by Sue London
She didn't look back before making her way downstairs. She typically liked thoroughly disreputable men, but this evening Robert wasn't wearing it well.
Chapter Thirteen
Staggering back down the steps, Robert admitted to himself that perhaps he had drunk a bit more than his role had required. In the past he had been the model of cool-headed assessment in such a situation. He drank enough to make himself seem a fool without actually being one. Today, however, he had gone somewhat past that and now, hours later, he could still feel his head swimming with libations.
Miss Grant was waiting for him in the kitchen near a tub of steaming water. Waiting impatiently, if her crossed arms and tight lips were any indication. But if she was disapproving of his activities of the day, all the better. He had no more interest in a relationship than she did. He tossed his garments aside and climbed in. Apparently unwilling to let him relax, she set to scrubbing him with a soapy cloth.
“I don't need-”
“I've met street urchins who looked and smelled better than you do right now.”
His stomach was still churning enough that he needed to focus on not casting up his accounts, but she took his silence as acquiescence and set to scrubbing everything clean. Her fingers on his scalp actually felt quite nice but she finished with alacrity and poured the hot rinse water over him.
Sputtering under the onslaught he said, “I will assume that I've annoyed you.”
“Not especially.”
He caught her wrists and pulled her into his lap in the tub with a splash.
“Well done,” she said drily, “now you've annoyed me.”
He kissed her. Kissed her until she melted against his chest. Until the water cooled and the fire had burned down in its grate. Nipping her ear he murmured, “I should take you upstairs.”
“If either of us can get me up the stairs in this sodden dress.”
He pulled the sleeves down. “Leave it here.”
“If you keep pulling at it like that you'll tear it.”
He pulled harder until it ripped. “You mean like this?”
She bit his chin. “You are a terror to my wardrobe.”
“I can't have you struggling on the stairs. Or catching your death of cold.”
“So now you'll have me run about in my wet chemise?”
He looked at how the drenched silk clung to her curves. “At all times, if possible.”
She leaned close to whisper in his ear. “Why, Mr. Bittlesworth, whatever will the servants think?”
He stood, lifting her from the chilling water. Her sodden, rent dress fell to the stone floor with a soft splash.
She shivered. “I might yet catch my death.”
He carried her to his room where they made love under the blankets until they were both quite warm again.
* * *
Imogen awoke in a tangle of bedclothes with her lover's breath feathering over her lower back as he snored. It tickled and was oddly endearing. She must have shifted, because she heard his breath catch as he awoke. One arm snaked around her belly as he kissed her back.
“Robert,” she said, wriggling.
“Yes, Miss Grant?” He kissed one cheek of her derrière, then the other.
“I need to use the necessary.”
He nipped and kissed her hip. “Urgently?”
“A bit, yes.”
“Perhaps we should test your self-control.”
“Robert!”
Her struggling ceased after he turned her on her back and licked his way up her inner thigh. Lord, but the things this man could do to her. He refused to let her up until they had achieved another shuddering climax together. She made her way to the chamber pot on unsteady legs.
While she was behind the screen he asked, “Any plans for today?”
“Today is going to be different than our other days here?”
“We have little time left. I wondered if you wanted today to be different?”
When she came around the screen she saw that he was still sprawled on his back in the bed. She might never get her fill of the delicious, uninhibited, and decidedly naughty Robert Bittlesworth. If they had so little time left she knew precisely what she wanted. She crawled atop him and relished the feel of his strong hands grasping her hips as he looked up at her curiously. “I think,” she said, drawing her fingernail lightly down his chest, “that we should stay right here. All day.”
“Just like this?”
She giggled. ”Perhaps we could move around a bit.”
His smile of approval at her humor was tinged with too much affection. She didn’t want his affection, just his passion. She kissed a trail down his chest to see if she could arouse that passion again.
* * *
Robert awoke in the middle of the night. He couldn’t remember a time when he had slept as much, or as well. Some of it was undoubtedly his warm, delightful bed companion. He reached out to touch her, surprised that he didn’t have at least a hand on her, as he always seemed to when they were in bed. The bed was empty, the sheets already cooling. He sat up, on alert. Robert was a light sleeper. How had she slipped from bed without his notice?
He took stock of his surroundings. Pale moonlight filtered in past the curtains. The fire had burned down and only the slightest scent of smoke stayed in the air. It was quiet, with even the crickets having gone silent for the night. He heard a sniff. Imogen. Not in the room, but somewhere close. He rose to investigate.
She was standing on the tiny balcony off the sitting room.
He called to her quietly from the door, not wanting to startle her. “Imogen?”
She looked over her shoulder, surreptitiously wiping her eyes. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“What’s wrong?”
She shook her head, her gaze returning to the darkened vista. “Nothing for you to worry about.”
He drew closer and caressed his hand over her silk-covered shoulders. “All right. Then I won’t worry about it.”
After another few moments she turned to lean into him, wrapping her arms around his waist.
They stood quietly for some time until Robert finally asked, “What is it that I’m not worrying about?”
She pulled away and shook her head.
Robert had already considered five tactics for how to make her tell him before he asked himself why he wanted to know. Why he felt he needed to know. The simple truth was that Imogen was in pain and he wanted to make it stop. The realization made him back up a step. There were few people he cared about. If pressed on the point, there were only two, really, and they were both related to him by blood. There was no reason for him to be invested in this woman. She was a lovely distraction, nothing more.
However, his silence seemed the tactic to loosen her tongue. “My grandmother died.”
That confused him. “When?”
She looked up at the moon and took a deep breath. “Tonight.”
What she said was, if not completely impossible, at least entirely improbable. “How do you know?”
She smiled and shook her head again. “You wouldn’t understand. She and I are alike. Were alike. We had a connection.”
Beyond the essentially disturbing idea she was suggesting, Robert was concerned about why he cared at all. Why he still wanted to pull her to him and soothe her grief. He withdrew into the house. “Don’t stay out long, you’ll catch cold.”
* * *
Imogen awoke with the sun streaming into the bedroom. Alone. It felt strange not to have Robert nearby. She smiled to herself, thinking that they only had this one day left, as they would need to travel tomorrow. Perhaps, once she found him, she could convince her lover to spend this final day in bed as well. She dressed, humming to herself and thinking that she could use Robert’s help with her stays and ribbons. Of course, if she called him up now, he would only want to remove them all. As she was starving, she opted to do the best she could with her dress and meet him downstairs for breakfast.
Once
downstairs she still didn’t see Robert. The housekeeper was in the kitchen.
“Where is Mr. Bittlesworth?”
“Oh, good morning, love. Left early this morning, he did. Said to tell you the carriage was here for you to take whenever you like, today or tomorrow. He just took his horse, he did, so the men will pack up his things for him.”
Imogen opened her mouth but found that she couldn’t make a sound. Closing it again, she nodded and turned back to the dining room, sitting heavily on one of the chairs. This. This was why she so seldom shared the truth of her gifts with anyone. They either disbelieved her and derided her for foolishness, or avoided her like the plague. It helped little that there were so many charlatans in the world, people with fake claims of talents. Or that she was often lumped with the mystics, with their abstract ideals and off-putting beliefs.
It was just as well, she supposed. She had been concerned about him forming an attachment, and obviously that was no longer a concern. Having lost her appetite, she went upstairs to pack.
Chapter Fourteen
Once back in London, Robert focused on assessing how things had changed since he left. He spent a solid fourteen hours interviewing agents, reading reports, and making his own careful, and coded, notes about his conclusions. It was, fortunately, not the worst time to have been out of touch. Now here he was in his study, late into the night, parsing through the personal correspondence that had arrived in his absence. He set aside letters from Charlie and Sabre to read later, and flipped through the rest standing in front of the fireplace so he could simply burn the ones that were of no interest to him. The fifth missive stopped him cold. He tossed the remaining mail aside and brought this one to his desk, turning up the lamp so that he could study it more closely. He would need to examine it in daylight, but his immediate assessment included feeling the weight of the vellum, smelling it. French, if he wasn’t mistaken. Not that such a thing indicated the origin of the note, as this paper would be available to anyone who had the funds to acquire it. But it was expensive, far too fine to be wasted on such a short and cryptic message. The envelope had not been franked, thus had been delivered personally. Perhaps among a few hands, as it seemed a bit worn and grimy. Not overly so, but clearly enough on close examination.
He spread out the note in the lamplight and leaned over to read it again.
M. Bittlesworth,
If you keep losing top hats you’ll catch your death.
M. Amicus
An innocuous enough text, on the face of it, signed simply with the word for “friend” in Latin. Innocuous to anyone but Robert Bittlesworth. He sat down heavily in his chair. His first major coup for the Home Office had been building a network of informants within Great Britain. He had given it a very particular structure, designed to keep those who actually supplied the information ignorant of how that information was used. It was a complex, highly guarded secret and there were portions of it that still only Robert himself knew about. The regional information aggregators were known at the Home Office as Top Hats. They reported to their Key. Since June there had been ten Top Hats that had turned up dead, most beaten to death. Prior to this, Robert assumed it had been a product of the unrest that had been rife throughout his country since the end of the Wars, as Top Hats were agents also charged with forestalling uprisings. Now he had to suspect that they were being targeted. But why? And if those men had been beaten to death to extract information, what information had they yielded? At least enough, it seemed, for this vaguely threatening note to be addressed to him personally. Top Hats shouldn’t know who he was, only the Keys knew that and all the Keys were still in place.
Robert locked the note in the drawer of his desk and sat back to consider what he knew. His gaze, however, was on the desktop and he was soon distracted by memories. Miss Grant in her blue silk, bold and wild and lascivious. The lust that image inspired was welcome, but the thorn in his chest from wondering where she was, was not. He grabbed the bottle of scotch off his sideboard and the letters from his siblings and made his way to his bedroom in the early morning light.
* * *
Imogen had anticipated that she would be refreshed and relaxed from her illicit tryst. In some ways she was, but she was plagued with distracting thoughts. Upon waking she still missed having her lover’s hands on her. She tucked away the celestial blue gown at the back of her wardrobe, but couldn’t stand the thought of discarding it. She even, though she didn’t want to think on it too closely, took to wearing the lawn chemise he had given her, telling herself that it was more suited to the damp, cold British autumn approaching. While out shopping with Violetta, she would invariably encounter something that would make a clever gift for him, but would firmly set it aside. At times she wondered if a gift in thanks would be appropriate, but she doubted that he wanted anything from her.
Meanwhile, she had to keep answering Violetta’s questions about her week with the duchess. Imogen was a careful and creative spinner of tales, but her heart wasn’t in it. She didn’t have the energy to make her time sound fun and exciting. She related the details about Belle Fleur that Robert had told her, such as some of the flowers in the expansive gardens, but otherwise made it clear that whatever budding friendship she had with the duchess was mostly hers to enjoy. She was, as she pointed out to her cousin, leaving shortly so it hardly mattered.
The sixth day after she returned from the country, a box came for her, delivered from the modiste that she had frequented with her cousin since being in London. As she hadn’t ordered anything, she retreated to her room to open it. Inside the carton there was an envelope atop the tissue. She was entertained by the sender’s handwriting, the bold, dark strokes making “Miss Grant” look entirely too serious. She opened it to retrieve the brief note inside.
Miss Grant,
My apologies for the delay, but your taste in fabrics and colors proved to be a challenge for the seamstress.
Robert
She folded back the tissue to find ten absolutely stunning chemises in bold, jewel-colored silk. Blues, greens, one a deep ruby, and another the darkest amethyst. But when she dug to the very bottom her breath caught. She lifted the pale garment up to rub against her cheek, enjoying the rose petal softness of the expensive silk. This one was the precise icy blue of Robert Bittlesworth’s eyes.
* * *
This evening Robert’s correspondence finally held something he wanted to see, a note from Miss Grant.
Robert,
Thank you for the kind gift; it was a wonderful gesture. As you had a struggle finding a seamstress, I can only be grateful that your sister didn’t volunteer to embroider them.
Imogen
He smiled, remembering their first encounter in this very room, when she had disparaged Sabre’s early attempt at embroidery. He had originally ordered the chemises before they left for the country, and was glad for their delivery. His brief melancholy in missing her when first he returned to London had been superseded by lust and desire, and he wondered if she could find an afternoon, or even a full evening, free to rendezvous with him before she traveled again. Certainly he, one of the greatest operators in England, could find a way for them to meet covertly? Perhaps at one of the fancy hotels where he could spoil her with champagne and hors d’oeuvres? He became distracted thinking about what parts of her he could splash with champagne so that he could lap it up.
Then his mind took the perverse turn of wondering if she already had another lover. Was she, even now, wearing those chemises as she seduced another man? This time when he felt the pinch in his chest and twist to his gut he knew that he had done it to himself. But he could not deny that the idea of her moving on to another was bothersome. He penned a note for delivery this evening to an agent that he particularly wanted to speak with first thing in the morning. The agent who had been tasked with investigating her. Neither the agent, nor any of his other research, had yielded any suspicion of her. But one could never be too careful and he should find out if she had any new or u
nusual associates.
* * *
Imogen had been hopeful that her note might lead to at least a flirtation via correspondence with Robert, but it had been five days and she had yet to hear from him. He was, she supposed, busy. With discreet inquiry she had determined that his role with the government, which he had described as being completely public, was engrossing. She had heard three different jobs ascribed to him with vague but important titles like Secretary of Interior Communication, and didn’t know if he had done them successively or was doing them concurrently. Two men had also used the moniker ‘Hero of the Home Office’ for him. Whatever it was he did, it was Important. She was used to being set aside for things that were Important, and took the opportunity to focus more keenly on her own entertainment. At night she drank, flirted, and danced as though she hadn’t a care in the world. In the mornings she crawled about on cousin Violetta’s floors playing games with the boys. Anyone who encountered her at any time of the day would assume that she was the happiest, most vivacious woman of their acquaintance. Even cousin Vi remarked that Imogen had blossomed in the convivial company of London Society.
Alone at night, however, she was often restless. She took to sleeping with a pillow over her hip so that upon awakening she could imagine it was an arm.
Chapter Fifteen
Periodically Robert continued to receive little missives, always delivered by a different young boy. They hadn’t discovered anything based on the boys yet. Children who would do odd deliveries for a bit of coin were prevalent throughout the city. It was clear that his tormenter M. Amicus wanted the Keys and was becoming progressively insistent. Rather than supply the information at the suggested sites and times, Robert had them monitored. Nothing had come of it yet.
