When Archie had finished, he simply shook his head, his brow furrowed, as though puzzled about something. In the meantime, the officer nearest her was in close conversation with the hotel manager.
“Archie?” she asked tentatively.
“Hm?” He sounded distracted.
“What did he say?”
He looked up at her, his dark eyes searching her face as if looking for answers there. “It’s just as you surmised.”
“If you are arrested, I should be, too,” she said staunchly. She still hadn’t figured a way out of this mess. But if she shared his difficulty, he might forgive her. Maybe. Hopefully.
“Lucy, don’t,” Archie said, sounding tired. “You weren’t the one who promised Navarre full payment. I was. They won’t arrest you.”
She turned to the gendarme. “Monsieur, I insist you arrest me, too!” He spared her a quick, exasperated glance before asking the hotel manager a question. At the reply, he gave a snort and let fly a rapid stream of French. Oh, why hadn’t she actually learned the dratted language?
“But you didn’t steal anything!” she protested, her sense of doom increasing by the second.
“Technically, I did. They’re right, I stand guilty as accused. I . . . I can’t quite believe this—no,” he said, firmly, “I can. What I can’t believe is that I didn’t foresee this would happen. Of course Navarre would wire ahead to the authorities. He knew where we were going. Why wouldn’t I have thought of that?”
“Because you intended to pay him as soon as circumstances allowed.”
“That may be true, but it’s no excuse,” he said. “As for why I didn’t think things through clearly, well, the answer to that is obvious. I haven’t thought clearly since I embarked on this . . . this madness.
“You have a way, Lucy, of making whatever comes out of your mouth sound reasonable, even when it’s not. Maybe even especially when it’s not. Or maybe it’s not you, but me?” The idea seemed to find some merit with him for he nodded sadly. “There’s some part of my thought process that is broken where you are concerned.”
The officer by the desk, apparently the man in charge, had finished talking to the hotel manager. He spoke to the other two uniformed men, gesturing for them to take Archie elsewhere.
She couldn’t let them arrest Archie.
But there was only one way to stop them. “No, let him go. Please!”
The gendarmes on either side of Archie hesitated, deferring to their commander.
Lucy swiveled, seizing the fat manager’s hand and wringing it. He stared at her, aghast. “Please. Please tell them this is all my fault!”
Archie shook his head. “Lucy, it’s not—”
She couldn’t bring herself to look at him. “Yes, it is, Archie,” she said, keeping her back to him because she knew she couldn’t face him and say it. She tried to blink away the tears that sprang to her eyes, tears of remorse. And of fear. What would he do? What would he say?
“Mademoiselle, if you would kindly release my hand?” the manager said, pulling at it until she let go. “Now, what would you have me say?”
“Tell them it’s all a mistake,” she said. “Tell them we will repay the bill.”
“Mademoiselle,” the innkeeper said not unkindly, “you miss the point. Even if you could afford—”
“I can!” she said desperately and, fumbling deep down into her skirt’s pocket, pulled out the wallet.
Archie’s wallet.
A terrible silence met this revelation. No one moved. No one breathed. It was as if time itself had stopped. She closed her eyes in misery, waiting to hear Archie say something, say anything, to break the awful silence.
And when he didn’t and she could stand it no longer, she gathered her courage and turned around to face him.
It was so much worse than she could ever have anticipated.
He looked lost, utterly betrayed, his expression dazed and uncomprehending.
“Archie, please.”
“You had it all along,” he said wonderingly. “All this time.”
“Yes. I—”
“Found it?” His eyes were bleak, his tone unhopeful.
She swallowed. As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t lie to him. “No. I took it.”
He closed his eyes briefly, as if the mere sight of her was painful, but she plowed ahead, unwilling to let anything remain undisclosed. “At the restaurant, when I excused myself at the end of dinner. I picked your pocket when I bumped into you.”
At the look on his face, she began trembling and once she started she could not stop. She hadn’t realized . . . She’d never meant . . . Oh, no. No. No. No. Please, no.
She raised a shaking hand toward him in entreaty, pain and panic racing headlong through her, lancing straight to her heart.
“I see,” he said, then, “I hadn’t realized your talents extended that far.”
“Archie . . .” She took a step toward him but he was already turning away, murmuring something to the officers. Then, without another word to her, he let them lead him away.
The town hall had just three cells, each occupied by a prisoner guilty of a felony of some degree or other. At the end of the corridor that accessed them, a door swung open. The guard who’d opened it stepped aside, allowing Lucy to enter.
Archie rose slowly to his feet from the narrow bed that was the only furnishing in the cell. “What is she doing here?” he demanded in French. “Get her out.”
The guard shrugged. “She has the commander’s permission. Also, she paid.”
“It must be true that all Englishmen are mad,” said the prisoner in the next cell, an unclean antique of a man with the bulbous, red-mapped nose of the perpetual drunkard.
“Obviously,” concurred the youth occupying the far end cell, a good-looking lad with overlong hair whose socialist ideals had led him to leaving a flaming pile of excrement on the mayor’s doorstep. “Why else would he want her to leave? She’s beautiful.”
Archie ignored them. The last thing in the world he wanted right now was a solicitous call from Lucy Eastlake. “I don’t care whose permission she has or what she’s paid,” he told the guard, “I do not want to see her. Don’t prisoners in your country have any rights?”
The guard shrugged. “No.”
Lucy, who didn’t understand any of this exchange, regarded him owlishly, looking vulnerable and small and exquisite. How could she have done this to him? And why did his heart still jump at the sight of her?
Madness. But then he’d been headed for madness the moment he’d met her. He’d suspected it; he just hadn’t heeded the warning bells his higher faculties had rung.
It was long past time he did.
He had spent the last days in some weird altered state of consciousness where folly had became the norm. But seeing his wallet in her hand and realizing that she had purposefully turned him into a criminal, engineered a trip that had organically changed his life, and very possibly ruined any hopes of returning to his former one, had catapulted him back to his senses. Finally.
It didn’t matter that enough vestiges of the madness remained so that his pulse quickened at the sight of her and his chest constricted painfully, and that something inside him leapt, ready and willing to dive back into the lunacy. He ruthlessly ignored the drive. As he understood it, a drug addict experienced much the same sort of thing upon withdrawal; it didn’t mean drugs were good for him. Eventually they destroyed you.
The guard beckoned her in. She hurried down the corridor, past the ogling gazes of the other prisoners.
“What are you doing here, Lucy? You should be with your great-aunts on your way to Saint-Girons.”
“They’re not here. They left a letter with the hotel manager. My friend is escorting them to Saint-Girons and I’m to meet them there.”
“Then you should go.”
“No. It isn’t right that a moment of reckless abandon keeps you in jail.”
He burst out in bitter laughter.
�
�A moment of reckless abandon?” he echoed. “My dear girl, the entire week has been one episode of recklessness after another. Please, just go.”
She shook her head vehemently. She stepped closer and gripped the bars. “No. Not until you are free.”
He might have anticipated something like this. Her sense of drama had been engaged. “You have to join your great-aunts. There should be enough money left of that boxing purse to pay for a train ticket.”
“It’s not my money, it’s yours.”
“I cannot believe that you of all people are sticking at that.”
At least she had the grace to blush.
“I won’t touch a sou of that money, Lucy. Not one sou. So you can throw it in the river, give it to the town drunk, or pay the hotel bill. I personally recommend the last option, seeing how the French seem radically opposed to people not paying their hotel bills.”
Her blush grew brighter. “Fine. But I still can’t leave you here like this.”
“Like what? I’m hardly doing hard labor, Lucy. Look, they’ve telegrammed my family’s lawyer and he’s sent word he’ll be here Monday. I should be in front of the judge by midweek. If I am lucky, he will allow me to repay what is owed along with whatever fine he deems appropriate and then let me return to London.”
“Midweek?” she exclaimed in horror. “That’s not fair. If anyone should be behind bars it should be me.”
“Doubtless true, but probably in another sort of facility. One with inmates rather than prisoners.”
“Now, that is simply unkind.”
His anger faded. “You’re right. It isn’t you who put their life’s work at risk for a rash and ill-considered scheme. Perhaps I should look into renting a room at one of those barred establishments myself when I get back to England.”
At this, she went still. “What do you mean, your life’s work at risk?”
He sighed and dropped down on the bunk, his forearms resting on his thighs, his head bowed tiredly.
“Archie? What do you mean?”
He looked up, vexed by her heedlessness. “As hard as it is to imagine—and I concede that judging from my recent activities it may be damn near impossible—I am a well-respected scholar. Some people, like my fellow professors, students, and research colleagues, actually look up to me. Not to mention the directors and trustees at St. Phillip’s where I am employed.” He paused, considered his last words. “But perhaps I should say was employed.”
She stared at him, stricken. “But Archie, surely once you explain—”
“Have you ever heard of St. Phillip’s, Lucy?” he broke in conversationally. “It is a very old, very conservative college with a very old, very conservative board of directors.
“They are vigilant in squelching any threats, real or imagined, to the college’s reputation for dignity and rectitude. What do you imagine their reaction will be when they discover that the man whom they had anticipated making the director of their newly minted anthropology department has been arrested for fleeing a foreign hotel with an unknown woman in the dead of night in order to avoid paying his bill?”
“They wouldn’t like it?” she asked in a small voice.
He nodded thoughtfully. “No, I daresay they wouldn’t.” He tipped his head, regarding her. “Do you suppose they will still offer me the directorship of the department?”
She shook her head.
“No? Neither do I.” He mused in silence for a few seconds; he could hear her unsteady breath.
“Which leaves only a few unanswered questions, the first being will I have a job at all when I return to England?” He met her eyes. They shimmered with tears and he reminded himself of his pledge not to be swayed by emotions.
He had spent a good part of his adolescence being extricated from one sort of trouble or another, disappointing his parents and thwarting his own aspirations. Subsequently, he’d spent an even better part of his young adulthood learning to keep his passions under control. And it had worked. Vigilant self-control had facilitated his successes. Why had he abandoned those hard-learned lessons? What about her had made him forget them?
Did it matter? Abandon them he had and look where it had got him. He might as well be fourteen again, trying to explain to the dean of students why he’d thought spelunking in the school’s abandoned well had been a good idea. Only this time rather than a corporal punishment, he stood at risk of losing his life’s work. The only thing that ever mattered to him, the only thing that had garnered him respect while still allowing him to do something he relished.
No, he would not be led by impulse and emotion again. Not his, God help him, not even by hers. They only led to imminent destruction. Hadn’t that been his life’s early lesson?
So now, he looked her dead in the eye and asked her, “Well, Lucy, what do you think? Will I have a job? Is my career effectively over? The career you once took pains to point out that I loved?”
At the barely sustained amiability in his voice, she broke down. Tears spilled from her eyes and trailed down her cheeks. Her hands gripped the bars so tightly her knuckles shone white. “Oh, Archie, I am sorry! I am so, so sorry. Maybe if I talk to your directors, I am sure I can make them understand—”
“Oh, no. No. For God’s sake, no. I beg you, spare me your help.”
“But—”
“No. Can you at least do this one thing for me?”
Her lips trembled but after a second she nodded miserably. “All right. But you must believe me, Archie, when I tell you that I never meant any of this to happen. I swear I would never have—I wasn’t thinking—”
“Exactly!” Even to his own ears, the word came out with whiplash cruelty. He saw her flinch but still could not stop the words from coming. All his frustration, his sense of betrayal, his outrage and confusion came pouring out, demanding to be heard. “You were not thinking. What the hell were you doing, Lucy?
“Why in God’s name would you steal my wallet and then convince me to take off in the middle of the night leaving a bill, a bill I could have paid, behind? I’m not blaming you solely for that part. I could have said no. I didn’t and that responsibility falls squarely on me, but I need to understand why you would take my money. Why would you risk a virtual stranger’s entire life work like that?”
She paled. Her hands fell limply to her sides. “Stranger?”
“Yes,” he said, his anger carrying him along while, inside, alarms were clanging madly. “What else would you call someone you didn’t know existed a month earlier?”
Which really wasn’t what he wanted to know at all. But he charged on, bent on getting an answer to his question. The question. “Was it simply a lark? On a whim? What? Why?”
Her head drooped, a flower too heavy for its slender stalk.
“Did you ever stop to consider the risks? Not to me—clearly I didn’t rate that sort of consideration—but to your great-aunts? Lavinia stood a very real chance of not arriving in Saint-Girons by the proscribed date. If it hadn’t been for this friend of yours—” The friend. The man to whom she’d entrusted her great-aunts so she could play havoc with his life. “Who is he? How could you play so fast and loose with your great-aunts’ future?” He plowed his fingers through his hair, trying to make sense of it.
“No,” she said tragically. “No. I would never have let it get to that point. I swear it. If things got too tight I would have—”
“Would have what? Suddenly ‘found’ my wallet? You may think I’m dense, Lucy, and heaven knows I’ve provided ample evidence to support that idea, but even I am not as gullible as that.”
“No.” She sniffed. The tears were still streaming down her cheeks. She made no effort to wipe them away and against all reason he found his hand twitching to do just that. “No, I would have told you what I’d done.”
“Really? You mean as in told the truth? No fabrication, none of your stories?”
“I’m not sure.”
He turned away from her with a sound of disgust. “Well, there’s an
honest answer at last.”
“Monsieur, please. How can you treat the girl so? You are breaking her heart!” exclaimed the young socialist.
“Shut up,” Archie said tiredly. He was drained, wrung dry, nothing left in him to give, neither anger nor understanding.
“I thought I knew exactly what I risked,” he heard her say softly.
“Then why?” he asked the wall, not really expecting an answer.
“I did it because I’d fallen in love with you.”
Something deep inside of him leapt at the soft declaration, like a deeply buried ember, uncovered by a thready, chance wind and blown to life. A small warmth seeped through the chill engulfing him.
No. No more burning and glowing for him. Ruthlessly, he forced himself to view her words as the delusional, romantic fantasy they were.
“That’s ridiculous. People don’t fall in love at first sight.”
She laughed a little at this, forlornly, sounding much older, much more worldly than him.
“Of course they do. They do it all the time. Why, my grandparents fell in love after one dance. Lavinia fell in love with your grandfather within days of meeting him.
“But I knew you wouldn’t believe that. So I tried to buy us some time, so you might realize that you were in love with me, too.”
“In love with you?”
She nodded somberly.
“I don’t know you!”
“Yes, you do.” She sounded so certain, so sure of herself, and he reacted against her conviction because it threatened everything he’d been taught to believe.
“No. I know Cornelia. I know my grandfather. My parents. My brothers and sisters. Not you.
“And as for love? Love doesn’t pounce on you like some overly friendly puppy or catch you unsuspecting when your resistance is down like a bad head cold. It’s a process. It comes from a slow discovery, from the security of knowing how someone is going to react or what they are going to say, to shared ambitions and a common base of experiences. And from trust. Trust, Lucy. As in not lying to another person or manipulating them or playing havoc with their lives . . .”
The Songbird's Seduction Page 24