by Gaelen Foley
He let out a rebellious snort, but did not argue. Working as quickly as possible for the next half hour, she blotted the wound often with the brandy-soaked rag, her hands covered in his blood. God, she could have lost him and it would have been all her fault. She suppressed the urge to take him into her arms and hold him tightly, knowing it would only make her emotional when she needed a clear head. She brushed the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand, then made the next stitch in his side.
“So,” he said after a moment. “You thought you’d check up on me. Was it worth it?”
She just looked at him, then rethreaded the needle for the next stitch.
“I was not cheating on you.”
“Yes, I rather guessed that when she did this to you,” Alice bit back, matching his sarcastic tone. “Will you please be quiet and let me work? I am already upset enough.”
“I would never cheat on you. I was searching her for weapons.”
“Like you searched me last week?” She slanted him a dubious look and yanked the thread a bit too quickly through his flesh.
“Ow! You did that on purpose,” he muttered with a wince.
At last, she checked each neat stitch and found the whole row of twenty little knots satisfactory and secure.
“I have to bandage you now—”
“Enough, woman!” He brushed her off with all the moody impatience of a cat. Shirtless, he slid off the dresser and stalked past her, the firelight flickering over his bare chest and sculpted arms. “Lucien.” She sighed. “Now it needs to be bandaged.”
He rested his hands on his lean waist and turned to her. “Henceforth, when I give you an order, I expect you to obey it. Understood?”
“No.” Throwing down the towel after washing her hands, she picked up his bottle of brandy and downed a swallow straight from the bottle to bolster her frayed nerves, then set it down squarely on the dresser.
“Pardon?” His stare darkened in warning.
“I am not your puppet, Lucien.” She folded her arms over her chest. “Who was she?”
“Forget you ever saw her.” He walked over to the medicine box and began bandaging his side without her help.
“Forget? Lucien, that woman is dead, and it’s my fault. We have to go to the authorities.”
He sent an ominous look of warning over his shoulder. “We are not going to the authorities,” he said slowly.
Her face drained of color as she stared at him. “I heard what you said to your men. ‘Get rid of the body.’ Lucien, you can’t simply cover this up. We need to send for the sheriff. Whoever she is, that woman deserves a proper burial on consecrated ground, not an unmarked grave in your woods! Her family should be notified—”
“Stay out of it, Alice.”
“I will not.”
“Haven’t you caused enough trouble already?”
With a fleeting look of pain, she took a step toward him. “And aren’t you already carrying enough secrets? How far will you go to hide your activities in the Grotto? A woman just died at your party, Lucien! If you don’t send for the sheriff right away and explain what happened, eventually the truth will out. It is inescapable. Then one day, when they find out how you covered up her death, it will look so suspicious that you may be held accountable for murder. Is that what you want?”
“Nobody is going to hold me accountable for murder,” he said in a low warning tone, turning his back to her.
“Why wouldn’t they? Because you’re one of the mighty Knight brothers? You’re not above the law! What’s right is right.”
He didn’t answer. He was standing very still, staring into the fire.
Seeing that she was making no impact on his stony will, she tried another approach. “Lucien, we are leaving tomorrow morning for Scotland to be married. I don’t want this death hanging over our heads as we start our lives together. . . .” She waited for him to say something, but when he remained silent, her eyes filled with tears. She clenched her hands at her sides and marched toward the door on legs that shook beneath her.
He pivoted, watching her pass with a searing stare. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“If you won’t do the right thing, I will,” she forced out past the lump in her throat. “That woman’s death was my fault—”
Lucien appeared in front of her, leaning his back against the door, blocking her exit. He stared at her with a feral glint in the depths of his wolf-gray eyes. “Stop blaming yourself right now,” he ordered in a low, harsh tone. “I am responsible. Not you.”
Fresh tears brimmed in her eyes as she stared up at him. “What manner of man are you, to want to pretend this never happened? Get out of my way. I am going to the authorities—”
“I am the authorities, Alice,” he whispered emphatically, his eyes shimmering with white-hot intensity.
She searched his face without comprehension.
“Listen to me very closely,” he said as softly as the wind. “That woman was a Russian spy. She committed murder under my roof. She killed an American agent in the Grotto. That’s why I was questioning her.”
“What?”
“I am not a diplomat, Alice. I am a secret agent for the Crown. A spy. And the Grotto is nothing but a front for what we in the Foreign Office call a listening post.”
She stared at him shock.
“You wanted the truth. There it is.” His silvery eyes were as unreadable as mirrors. “I have now put my life in your hands. If you tell anyone about me, you will jeopardize my safety.”
“A spy,” she echoed. “You’re a spy.”
He nodded.
She sank down onto the chair beside the door, staring blankly at the floor as everything came clear to her. “A spy?” She looked at him again, flabbergasted, then studied him as though she were seeing him for the first time.
He crouched down slowly beside her chair. She saw fear darting through the depths of his eyes as he searched her face. “The Russian woman was aiding a dangerous French agent who is even now in London, working against our country. You see? I am not an unfeeling man; it’s just that Sophia was aiding the enemy. That’s why we are not concerned about her death. When an agent dies on enemy ground, nobody cares. If I had died in France, they would have buried me in an unmarked grave, as well. That’s just how it is,” he whispered, caressing her thigh as he tried to soothe her shock. “You mustn’t blame yourself or worry about what will happen. All that matters is that you are safe.”
She gazed at him for a moment, then suddenly pulled him into her arms and held him, closing her eyes tightly. “Oh, my darling.” She kissed his cheek. “Thank you for finally telling me,” she whispered.
“You aren’t angry?”
“No.”
“You’re not . . . revolted?” he asked.
“Good heavens, why should I be? You are even more extraordinary than I realized.” She kissed his hair and felt him shudder in her arms. He kissed her neck, his shaky exhalation tickling her ear. “I didn’t know how you would react. Damien still hasn’t forgiven me for my choice of professions,” he said bitterly. He looked up at her with his soul in his eyes. “I was afraid that I would lose you, too.”
She cupped his jaw and leaned forward, kissing his brow. “My darling, foolish love,” she whispered. “You must never fear to tell me the truth.” She hugged him again, careful of his wound. “Oh, I can’t believe that vicious woman nearly took you away from me. I never saw anything so awful. Thank God you weren’t hurt worse.”
“I’m all right.” He pulled back and stared wonderingly into her eyes. “There isn’t much time. Tomorrow morning, I must send you north to Hawkscliffe Hall, my family’s ancestral castle in the Lake District, until I’ve dealt with the situation in London. With a few of my men to guard you, you will be quite safe there.”
“What about Gretna Green?”
“We’re going to have to postpone it. I’m sorry, love. The situation is critical, and it is my job to catch this man.”
“Let me go with yo
u to London, then—”
“Absolutely not. This man is a very disagreeable fellow. That woman was his lover. He will want to avenge her when he realizes she’s dead. If he were to find out about us, he might try to harm you or to use you somehow to get to me.”
She stared at him in growing dread. “Is he so very ruthless?”
Lucien nodded grimly. “Worse.”
“Well, then . . . maybe you shouldn’t be the one going after him. You’re already hurt. If his mistress did that to you—” She nodded at his wound. “—what will the man himself do? Why don’t you send a messenger to the Foreign Office and ask whomever it is that gives you your orders—”
“Lord Castlereagh.”
“Ask Lord Castlereagh to assign someone else to the task, because you’ve already been injured and you’re supposed to be getting married? I’m sure there must be other capable agents who can see to this man. That way we can go straight on to Gretna.”
“Alice.” He smiled wryly at her. “For one thing, Castlereagh is in Vienna; for another, these are my orders. And thirdly—” His expression darkened. “—this is between me and Claude Bardou.”
She did not like the cruelty that hardened his face when he mentioned that name. She studied him warily, shaking her head. “I have a bad feeling about this. Look at your side. Look at what almost happened to you tonight. Lucien, as your future wife, I don’t think I want you to do this.”
“I have to,” he said coolly, murder in his eyes. “I want to.”
“You want to?”
“Yes,” he murmured. “I want this man dead.”
“Oh? And what if he kills you, instead? What am I to do then?”
He stared at her for a long moment, then shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” Perhaps she had expected him to put her mind at ease, assure her there was no chance that he would be killed in the line of duty. He offered no such comforting lie.
She got up abruptly from her chair and walked past him across the room, her mind reeling, a cold knot of dread in the pit of her stomach. She rubbed her forehead, trying to absorb it.
“Alice? Are you all right?”
“No, I’m not.” She turned around. She fought a sense of rising hysteria. “Lucien, you know what I’ve been through. I lost my mother, my father, my brother—and now you’re telling me there’s a good chance that I could lose you, as well? I don’t think I can bear it.”
He rose warily to his feet and turned, his stare clamped on her.
Tears filled her eyes. “Don’t you love me?”
“You know I do. More than anything.”
“Then how can you do this to me?”
“Alice, I have a duty. I love my country and I love you.”
“But you hate him more.”
He looked at her uneasily.
She swallowed hard. “Love or hate, Lucien? You can’t have both. Choose.”
“Alice, don’t be bullheaded—”
“Choose!” she cried, her whole body trembling. “A week ago, you made me choose whether Caro or I should go home to Harry. Now it’s your turn. Him or me?”
“No more ultimatums, Alice. We made love. You could already be carrying my child—”
“I am like clockwork, Lucien. I have already begun to bleed. Now, choose!”
“Don’t do this to me,” he whispered.
“I am not going back into mourning again. I’m not dying all my clothes black again, and I am not going to watch another young man’s coffin go into the ground. I can’t do it, Lucien!”
He let out a furious roar of frustration. “If I don’t kill Bardou, he’s not going to give us any peace, Alice! You have no concept of what this man is capable of! He has to be stopped, and I’m the one to stop him!” His rage charged the air between them like lightning. “We are mortal enemies. Do you understand? If I don’t go after him, he’ll come after me when he’s through making mischief for England. Bardou wants my blood just as much as I want his.”
“Oh, my God,” she uttered. “Then you must come to Hawkscliffe Hall, as well!”
“Hide from him? The hell I will!”
She flinched. “Then you’ve made your choice.”
“That’s right, Alice. I choose revenge!” he flung out, his chest heaving in untamed defiance.
“Then I choose never to see you again,” she forced out. She brushed past him and ran out of the room, blinded by tears.
Chapter 13
A stillness hung upon the gray, misty dawn as Lucien watched his carriage preparing to leave Revell Court with Alice inside, sitting huddled in her cloak. He caught a glimpse of her pale, hurt face as the landau rolled by, but she did not acknowledge him, coldly looking through him as she passed. Her flat gaze twisted the knife in his heart. He could not believe the rash choice she had forced on him, but he refused to accept that he had lost her permanently.
The carriage paused in the courtyard, waiting for the guards to pull back the tall iron gates. Shrugging deeper into his greatcoat, he fought the urge to run after her. He held his ground firmly, his eyes narrowed with guardedness and concentrated intensity.
I’ll get her back when it’s over.
McLeish saluted him as he rode by on his chestnut gelding. Lucien nodded. He was sending the leather-tough Scotsman and two of his most reliable subordinates to escort Alice to Glenwood Park and to guard her there until his business with Claude Bardou was finished one way or another. He still would have preferred to send her to the more distant and heavily fortified Hawkscliffe Hall, but she had flatly refused to go. After upsetting her so deeply, he felt too guilty to say no. He knew that her beloved home and her Harry were the only things that could comfort her now. Admittedly, he tended toward paranoia. There was probably no reason whatsoever to worry. The only people who even knew she had been with him at Revell Court were the two of them and Caro. The sleepy little Hampshire village of Basingstoke was well enough out of the way that she would be quite safe there, he thought with a sigh, especially with McLeish looking after her.
As the great iron gates of Revell Court creaked open, the coachman flicked the whip over the horses’ backs and the carriage was once more in motion. Lucien clenched his jaw and held himself back, swallowing down the lump of emotion in his throat as it bore her away from him.
I will get her back when it’s over, he assured himself a second time, provided, of course, that I live through this. He had not attempted to soothe her after their awful fight the night before because if he did not survive, it was best to let her hate him. Her anger would brace her for the blow of his demise.
He watched the carriage as it crossed the wooden bridge and climbed the hill out of the valley. Even after it had disappeared, he still stood there in the bleak gray dawn, his chin to his chest, the cold stinging his cheeks, his hands thrust down in his coat pockets. A tremor of contained anger ran the length of his body. He lifted his brooding stare, his expression hardening. The time had come to hunt and kill Bardou.
He was ready. The beast in him was awake and hungry for blood.
The warm lights gleaming in the windows of home brought tears to Alice’s eyes as the landau rolled through the darkness up the drive to Glenwood Park. Her day had been spent dismally staring out the carriage window, nursing her broken heart, with a few stops along the way at coaching inns to break up the tedium of the long ride. Now, at last, she had come home. She could not wait to hold Harry in her arms. The very thought of his smell and his soft little body in her embrace made her chin tremble with threatening tears again, but after all that had happened, at least she still had her beloved home and the people who loved her—Harry, Peg, Nellie, and the others. Never had she been more grateful for their simple comfort.
Wondering what lie Caro had told them to explain her absence, Alice quickly brushed her tears away as Lucien’s carriage slowed to a halt in front of the elegant manor house. She had no idea how to explain the presence of McLeish and his two rugged men. The landau
had barely stopped when the front door flew open and Peg came rushing out with Nellie and Mitchell a few steps behind. When she alighted from the carriage, they hugged her and greeted her and made much of her.
“Oh, dearie, you’ve come back to us at last! Thank heavens you’re well again! I was so worried! Oh, let me look at you, poor thing.” Peg braced Alice by the shoulders and looked into her face by the glow of the carriage lantern. “You still look weak. Have you been able to keep anything down?”
“There’s nothing worse than a bad salmon—nothing!” Mitchell said with a grimace.
So, that was Caro’s lie, she thought.
“Oh, Miss Alice, can you ever forgive me for leaving you? I begged Her Ladyship to let me stay with you, but she forbade it,” Nellie said anxiously. “That place was so strange! But she said if I gave her any cheek I would be dismissed!”
Alice noticed the sharp look that Peg shot Nellie, but did not know what to make of it. “Of course I forgive you, Nellie. I am quite well now. Thank you all so much for worrying about me. It’s so good to be home,” she choked out, giving Mitchell’s arm a squeeze while Peg and Nellie both clung to her. She quickly schooled her composure back into order and turned to Lucien’s coachman. “It’s too dark to leave now. Please accept our hospitality.” She exchanged a meaningful glance with McLeish.
“Thank you, ma’am,” the Scotsman said, tipping his hat to her.
“Mitchell, will you be so kind as to show Lord Lucien’s servants to their quarters and help them with their horses?”
He bowed and quickly went off to see that McLeish and the others, as well as their horses, were given comfortable accommodations for the night.
“Come now, into the house with you,” Peg said in a businesslike tone. “You’re barely recovered from one ordeal. I won’t have you catchin’ the ague next.”
“Her Ladyship said there were half a dozen people from Lord Lucien’s house party who were laid low from the fish,” Nellie said confidentially as they walked back toward the house.
“Yes, er, we were all quite ill,” Alice answered, hating herself for lying to her loyal maid and her beloved old nurse, but what choice did she have? She was not about to admit that she had been Lord Lucifer’s plaything for the week.