“How beautiful you look in the snow,” he said softly. He stood so close that his breath mingled with hers in the cold air. “My enemy, my ally.”
Her heart thudded. Now was to be her moment. Not later in the hour, when she would have grown more used to his nearness. “I don’t want to be your enemy, Louis,” she whispered.
His fingers slid up to her wrists, gently caressing. “Then don’t be. Trust me.”
“I do trust you. I’m meeting you here, alone, am I not?” She shivered as his hands moved up to her shoulders, warm and heavy. But she felt no panic, only a thrill of anticipation.
“Why?” he asked. “Because you care for my wellbeing? Because you are drawn to me as I am to you?”
“Yes,” she admitted. The truth was no longer so hard to say.
His arm went around her, pulling her against him, his palm flat against her back. His other hand caressed her arm, brushed against her waist. Everything about him was hard, strong, and yet it was his gentleness that beguiled her.
“What shall we do, Anna?” he murmured, inhaling the scent of her hair. “Is there a way forward for you and me? Together?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “There has to be. Louis—”
Too late, she felt the soft play of his fingers dip suddenly into the folds of her gown, not in a bold caress, but to withdraw the stiletto from its hiding place. She made one instinctive move to snatch it from him, and then was still, for his expression had not changed. Neither his face nor his voice threatened her. And yet for the first time, he did not veil the fierce intelligence in his eyes. Her stomach dived with sudden fear.
“Did you come to kill me, Anna?” he asked evenly.
She shook her head, blindly. He’d always known about the weapon, watched the movement of her hands whenever she felt unsure or threatened.
“I needed to protect myself,” she whispered, raising her face closer to his. She didn’t know if she was fighting now for his trust or for her own life. “You must understand that. I need to protect us. Louis, tell me everything. We have to go now to safety, to save you and to end the war. Nothing else matters.”
“Do you believe you and I can do such things?” he asked.
“If we save you, it is a start. I feel it.” Her heart pounded. Their lips were so close she could taste his breath—coffee and a faint, fresh tang of herbs. “We can be together, Louis. Kiss me and you will know. Kiss me and come with me. It is the only way for us.”
His hand slid into her hair, pushing the hood aside to cup the back of her head. “There is another way. I will not argue the kiss, but trust must begin with you. You must tell the truth.”
His eyes were warm, his breath unsteady. Whatever was happening to her, she was still winning. She could agree to anything. One kiss would reel him in completely.
“I have always told you the truth,” she whispered. “You will see.”
His lips quirked and he angled his head, closing the last hairsbreadth between them. His mouth covered hers and parted her lips. Wonder, not panic, filled her, for this was gentle, too, his lips moving on hers in a soft, sensual caress. And then his mouth clung and sank into hers, and she gasped in shock as waves of emotion flooded her, battering her like a stormy sea.
There was no escaping it, for his hand behind her head held her steady. His other arm crushed her to his body as the stiletto fell into the snow, and the kiss went on and on, a tender tangle of lips and tongues, blinding, terrifying in its sweetness, utterly overpowering her.
For a long, long, moment, she didn’t even know she had lost, so overcome was she by this new pleasure. And then she knew. She understood the feeling at last.
She cared. And she could not hurt someone she cared for. Worse, she knew she had betrayed the fact with her devastated lips, as surely as if they had spoken the words.
A tear squeezed out the corner of her eye and trickled down her cheek.
One kiss and everything changed. It bound her, defeated her, and now only the truth would do.
His fingers caressed her throat and cupped her cheek as slowly, gradually, he detached his mouth from hers. “Who are you, Anna?” he said huskily.
“I’m Anna Gaunt,” she whispered. “And my brother-in-law, Henry Harcourt, sent me to help you escape the fort. You did that without me…”
“And what exactly is Henry Harcourt?”
“He has a position at the foreign office, is building himself a unique career in finding information no one else can. I help him.”
“Does he pay you?”
“When he can. I do it for fun, mostly.”
“I hope I am the most fun.”
A laugh that was more like a sob broke from her. “You are the most of everything. I’ve failed and I don’t even care.”
To her surprise, his head dipped and he kissed her again, when there was no need, when she was already won. Daringly, because she would never have another chance, her hand crept up to touch his cheek.
“It’s gone beyond success and failure, winning and losing,” he said against her lips. “Who is Banion?”
She drew back, frowning. “Banion? What has he to do with anything?”
He smiled, and she knew she had said something that pleased him. “Something more important than our little game is happening here, something I suspect threatens both our countries. Banion is Gosselin, my enemy and yours.” The smile faded as he touched her cheek. “Why so stricken, Anna? Do you care for him, after all?”
She blinked. “Banion? I barely noticed him. You suspected me, used me all along.” I thought you liked me. I thought you were different.
“I have been doing this a long time,” he said. “Too long.”
“Doing what?” she asked. Stupidly, she felt like weeping. She, who never wept.
“Asking questions, listening, learning, playing so many roles that there is no longer any difference between them and me. They are all part of me. I cannot even wish to be different any more, and I certainly don’t wish you to be.” He bent, brushing his cool lips against hers. “You are magnificent, Anna Gaunt, and I wish you were mine.”
She pushed him away. “Who is pretending compassion now?” she snapped. “I do not need it. And I can still have you arrested.”
“But you won’t,” he said with so much certainty that her fist clenched. “Because, like me, you have to know how this ends.”
Her brow twitched. “This? Do you mean Banion? Or you and I?”
“All of it.”
She drew in a shuddering breath. She felt as if the earth she stood on was sinking, that all the foundations she had so carefully built for her life, had crumbled. Because of him. And yet, he had not hurt her, had not taken her information and run, safe in the knowledge that she would not betray him. He had not even taken advantage, beyond the kiss she had offered, and those she had allowed for reasons she couldn’t fathom save for the fact that they were sweet and thrilling. And she had always craved thrills. She had just never found them in a man before.
“You’re cold,” he said, pulling her cloak more closely around her. He bent and retrieved the fallen stiletto and unerringly returned it to the pocket in her habit. A smile twisted his lips. “Madam, will you walk? Madam, will you talk with me?”
Chapter Eleven
A beam of pale sunshine filtered through the trees. The whiteness seemed to fold them into their own isolated world.
“Did you know?” she asked. “Did you know all you had to do was kiss me?”
“All? I would like to do a great deal more. But if you had not invited me, I doubt I would have gone even that far.”
“You said we could be friends,” she recalled. “But…you do not like me in that way?”
He looked startled. “Oh, I like you in every conceivable way there is. It was not my preference that concerned me but yours.”
“I thought you knew I liked you.” Somewhere, she couldn’t quite believe she was having this conversation.
He shrugged. “I knew you w
ere not indifferent. I am observant… And I confess I felt your pulse to see if your reaction was genuine. For at other times, you avoid me and flinch.”
Warm blood seeped into her cold face. “I do not like to be touched.”
“Which made it hard to seduce you.”
“I am still not seduced,” she said hastily.
His eyes laughed though his voice was grave. “Quite right,” he said outrageously. “It gives me something to aim for.”
“And allows me another chance to win,” she suggested, and this time he laughed out loud, and lifted her fingers to his lips.
“I look forward to that… You do not flinch anymore.”
“I am used to you,” she said at once.
The smile in his eyes began to fade and she looked away.
“Did something happen to you, Anna?”
“To me…to all of us, through me.” She turned suddenly, hitting him in the chest with her clenched fist. “Stop it!”
He caught her hand and held it there. “Stop what?”
She could not look at him. “Stop…working on me. I will not tell you this.”
Beneath her hand, his heart beat strongly, steadily. “You need tell me nothing. But there is no working with you, Anna.”
Slowly, she raised her eyes to his face. “Why not?”
“Because we are not objects, machines to be switched off and on. And I care for you.”
Almost unable to help it, she let her cheek fall against his chest. His arms came around her and held her.
“You have not lost, Anna,” he whispered into her hair. “God help me, I have not won unless—” He broke off on a hiss of laughter. “But there, there are some things a man like me cannot win from a marquis’s daughter.”
She understood what he meant. She had been around men enough, flirted with them enough, to know. But the disgust that normally came with such recognition seemed to be absent. It did not fit him.
Her arms lifted, tentatively embracing him. “A man like you is not the problem,” she said into his coat. “A woman like me, is. And I do not mean my family’s rank.” Her fingers curled in the hair at the back of his neck. “I cannot give you what you want.”
Instead of stepping away, his arms tightened. She should have felt threatened, but she didn’t. She felt…safe.
“And yet,” she said with something like awe, “And yet, I confess I am…curious.”
She felt the stretch of his lips against her hair as he smiled. “Let us settle for curious,” he said. “For now.”
In a little, they walked on again. Anna did not feel at all as if she was with a dangerous French spy who had just extracted from her the admission of her work for Henry and the Foreign Office, to say nothing of the more personal. She felt as if she were walking in the snowy woods with her lover, her suitor. Which was ridiculous in so many ways it was laughable. And yet, it was undeniably blissful.
He said, “Someone is coming to Blackhaven. Someone important is coming secretly to the hotel. I got into the reserved rooms. The bedchambers are all made up, and the sitting room is set with a table and lots of blank paper and pens. More than that, it is my belief someone is also going to Roseley, where your friend, Mrs. Alban—”
“Mrs. Lamont,” Anna corrected. “Alban is her husband’s Christian name.”
“Mrs. Lamont,” he allowed, “seems to be preparing for an important visit, too. I think Gosselin is here for that meeting—to protect it, to disrupt it, I don’t know which. I do know it’s more important to him right now than I am.”
“We could have him arrested,” Anna suggested. “I’m sure it would be easy enough to convince Mr. Winslow.”
“Or I could kill him,” Louis said brutally. “Either way, it would stop him. Only…”
“Only what?”
“What if he is doing something right? What if stopping him is the wrong thing to do?”
Anna stared at him. “Are you and I likely to agree on the right and wrong?”
“No,” he admitted. “But it would help both of us to know. Can you find out from your brother-in-law who is meeting in Blackhaven?”
This, of course, was what he needed to know. Perhaps she should have been hurt, but the boundaries between the personal and the professional had become so blurred that she simply accepted that they both needed the answer to his question.
“Henry doesn’t know anything about it,” she said impatiently. “Even if the meeting had been arranged after I left, he would have found a way to tell me if he knew it. But…Henry is only building his empire. He does not yet hold a senior post. And if this meeting is as important as you think, and as secret as you think, then it could easily happen without his knowledge.”
“Damn.”
“You saw the hotel book,” Anna reminded him. “Was there no name for the rooms they’re keeping?”
Louis grimaced. “Mr. Smith.”
“How unimaginative.” She glanced at him. “Could it be a real name?”
“Of course. But there are too many other coincidences. Every instinct tells me this is no mere Mr. Smith.”
“We have to be discreet,” Anna said. “If we draw attention to this, we risk ruining something…for Britain or for France. And yet we cannot do nothing if your evil Gosselin is involved.” She regarded him thoughtfully. “Why do you hate Gosselin?”
“Like yours, that story must wait for another day. Someone is coming too close. I must flee before your brother calls me out.”
“He is not so straight-laced. It’s my belief he and Serena used to have assignations here, too.”
“Perhaps. But he would not permit anyone to hurt you.”
It was true, though she wasn’t sure how Louis knew it.
“Au revoir,” he said, tilting up her chin. He swooped and kissed her mouth. Desire unfurled deep inside her, novel and yet increasingly recognizable. Oh, yes, she was curious.
“But this is insane,” she whispered against his mouth. “We are still enemies.”
“No. Our countries might be. Not you and I.”
And then he was gone, striding off through the snow, and she realized she was cold. And yet happier than she could ever remember. Because she cared. Because her enemy did.
*
Later, of course, without the thrill of his oddly spellbinding presence, she castigated herself for a gullible fool. There had been no reason to tell him what she did for Henry, just because he had kissed her and she had found she was not so cold as she’d always thought…. Very well, that she cared. That his kiss shattered her. How could she have built a simple kiss into an event that meant she won or lost?
Her pride writhed inside her, while her brain tried to make sense of the information they had exchanged. And in truth, as she had admitted, she had very little information to give. Henry Harcourt was a small if clever fish in a pond of large, important ones. And that is what saved her pride in the end. If he still sought her out, knowing all that, then she was right to believe he cared for her. Was she not?
With her head spinning and her mood fluctuating between despair and wild elation, she almost didn’t catch Tamar’s words to her in the library that afternoon.
Eventually, she glanced around from the window to find him gazing at her with a tolerant kind of frustration.
“I beg your pardon,” she said mechanically. “Did you speak to me?”
“I asked if you were not primping for tonight’s ball.”
She frowned. “But the assembly ball is on…oh. Tonight.”
This was the regular assembly room subscription ball for the quality of Blackhaven and its environs, as distinct from the invitation-only masquerade which had been sponsored by Mrs. Winslow and Mrs. Grant.
“You don’t sound happy about it,” her brother observed. “You haven’t quarreled with Lewis, have you?”
“Not exactly… I mean no, of course I have not.”
“You do seem very preoccupied.” Tamar threw himself into the chair beside her and sprawled, hooki
ng one leg over the chair arm.
She said, “I do not like…not being in control.”
“I know.”
She swallowed. “I want him gone from my life.”
“And if he goes?” Tamar asked.
“I will die.” A laugh that was almost a sob forced its way out. “Does that make me insane, finally?”
Tamar gave a twisted smile. “No. It makes you normal. Or as normal as a person can be in love.”
“Love?” she repeated with revulsion.
Tamar laughed, and unwound himself from the chair. “Exactly.” And sauntered out looking far more amused then concerned.
*
Gosselin had not left Blackhaven. Instead, he had taken a small and insalubrious room at the local tavern. Such accommodation suited neither his dignity nor his personal tastes, but he could no longer stay in the pleasant house on Cliff View. Louis Delon would find it too easily. At the tavern, at least, he could blend with the scum who frequented it, and who turned out to be beneficial since he was able to hire a slippery villain to find out who the devil Delon was pretending to be.
Gosselin had to admire Delon’s gall. To have escaped his prison and not only survived his injury but placed himself in the Blackhaven Hotel, right in the heart of the town’s society, was impressive. Not only that, but he’d clearly made friends with the most important family in the neighborhood, for he had been standing on the hotel step, waving off Lord and Lady Tamar. And the beautiful Lady Anna, who stirred Gosselin’s blood.
Not that Gosselin would do anything about the latter, of course. His pursuit of Lady Anna was largely to provide himself with an innocuous reason to stay so long in Blackhaven, but her beauty, nevertheless, disturbed his sleep. Whenever they were in the same room, she drew him like a magnet. And if he was truthful, part of his irritation at discovering Colonel Delon was that he had clearly been in her company, a more favored suitor than he.
But, of course, the more important question was, what the devil was Delon doing here? Was he just hiding where no one would expect him to be, until he could slip away? He could not return to France without being arrested. Gosselin and Fouché had seen to that…
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