by Louise Allen
There were a few portmanteaux he had glimpsed in their sleeping spaces, enough for a limited wardrobe, but Cleo seemed to possess no ornaments or trinkets, only tools, kitchen implements and her medical kit.
‘We cannot do more this evening,’ she said at last, coming out to find him feeding the donkey to escape her father’s complaints. ‘What is left are the cooking and eating things and tonight’s bedding and of course the tent, but that comes down very easily.’
‘It does?’ Quin slopped water into the bucket and straightened up to look at the structure.
‘It does when you have done it as often as I have,’ Cleo said. ‘Here, there are some spare clothes of my father’s.’ She thrust a bundle topped with a wide-brimmed straw hat into his arms. ‘You will find it easier to relate to the soldiers if you look more like a European.’ She shrugged when he looked a question. ‘They do not trouble to get to know the local people. As far as they are concerned the villagers are either the lowest form of peasants or brigands—or both.’
Quin shook out a pair of loose cotton trousers, a shirt and a long, sleeveless jerkin. Not exactly the thing to be seen wearing at Almack’s, but ideally suited to the heat. ‘Thank you, I must admit to becoming tired of my skirts.’
‘They will be too big,’ she said as she walked back to the tent, ‘but you can use a cord as a belt. I will find something.’
‘Cleo.’ She stopped, but did not turn. ‘Leave it, I will manage I am sure. You look exhausted. Surely there is nothing more to do tonight?’
‘Just supper and heating the washing water and some laundry.’
‘Cleo.’ That brought her round, a frown between the dark slashes of her brows. ‘Come here. Please.’
She trudged back towards him, her usual grace lost in what must be a fog of tiredness. Quin opened his arms and gathered her to him and after a moment she slipped hers around his waist, leaned in, her face in the angle of his neck and shoulder. She relaxed against him and sighed.
Quin held her and breathed in the scent of hot, tired woman, the herbal rinse she used on her hair, the faint scent of mint tea on her breath, the dust that filmed her skin. He was beginning to care too much for her welfare, he knew that. He had a mission to perform and it was not certain yet that she was an entirely innocent victim to be rescued. This was all too near spying to be comfortable and yet it was his duty. This was no place to strike fine attitudes about being a gentleman. He sneered at himself. So anxious to be a true gentleman and not a bastard? This is the best thing for her, the authorities will bend over backwards to look after her welfare, if only for her grandfather’s sake. Your sensitive conscience can rest easy, Quin.
Cleo stirred in his arms and he forced himself to think clearly about her. She professed no loyalty to England, she had married a Frenchman for love and she carried her father’s suspicious paperwork back and forth to the troops. Had she any idea what was going on? She was an intelligent woman, but curiously sheltered from the real world. An innocent, an obedient daughter or a willing servant of the French?
Having a woman plastered to him was having its natural effect on his body and the thin robe he wore was not exactly designed to hide the fact from someone as close as Cleo was. Quin realised the proximity was having an effect on her, too. He could feel her nipples hard against his chest and her breathing had changed.
He wanted to make love to her, but that was out of the question. Back to his blasted gentlemanly sensibilities, he recognised with resignation. To make love to Cleo while he was uncertain of her smacked of a ruse to gain her confidence and extract information through pillow talk. He would die for his country, he would kill for it if he must, but he was not going to seduce a woman for it and if that made him a hair-splitting hypocrite, then so be it.
Cleo wriggled back a little and he opened his arms to release her, half-thankful, half-regretful. Then he realised she was simply putting enough space between them so he could kiss her. Who is seducing whom? he wondered. Or is this just for comfort? If it is, it must be hers, because it is most certainly not going to help me sleep tonight... To hell with it. He bent his head and took the proffered lips. Just one kiss.
Her mouth, hot and soft under his, opened without him needing to coax. She was willing and yet, despite it all, shy. Quin took a firm grip on his will-power and kissed her with more gentleness than passion, his tongue sliding against hers, his palms flat on her back in the loosest of holds. She was trembling slightly, he realised, like a woman fighting emotion.
Quin raised his head. ‘Cleo?’ Her eyes were wide and dark and flooded with unshed tears. ‘Cleo—’
‘Unhand my daughter!’ Over her shoulder Quin saw Sir Philip emerge from the tent, his fists clenched. ‘How dare you, you libertine!’
Quin felt something snap under the layers of carefully cultivated diplomatic restraint. Suddenly he did not care if the woman in his arms was writing a daily journal to Napoleon himself with intimate details of Lord Nelson’s sailing plans, because, if she was, it was entirely the fault of the red-faced, selfish, blustering man in front of him.
He set Cleo carefully aside and took two long strides to confront Sir Philip. ‘I have had more than enough of you, sir,’ he said and when the older man swung at him he ducked under his guard, hit him on the point of the chin and watched with nothing but pure satisfaction when Sir Philip’s eyes rolled back in his head and he fell full-length on the sand.
That was definitely what had been missing from his diplomatic career to date: the opportunity for unthinking violence, Quin thought as the anger cleared and he stared down at the unconscious man at his feet.
‘Damn.’ It might be satisfying, but neither particularly honourable, nor practical. ‘Cleo—’
‘Don’t you dare apologise,’ she stormed at him.
Quin rocked back on his heels. You look magnificent when you are angry... No, don’t say it. You should lose your temper more often, it is good for you? No, probably not tactful either. The memory of those unspilled tears nagged at him. ‘But I should apologise.’
‘No. Not for hitting him, not for the kiss.’ She stood over her father. ‘But we can’t leave him here and he is much heavier than you.’
‘We could, this side is in shade now.’ Quin knelt and examined the unconscious man. He was breathing normally, there was no blood and nothing but a bruise on his chin and a small lump at the back of his head to be found. ‘If you fetch me a mat, I’ll roll him on his side so he doesn’t choke and put something under his head. He’ll wake up soon.’ And in no very good temper, either, but in the meantime...
Cleo went to start preparing supper, clearly with no expectation that Quin would assist her. He ignored the chivalrous instinct to take over and make her rest and went into Sir Philip’s workspace. The boxes were all packed, but the locks were still open. Quin knelt in front of the first and began to search, ears straining for the soft pad of feet on sand.
When he was through in there he went into the other man’s sleeping quarters, feeling beneath the mattress pad and pillow, sliding his fingers between neatly stacked shirts and linen in the trunk, flipping through the pages of the books on the floor by the bed.
‘Quin! Father is stirring, can you come and help him into a chair?’ Cleo called. The table was laid when he walked round from the far side of the tent from Sir Philip’s quarters, wiping his freshly washed hands on a towel.
‘Yes, of course. There you are, sir.’ He took hold under the man’s armpits and hauled him to his feet, then dumped him unceremoniously into a chair. He expected an outburst, but all he received was a glower. Woodward truly was a bully who would back down when challenged.
Cleo put platters on the table, added a basket of flat bread and sat down. It seemed that everyone was capable of pretending that nothing untoward had happened, even if conversation eluded all three of them.
The silence gave Quin the opportunity to review what he had found. Or had not found. There was no sign of any cipher keys, but that meant li
ttle. Quin was not certain he would recognise anything very sophisticated in the way of codes and if one was being used that involved substituting letters in a particular book, then he could spend a week and not find it. On the other hand he did know how to check correspondence for signs of tampering and some of the seals on the letters to Sir Philip had, to his eye, been opened once with a thin hot blade and resealed before the recipient had cracked open the seal.
Possibly all of them had been opened, he could not be certain when the seal had been completely destroyed.
‘More dates, Father?’ Cleo pushed the platter across the board and Quin watched the older man as he took a handful and began to strip them off the stalk. If the letters were being opened before he received them, then presumably he was unaware of what was happening, unless pains were being taken to protect him. But was he naïve or simply ignoring what was under his nose? Whichever it was, Cleo was surely innocent of any involvement, which would make the Duke of St Osyth a very happy man. It certainly made Quin feel better.
‘What will you do when we get to Cairo, Quin?’ Cleo asked.
‘Depends what the situation is. But I’ll be going home fairly soon, I suppose.’
‘To your wife, sir?’ Woodward said, so suddenly that Cleo dropped her knife.
‘I am not married, Sir Philip.’
‘Should be at your age. What are you? Twenty-seven?’
It was the first conversation Woodward had made that was not essentially about himself or his own interests. It sounded suspiciously like a father asking questions of his daughter’s suitor. Quin controlled the wry smile that tugged at his lips and answered truthfully. ‘I am twenty-eight, Sir Philip. And I intend setting up my household once I am settled back at home.’
A wife was a considerable asset to a career diplomat and his superiors had not been reticent in pointing that out to him. It might be an open secret that Lord Quintus Deverall was not his father’s son, but, as the marquess acknowledged him, he was an eligible match for the daughters of the middling aristocracy. As his career developed he knew he would become even more of a catch and he had no hesitation about laying out his ambitions very clearly to a prospective father-in-law.
He was even prepared to be very frank about his desire to cut every link between his father and himself. His sense of self, his pride, his very honour, were tied up in being unambiguously his own man, not the tolerated cuckoo in the marquess’s nest. The older he became, the harder it was to stomach the legal pretence that, as his mother’s husband had not repudiated him at birth, he must be his son. The world was going to have to accept Quintus Deverall, gentleman, on his own terms, as his own man. Nothing else was acceptable.
Now what he needed in his calculated campaign was an intelligent, sophisticated woman with good conversational skills, several languages and complete competence in organising social events at a high level, someone who one day could be an ambassador’s wife. All he needed to do was to get himself back to London without further bullet wounds, a dose of the plague or having his eyes scratched out by a Frenchman’s furious widow and then he would be all set for the new Season.
Lady Caroline Brooke was top of his list. Blonde, as sophisticated as an unmarried lady was allowed to be, a superb organiser and the daughter of a leading light in the government. He had seen her deal with a tricky dinner-party encounter between a Russian grand duke and the Italian count who was sleeping with his wife with both aplomb and tact...
‘Quin?’
He blinked and realised he was gazing absently at Cleo, fitting the piquant heart-shaped face of Lady Caroline, framed by her customary fashionable coiffure, on to the tanned oval of Cleo’s face. If her hair had ever been in the hands of a lady’s maid, let alone a hairdresser, he would be very much surprised. ‘I apologise, I was miles away thinking about the...’ lady I intend courting ‘...about tomorrow. What time must we be stirring?’
‘Dawn,’ Cleo said. ‘Of course.’
He had a pretty good idea that she knew he’d been thinking about another woman, females had that uncanny instinct. Very diplomatic, Quin. Ambassadorial-level tact, that. ‘I’ll clear this away,’ he said and got to his feet. When he returned to England he’d be fully qualified as a kitchen maid.
* * *
Cleo had no problem waking before dawn, not after a night where she had hardly snatched more than a few minutes’ sleep at a time. Her carefully cultivated calm and resignation had completely deserted her. She was excited about returning to Cairo and worried that she could make no firm plans to escape from there and get to England or France. Under that was apprehension about the dangers of the river journey and the lack of privacy as the only woman in a small flotilla of men.
And deep down, beneath those practical concerns as though she had pushed it under a mental rug, was that kiss. That had been no friendly hug, even though she was certain that was how it started. Quin had wanted to comfort her because she was so tired, she had wanted someone to care, someone to hold her. And then that fire had flared between them. She had felt his body stir and harden against hers, as her blood had surged in her veins and her breath had caught in her throat.
Cleo shifted, restless on the hard bed, and rolled over so she could watch for the betraying greyness that signalled the approach of dawn. When she had all but asked for his kiss Quin had not hesitated. Yet he had not snatched at his own satisfaction... What would happen if she got up and went to him now? If she knelt beside his bed and touched his face, bent and pressed her lips to his temple, to the corner of his eyes, to his lips?
Nothing, she told herself as she sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees. Quin was not going to make love to her in a tent with her father only a few yards away, any more than she was going to act on these foolish fantasises.
There was movement, a stir in the air, and she saw the wall hangings move as someone brushed past them. Dim light filtered in under the bottom of her door cloth. Quin was up. Cleo tipped her head to one side and followed what he was doing by sound. The pad of leather sandals on the sand, the splash of water. A long silence, then scuffling noises from the area of the hearth, a murmur as he spoke to the donkey.
Cleo threw back the covers and found her robe and sandals, then went out to join him. It was cold still, the world was grey and white coils of mist hung over the river. She shivered and hunched into the robe.
‘Here.’ Quin stood up from the fireside where he had been hunkered down. ‘I’ve warmed some water for you.’
‘Don’t you want to wash?’ It was curiously difficult to meet his eyes, as if he’d read her heated thoughts in them.
‘I have. I used cold water.’ He handed her the jar and squatted down again, his focus apparently on the glowing wood. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’
There was no answer to that other than, Oh? Why not? And that risked receiving an answer she would not want to hear. Cleo went and washed, wishing she had cold water, too, then slipped back inside to dress and pack away her clothes and make a bundle of the bedding, shaking each piece vigorously. Whatever else a voyage down the Nile would involve, there should be a merciful absence of sand.
‘What shall I do with the bed frame?’ Quin called.
‘Stack them all by the donkey’s shelter. I will put everything we are leaving for the villagers there.’
From the far side of the tent she heard the sounds of her father waking, grumbling as he moved around. ‘Hot water by the fire, Father,’ she called and went to set out breakfast.
* * *
The villagers came straggling towards them, donkeys at their heels, by the time the big tent was cleared and their possessions piled into two heaps, one to stay, one to go. Quin left Cleo to discuss the loading and carried on pulling tent pegs out of the ground. She came running back as he finished that and began directing men to remove poles and collapse the structure in such a way that they could fold and roll it into series of bundles that were then tied with the guy ropes.
‘Very efficient,’ he rema
rked as he dropped the pegs into the drawstring bag she produced.
‘I am.’
Quin grinned at her back as she marched off to supervise the loading of the donkeys. Cleo was being exceptionally crisp this morning and he suspected he knew why. That kiss. He could not regret it, although it had made for an uncomfortable night. But it was as far as things could go, even though his body was clamouring for more and the part of his brain that tried hard to ignore his conscience was protesting that Cleo needed comfort and human warmth.
You are not going to seduce a respectable widow, he told himself firmly. She does not deserve it and she certainly is not going to end up as your mistress. He watched her now as she saw to the loading of Sir Philip’s trunks, showing no more concern for them than she did for her cooking implements. In contrast he noticed the way she kept an eye on the box containing the weapons and could only conclude that she had no idea that her father’s correspondence might be in any way important or compromising.
I can acquit you of harm, Cleo Valsac. And I can hand you back to your grandfather the duke with a clear conscience when I tell him you are the victim of the piece. And you can become the lady you should be by birth and leave this drudgery behind. All I need to do is get you there despite, no doubt, your best efforts to do things on your terms.
Quin flexed the muscles in his injured arm, feeling the pull and sting of the healing wound, then went to keep an eye on the weapons chest. It was a long way to England.
Chapter Seven
What excellent Arabic you speak, Mr American Engineer. I wonder why you need that particular language. Cleo sat on a pile of blankets and watched as Quin organised the sailors into creating small enclosed compartments midships on both boats, using parts of the dismantled tent.
The crew, she knew, would sleep ashore each night, but she was profoundly grateful to see the makeshift cabins that would give her a little privacy in the midst of all these men.