The Scot and I (26 page)

He smiled into her eyes. “No offense taken, and I’m sure Gavin would agree with you. Perhaps I am a little overbearing at times, a little too inclined to think I know best.”

Her smile faded. “You seem very sure that the others are all right.”

“As sure as I can be of anything. Just think about it, Mahri. When the train stopped at Aboyne, Murray and his thugs came for us—you and me—not for the others. That’s what makes me believe that the others are safe. What we have to think about now is ourselves.” He tried to edge away from her. “Get some rest. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.”

“No,” she replied quickly and grasped the sleeve of his shirt. “I’m not tired, and I don’t want to fall asleep reliving the past. Talk to me, Alex, please.”

He wasn’t immune to the appeal in her eyes. All the same, he didn’t think it wise, in their state of undress, to be lying supine on a bed. Just thinking about it was making him break out in a sweat. Short of detaching himself forcibly from her grasp, there was nothing he could do.

Resigned to acting the part of a monk, he said, “What shall we talk about?”

“Tell me about yourself. What were you like as a boy? Were you always this serious?”

“Serious!” He broke into a smile. “You abominable girl! You like to cut me down to size, don’t you? If you must know, I was a tearaway, always getting into trouble, playing tricks on unsuspecting people. I’ve had more beatings from my father than you have had hot dinners.”

“Whatever happened to that boy?” she teased.

“You said it yourself. He got older. He grew up. Things changed when my parents died. I became the head of my family.”

“You mean, you felt responsible for Gavin?” She answered her own question. “Well, of course you did. It’s in your nature to protect your own.”

“I could say the same about you.”

“And I would agree with you, but it’s a trait I admire. I don’t want to change you. You, on the other hand, want to change me.” She seemed to realize that she’d strayed into a bog and quickly changed direction. “How did you come to work for the secret service?”

He yawned, but she didn’t take the hint. Sighing, he said, “I was recruited by a friend. That’s how it’s usually done. We recruit people we know, people we can trust. You’ve heard me speak of Durward?”

She nodded. “He’s the one you think will clear you when he takes charge of the investigation.”

“Well, he taught me mathematics at St. Andrew’s. Brilliant teacher. I was in the chess club, as was Durward. What I didn’t know was that he was also a code breaker attached to Whitehall. When he became section chief of espionage, he asked me to take his place as a code breaker. And that was what I did. He is short on charm, doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and is a law unto himself.”

“You like him?”

“I respect him.” He shrugged. “That’s how I was recruited, because of my aptitude at chess and at breaking codes.”

Her brow creased. “Were we at war back then?”

“We’re always at war, especially in times of peace. Spies can always find work ferreting out their enemies’ secrets.”

She was indignant. “That sounds like a great piece of nonsense to me! No wonder we’re always at war with our neighbors.”

“Don’t blame me. I didn’t invent the system.” He shook his head. “It wouldn’t be necessary if we were all good people.”

“Yes,” she said, as to herself, “it’s surprising how easily good people can be corrupted.” Her reflective look vanished, and she went on, “How did you go from working with codes to active duty in the secret service?”

“By accident.”

She raised her head to look at him. “By accident?”

He nodded. “Durward needed an extra man, and I was the only one available. I acquitted myself well, so I believe, and developed a taste for a more adventurous sort of life than sitting in a room all by myself, poring over numbers and letters.”

She started to laugh, as she was meant to, but stopped abruptly. “But something went wrong, didn’t it? You went back to your little room in Whitehall? Is that when Ariel died?”

He said savagely, “Little brothers should mind their own business.”

She took offense at this. “Just be grateful that you have a brother who worries about you. I would do anything, give anything, to have my brother back. And you are mistaken. Gavin said nothing to me.” She paused and lowered her voice. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned her name.”

He felt horribly chastened. After what she’d told him about her own brother, he should have had more tact. “I
am
grateful that I have a brother who worries about me,” he said, “and I’m sure Gavin would say the same of me.” There was a brief silence. “You’re right, of course. Something did go wrong, terribly wrong. It was all my fault. Someone I trusted, someone I recruited, not as an agent but as a source of information, deliberately lured me into a trap, and not only me but three of my comrades. I’ve told you this before.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “You blamed Demos.”

“She worked for Demos! Oh, yes, it has branches in England as well.”

Her head came up, and her eyes searched his. “She?”

“Ariel.” He kept his voice neutral and steady. “The woman I thought I loved. She was in an ideal position to observe and pass on information. Her father, a Scottish peer, was in the House of Lords. She was his hostess. Ariel heard things she wasn’t supposed to hear, saw things she wasn’t supposed to see.” He heard the bitterness creep into his voice and checked it. “You might say that she was everyone’s favorite confidante, including mine. She sent me to a house in Kennington where the leader of Demos was supposed to be hiding out.”

She took his hand and put it to her cheek. “What happened to Ariel?” she asked softly.

He gave a mirthless laugh. “She was the daughter of a peer. She thought she was untouchable. She told me so when she visited me in hospital. If I’d been able to move, I would have strangled her with my bare hands. As it turned out, she was found with her neck broken at the foot of the stairs in her own home. I never found out who was responsible, Demos or my own people.”

“It might have been an accident.”

“Not in the game I’m in.”

Brows drawn, he watched as she got off the bed and moved to the table. When she returned, she offered him a cup.

“Whiskey?” he asked, his smile breaking out again.

“Why not?” She sat on the edge of the bed. “I think we deserve it after what we’ve been through. Frankly, I don’t know how you can sleep at nights after what Ariel did to you.”

He took a healthy swallow, then another before handing her the cup. She made a face but managed a few dainty sips before returning it to him. He bolted what was left.

“You’ve got it wrong,” he said. “It’s not Ariel’s betrayal that disturbs my dreams. It’s my own bloody naïveté that cost the lives of three of my friends.” He broke off and looked down at the empty cup. “This was a mistake. I’ve never told anyone outside the service about Ariel. All that my family knows is that we were going to be married, and when she died I went a little crazy. By that I mean that I cut myself off from everyone. Mahri, what are you doing?”

She’d taken his face between her hands. With eyes wide on his, she said, “Are you or are you not still in love with Ariel?”

At first he was baffled; then, as his brain began to add things up, he grinned hugely. “Are you jealous of Ariel?”

“I suppose I must be. Everyone keeps telling me what a paragon she was and how your heart was broken and would always be hers. Only Dugald was skeptical.”

“And what did Dugald say?”

“Oh, he said that if your heart was broken, you wouldn’t always be following me with your eyes.”

Without warning, she climbed on the bed and half sprawled over him.

He held her away with his hands on her shoulders. “You can tell Dugald,” he said hoarsely, “that—”

She stopped his words with a kiss. Her lips brushed over his, and when he relaxed his grip on her shoulders, she moved in closer. But when he didn’t respond, she pulled back to get a better look at him.

“What?” he asked when she laughed.

“You look like a cornered wild thing.”

And that was exactly how he felt.

She shook her head. “I’ve already made my decision, and I won’t let you stop me.”

“We’ll see about that.”

She stopped him from rising by pushing on his chest. “You did not answer my question,” she said. “Are you still in love with Ariel?”

“Of course I’m not in love with her! I only thought I was. But that does not mean that I’d take advantage of an innocent young girl.”

“I’m twenty-four.” She nibbled on his ear.

His hands fisted on the quilt. “And I’m . . . and I’m . . .”

“Thirty-one,” she supplied. “So we’re both old enough to know what we’re doing.”

She was tracing his lips with her fingers. “I’ve wanted to do that for a long, long time.” She dimpled. “Well, at least for a week.”

He made one final attempt to bring her to her senses. “It won’t stop at a kiss.”

She gurgled with laughter. “Simpleton,” she murmured. “I’m not so innocent as you seem to think. As Thomas Gordon, I learned a few things about relations between the sexes that would make you blush to the roots of your hair.”

He put his lips to hers. “Little liar,” he breathed into her mouth.

She laughed. “Put it to the test if you don’t believe me.” Suddenly, she turned serious. “I’m not asking for your undying love. I’m not asking for anything. We both know that our loyalties will take us in different directions. I want you to know I will never forget you, Alex Hepburn.”

Her words set his teeth on edge. She was still resolved to slip away and start a new life where neither Demos nor he would ever find her. It didn’t work like that. One day, she would grow careless and give herself away; then Demos would take its revenge.

Not if he could help it.

He knew how to hold her. He knew what would bind her to him so that she wouldn’t want to run away.

With infinite care, he cupped her face and brought his lips to hers.

Nineteen

As the kiss lingered, he drew her to his side and used his weight to anchor her to the mattress. She twined her arms around his neck and melted against him. She could have wept at such intimacy, but the intimacy was bittersweet. All she could be sure of was the present moment. All her tomorrows were here, right now, in the arms of the man she loved.

His mouth on hers was warm and gentle; she felt safe and sheltered. It was an illusion, of course. She had dragged him into something that was infinitely dangerous. The longer she stayed with him, the more she endangered him. How could life have dealt her such a blow?

But her sadness went deeper than that. She wasn’t seeing him as a secret service agent, a latter-day centurion who faced danger without flinching. She was seeing him as that bookish young man in a small room in Whitehall, devoting his life to numbers and codes. No wonder he’d jumped at the chance to escape that sterile world. And wasn’t Ariel all the colors of the rainbow?

And Ariel had betrayed him.

How long had he been alone?

They weren’t so very different. If only . . .

He sensed the darkness in her and he raised his lips an inch from hers. “You’re wrong,” he said. “This isn’t the end for us. It’s just the beginning.”

She smiled. “What’s this? You can read minds now?”

“No. But a famous seer foretold this moment. I didn’t understand her prophecy at the time. In fact, I was skeptical. Now I believe her.”

When he was silent, she prompted, “And what did this famous seer foretell?”

The words were branded into his mind. He selected the part that he thought would comfort Mahri. “She said, ‘Hold fast to what you feel, and all will be well’—or words to that effect. And that is what I intend to do.”

Hold fast to what you feel,
she noted,
and not to the one you love.
What difference did it make? She was leaving him anyway.

“I thought,” she said, “you didn’t believe in seers and witches and so on.”

“Well, most are charlatans, but a few are genuine. I believe what my seer told me.”

“You’re just trying to humor me.”

He felt the darkness in her turn to light, and he smiled. “Remind me, one day, to tell you the whole prophecy, but not now, not when I’m waiting with baited breath to discover what tricks you learned as Thomas Gordon.”

She looped an arm around his neck. “I learned that some women are predators, and the only way to escape them is to run like blazes. I’m not exaggerating. There were times when poor Thomas was lucky to escape with his virtue intact.”

His shoulders shook. “Should I run?”

“Too late. I’ve got you just where I want you.”

All humor left her face, and she looked directly into his eyes. “Let’s agree on something. Let’s agree not to think of tomorrow.”