The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

Chapter Thirty-Five

But it was happening, and Amy didn’t want it to stop. His lips reached hers, and reality disappeared in a floating mist of taste and touch and scent; his tongue burrowed deep into her mouth, and, unthinking, Amy lifted her arms to clasp tightly about his neck. They kissed with the savagery of long separation; lips slanting together, tongues twining, bodies pressing together. Richard’s hand slid under Amy’s back, molding her to him, while his thigh pressed between her legs.

Amy gave a little cry and arched up against him, kissing him back hungrily. Why couldn’t she have just this one last time? she thought hazily. Just one last memory to store up to savor on all those long, empty nights ahead. . . . Knowing that this would be the last time, the very last time she’d feel his lips, his caress, his strong body against hers—that this wasn’t supposed to be happening but it was—magnified every sensation. The crisp brush of his hair against her sensitive fingertips, the flick of his tongue around the curves of her lips, the warm pressure of his hand along her spine. Just this one time . . . she promised herself. Since she would never have the chance again . . . Amy greedily tugged the Gentian’s shirt from his waistband, sliding her palms along the smooth skin of his back. She traced the contours of his muscles, memorizing their shape and texture.

The Gentian’s lips left Amy’s to trail along her cheek, down the curve of her chin. Amy gave a little cry of protest, and pressed harder against his back, trying to urge his mouth back up to hers, but Richard just grinned wickedly, and trailed his tongue along the curve of her neck, and . . .

Richard’s nose twitched. He sniffed Amy’s neck. He frowned. He sniffed again. “What,” he asked dazedly, “is that smell?”

Amy’s own nose had long since become accustomed to the eau de unwashed groom that permeated her borrowed clothes. Besides, she didn’t want to speak. If they spoke, she might have to think.

“Don’t breathe,” she advised huskily, yanking his head back down towards hers.

The Purple Gentian showed no signs of disagreeing. His mouth reclaimed hers with alacrity. His hands slipped into the loose waistband of Amy’s trousers, molding her against the bulge of his arousal.

Amy’s legs instinctively closed around his waist, and she moaned in a voice that was half-protest, half-plea, “Richard . . .”

Suddenly, the Purple Gentian’s hands grasped her shoulders in an iron grip, yanking her into a sitting position. “What did you say?” he bit out.

“I said . . . oh.” Amy gulped. Her head swam from being yanked upright, but even through her vertigo Richard’s green eyes on hers were as implacable as the jade eyes of an ancient statue. “I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I said I only just guessed?”

Richard gave her a little shake. “How long have you known?”

Amy considered prevaricating, but something about the way Richard’s fingers bored into her shoulders and his gaze into hers warned her that that would be a very bad idea. “Since the day after the Seine.”

“That night in the garden? You knew?”

Amy could barely nod.

“Damn you, Amy!” He let go of her so abruptly that she almost tumbled back onto the mattress, grabbing at the end of the night table to steady herself. “All the while I was eating my heart out—with jealousy of my own bloody self, no less!—you knew?”

“I wanted—” Amy’s throat was so dry that it took an effort to force out the words. She licked her swollen lips. “I wanted you to know how it felt. To be played with like that. I’m sorry.” She only half heard her own words. Jealousy? He was jealous?

“You’re sorry. Now you’re sorry.” With the amount of sarcasm dripping from his words, Amy was surprised she didn’t dissolve into nothingness on the spot.

Amy caught herself on the precipice of an apology and sprang up from the bed. “I don’t know why I should be. You repudiated me, if you remember correctly.”

“Only because I had to.” Richard frowned under his mask, not liking the way the conversation was turning.

Amy took a step forward, hands on her hips. Richard would have enjoyed the sight—they were, after all, a very nice pair of hips—if the expression on her face hadn’t been quite so ominous.

“And then you flirted with me the next day!”

“It made sense at the time.”

“For all I knew, you were just playing with me out of some . . . some malicious whim!”

“You were never a whim.”

“It certainly doesn’t feel that way. For all I knew you might have been the sort of cad who enjoys driving women mad just for the sheer joy of it. You told me I was an infatuation.”

“I had good reasons.”

“All right, then. What are they? Or do you need time to invent some?”

Richard bit down the automatic urge to snap that it was none of her affair. Because it was her affair, and had been ever since he had kissed her in her brother’s study. Looking down at Amy’s flushed face, Richard felt oddly sheepish. It was an unpleasant feeling, a feeling entirely unsuited to an intrepid secret agent, and Richard did his best to squelch it. He had had good reasons, he reminded himself. Deirdre. The mission. Saving England, and all that. Surely saving England counted as a good reason. If he could only convince Amy of that then . . . well, then maybe he would stop feeling like such a complete heel.

“There was someone. Someone I fancied myself in love with. A long time ago.”

Amy swallowed the impulse to demand sarcastically if this nameless someone had been more than a mere infatuation. She wondered if he’d kissed her on moonlit nights on the Seine. If he’d taken her to see his antiquities. If she’d been prettier and wittier than Amy. If she’d been blond.

“Who was she?”

Richard shrugged. “The daughter of neighboring gentry.” He paused, trying to think how to go on. For all that the images of Deirdre’s betrayal and Tony’s death were emblazoned into his brain in precise detail, he’d never actually had to put any of it into words before. Those who knew, knew. Geoff, Miles, Sir Percy, his parents . . . None of them had ever taxed him with an explanation. They just knew. And they never discussed it.

“I fancied myself in love with her,” he repeated, as if by focusing on the foolishness of the lovelorn swain he had been, he could put off the other part, the darker part. “It was nearly six years ago.”

“Are you still in love with her?” Amy croaked.

Richard’s head snapped down towards Amy. “In love with her? Zounds, no! It was . . .”

“An infatuation?”

The sarcasm was wasted on Richard. “An infatuation,” he agreed. “She was young, pretty, and nearby. I was impressionable.”

Amy sniffed scornfully.

“I had a rival. A middle-aged widower. I’d been running missions for Percy for just over a year. I thought that if I told her . . . Hell, I was bursting to tell her. To tell anyone. I was young, and stupid, and I wanted to boast. Even if Baron Jerard hadn’t been involved, I would have told Deirdre about the League sooner or later.”

Deirdre. The name somehow made the woman more real to Amy. Deirdre. It was a nasty name, Amy decided viciously, despite the fact that she’d heretofore always rather liked it, and when she was ten had given the name to her third-favorite doll.

“Her maid was a French operative.”

Amy’s eyes flew up to his face in surprise.

With the grim air of a man running a gauntlet, Richard plunged on. “I made the mistake of telling Deirdre, in some detail, of a mission we had planned for the following month. Her maid alerted the Ministry of Police. They preceded us to our meeting place.”

“Were you hurt?”

“I?” Richard laughed bitterly. “Not a scratch. They arrived at the cabin just before T—one of our best men showed up with a French count he had rescued from the Bastille. By the time Geoff and I arrived, the count was recaptured. Tony was dead. I was unhurt. It didn’t take long to trace the link to Deirdre.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“So was I.” Richard shook his head. “But that didn’t make any difference to Tony.”

Remembered grief incised deep lines on either side of Richard’s lips, and chiseled away at Amy’s anger. It had seemed so straightforward just moments before. He had wronged her. He had played her for a fool. He was in the wrong, and no excuse, no excuse at all (short of memory loss, or an evil twin) was going to set that right. When he mentioned Deirdre, Amy had bristled with righteous indignation. It would have been so easy to scoff at a betrayed love, to fling shrill derision at him like poison-tipped arrows.

Even knowing the rest of it, part of Amy still wanted to fly at him like a harpy, and screech, “That was it? You played games with my heart because another woman—a woman who was not me—betrayed your trust years ago? You made my life agony for that?”

But she couldn’t.

Not when his remorse hung between them like a living thing. Or did she mean like a dead thing? Tony.

“But I’m not Deirdre,” she blurted out.

“I couldn’t tell you, Amy,” Richard said quietly. “There were too many lives at stake.”

Amy stared at him dumbly. You didn’t have to dally with me, she thought. You could have just left me alone. Or you could have trusted me. I wouldn’t have told. She desperately rehearsed all the grievances that had fueled her since that afternoon she had realized his double identity. But all of them scattered in the face of those horrible, weighty words, too many lives at stake.

Amy shook her head and took a step back. “I can’t . . . ,” she began, but choked on her own confusion.

How could she say she couldn’t accept that, when she knew he was right, that he had done the honorable thing? Her hurt feelings were insignificant when weighed in the balance against a man’s life. She knew that. A line from one of her favorite poems flitted through her head: “I could not love thee dear so much, loved I not honor more.” It had always seemed such a noble sentiment. But here the sentiment stood embodied before her, and Amy wanted to scream and rail. How had everything turned upside down? Five minutes ago, he was a rogue, and a deceiver, and she a maiden wronged. Now, Amy’s head ached with the uneasy sense of being wrong rather than wronged.

But he hurt me, her heart argued back.

Why couldn’t he have been the despicable cad he seemed, so she could just hate him? None of these horrible, messy, confused emotions.

“I’m going home,” she said thickly.

Richard immediately stepped forward. “I’ll see you back.”

“No.” Amy shook her head as she flung her legs recklessly over the side of the window. She wanted to walk and walk and go on walking as though, if she moved quickly enough, she might outpace the confused thoughts that pursued and pricked her.

“No,” she repeated, “I’ll be all ri—aaaaah!”

Amy’s words turned into an agitated cry as a pair of hands closed around her midriff and jerked her down from the window.

“Let go!” Amy drove an elbow into her captor’s arm, earning a muffled oof. In retaliation, the arm around her stomach tightened. Amy gasped for breath, ineffectually trying to kick backwards, as she was hauled inexorably into the alleyway behind Delaroche’s lodgings.

Richard flung himself out of the window after her in a swirl of black cape—and froze, as a phalanx of military men materialized out of the darkness. The brass on their uniforms might have been somewhat dull in the dark, but it didn’t take much moonlight to see that their muskets were primed and ready.

A short, bandy-legged man strutted through the semicircle of musket points. “The Purple Gentian, I presume?” Delaroche sneered.