“Yes.” As long as Whitehall allowed him to breathe. Which most likely wouldn’t be long.
But Morgan was here in Bradwell, and Kit wouldn’t let this last opportunity for justice to slip through his fingers.
With a frustrated sigh, she rolled away from him and onto her back beside him, somehow managing not to touch him at all on the narrow bed. He felt the loss of her like a chill seeping through his bones, and he fought with himself not to grab her back into his arms.
“Why won’t you realize that Garrett isn’t a traitor?” she said into the darkness. “He’s been protecting Meri and keeping her safe. He was watching over me tonight at the festival when the exchange happened.” In her mounting frustration, she fisted the sheet at her side. “For God’s sake! He had the diary in his hands tonight. If he was working for the French, why would he give it back? Why not just take it from me?”
The chill turned into an electric jolt. He rolled over on top of her, pinning her beneath him.
“He had the diary?” He searched her face for any clues in the shadows. “You gave it to him?”
“Not exactly.” When she tried to wiggle free, he held her still, and she glowered up at him in frustration. “I saw him before the exchange. He told me that the French would be contacting me soon, that Meri was safe and his men were guarding her. He took the diary from me, flipped through the pages, and then gave it back.”
His heart skipped with dread. “He tore pages out of it?”
“No. He just handed it back, said to give it to the French when they asked for it.” Her frown deepened. “What does any of that matter? The French have it now.”
But they didn’t. That realization stood his hair on end. What her brother had done—
He stared down into her confused face as all the pieces of the puzzle finally fell into place, each one fitting into the other like Russian nesting dolls… Why her brother concocted that story about visiting friends before he went missing, why the Foreign Office knew of Morgan’s connection to Fitch-Batten’s murder and didn’t care, why Nathaniel Grey had ordered Kit to stop chasing Morgan.
Her brother was working for the French. But with England’s blessing.
Yet Morgan had known all along where the diary was hidden and could have given it to the Foreign Office at any point. So why work in secret? Why murder Fitch? And if Morgan had nothing to do with his own fake kidnapping or Meri’s real one, then who did?
That was the question now…who?
Another player had entered the field.
“Garrett didn’t take it when he had the chance,” she protested gently, not knowing what information she’d just revealed. “Surely that proves he’s not a traitor.”
His mind whirled, and distracted, he mumbled, “Your brother isn’t what he seems.”
“He said the same about you.”
Of course he did. If Morgan was working for the Foreign Office, then he would have been told about Kit’s manufactured identity. He smiled tightly. “But you already knew that.”
“He didn’t mean the Home Office. He meant that you were keeping other secrets.” She stiffened beneath him as his smile faded. “What secrets?”
She moved again to free herself, and this time, he let her slide out from beneath him.
Clutching the blanket to her front, she sat up. “I think I deserve to be told the truth now, don’t you?” She placed her hand over his. “All the truth. From the beginning.”
“That’s a lot of truth,” he warned, attempting to inject a hint of teasing to lighten the sudden tension between them.
And failing, when she grimly countered, “I think I’m strong enough to handle it.”
She was the strongest woman he knew. But this… He blew out a harsh breath, relenting. “It started six months ago.”
He rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling again, wishing to God that he had a bottle of whisky to help him get through this. She wanted the truth, so he would give it. He only hoped she’d understand when he finished.
“I had a partner who worked with me on Home Office assignments. We were even at Peterloo together, but three streets away when the massacre occurred. The Home Office wanted us there to help keep the peace, but we decided that we’d rather be in a tavern than in the field listening to people talk about not having the vote.”
“Peterloo?” she whispered.
He gave a curt nod. Guilt for not being there still ate at his gut. It was slaughter at the hands of the cavalry, condoned by the Home Office, and the event that had started him doubting his unqualified allegiance to Crown and country.
“Fitch and I often went our own way on assignments, both from what the Home Office wanted from us and from each other. That time, it had been a mistake.” But it wouldn’t be the last. “We might have been able to save some of the protesters if we’d been there.”
Her hand tightened over his. “Fitch?”
“James Fitch-Batten. The son of a canal builder from Lincolnshire who saw his father work himself to death making other men rich and so wanted a better life for himself. We would never have been friends if we weren’t thrown together by the Home Office.” He smiled wistfully. “Dear God, could that man drink! I’ve never seen anyone go deeper into his cups than Fitch, yet still be stone-cold sober enough to hit a bull’s-eye with a pistol from twenty paces.”
“He sounds like a remarkable man.”
“He was.” Was. The word lay bitter on his tongue. “One of the best operatives the Home Office ever produced.”
“Next to you, of course.”
At that soft compliment, he lifted her hand to his lips and placed a kiss to her palm. Instead of releasing it, he placed it on his chest.
“Your friend’s no longer an operative, then?”
He paused. She’d asked for the truth… “He’s no longer anything.”
When she stiffened and tried to pull her hand away, he tightened his fingers around hers and kept it in place, right over his heart.
“Last winter, Fitch and I were investigating communications between the French and their operatives here in England. A standard assignment. We’d done work like that dozens of times. So we scheduled a meeting with one of our assets, a man we’d worked with before and trusted.”
As if sensing the tightening knot of guilt and fury inside him, she lay down in the hollow between his arm and his chest and nestled herself against him, providing comfort with her presence.
“It was routine work, and I didn’t want to give up my evening for it. Given a choice between being in a woman’s bed or walking through the cold London rain at midnight just to confirm what we already knew, I’d have been a damned fool to go.”
She stiffened against him but said nothing, yet he knew that revelation upset her. She’d asked for the truth—all the truth—and he was giving her exactly that.
“I didn’t go to the meeting.” Didn’t want to go. Not to do work for the Home Office when it was becoming harder and harder to believe in his work, when he was sick and tired of letting Whitehall dictate his personal life. For once, he’d simply wanted to be normal. “I let Fitch go without me.” He paused. “By three in the morning, when he hadn’t yet tracked me down to tell me how the meeting went, I become worried. So I went looking for him. I found his body in an alley.”
So softly that barely any sound at all crossed her lips, she breathed, “He was murdered?”
“Yes.” He paused to keep his voice from cracking with emotion. “And I wasn’t there to stop it.”
He lifted his arm from around her and sat up, dropping his legs into the small space beside the edge of the mattress. He yanked open the curtain covering the tiny cabin window but could see nothing in the darkness except moonlight teasing across the black water. No stars, no other boats—not even the land edging the bay. An illusion of being utterly alone in the world, but not even adrift.
The irony of that pierced him. Being adrift meant the possibility of eventually washing up onto shore, in a new
place, with a new chance. But this, sitting here simply waiting in his own private purgatory, waiting for the end… Hell.
And damn the world that fate should finally deliver a woman like Diana Morgan to him! Now, of all times. Dangling in front of him the possibility of a happy, secure future with a woman who was his match in every way, only to cruelly snatch it away.
She sat up behind him, her hand touching his bare back. “What did you do?”
“I went on the hunt.” His eyes still scanned the darkness of the bay, but what he saw were flashes of Fitch’s dead body, so badly beaten that his face was almost unrecognizable, his left shoulder dislocated and his right arm broken, his kneecaps smashed. The cut at his throat so deep and vicious that it had nearly severed completely through his neck. He’d died neither easily nor quickly, in an act of unchecked brutality and viciousness that Kit hadn’t seen since Peterloo, when defenseless men, women, and children had been sliced open with sabers and trampled beneath horses. “I tracked down every clue, every lead. That’s all I’ve been doing since then. Hunting down the man who did it.”
Leaving carnage and scorched earth in his wake, destroying relationships and contacts that took years to establish, turning his back completely on the Crown and its offices. Until it all brought him here.
“And I won’t stop until Fitch has justice.” Or until he drew his last breath.
“That’s why you’re after Garrett,” she whispered. Not a question, but a confirmation. “You think he’s the man who murdered your friend.”
He looked over his shoulder at her, and his dark expression made her gasp. “I know he did.”
The haunted look in his eyes chilled her down to her soul, and she shuddered. “No,” she breathed out, stunned. “That’s…that’s not possible. Garrett would never—could never…”
But his gaze didn’t soften. A gleam of certainty remained in his eyes.
When he didn’t reply, she admitted painfully, “My brother has been a failure his entire life. He has been successful at nothing. Not the army, not university, not any kind of business venture. Nothing.” Her voice rose with mounting alarm. Garrett was nearby in Bradwell. If Kit was this determined to find him, to hang him for treason and murder, if she couldn’t find a way to convince him— “For God’s sake! He’s never won a single fight in his life. He’s lost every bout of fisticuffs, every fencing match, every race. You know my brother. You truly think he has the wherewithal to be able to physically overpower a trained agent and murder him?”
“Morgan was there that night. A witness saw him go into the alley and come out with blood on his hands. Footprints in the mud matched your brother’s. So did a footprint on the stone. One imprinted in Fitch’s blood.”
“That means nothing.” Yet doubt began to gnaw at her belly. “Lots of men have the same size foot.”
“But men don’t wear down their boots in the same way. That’s what showed up in the footprints. That’s what matched your brother’s boots.”
“You—you had Garrett’s boots?” Her mouth fell open as her mind whirled to fathom what he was telling her. “How?”
“I bribed one of your servants to bring them to me. I had them resoled and kept the originals, and within two hours, the servant put them back right where he’d found them. Your brother didn’t know they were ever gone.” When the blood drained from her face, he lifted a brow. “You said you wanted the truth. Here it is, Diana, warts and all.”
“I did. I just—” Good God.
“So I had his soles, the imprint in blood that I’d pressed onto a sheet of paper, and the drawings I took of the other footprints in the alley, right down to how deep each place on the shoe pressed into the dirt. I matched the wear of Morgan’s boot soles to the prints. A perfect match. That, and the witness’s physical description of the man he saw enter the alley conclusively put him there.”
“But that doesn’t mean Garrett murdered Fitch.” She clung to straws now. Anything to convince him! “People are murdered in London at night all the time, straying someplace they shouldn’t. Just because Garrett was in that same alley doesn’t mean that he was responsible.”
“I investigated your brother and learned that he’d been in contact with the French, through those same communication channels that Fitch and I were sent to confirm. Most likely, he waited until Fitch met with our asset, then followed him until the right moment presented itself. Better to silence Fitch than let Morgan’s name get back to the Home Office as a traitor.”
No—no, this was all wrong! She slapped her hand on the mattress in fear and frustration. “My brother doesn’t possess that kind of cunning!”
“Your brother had a copy of your father’s diary made and then switched it out tonight when you handed it to him. What you gave to the French tonight was a fake.” His eyes softened then, not with understanding but pity. “He possesses exactly that kind of cunning.”
She pressed her fist against her squeezing chest as she replayed that moment from tonight in her mind. How Garrett had demanded the diary and flipped through it, to make certain that it was the original and still contained the information the French wanted. How he had angered her on purpose, then turned his back, to distract her while the diary was temporarily out of her sight in the shadows, so he could switch books and hand her the copy. Oh good Lord.
“Why?” she forced out breathlessly, her mind spinning. “Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know. And to be honest, I don’t care.” With a bleak expression, he reached up to stroke her cheek, but for once she found little comfort in his touch. “You and Meri are safe. That’s all that matters now, not who has the diary or why.”
“But it does.” She grabbed his hand and held it tightly. “If Garrett kept the real diary from going to the French, then he’s not a traitor. The exact opposite, in fact.”
She eagerly searched his face for any traces of the same conclusion that she’d made, any signs that he could give up his hunt for her brother. But the grim expression never lifted from his face, and she knew—
“You don’t care.” Icy dread flared out to her fingertips, turning all of her numb. “You don’t care that he’s not a traitor. You still think him a murderer. That’s why you’re still planning on chasing after him, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
That single word reverberated through her like cannon fire. “My brother didn’t murder your friend. But whoever did—”
“Diana—”
She repeated forcefully, “Whoever did is also capable of doing the same to you. You know that, yet you’re risking your life anyway.”
His bleak silence answered her.
“Why, Christopher?”
“Because Fitch deserves justice.”
“Not at the cost of your life.”
“If that’s what it takes,” he admitted. Yet something told her that he was answering for far more than her brother. But what?
He shoved himself up from the mattress. But there was no room to pace, with only two feet between the end of the makeshift bed and the short ladder that led up to the deck. He crouched by the ladder, unable to straighten to his full height in the tiny cabin, and stared silently out into the dark night through the open hatch.
“Christopher, you’re wrong.” Fear for his safety swelled inside her. She couldn’t bear to lose him now. “What happened to Fitch was terrible, but nothing you do can ever bring him back. Nothing.”
He stiffened, but didn’t turn to face her or crawl back into bed with her, where he belonged.
“I know what it’s like to lose someone you love to such a senseless act.” Her eyes stung as fresh grief swelled inside her. “I know how wrenching it is, how you would do anything to bring them back, how you would offer anything—including yourself.” She inhaled a long, jagged breath. “When John died, I spent days praying, bargaining, telling God to take me instead and make it all be some kind of terrible mistake, to let—” She choked. “To let me die, too. Any kind of sacrifice I cou
ld make to bring him back.”
“It’s not the same.”
“Grief is grief,” she corrected gently. “It’s always hell.”
A grisly laugh strangled in his throat. “Then I’m in a special kind of hell.”
“Yes.” With trembling fingers, she reached for his hand as it dangled at his side. Around the knot of grief in her throat, she whispered, “But you’re not alone.”
Her fingers tightened around his, and he shuddered. Yet he didn’t pull his hand away, and she foolishly took hope in that.
“You didn’t know what was going to happen that night. There was no possible way for you to have stopped…”
The icy realization for why he was so determined to risk his own life froze her blood, and her heart stopped. When it began to beat again a moment later, each beat pounded a brutal thud through her.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” With a tug to his hand, she pulled him around to face her. “That’s why you’ve been hunting Garrett all these months, why you went to the lengths you did—why you’re willing to risk your life.” She rose up onto her knees on the edge of the mattress. “Because you blame yourself. Because you think that you could have stopped it.”
“I don’t think it,” he bit out. “I know it.”
“It’s not your fault that—”
“I should have been there!” He grabbed her by the shoulders. “This wasn’t an accident. He was murdered, and I should have been there to stop it. For Christ’s sake!” His fingers dug into her arms. The anguish pulsating from him was palpable, the pain visible on his face. “He was my partner, and I wasn’t there when he needed me.”
“Christopher—”
“Instead of going with Fitch to Covent Garden, I went to Mayfair to spend the night tupping Lady Bellingham.”
He dropped his hands away, as if he couldn’t bare to touch her as he admitted this. As if he didn’t deserve to.
“That’s why I wasn’t at my partner’s side that night as I should have been. Because I preferred being between the countess’s thighs to doing my duty. And Fitch was murdered because of it.”
After the Spy Seduces Page 20
