparently the one who sees to that side of the business.’

Hawk began to laugh. ‘They sound formidable.’

‘They are. Kenyon Riley is involved in the endeavour as well.’

‘I thought he had lost a leg somewhere in America?’

‘Lost a leg and gained a fortune.’ Hawk took up the conversation. ‘And his great-uncle, the old Duke, is about to die without issue.’

‘A timely inheritance, then, for the Northrups.’

‘Oh, indeed,’ Acacia trilled. ‘And Kenyon is most besotted by them.’

Nat looked away. Cassandra Northrup had a knack of landing on her feet after adversity and using others to the very best of her own advantage.

Of all the men in the world he was the one to know that.

‘Maureen Northrup has her own worries.’ A wide frown marred Acacia’s brow.

Now this was new.

‘She does?’

‘She is virtually deaf. She lip-reads, of course, and speaks in her inimitable fashion, but it is the younger sister who runs the show.’

‘And the father?’

‘Lord Cowper is a man who has tried to carry on the life’s work of his beloved wife. Something of tiny animals we cannot see that live on our skin and make us sick.’

Nathaniel’s mind went back. Sandrine had insisted upon dousing his gunshot wound in the clearing all those years ago with water and she had cleaned her hands before she had touched him. She believed in these things, too, then. Every single fact he heard about her was more astonishing than the last.

‘I have read of this. Such a hypothesis is gaining in traction in scientific circles as a credible theory.’

Acacia spread out her fingers and peered at them against the light. ‘Well, I can see no sign of these things of which they speak and because of the wild claims of their science there are many here in society who do not view the Northrups with much kindness. Bluestockings frighten men of little brain.’

Hawk began to laugh loudly. ‘Not quite the ideal of Victorian expectation.’

‘By virtue of ornamental innocence, you mean?’ Acacia shook her head as she said it.

Innocence.

The word stretched across the years, and Nathaniel was back beside the river in the small cottage of the Dortignacs, his new wife’s hair spilled across the pillow like living streams of fire and gold.

Madam and Monsieur Dortignac had insisted they both be up the next morning, bathed and dressed in clothes that were remarkably formal. It was therefore no surprise when a man of the cloth had appeared an hour later, although the blood had ebbed from Sandrine’s cheeks as she had grasped the intention of his visit.

‘Marriage? They want us to be married now?’

‘They feel as though they have fallen from grace, so to speak, by allowing us the freedoms of sharing a bed. This is their way of making amends with God.’

‘But you cannot possibly want this?’

He smiled. The light caught at her hair this morning and tumbled across the soft green-blue of her eyes. ‘Sometimes when people need things with as much passion as they need us to marry it does not hurt to humour them. Particularly given that they saved our lives by their actions and probably put their own at risk.’

‘You think it wise, then?’

‘I do.’

‘Well, I should never hold you to such a farce, Monsieur Colbert,’ Sandrine said. ‘If we are wed by simple expedience and obligation then who should need to know of it when we leave here?’

God. You. Me. The priest. Two names in a book that make this union traceable? Nat said none of what he thought, however, as he looped the chain over his head and unhooked the clasp.

‘I received this after my mother died. It belonged to her mother and her grandmother before that.’

‘Then you shouldn’t risk it with me.’

Ignoring her protest, he lifted her left hand, the cold smallness of it within his warmth. ‘Let’s try it for size.’

It did not fit her ring finger, but it nearly held on her middle one. When they reached Perpignan he would have it resized.

‘It almost looks as though it could be a real emerald,’ she said quietly, and he smiled as the Dortignacs and the priest came into their room. Madam Dortignac had found some winter wild flowers and she handed the straggly bouquet to Sandrine with a smile.

‘For you, my dear, she said softly. ‘The very last of the autumn purple crocuses.’

* * *

Much later, as Sandrine held her arm out so that the light glinted upon his mother’s ring, it was impossible to clarify what he felt, the witchery of the sickness from the wound at his side still holding him prisoner, yet something else free and different.

But while his mind was ambiguous, Nat’s body was not and the need in him surfaced beneath thin sheets. She had felt it, too, he thought, because she rolled over to watch him, a silent, wary question in her eyes and a hint of compliance. Her lips turned up at each end like the beginnings of a smile, a girl changing into woman right before his very eyes.

He could not help his want, nor could he rein in all that was left better unseen, the words of troth between them allowing whatever it was they might desire: warmth, relief, resolution.

Or nothing, with their sickness.

He wished he might touch her in quiet acquiescence, but instead he turned onto his back, sense winning out.

‘They were more than happy to leave us alone this time.’

At that she laughed, joy enveloped in the dark closeness.

He remembered the feel of her in the bed when he had awoken that first time, the contours of her body, the thinness, the elegance. Like catching energy and holding it.

‘You were a beautiful bride, Sandrine Mercier, with your hair let down.’

‘And my bare feet. Don’t forget those. But I think green suited me.’

‘Indeed. The ancient gown was particularly flattering.’

‘It was our hostess’s grandmother’s and it was twenty sizes too large. At least you had clothes that fitted.’

He held his tongue and wished that they were home at St Auburn, the English winter about them and everything familiar. When she had taken off the wedding gown after the ceremony the lines of her ribs had been drawn starkly on her skin.

‘You are too thin.’ He should not have said the words, he knew, a piece of paper gave him no mandate for such a criticism, but it was concern that made him speak, not disparagement.

‘I was sick. For a long time.’

‘At Nay?’

‘Before that even.’

‘And now?’

She shrugged and looked directly at him. ‘Have you ever lost someone close to you?’

He looked away.

‘My whole family, apart from my grandfather.’ He wondered at what had made him say it, made him confess to a hurt he had always held so very far from others.

Her fingers crawled into his, warm and true, the honesty of the connection endearing. He coughed to clear the thickness in his throat and thought with all this emotion he must be more ill than he knew.

‘My own mama died fifteen months ago. It was an accident.’

She stressed the last word in an odd manner, making Nat wonder if perhaps it wasn’t.

‘I was there when it happened and the doctor thinks my mind became damaged. Afterwards I could not be...happy. Papa grew impatient and I was sent on the journey south with my mother’s brother and his daughter to recuperate and forget.’

Cassie swallowed and held on to him even more tightly. The fever made her head swim and her vision blurry, but she knew exactly what she was saying. She needed to tell him—there was no going back because in the past few days even under the duress of hiding from those who would want to find them she had suddenly felt free. At liberty to be honest and say all that had been held bound in her mind.

‘It was my fault.’

He did not even flinch. ‘The accident?’

‘I added some liquid to her experiment before she had asked for it to be done and the vapour from it made her sick right then and there. She died three hours later.’

‘How old were you?’

‘Sixteen. Old enough to wait and listen.’

‘The exactness of science is sometimes over-exaggerated and the emotion of blame is the same.’

His voice was quiet, unfazed. For the first time in a long while Cassie did not feel breathless.

‘Did you intend to kill her?’ he asked finally.

‘Of course not.’ Shock jagged through her.

‘But you knew that those particular elements combined might cause a problem?’

‘No. I have no true understanding of all the properties of things.’

Dropping her fingers, he stretched his arms above his head, linking them under his neck so that he could watch her with more ease.

‘Once, when I was small, I took a horse and rode it for hours until the steed sat down and died. My father said the horse could have stopped running with my light and small touch upon it, or thrown me off into the brush. He said the stallion did neither because he wanted to keep running. His choice. Would your mother have added the next ingredient of her experiment if you had not been there?’

‘I think so.’

‘Then it was her choice.’

‘But I ruined our family. Papa told me so.’

‘No. I think if your father blamed you, it was he who did that completely by himself.’

Perception. Skewered into truth. It was all she could do to stop the tears of a relief that felt indescribable. Someone else believed that she was not responsible even with all the facts at hand. More of the inheld tension that she always felt melted away.

Colbert had saved her in the river, she knew, the water in her throat and in her eyes, the heavy panic of exhaustion pulling her down. He had saved her, too, when he had insisted on the hole covered in leaves and branches being made on the leeward side of the bush, tucked into calm. How would she have found shelter otherwise without his knowledge of survival?

Survival was marked on his skin, in the scars of bullet and knife. On the upper side of his fighting arm she saw the blue mark of indigo. A serpent curled about a stake.

A man who had lived a hundred hard lives and come through each one. She needed this certainty and this prowess because for the first time in years hope inside began to beat again.

Not all ruined. Not all lost.

A small refrain of promise.

When she smiled at him he smiled back and Cassie felt, quite suddenly, reborn. ‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-three.’ He added the word ancient in a whisper.

‘Yet you haven’t married?’

‘I’ve been busy.’

The stillness in him magnified. He never fussed, she thought, or used up energy in movements that were surplus. For a big man there was a sense of grace about him that made one look again and wonder. The danger of a panther about to strike, the liquid stretch of muscle honed with a precision that was undeniable, jeopardy tethered to a strict and unrelenting accuracy.

She had seen it in Nay in the way he fought and again at the barn by the river. Someone had trained him well. The government or an army? No amateur could have forged such expertise, but a political mercenary might have managed it. Once a man similar to Colbert had come to Baudoin’s compound in the company of a French General, and had been accorded much respect and esteem.

This was Nathanael Colbert’s legacy, too. No one could look at him and fail to see the menace, even when he was sick almost to death and the fever burned. Glancing away, she felt her stomach clench. To have someone like this on her side...

She shook the thought gone. One day if she was lucky she would remember back at this moment and know that just for a small time he had been hers, her husband, a ring on her finger and the simmering potential of more. She wished her body had had the curves of Celeste and that she might have met him in Paris as a woman of an impeccable reputation and virtue. They could have danced then to a waltz perhaps, her dress of spun gold matching her hair and at her throat her mother’s diamonds. She could have flirted with him, held her fan in that particular way of a coquette and watched him through smoky eyes, the promise of all that might happen between them so very possible.

And instead? Her ruined hand on the counterpane caught her attention, the missing part of her forefinger and the long red scar easy to see in the moonlight.

‘Could you kiss me?’

Her words were out, an entreaty in them that she had tried so hard to hide. But the emotion of the day was thrumming underneath everything they said and if she parted company with him, as she knew she would, she did not want to be left forever wondering. Or wishing.

For a moment she thought he had not heard or had not wanted to hear and her fists clenched by her side. But then he moved, balancing on his arm and leaning across her, his eyes the grey of the sea at dawn just after the sunrise.

Nathanael’s lips were as she had imagined they might be, soft at first and then harder, searching for things that held a promise. Gentle and strong, harnessed by both power and care, his free hand caressing the line of her neck and bringing her closer.

Only them in the world, only this, she thought, as she rose up to him, her tongue meeting his and tasting. She allowed him to force her back against the pillow, the darkness behind her closed eyes calling for more. She felt him turn and come across her body, the outline of his chest meeting her breasts, though his elbows kept the bulk of his body away. The shiver of passion, the heat of want, the memory of this day quickening as he covered her mouth and kept her breath as his own.

A wife and her husband.

Then he broke away. ‘When I am not so sick, Sandrine, I promise to take the kiss much, much further.’

Under the cover of darkness Cassie smiled because his heart was racing every bit as much as hers and when he turned away as if to quell all the thoughts his body was consumed by, she simply curled up into his warmth.

But it was a long, long while until she finally went to sleep.

* * *

They woke to the crow of a rooster outside, and inside Cassie could hear the movements of the Dortignacs preparing for a new day, the dawn only a little while off.

‘We will leave with the first light,’ he said as if he had been listening too. ‘If Baudoin’s henchmen following us find these people have been sheltering us...’ There was no need for him to finish.

To the south, the mountains of the Pyrenees seemed to hold their breath, dark with the presage of rain. Another cold day. A further freezing trek towards Perpignan, many long and difficult miles to the east.

When Nathanael sat up on the side of the bed she saw the bandage across his wound was sagging. She should change it, she knew, but she did not think he would allow it and so she did not say. When he put on his clothes she understood he was in a hurry to leave and that the quiet moments of honesty between them had come to an end.

He looked healthier today. She could see it in the way he stood, no longer favouring his right side in the way he was yesterday. She also saw in his expression a hint of the promise he had made after kissing her.

In the new day, Cassie suddenly understood the danger of a relationship. She needed to go on alone from here because she was certain Lebansart and his men could not be far behind, and if Nathanael died for her...

She shook her head.

If she struck out early across the hills, she could find a pathway and other travellers and make her way to any larger town in the vicinity.

Monsieur and Madam Colbert.

For one night of marriage only.

He had saved her so many times it was only right that she must now protect him.