by Baird Wells
He nodded to the street. “Not for these people. They see Joseph Fouche every day, on whichever side he's claiming at the moment. They pass the Place de la Concorde and that hulking guillotine too bloody huge, and maybe still useful, to be torn down. For them, I'm not certain that any time has really passed in Paris.”
“You're right.” Olivia drew a deep breath, and some of the tension eased from the pretty oval of her face. “I'm just tired of running away. Of being chased away,” she corrected.
He picked up her bonnet, settled it over her curls. Smoothing its silk ribbons, he looped them into the start of a bow, enveloped by the scent of vanilla bark from her clothes and hair. Close your eyes, lean into it, a voice whispered. Instead he pulled back and stood up, chiding that it was not the time, then reminding himself that it was never the time.
With Olivia he forgot himself entirely, and there was no hope of improving any time soon. He forgot that they were assigned together, even that she was engaged. Dangerous territory that he tried to avoid at all costs. He leaned down and reached out a hand, admitting it was impossible ignore how their fingers fit together.
He was destined to be star crossed when it came to affairs of the heart. That had become apparent years before. The first woman in ages to claim him to his very soul had no interest in more than friendship. A close and irreplaceable friendship, but hardly satisfying to the ache on his chest. Still, Kate would forever be the standard by which he judged all others. Was it worrisome or encouraging that since meeting her in January, Olivia had surpassed it?
Something occurred to him as they traced a path back to their lodgings. “Haddon called Lord Portsmouth your uncle.”
She nodded slowly. “He's one of the few who acknowledge the truth.”
“Seems a strange bit of hair splitting.” Portsmouth was Olivia's uncle, unquestionably. He wasn't clear on why Edward Fletcher was so often referred to as her father.
“Doesn't it? Uncle Edward traveled so much when I was a child, so of course when he brought me to England, people seized upon that detail to fuel gossip. No matter how much evidence was presented, rumors abounded that I was his child. Some, especially his enemies in parliament, have never recanted; they still refer to me as his.” Olivia sighed. “More willing to accept the illegitimate daughter of an Englishman, than an Englishwoman and her French duke.”
“What a delightfully impossible set of rules we live by.”
She drew herself up, looking regal despite her twitching lips. “Such complicated etiquette to being a bastard. What of the Burrell clan?”
“Equally complicated, though we are not Burrells. I was raised with my uncle's nine children, every one of us illegitimate.”
“My goodness! Your uncle must possess a great deal of stamina,” Olivia teased.
The thought had crossed his mind. “My father claims me, and a brother but can grant us very little, which suits me. I am perfectly happy to remain anonymous and live my life unmolested by the ton.”
“Anonymous?” Olivia scowled up at him. “Who is your father, that you must remain anonymous?
“Completely beside the point.” He didn't want to discuss it, not even with Olivia. People always treated him differently, General Webb being a rare exception. He'd made a mistake discussing this at all. Olivia was too intelligent not to fit the pieces together.
Her gears were working. He could see it in the narrowed green depths of her eyes. “Nine cousins. Raised in London. And you were born about eighty-five...”
She was going to puzzle it out.
Olivia gasped, pressing a hand to her mouth. “That means your father is –”
“Yes, perhaps it does,” he admitted. “Or perhaps there are simply a lot of amorous noblemen about London.”
Her throaty laugh warmed him against a nipping afternoon breeze. “That seems plausible. But then explain how you came by your name. Is it an alias?”
He led them through a low stone arch, out into the square. “Burrell is a family name on my mother's side. Adopting it was the only request of an aunt who settled me in her will.”
Pressing closer against him, Olivia rested her head against his arm, laughing.
He nudged her, smiling. “What's so amusing?”
She looked up at him, color in her cheeks from the laughter. Good lord she was beautiful. “Is it any wonder you and I are not who we claim to be in our professional lives? We are not really ourselves in our personal lives.”
He led them out across the square. “Dimples, I know exactly who you are.”
* * *
“Olivia?”
She was preparing to give Ty a piece of her mind for his ridiculous nickname when a familiar voice snapped her around at the far edge of the street.
Olivia wished she had kept walking and the gentleman believe he was mistaken. Now the damage was done and all she could do was make the best of it.
She had no idea how.
“John!” She spoke the name before her mind could reconcile the word with the man before her, buying time. Dammit, why was he in Paris? He hadn't said a word when she had talked about going to Lyons. Did he suspect something? Mind racing, she waved a hand at Ty, stalling. “John, this is Major Burrell. He was just escorting me back –”
John's eyes narrowed to dangerous blue slits in the shadow of his low brim. “I am acquainted with Major Burrell.” He spit the words. “His reputation precedes him, at home and abroad.”
Ty, to his credit, took a few steps forward, hand outstretched. He was polished as always, not a sign of the awkwardness he must be feeling. “Mister Talmadge, a pleasure. Miss Fletcher has had infinitely good things to say...” He trailed off when John's arms laced firmly across his chest, withholding a hand.
Dodging a post-chaise and two enthusiastic boys chasing a cat, Olivia closed the distance, leaning in to John and praying her smile was not as nervous as it felt. “What's brought you to Paris?”
He held up a hand almost before she had finished. “You set sail eight weeks ago, Olivia. All that time you have been in Lyons looking for your parents? You must think me an idiot. Lyons is not that big.”
She put a step between them, hurt by his unspoken accusation and not willing to lie. “Is Lyons the only place in France I am permitted to go?”
John's jaw clenched beneath a dark sideburn. “Did you go there at all?”
“Please, I had a very good reason –”
“Paris last October, Vienna in July?” He threw a heated glance at Ty over her shoulder. “Is that truly where you went? Or somewhere else?”
For the first time, Olivia felt she had the right to be defensive. “As a matter of fact, it was.” She could feel things crumbling, slipping like sand through her fingers.
John stabbed a finger at Ty. “What are you doing here now, with him?
“Major Burrell is a friend. He was escorting me back to my lodgings.” Two things that were true, at least.
John stiffened, deflecting her answer. “Truthfully, Olivia. Why is he here?”
She swallowed hard, working at a knot in her throat. “I have no idea.” There were more reassuring things she could have said; it became painfully clear after the words were out. What was she supposed to do? John had never once come close to stumbling upon her secret, and now she was practically cornered. At her back, Ty cleared his throat, an unspoken prompt for her to craft a clever excuse, or any at all. But she had none. “I cannot say,” she finished weakly.
“Perhaps you do not need to.” John held out his hand. “I would like my ring back.”
“No!” Catching herself, Olivia lowered her voice to a whisper. “Please, John, you have to trust me. You know better; this isn't what it seems.”
His hand stayed put, expectantly outstretched. “Tell me why you are here with Burrell.”
Frustrated tears pricked at the corners of her eyes. “Please, please just trust me,” she whispered, glancing around. They were drawing looks from the passing crowd, pedestrians slowing their pa
ce to catch an earful of the drama.
John snorted, unaware or uncaring of an audience. “That's asking a great deal, Livvy.”
Fury rose so quickly that she forgot to be quiet. It was a gentleman's duty to escort a lady, after all. She and Ty weren’t engaging in more than twenty other pairs of men and women passing by. “Trust?” she hissed. “Asking for your trust is a burden? I have never once given you cause to doubt my faithfulness, my fidelity. I have trusted you in your absence for weeks on end, and this once, trust is too much to ask?” She tugged the band from her finger, crushing it into John's stiff palm. “You're right. You should have this back.”
She knew by his stare, and the disbelief with which he studied the ring, that John had not truly expected her to part with it. He’d wanted nothing more than reassurance. Determined to argue, bicker, perhaps chase her as she stormed away and smooth things over, John's gaping mouth, stuttering half- words, said he'd only meant for her to sooth justly inflamed pride.
There was no sense dragging it out. John could not give her his trust, and in a moment of clarity, Olivia realized she had no right to ask it of him. Haring off unexpectedly, alone, almost never to the destination she claimed; it would test any man's resolve, even one as stalwart as John. Her thoughts picked their way around her confusion with Ty, a breath of shame preventing her from exploring lines she may have blurred for more than necessity.
She turned back to Ty, stock still and looking stricken where she had left him at the street corner. “Take me back,” she whispered hoarsely. “Take me back to the hotel.”
She waited as they crossed the square, for John to lope up beside her and pull her back, to call her name. Her ears throbbed with listening for it.
Nothing. Just the murmur of the crowd threading between rumbling carts, the clip-clop of hooves.
Blessedly, the hotel came into view, rising up at the far side of the square. Eyes aching, Olivia gave silent thanks. Under curious stares and whispers, it was the farthest distance she could manage to hold herself together.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Ty leaned against the tavern's cold stone face, watching his breath steam in the crisp night air. A stoop-shouldered man shuffled past, muttering to himself inside a moth-eaten scarf. Three figures, a man and two women, appeared over and over at the mouth of a darkened alley. A pimp, looking for an opportunity to hawk his wares. He had determined, correctly, that Ty was not a customer. Burrowing deeper into the wool of his greatcoat, Ty listened to the sounds inside. A constant murmur of conversation punctuated by tankards slamming, drunken guffaws, and occasionally the only one or two stanzas a singer could recall from a bawdy song echoed within. Dishes clinked together in a basin, ringing off the narrow basement window. His ears caught and sorted every sound, accustomed to listening for a voice, a tidbit drowned beneath the obvious.
To his left, the tavern's front door swung wide and struck the building's face, jarring hard enough to reverberate through the stones at his back. A wet, skidding sound followed.
He caught the barkeeper's stocky silhouette hung half outside, one hand buried in his apron pocket, the other jabbing into the air. In rapid French, he cursed a figure now crumpled at the foot of the tavern's low steps, oaths so colorful that even Ty's ears burned a little at the translation.
The lump on the sidewalk groaned and rolled onto its belly with the grace of a mating pig. Getting half up onto his feet, the man stumbled and shook a fist. “I will, sod your mother! Sod you too!”
Ty had expected John to be crocked, having witnessed him put down a few pints in their time. Watching him now, weaving, bending over panting, vomiting into shrubs at the end of the building, Ty realized John was utterly pissed.
So much for conversation. He would have to follow John and hope that, wherever he was headed, by the time they got there he'd have sobered enough to talk.
After several minutes of pressing into a building's shadows or ducking behind fences when John got himself turned the wrong direction, Ty realized they had a way to go. Unfortunately, he had been in Paris enough times to reckon out what their direction was: Rue Montmartre. The street boasted all sorts of vanguard establishments for daytime patrons: silks and chocolates, the finest wines. There were equal indulgences at night, however, when fashionable ladies were in bed and their men still roamed. Le Temple du Satin was just as popular, if not so openly discussed, as its above-board neighbors. Not that it was inconspicuous. A gaudy Grecian facade and blazing torches on either side of the door caught eyes from two streets down. A brazier burning some God-awful 'aphrodisiac' incense choked every person passing by.
John was just preparing to mount the steps when Ty loped up, jumping ahead of him and blocking his path into the brothel. “John, before you go inside –”
The swing caught him off guard. It was the deftness, that a man so drunk had nearly landed a sound blow. Conditioned by years of boxing, Ty rocked back, weaving left just in time.
“Goddamn you, Burrell. I should put your fucking handsome nose through the back of your head.” John bared his teeth, listing to one side and raising an arm.
“Why?” Ty dodged another, less well-aimed blow. “Oh, because Olivia was lying to you?”
John scrubbed at a broad chin, weaving a little, absorbing the words. His face dimmed from angry to confused. “Livvy wouldn't lie to me.”
She would, just not about this. “Then why in God's name would you strike me? Have I ever raided another man's hen house?”
The question forced John to see some reason, but a stubborn scowl said he didn't like it. “No,” he spit.
Ty nodded. “No, I have not, and I don't intend to start now.” He left out the weeks of temptation he’d resisted in order to keep honest. Instead, he gestured to the brothel's double doors. “If you step inside, your chance to make amends is lost. Olivia will never take you back, reeking like old sweat and perfume. Nor should she.”
“She shouldn't take me back, anyhow!” John was yelling, but Ty wasn't certain he was aware of it.
“Shh! Stop your goddamn raving before you bring the gendarmes down on us.” He had to find them transportation and quick, before John started bellowing things that got them both into a great deal of trouble. What John was doing now was precisely the reason Ty never imbibed more than a glass while on assignment, no matter what observers were tricked into believing.
Jamming two fingers between his lips, he waved down a passing cab and began dragging a limp- limbed John toward the conveyance. The balding, heavily bearded driver spit, landing most of it in his facial hair and glared. “No, no! You cannot put him in my cab. If he pisses –”
Rifling in his breast pocket, Ty threw a handful of francs into the driver's foot well. “I'm good for the difference. Rue de la Madeleine.”
Getting John into the coach took the same amount of effort as it might a sack of lead ball tied to a rabid fox. But in the end, and with a lot of swearing, Ty got him loaded and panted up behind, wondering that he was in a worse mood than when he'd started.
John fell back against the dirty, pocked leather squabs and as the cab lurched forward he emitted a wet belch. Ty rested a hand on the door in preparation, but after a moment, his companion fell back, slumped in his seat, and lolled in time with the wheels.
Studying his former partner, Ty struggled for something to say. Finally, he sighed. “I had no idea 'John Talmadge' was you.”
John cracked an eye, still bent back over the seat. “Meaning what?”
“Meaning, you dense ass, that I wouldn't have escorted your fiancée through Paris without your permission had I known.”
He wasn't certain if the sound that came from John was a hiccup or a sob. “It doesn't matter. I was never angry with her,” John slurred. “Edgy, because she caught me in Paris, certainly. And then mad with guilt when I realized I had been doing just what I’d accused her of.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “Lying to her all along.”
Ty sat forward, trying to hold John's wavering
gaze. “I did help her look for her parents, John. Olivia was telling the truth about that.” Not about most everything else, but now was not the time for that conversation.
John nodded and was silent. Ty had no idea if he was thoughtful or asleep.
They were approaching John's lodgings, if the card in his pocket was to be believed. Ty rapped on the ceiling, signaling the driver to stop.
An absence of motion roused John, who scrubbed his face again. “I lied, but not because I wanted to.”
Ty nodded his agreement. “You lied to her, but not because you don't love her.” It was killing him, not being able to confess that Olivia too was a Whitehall agent. But there were rules, protocol, and they were in place for good reason. If John didn't already know about Olivia, it was not his place, or right, to tell.
“I don't love her,” he cried. Surprise in John's voice said he'd only just come to the realization.
A hazy length to the words left Ty with doubts. “Just go apologize. Make her apologize, if you can manage it. Stop being so damned stubborn.”
John shook his head, anguish overblown thanks to the liquor. “I don't want to patch things up. But I don't want to be without her.”
For the first time all night, they were truly in sympathy. Ty had felt precisely the same way with Kate.
John rooted in his lapel pocket with two limp fingers. Producing something, he held it out with a trembling hand. “Take this. I have no sodding clue what to do with it.” He dropped Olivia's engagement band into Ty's outstretched palm.
Before he could argue, John half-rolled from the seat, falling against the door. It swung open and he crumpled to the ground and was still.
Groaning, Ty jumped out behind, pocketing the ring. He grabbed John under the armpits, hauling him toward the darkened townhouse like a sack of grain. In through the hall, up the stairs, Ty saw very little, huffing and puffing at the effort of dragging the uncooperative form through the house. The first two bedrooms were vacant. He tugged John into a third when he spied clothes on the floor and belongings dotting a tabletop.