“No,” she whispered, her fingers tightening desperately around his. “What you’re saying— No! I won’t leave you.”
“Listen to me.” He slipped his other hand behind her nape and drew her toward him, until he could place a kiss to her temple, then rested his forehead against hers. “It will take Whitehall a few days to learn that the French have the diary and that I played a part in handing it over. They’ll track me to Bradwell. I don’t want you here when that happens.”
“No,” she whispered. Dear God, she wanted to scream!
She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pressed herself against his chest, until he had no choice but to pull her down onto his lap.
“Stop saying things like that,” she ordered, rubbing her cheek against his shoulder. He was so strong and solid, warm…alive. He was with her, safe in her arms, where he was meant to be. “We’ll explain that the French kidnapped Meri, that we had no choice but to hand over the diary, that all of it was my idea—they’ll understand.” Her hands clutched at his waistcoat, and the words choked in her throat as they tore from her. “For God’s sake, the general will swear to it! They’ll believe him—and your brother.” Her voice rose as her hold on him tightened, each breath coming forced and hard. “They’re both heroes. Whitehall will listen to them. We’ll send messengers, and they’ll come and—”
“Diana—”
“No!” If she didn’t stop talking and planning, then he couldn’t send her away. And if he couldn’t send her away, then she would be right here with him, keeping him safe. The same way he had protected her and Meri.
She pulled back just far enough to stare up into his somber face, and what she saw there clenched like a fist around her heart. The fatalistic look of a prisoner marching to the scaffold. The same look she had seen from him once before, that night at Idlewild when he read the ransom note, when he agreed to bring the diary here to hand over to the French…
He’d known then. Dear God. He’d known days ago what coming here would mean, how he would accept all the responsibility for it himself, how Whitehall would see what he was doing as disloyalty. He’d known! Yet he’d agreed to come here anyway. A trade…
A life for a life. His life for Meri’s.
She grabbed at his lapels and shook him as hard as she could, all the fear and grief inside her for him striking out in anger. “You knew—for God’s sake! You knew!”
She hit him in the shoulders with her fists. He’d known all along. Which was why he refused to think of any kind of a future with her, why he’d hesitated to make love to her—not because he feared getting her with child, but because he knew she would lose him, that she would grieve for him the same way she’d grieved for John.
He grabbed her to him, holding her so tightly that she could barely breathe as she choked back pained sobs. He rasped out, “It was the only way to save Meri.”
“You had no right to make that decision!”
“I had every right. Because I would do anything to protect you, Diana. Anything.” He squeezed his eyes shut but couldn’t stop the pain from gripping his face. “Which means that I would do anything to protect your daughter.”
“Not this! Not your life.” She clung to him as she shuddered violently. The anguish was unbearable. “I won’t let this happen to you. You will not give up on me, do you understand? I won’t let you.”
“I’m not giving up.” He placed a kiss to her temple, but she wasn’t reassured. “I’m the best agent the Home Office has, remember? You said so yourself. I’ll use that to my advantage.”
The fury and fear boiled inside her belly, and her hands gripped him so hard that her fingers turned nearly as white as his neckcloth. “And this is how they treat their best agents—they slaughter them for saving innocent lives?”
He grinned somberly against her forehead. “That’s my angel, always fearsome.” He cuddled her in his arms, resting his cheek against hers so she couldn’t see his face. “I knew that being an operative was dangerous, that it meant making difficult choices.” His lips lingered against her ear as he murmured, “I’ll never regret helping you and Meri. I need you to understand that.”
“But—but we’ve come so far.” Each word was little more than a pained breath on her numb lips. Her heart had broken like glass, and she couldn’t find a way to ease the storm of roiling pain and fear that was consuming her. Hot tears stung at her eyes, and she swallowed them back, not wanting to break down in his arms. “How am I supposed to go on without you?”
“You will, and you’ll be happy.” His voice lowered to a hoarse whisper. “I want that for you, Diana, with every ounce of my being.”
“I’ll never be happy knowing that you…” The words strangled in her throat. A desperate solution shot into her head. “Don’t stay here. Don’t wait for them to come after you. Leave! Go to the continent, go to America—just leave.”
“I won’t do that.” He took her chin and lifted her face to touch his lips to hers. In that kiss, she tasted his determination to see this through. “I’ll stay and explain. I won’t flee.”
“Not even to save your own life?” A tear slid down her cheek. “Not even for me?”
“You would never suffer a coward, and I won’t tuck tail and run.” His eyes softened with sympathy as he brushed away the tear. “I couldn’t live with myself.”
“But you would be alive!”
“What kind of life would that be, never to be able to return to England, never again to see the ones I care about? Never to make love to you again?” He sucked in a long, ragged breath. “No. I have to make my stand here.”
“Promise me—promise me that if they won’t accept your explanation that you’ll leave on the first ship out of the bay.” Another tear followed the first, but she couldn’t stop them. The grief was overwhelming. “At least give me that.”
He paused, then somberly nodded.
She buried her face in his chest and held tightly to him for as long as she could. But in her heart, she knew that he had just lied to her.
Chapter 22
With a punishing strain of his back muscles, Kit dug the oars deep into the water in a final stroke to propel the rowboat to the pier. He didn’t dare look at Diana for fear that she would still be crying. For him.
He didn’t want her tears, because he sure as hell didn’t deserve them. Nor could he tell her what he now suspected about her brother. That he would be the one the Foreign Office would task with killing him. The same way he’d killed Fitch.
The little boat glided silently across the last few feet of smooth water, and he secured the oars in place as the hull bumped gently into the piling post, sending the pelican perched on top into a squawking and flapping fit at being disturbed from its early morning nap. He couldn’t remember—were pelicans portends of bad luck for sailors, or albatrosses? Not that it mattered. He’d been living on borrowed time for the past six months. The end had finally arrived.
But damn the world that he had to hurt Diana!
She loved him. She hadn’t said it, but he saw it in her eyes, felt it in her caresses. Only a woman who loved him would have come to him the way she did last night and healed him with her body and soul. Never had another woman offered herself to him the way she had, so vulnerable and completely trusting. Never. And he knew in his heart that no other woman ever would.
Grabbing the end of the rope in one hand and the iron rope tie with the other, he swung up onto the pier. He tied the boat off, still not able to look at her. Cowardly, he knew. But he wouldn’t be able to do what had to be done over the next few days with the memory of her heartache at the forefront of his mind, that expression of inconsolable grief he knew would be marring her beautiful face even now.
No, he wanted to remember her as she was last night, with her golden hair falling softly around her bare shoulders, her body warm and inviting, and her heart…his.
The wharves were busy, given the early hour, and groups of people spilled down the long pier from shore. More than a dozen fest
ival-goers were yet wide awake from last night’s revelries and a good portion of them still swaying drunk. Sailors scampered over the pier and ships as they readied the boats that they’d brought to the docks specifically for yesterday’s blessing, now hurrying to sail away before the sun rose much higher so they could continue on with their fishing or trade routes. Dozens of others completed the crowd—porters moving barrels and crates, merchants checking on their cargos, travelers checking on passage, and lightskirts yet hoping to find a man to pay for their pleasures before last night’s festival became too much of a memory.
Thank God the place was busy. Because that meant that Kit didn’t have to speak to Diana, at least not for a little while longer, when he could figure out how to make her understand that he was doing all this to protect her. That he didn’t regret the decision he’d made. That he would give his life for her, without hesitation.
“Christopher.”
Pausing as he knelt on the dock and tied off the boat, he steeled himself, then forced his gaze to meet hers as she still sat in the boat below, waiting to be helped onto the pier.
Her blue eyes glistened brightly with tears. “I really think we should—”
A scream tore through the early morning air from directly behind him.
Kit wheeled around, his hand going to his forearm before he remembered that the knife wasn’t there.
A woman stood at the edge of the pier and screamed again at the top of her lungs, crying out hysterically for help and jabbing a finger at the water below her feet. Men rushed forward to help. But Kit reached her first.
“My baby!” she screamed. “There—in the water! Save him!”
Just below the surface, Kit saw white swaddling floating slowly downward toward the murky bottom of the bay. Without hesitating, he dove into the water and swam fiercely after the sinking baby.
He grabbed it, yanked it toward him, and kicked hard to swim upward as fast as he could. When he broke through the surface, he shoved the baby up into the air with one hand, while he grabbed with the other at a ladder of wooden boards that had been nailed haphazardly to the piling post. His smooth-soled boots slipped on the wet rungs, but he slowly and carefully made his way up to the pier, the baby securely in his grasp.
He reached the last step and held the baby toward its mother, who reached desperately over the edge of the boards on her hands and knees for her little son. When she snatched him into her arms, the abrupt movement startled the babe, who blew out a mouthful of water and began to wail.
“Thank God,” she sobbed, cradling the screaming infant against her bosom.
Kit flopped his wet body over the edge of the pier and onto the boards with one last, large step. The seawater poured off him as he rolled onto his back and panted hard to catch his breath, ignoring the curious crowd that had gathered and pressed in around them.
The mother reached a shaking hand to Kit’s arm and squeezed, barely able to force out past her grateful sobs. “Thank you. He would have drowned if you hadn’t dove in like that.”
“What happened?” he demanded as he sat up.
“A man grabbed him from my arms.” She cried so hard with relief now, nearly matching the baby’s ear-splitting screams, that Kit could barely hear as he shoved himself to his feet, dripping and cold to the bone. “He ripped him away from me and threw him into the water.”
His blood turned to ice. “What man?”
She pointed behind him toward shore. But when Kit turned around, his heart stopped. The man was gone.
And so was Diana.
Steely fingers yanked at the ties cinched so tightly around her wrists that the bindings cut into her skin. They ripped the straps off her hands, painfully scraping them over her thumbs and fingers. A fierce shove to the middle of her back—
Diana stumbled forward and fell, landing so hard on her hands and knees that skin scraped across the rough boards beneath her.
With her freed hands, she pulled at the burlap sack that had been flung over her head and shoulders to keep her from seeing where they were taking her. Or who. She’d been grabbed from the rowboat so quickly that she hadn’t had the chance to scream before the cloth gag was forced between her teeth and the bag dropped over her head, all from behind.
But she had the chance now.
Tearing the gag from her mouth, she let out a scream so loud that it echoed off the wooden walls of the tiny room around her. No—not walls, not a room. Finely fitted boards forming the sides of a ship’s cabin. She could barely see them as her eyes adjusted to the bright light pouring in through the row of tiny windows lining the top of the cabin wall.
“Shut up!”
Her gaze darted to a man in the doorway, and she sucked in a deeper breath to scream again.
“Let the bitch scream her bloody ’ead off,” a second man reasoned as he came up behind the first and peered over his shoulder at her. “No one can ’ear her out ’ere on the water. No one’d bother checkin’ out no screamin’ woman i’ th’ first place, not on a ship wi’ sailors.”
As her eyes adjusted and she could finally make out their faces, the memory struck her like a blow. The two men who yanked her out of the rowboat and brought her here were the same two sailors who had chased her through the fairgrounds last night, the same men to whom she’d given her copy of the diary.
Her heart froze. Had they discovered that Garrett had switched out the real diary for a fake? Oh God—Meri!
The first man spat on the floor at her feet. “Demmed shame if the bitch found that gag shoved into ’er mouth again.”
Flexing his hands into fists at his sides, a malicious gleam shined in his eyes as he stepped into the room. Her hand strayed toward her skirt and the knife strapped to her calf. If that man dared to come after her, she’d make him regret it.
The second man grabbed his arm and stopped him. “Redcoat said not t’ touch ’er.”
Redcoat?
“I ain’t risking me skin fer ’er.” The second man pulled the first back out of the cabin and into the gangway. “Ye’d not either, if ye had a speck o’ brains ’bout ye.”
Stifling a wince of pain, she climbed to her feet. Her hands had been scraped raw from the bindings and from the splinters on the floor. “I demand that you release me this instant.”
Both men cackled loudly at that, but now she knew. Whoever Redcoat was, he’d hired them to come after her. And with a name like that, the man wasn’t French. Had Kit been wrong? Had the Foreign Office arrived early in Bradwell and come after her for passing secrets to the enemy?
“Who are you?” She stood her ground, refusing to let the two men think they’d cowed her, even though they actually terrified her. “Who hired you to kidnap me?”
She took a step forward, just to see how they’d react. As she predicted, the two men stepped deeper into the gangway outside the cabin. They didn’t like her, but they liked Redcoat even less.
So they had orders not to harm her. But given by whom?
“Was it the Foreign Office?” she pressed. “Or the people who took Meri?”
Her questions only gained her the same hostile stares as before. They had no idea what she was asking about.
“Redcoat’ll be speakin’ to you soon enough, I ’spect.”
“Who is he?”
He answered the question silently with a grin that showed missing teeth.
“He hired you to bring me here.” She fought to keep her voice calm and swallowed down her fear. “But I’ll pay you more if you let me go—twice whatever he’s paying you. My father’s a wealthy general. You can take the money he’ll give you and disappear.”
“Just what we need, eh?” The second man slapped the first on the back. “ ’Nother redcoat after us!”
“An’ this one a general, no less. Guessin’ we be climbin’ the ranks, eh?”
They didn’t know or care who she was. Yet they both feared this man named Redcoat who’d hired them, and especially violating his rules of not harming her.
&
nbsp; For now, she would use that to her advantage. “I want to speak to Redcoat. Now.”
“He’ll tell ye what ye need to know when ye need to know it.” He snatched up the gag cloth from the floor where she’d ripped it off. “Until then, shut th’ hell up ’fore I’ll make ye.”
“If you lay one finger on me, I’ll tell him what you did,” she threatened. “I’ll tell him that it was you who forced that gag between my teeth, who bruised my face and cut my mouth doing so. Apparently, I’m his prize, and I don’t think he’d like to discover my face all black and blue and swollen because you two couldn’t figure out how to handle a woman without abusing her, do you?” Her voice took on a fierce, burning intensity that pulled both men up straight. “Because I promise you that the only way you’ll be able to put that thing into my mouth again is by force.”
The man clenched his jaw and gripped the cloth in his fist, but he didn’t take a single step toward her.
“Let me go,” she tried again. “I’ll make certain you both get paid well for your trouble, and I’ll not have the chance to tell Redcoat how you mishandled me or to give him the chance to punish you for it.” She reached desperately for whatever tendrils of hope were left to her, talking quickly but in a low, controlled tone, despite the pounding of her heart. As if they were in this together against Redcoat. “We can go back to shore. You’ll be long gone before he realizes what happened, and he’ll never find you.”
The second man laughed. “Ye don’t know th’ man, if’n ye think that!”
“Rather have me life than blunt,” the first man added. “So scream yer demmed head off fer all I care.” He threw the gag onto the floor and spat again. This time the wad of saliva landed on her shoe. She kicked it off with a disgusted gasp, which only drew another laugh. “Redcoat’ll make ye quiet soon ’nough, I wager.”
He slammed the door shut.
She ran forward and threw herself against the door to force it open, but the solid boards didn’t budge. The light clanking of metal against metal reverberated through the panels as the door was fastened from the other side.
After the Spy Seduces Page 22
