Behind him, he heard James draw in a sharp breath. To tell the truth, Leo wasn’t sure about this last part. He thought it equally likely that Cora Delacourt had killed the colonel because she was going slightly barmy in her old age or because decades of espionage had warped her moral fibers. Leo couldn’t decide whether Cora Delacourt was a cautionary tale about what happened when you got too used to killing, or a beacon of hope that Leo himself might aspire to a normal life, surrounded by people he cared about. But he wanted to make the case as generous as possible so life could return to normal for the people in this room.
“I knew it,” Wendy said as if none of this was news. “As soon as you started raving at me at the hencoop.” At this point Leo was starting to feel that Templeton had quite missed the mark in not recruiting Wendy.
“If only I had the pistol,” Leo said, carefully avoiding looking at either of the elderly ladies. “It must be one fine weapon.”
“Or perhaps the person who used it simply had excellent aim,” Cora answered sweetly.
“YOU,” JAMES SAID FIRMLY as they left Little Briars, “are getting dosed with aspirin and put to bed. That can happen at my house or the hospital. It’s up to you.”
“I wonder where my valise went,” Leo rasped.
“I daresay it’s in the pig sty. You can borrow my clothes.”
“But Dorothea,” Leo moaned, and now James was certain he was delirious with fever. “And Rosamund. I hate her. And I love her. Country doctors make such very bad choices.”
“Are they the piglets? Dorothea and Rosamund?”
“Very rude,” Leo said, but he let James lead him home and tuck him in bed, where he remained until the next morning. He slept fitfully. They both did, for that matter, for their separate reasons. But when James reached out an arm, Page was still there, and several times he felt Page reach for him as well.
In the morning, James made the easy decision to cancel surgery. Half the patients would only be looking for gossip, and the other half could wait for the district nurse. Instead, he brought Leo toast and tea and a bottle of aspirin.
“I feel like somebody scoured out the back of my throat,” Leo croaked.
“Probably I ought to advise you to rest your voice, but the sad fact is that I really want to talk to you.” He set the tray on the bed beside Leo.
“Ah,” Leo said, glancing away. James knew he would have an uphill climb to convince Leo of what he was going to say.
“First, when I went out to get the paper, your valise was there with a note from Wendy saying she had found it late last night in the pig pen.”
“Does that girl sleep?”
“No, evidently not,” James sighed.
“Second, I’d like for you to stay here for a while.”
“Until I recover, you mean. Shelter to a weary traveler and so forth, very in keeping with the spirit of the season, I daresay.”
James shook his head. “For as long as you like. I don’t foresee a point at which I won’t want you here, but we’ve only known one another for a week, and I don’t want to assume too much. But also, what I mean is, I don’t think you have a place to call your own.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “A place where you belong. You could belong here.” He saw the look of surprise in the other man’s face and quickly added, “If that’s something you’d like. Otherwise, forget I said anything.”
“I’ve never had a home, if that’s what you’re offering.”
“It is.” James felt like he was holding his breath. “For when you need a home. Even if that’s only from time to time. Or if it’s always.”
Leo stared at him. “Don’t you think that might be unwise? Sometimes the truth is ugly enough that you don’t want to have to look at any reminders of it.”
“I thought I’d feel that way,” James said. “I did. But I find that I’m growing fond of you at an, ah, accelerated rate.” His face heated, as much from the sentiment as from the knowledge that he was expressing it terribly. “When I look at you, I see the man I’m—well, Page, the fact of the matter is all it would take would be a stiff breeze to push me into outright love with you, and I thought you ought to know that. That, well, that’s what I think of when I look at you. Not the world’s evils. Which, to be clear, I think of the rest of the time, because...” He tapped his head. “But not in any particular connection to you.”
Throughout this miserable speech, Leo pushed himself to a sitting position and regarded James with an expression of dawning amusement.
“Oh, please don’t laugh,” James said. “I’ve never done this before. I don’t ever want to do it again, either. It’s terrible and I’m not good at it.”
“I don’t want you to do it again, either,” Leo said. “I’d kiss you, but I think I ought to keep my mouth well clear of anyone I like for a while. And I do really like you. Same thing about the stiff breeze and all that.”
“So stay and let’s, er.” He gestured between them vaguely. “Let’s eat supper and have bad dreams and visit the piglets. Whatever you like. Just don’t go.”
“We can say I’m renting your spare room,” Leo suggested.
“That would do,” James said.
“Just promise me, if you start to look at me and think of all the things that wake you up at night, send me packing, all right?”
“Fine,” James said instantly. “It’s a deal. But consider this. If the old lady who’s been giving me tea and biscuits for twenty-five years is a trained assassin, I suppose I might like assassins after all. I might have very positive and warm associations with assassins.” He gave Leo a smile that barely moved the edges of his mouth but was enough to make James’s heart nearly stop. “I might like them very much indeed.”
“I’m not an assassin,” Leo said. “Just a regular spy. And not even that anymore, so don’t get too excited.”
“You really mean to give it up? I know that’s what you told Miss Bright.”
“Yes,” Leo said, sounding almost surprised.
James sat on the edge of the bed. “Do you need to telephone London? Somebody at some ministry or other? To let them know where you are?”
“Miss Bright is managing that end of things. When I feel better, I’ll go to London and speak to the man I report to. You know, he sent me here to kill Miss Delacourt.”
“What?” James nearly spilled his tea.
“Oh, he didn’t say so. He kept telling me to get to the bottom of things by any means necessary. I suppose he was afraid Miss Delacourt had gone rogue and started killing charwomen, and that she’d be arrested and start talking about her time working for him. So, he and I will be having words, but I think that after this debacle he’ll be glad to see me go. So will Miss Bright, who will spend days spinning yarns for the Worcestershire Constabulary. Look,” Leo said. “I know that the decent thing for me to do would be to disappear into the night, to keep you far away from dangerous people.”
“Is that what you’re going to do?”
“I never was any good at being decent.”
“Good. Thank God. I’d hate to think I was falling for something as dull as a decent man.”
Leo smiled and buried his face in the pillow.
Epilogue
On Christmas morning, Leo put on a pair of James’s pajamas and read the newspaper while James did a fry up. They ate on the floor in front of the hearth.
“Nobody’s questioning our story,” Leo said for perhaps the twentieth time in the past few days. “And we haven’t heard that Norris was arrested, so I suppose he got away.”
They were interrupted by a knock on the door. Leo opened it himself to find Wendy, muffler wrapped around her neck and her bicycle leaning against a snow bank. The streets were clear of snow, but the drifts and mounds didn’t show any signs of melting. “I’m on my way to the vicarage,” she said. “But I’m under orders to give this to you.” She held out a brightly wrapped package.
“Me?” Leo asked stupidly. “Not James?”
“Cora says James c
an open his in person later when you come for supper,” she called over her shoulder on her way back to her bicycle.
If Leo were on a case, he’d assume that this meant Miss Delacourt didn’t want him to open it with witnesses present.
Or that it was a bomb.
But no, he didn’t think Miss Delacourt would risk James’s life. Besides, it didn’t feel like a bomb.
“What’s that?” James asked, coming up behind him.
“Not a bomb,” Leo said. “Probably.”
“That’s good,” James said.
“It’s a present from Miss Delacourt.”
“Huh. Want to open it?”
Leo knelt before the fire and carefully untied the string, then peeled off the red paper, revealing a wooden box. It appeared to be made of ebony and that was inlaid with lighter wood. He turned it over in his hands, examining it for a catch.
“That’s Cora’s puzzle box,” James said. “Lord, but I spent hours trying to work the thing when I was a kid. I don’t think it does open. My uncle said it was a prank played by vicious old cats on unsuspecting clergymen.”
“There’s something in it,” Leo said, rotating the box near his ear. He ran his fingernail over the surfaces, then held it up to his hear again. He slid one of the pieces of lighter wood to the side.
“They all do that, and it still doesn’t open,” James grumbled.
“You have to do it in order,” Leo said, already flipping it over and adjusting panels, sliding some over and pushing some inwards. When he had tried a series and it led nowhere, he pushed the pieces back to their starting position and began anew. He lost track of time while he worked at the thing, but eventually he was holding something that was no longer a cube, but a splayed open configuration of wooden bars. He reached inside and pulled out the tiniest handgun he had ever seen.
“Well,” he said, after checking it was unloaded. “She heard me say I’d love to get my hands on the weapon. And it’s just as small as I suspected. Must fire pretty damned straight, too. Nothing like this has ever been on the market. I suppose she had it specially made.”
“All those years she’s had a pistol in that box?” James looked outraged. “I always thought it was lemon drops.”
“I suppose she only put it there when Edith announced she was giving the rest of the arsenal to you. Or maybe she put it in the box to amuse me,” Leo said, turning the weapon over in his hands. It was the kind of weapon that would only do any good if you aimed perfectly. And that shot in the middle of Armstrong’s forehead couldn’t have been more perfect if Miss Delacourt had lined it up with a ruler.
But she hadn’t sent him the pistol to show off. She didn’t need to—they both already knew that she was a frankly terrifying marksman. He tried to imagine why she might have sent it. Partly because he had said he wanted a look at the weapon. But why in the box, then? He put the pistol back in the box and closed the panels so he once again had a perfect, unblemished cube, identical to how it had looked when he had taken off the paper. It was proof that puzzles could be solved without destroying things. He didn’t know if that was what the old lady had meant, but that was what Leo saw. Proof that he could go on, somehow, without tearing everything up around him.
“To amuse—well, you do look amused, so hooray for that,” James remarked.
Leo got to his feet and placed the box on the chimneypiece, right in the center, in pride of place. It had to stay here—it wouldn’t fit in his valise. He still hadn’t quite gotten used to the idea that he was able to stay with James permanently, but he liked the idea of a little piece of him staying here, connecting him with the place where he belonged.
“Come here,” Leo said, but James was already there, his arms wrapped around Leo, both of them holding one another in the warmth of the hearth fire and within arm’s reach of a murder weapon, and it was all as perfect as Leo could have wanted it.
About the Author
Cat Sebastian writes steamy, upbeat historical romances. They generally have at least one LGBTQ+ main character and always have happy endings.
Cat lives in a swampy part of the South with her husband, three kids, and two dogs. Before her kids were born, she practiced law and taught high school and college writing. When she isn’t reading or writing, she’s doing crossword puzzles, bird-watching, and wondering where she put her coffee cup.
Read more at Cat Sebastian’s site.
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