“Perhaps I shall try to coax it out of you later. We won’t be doing much talking at the hotel anyway, will we, my delectable little crème brûlée? I believe I’ll enjoy having you for dessert, Charlotte.”
She had been about to tell him her plans, having never really meant to keep the information from him, as her intention was merely to shop. Now she bit her tongue, wondering how he would coax it from her. Charlotte blushed, feeling the lurid pressure of delightful shame in her cheeks and down to her breast as the waiter approached, bearing food and tea.
Much as she wanted to give in to that feeling, wallow in it and in Dexter’s attention . . . part of her kept scanning the room, the windows and the street beyond, wondering who else might be witness to their conversation.
* * *
THEY SPENT THE day as highly visible tourists. After dinner, Dexter had made good on his affectionate threats, and Charlotte seemed to let herself disappear into the role of giggling, besotted bride for a few hours. It was easy enough, and very little talk was required. They devoured one another and lay dozing afterward, limbs wound together and tangled in the luxurious sheets.
He felt her stirring first and tightened his arm around her, not yet ready to lose the feeling of warm, loose-limbed Charlotte snuggled against his side and chest.
“Mm. No, don’t go.”
“I’ll be right back, silly.” She pushed at his chest until he relinquished her, and for the next few moments he had the pleasure of watching her as she walked about the room, finding their various pieces of discarded clothing and draping it all neatly over the back of a chair. He was less pleased when she pulled a night rail from the wardrobe and disappeared into the bathroom.
He pouted when she emerged. “You’re even more enticing with that thing on, you know,” he lied. “All it does is make me fixate on what’s underneath. You’d be better off without it.”
She just smiled and turned the lights down completely, then slipped back into bed again. “I don’t want to scandalize the maids in the morning. Poor things, they have enough to worry about.”
“I’m sure they’ve seen it all before, and far worse,” Dexter countered.
“Yes, but they haven’t seen it from me. Nor shall they.”
He grumbled a bit more, but his heart soared when she returned to the crook of his arm and nestled against him again.
“So tomorrow, my silly noodle, I must go pay a visit to Murcheson’s local operation, northwest of the city. Oh, I know,” he said, hoping he sounded as though he were quelling some gestured objection, “but it can’t be helped. I really must see more of the small parts works. And also the direct sales outfit. He does a land-office business out of that factory, he claims. I could do with expanding that way, I think.”
Charlotte gave a noisy sigh. “But Dex,” she whined, “what am I to do all morning?”
“All day, poppet,” he corrected her. “I don’t think I’ll return much before dinner.”
She made another noise, conveying infinite exasperation without words. “Fine. But I think you’re being beastly. It’s our honeymoon, and all you care about is those nasty, overheated factories, and pages and pages of figures.”
“Charlotte, nothing could be further from the truth. You know you come first with me. Haven’t you noticed you always come first?”
He gave a little dig into her side and grinned when she squirmed and giggled at the double entendre. A real giggle, not the fake one she adopted for this sham persona. Funny how he could love the one and loathe the other.
“I plan to be quite put out with you, Dex,” she replied a little breathlessly. “If you’re going to the factory, then I shall take my revenge by spending the entire morning with the most expensive modiste in Paris. And I plan to order everything as a rush job, to drive up the price even more.”
So that was her grand plan. If he hadn’t known she would be spending her own money at it, he might have been concerned. Or perhaps not, as Charlotte’s taste in clothing seemed nowhere near as extravagant as that of most fashionable ladies of Dexter’s acquaintance. But she was certainly playing her part well.
“Kindly don’t bankrupt us before we even return to the Dominions. If you’re starving to death it won’t matter how well dressed you are. Will you spend the entire day there?”
“Oh no,” she reassured him. “Only the morning. Then I’ll stroll about and sightsee, and in the afternoon I think I’ll go to a museum or something like that. Perhaps a tour of important cultural sites.”
“You must be prepared to describe it all to me at dinner, all right?”
“Of course, Dex. That is if I’m over being angry with you.”
“I see. And is there no way I can appease you?”
“I doubt it.”
“Well, what about . . .” He rolled toward her a bit and whispered a shocking suggestion in her ear, loving the way she tipped her head to accommodate him.
“That might work,” she admitted. “Only one way to find out.”
In the course of finding out, her gown came off again. And in the morning, though Charlotte was mortified, she found the maid who brought the breakfast tray and opened the curtains to be entirely adept at averting her eyes.
Thirteen
PARIS AND GENNEVILLIERS, FRANCE
CHARLOTTE FIRST NOTICED the man when she rang the bell at the modiste’s small, tucked-away shop. He had just taken a seat outside the bistro next door. He was so tall and skeletally thin that his knees knocked the underside of the table when he folded himself into the chair, and she felt a wave of pity for him.
How hard that must be for him, she thought. I should stop fussing about being so small.
Then she promptly forgot about the odd-looking fellow as she was ushered into the shop and lost herself in the world of fabric and color and style. An heiress from the Dominions, a baroness no less, might as well have been a princess to the modiste and her eager assistants. Charlotte had intended to stay for an hour and spend a fixed and rather modest amount on some specific garments she’d been needing. Instead she left four hours later, having overspent her budget by at least several hundred percent, but secure in the knowledge that no woman in the New York Dominion would be better-dressed than she by the time the seamstresses had finished and delivered their masterpieces.
He was still there. She almost didn’t notice this time, because his back was to her as she left the shop. When she walked past his table Charlotte noticed his hands, which held a newspaper in front of him. One of those hands, she realized with a start, was prosthetic. A glove—apparently dyed to match his skin—covered a structure that only peripherally resembled fingers and a thumb. His other hand held the paper gracefully, while the false hand rested like a cheap stage prop, holding the opposite edge of the page in a crude pincer grip.
Poor thing, Charlotte thought, a split second before she recognized the tall, lanky object of pity from earlier in the morning.
She forced herself to keep walking without a hitch, though her heart started to pound and a cold sweat broke out over her face.
At the corner she resisted the urge to turn and look behind her. It was a crowded street, in broad daylight; if he were to make a move, he would be unlikely to make it here.
A window display half a block down drew her to a bookstore, and she ducked inside to purchase a guidebook to the Louvre and an illustrated history of French fashions for her mother.
She didn’t see him outside the window when she approached it to leave. Perhaps her imagination had been playing tricks on her. Paris and the attendant anxiety over her impending assignment must have prompted a memory of Reginald’s lurid story—the only one of his stories that had ever been lurid—about his daring escape from the wraithlike, claw-handed agent with the curious metal device where one ear should have been.
Charlotte’s mind lingered on Reginald, wondering what he’d thought of Paris. Despite her solid intention to hate the place, she had to admit the city was fascinating and often beauti
ful. Had Reginald’s cover persona allowed him any time to sightsee, to marvel at Notre-Dame or wander through the Louvre? She’d never thought to ask, though she supposed in time she would have gotten around to it. If they’d had time. Mostly she’d been eager to hear his thrilling tale of intrigue, complete with horrific villain and the astonishing recovery of stolen plans for what appeared—at Reginald’s single hurried glance—to be the infamous, mythical, war-ending British doomsday device.
Without realizing it, Charlotte had strolled all the way to the Boulevard des Italiens. She was about to pull out her map when she recognized the massive edifice standing almost directly across the street from her: The Palais Garnier, home of the Paris Opera.
* * *
MARTIN COULD ALMOST believe it was accidental. The woman showed no guile, no subterfuge, as she observed the Opéra from across the boulevard. Only curiosity, and a puzzled expression as though she were trying to solve a problem or recall some elusive memory.
She didn’t plan to come here, his instinct told him. He listened to that instinct, and held back to watch her.
Dubois had ordered him to stick to Murcheson, and more recently to the Makesmith Baron, as though these men were some demons sent specifically to take down his empire. The more Dubois insisted, the more Martin became determined that the woman somehow posed the greater threat.
The American agent’s face still haunted Martin’s dreams on occasion, two aspects of the same man at very different stages of his life. The first, as the young agent saw his death approaching at breakneck speed but miraculously escaped it. The second, right before he lost all ability to control his speech, at the very moment he recognized that death had finally caught up with him.
Both times he had spoken the same, single word. “Charlotte.”
Coeur de Fer had no nemesis. He was a legend to himself, a shadowy figure in the annals of international espionage. But he did have a bit of an obsession with that boy from the Dominions.
“The only one who ever got away,” he mused to himself, “though even he couldn’t avoid me forever.” Martin lost himself in the crowd as he followed Charlotte across the boulevard and up to the Palais Garnier. Despite his outlandish appearance, he was talented at fading into the background.
She was just in time to buy a ticket for the next tour. Martin almost laughed aloud. A tour of the building where her husband had almost met his grisly end. So be it.
Martin would buy no ticket. He already knew how to pick the locks at the Palais Garnier quite well.
Fifteen minutes later, when he finally accepted that she was not with the tour group, Martin saw it as another sign. The woman was an agent, clearly, he should have seen it from the start. Her story was too pat, her demeanor too glib, to explain her presence as a simple tourist in the country her husband and father had lived to defeat. Despite her earlier expression of befuddlement, her presence in the Palais Garnier couldn’t be coincidental.
She was also still in the building, and he had a reasonable guess as to where she was heading. Just as he had once received a sign, Martin decided it was time for Lady Hardison to receive a sign. Or merely a scare, depending on her nerve and whether his guesses about her occupation and reasons for being here were correct. Sighing, he melted from the mezzanine and made for the service passageway to await her return.
* * *
“GLASS ISN’T MY area, to speak of. Can you be more specific? Are you interested in ceramics, resistor production, that sort of thing? Or specialized casings?”
“Neither, actually,” Dexter told Murcheson’s man Cormier. The rabbity, bespectacled Frenchman looked more like a clerk than the head of regional operations for a large manufacturer. Nevertheless, it was Cormier who ran things at the large Murcheson facility in Gennevilliers, and the various satellite facilities near Paris. Dexter could tell Murcheson held the man in the utmost respect, but he hadn’t thought to ask before the meeting if the obviously local Cormier was privy to his employer’s clandestine occupation. Murcheson’s placid expression gave him no clue, so Dexter decided on circumspection. “It’s a new application I’m developing. Trade secret, I’m afraid, but quite promising.”
Cormier frowned, as well he might. “Not much to go on. But if you’re heading to Nancy anyway, might try looking up young Arsenault. Late of the Lalique operation, has his own workshop now. He’s known for innovation. If it’s something new you’re after, I suspect Arsenault’s the one you ought to talk to.”
Dexter noted the name, and thanked Cormier profusely as the man walked out to have his secretary fetch the address.
“I can have him send a message ahead, if you like?” Murcheson offered.
“No, no. I don’t know when I’ll be there, I want to keep things flexible.” Dexter mostly wanted to keep from broadcasting any travel plans ahead of time. He was beginning to adopt the habit of caution, of suspicion. It gave him new insight into Charlotte’s reserve. What must it have been like, only child to a notorious gentleman spy? Wanting to follow in his footsteps, just at the time it was becoming feasible for a woman to do so? She had been shaped by her father for this role, whether or not he’d intended to do it. Dexter knew a moment of fear that Charlotte might never be able to adapt to a calmer, less perilous life.
But the more time he spent with her, the more he grew convinced that he wanted such a life with Charlotte. Far from fading, his initial infatuation seemed to be deepening with each day that passed. She was not the fantasy woman he’d once envisioned, but he had long since ceased to daydream about that Charlotte. The real Charlotte maddened him, challenged him, inflamed his passions and excited his intellect. But most of all he simply liked the lady so damn much it frightened him. He felt comfortable with her, and he had no idea why. She was nothing at all like the women he usually spent time with. Voluptuous, friendly, often tall and occasionally a bit too brassy for good taste. Good girls, all of them, but they were so many overblown roses, merrily shedding petals in every godless shade of red. And bless them, all of them, for he adored women like that. Especially in his bed.
Whereas Charlotte . . . Charlotte was a rosebud chiseled in diamond, dainty and crystalline and not nearly as fragile as she looked. But such sparks, such heat, if one could but look past the icy surface to see the flaring colors beneath. And when he was inside her . . .
Dexter crossed his legs, uncrossed them and crossed them the other way, clearing his throat nervously. He hoped his reaction to his own reverie was not as apparent as it felt. Chiding himself for regressing to schoolboy behavior, he forced his attention back to the factory plan that Murcheson was now describing to him.
“And here,” the older man was saying, pointing to a dotted outline on the plat, “we intend to expand our research laboratory next year. More focus on battery efficiency. This will also free up much-needed space on the factory floor, once we’ve rebuilt.”
“Impressive.” Dexter traced over the closest factory wall on the floor plan, a double blue line bleeding a bit into the thin white vellum. “Not quite as impressive as Le Havre, of course. No offense to you, Monsieur Cormier,” he said as the man returned to his seat, the secretary evidently duly informed.
“None taken, I’m sure.”
“Your steam cars are built here prior to delivery, I gather?” Dexter asked, sensing that both men would be eager to continue discussing their operation.
He caught the first few words of Cormier’s response, then lost the thread of meaning as his mind wandered forward to the afternoon’s schedule. He wanted to be back at the hotel so he could greet Charlotte when she returned from her shopping and cultural tour of Paris. He wanted to know she had made it back safely. She had looked so small, so precious, when he left her that morning after breakfast. The unsatisfied urge to pick her up and carry her back into bed, strip her naked and spend hours making love to her, had been a physical ache in his body all day.
“But then elephants never have made very good chauffeurs, as they can’t seem to learn their
left from their right.”
Dexter blinked and shook his head. “I’m sorry. Did you say elephants?”
“I wasn’t sure you were listening.” Cormier grinned at him, suddenly looking extremely French. Murcheson himself was doing a poor job of hiding a smirk. “This is your honeymoon, isn’t it, Monsieur Hardison?”
“Yes, it is.” It was a honeymoon of sorts, at least. The only one he’d ever had.
“What the devil are you doing here, then? Shouldn’t you be with your bride?”
Shrugging, Dexter leaned back and tried to affect an air of indifference. He avoided Murcheson’s gaze, not wanting to seem as though he was consulting the man for clues on how to feel about his honeymoon or his new wife. “She was at the modiste this morning, and this afternoon she’d planned to take in some cultural sights. I thought it was an ideal opportunity to occupy myself elsewhere.”
Cormier gave him a long, pointed look. Somewhere in the middle of it, Dexter decided that the man must be in Murcheson’s confidence, or Murcheson would have warned Dexter in advance. So more than likely he knew about the marriage, and that Dexter and Charlotte were conjoined only for purposes of espionage. But he spoke as he might to any young man who had been foolish enough to mix business and pleasure.
“Your mind isn’t here, my boy, and I suspect I know where it is. I was a newlywed once myself, and I recognize the look on your face. I have a recommendation for you. Would you like to hear it?”
Dexter did look at Murcheson this time. The spymaster merely lifted an eyebrow and shrugged at him. “The French, what can you do?”
Dexter turned back to Cormier and nodded, though he was baffled.
The older man smiled again. “Nobody ever really knows, before they wed, whether the marriage will be a good one or not. No matter what the original reason for the marriage, no matter the obstacles or benefits it might present, any marriage has as good a chance as any other, from all I’ve seen. What’s more, we don’t get to choose who captivates us. It simply happens, and denying it rarely works out well. And so my advice to you, Mr. Hardison, is that you go back to Paris and spend your honeymoon with your wife.”
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