“Doesn’t sound like a very cool nickname.”
“I think it suits you. It’s a character in a very popular computer game.”
“My God, Arthur. You’re a computer nerd.”
“Moi? Of course not. I’m the Earl of Severn and a peer of the realm, not to mention every gossip page’s favorite drunken degenerate nobleman.”
“All these code names are weird. Are these guys criminals or something?”
“No.”
“Superheroes,” she dead-panned.
“No!” Arthur kept walking while he laughed.
“Spies?”
“Oh, no, no. Heavens, why would I consort with intelligence officers?” He looked over her head and into the night air, his hands flicking floating dust motes and throwing off every sign of evasion he had taught her. “Don’t be absurd.”
Gen stopped and stared at him. “Are they spies?”
Arthur came back to her. Lamplight shone in his hood enough that she could see that he was frowning. “Don’t mention intelligence agencies. It makes them nervous. Wear these gloves and come on.”
She slipped the leather gloves on her shaking hands. They were thin leather like golf gloves, but black. The middle finger of her right hand felt a little stiff like the glove had some dried stuff on it.
Gen was too polite to mention it.
Arthur was wearing a similar pair of gloves.
She couldn’t figure out how to gracefully ask him what the fuck was going on, and she didn’t want to make a scene.
Inside the bar, the very few lights were dimmed until they were only faint spirals in the dark. Blue light glowed on the shelves of bottles behind the bar, but even that was dim fairy light. The back corners of the room were as dark as the night outside.
Arthur scanned the room. “There they are. Come, Lara.”
It was going to take Gen a while to get used to that.
In an especially dark booth at the back of the bar, three people were draped in hoodies. Beer glasses stood in front of them.
They threaded through the bar to the back corner and scooted into the booth.
Arthur made the introductions. “Vlogger One, Racehorse, and Luftwaffe,” he said, pointing to the darknesses inside hoods. They might have been hackers or Sith Lords. “Gang, this is Lara Croft.”
They all chuckled and said their hellos.
So, definitely computer nerds.
Gen said, “Nice to meet y’all.”
Vlogger1 and Luftwaffe leaned forward.
Racehorse, who had been sitting in the darkest corner of the table, reached far across the table and shook Arthur’s hand, a firm, long grip.
“You’re American,” Vlogger1 said to Gen, her voice rising.
“Texan. I’ve lived in London for a couple of years, now.”
Vlogger1 extended her hand to Gen to shake. “No, yeah? Nice to know that Blackjack is honoring the special relationship.”
Even with those few words, Gen could hear that the woman’s accent was a weird mishmash of High Society London and the US West Coast.
“You betcha,” Gen said, shaking her hand. The woman was also wearing a thin leather glove.
Racehorse nodded from within his hood. He was wearing black leather gloves when he lifted his beer and sipped.
Could they be worried about fingerprints?
When Gen sat back, her hand felt different. She stretched her hands, figuring it out.
The dried stuff on her middle finger had evidently rubbed off on Vlogger1’s glove.
Oh how mortifying.
The last person, Luftwaffe, leaned forward but was too far across the table to shake her hand. His dark hood dipped as he said, “Pleasure to meet you.”
He had a British accent, but his vowels were just a little flat. Luftwaffe? Maybe he was German. Made sense.
Racehorse said to Arthur, “So I heard through friends that you’re working on something interesting.”
“Variations found in the wild of some most interesting objects,” he said. “Got them off a French stripper’s ass.”
Gen must be becoming more British because even a few months ago, she would have dropped her jaw and demanded an explanation.
“French?” Luftwaffe asked. “That’s unusual.”
French was the weirdest part of Arthur’s sentence? Really?
The group talked for a while, mostly about politics.
Arthur kept touching her and turning his empty hood toward her so she didn’t feel excluded, but she had no idea what to say. Unsaid undercurrents ran through every sentence.
“The special relationship is strained by current developments,” Racehorse said in a deep, deep voice. “The speech made things a lot worse. The stars were looking down on him.”
Arthur nodded. “The special relationship is under scrutiny at Vauxhall, too. The official channels are silent. We’re getting no guidance.”
Racehorse’s hood nodded.
Vlogger1 said, “At least we can still keep up the fight, even if it’s unofficially.”
Luftwaffe said, “The anciens always do.”
Arthur raised his beer. “To hot chocolate being thicker than water.”
They all laughed and clinked their beers together.
A lank of long, blue hair slipped out of Vlogger1’s hood. Gen tapped her own shoulder, and Vlogger1 tucked it back and then kept her head lower for the rest of the evening.
They didn’t chat long, just one beer, and then Arthur said, “Lara, shall we?”
Who was Lara?
Oh. Right. Gen was Lara Croft. “So nice to meet all of you.”
What Arthur Hasn’t Told Her
AS they were driving back to their hotel, the Parisian streets only sparsely dotted with people or other cars’ headlights cutting through the late night, Gen considered what to say to Arthur and how to say it.
Everything that she thought of to say felt wrong.
All of it felt too American and un-British.
So, you’re totally a spy.
Who do you spy for?
Do you spy spyily for the spying spy-spies, spy?
So very wrong.
Arthur pulled over to the side of the road. He flipped on the dome light inside the car and, holding his hand down low between the two bucket seats, peeled something that looked like rubber cement off his glove near his wrist. He examined the flexible strip swaying in the breeze of the air conditioning vents, and then smoothed it onto a piece of paper. He folded that up and tucked it into his wallet.
Gen turned her right hand over and peered at the middle finger. Traces of something that looked like rubber cement or dried snot clung to the leather, but most of the stiff stuff was gone.
So that was how the spies passed spy things to each other, and Gen had given something to Vlogger1.
She peeled off the gloves.
Arthur reached overhead and clicked off the dome light.
The headlight beams shone down the road, skimming over the flat cobblestones and touching shop signs, but he hadn’t put the car in drive yet.
Now or never.
She asked Arthur, “What haven’t you told me?”
He had pushed back his hood. The wan reflections from the headlights and the car’s instrument panel lit up his face just enough that she could see him blink several times.
He reached over, took her hand, and rubbed the back of her hand with his thumb.
“I haven’t told you that I love you,” Arthur said, his voice hoarse in the dark, “but I do. I love you more than anything else in my life. These last few months, you’ve become everything to me. I don’t want to miss even a day with you. I’ve been skiving off work to have lunch with you for months. I’ve been pressuring charities for invitations to events that I’ve never attended before so that you would have to go with me and I could hold you in my arms for our one waltz. I’ve introduced you to everyone in my life who is important to me. I love you, and I can’t live without you anymore.”
Gen st
ared out the front windshield, dust motes and moths sparkling in the headlights.
She hadn’t expected that.
The darkness sheltered them, making the car a small haven of safety.
Gen turned her hand over under his and held on. A rock of fear lodged in her chest, but she pushed against it.
She did, God help her. She did love him. She’d been falling for him for months, although she had called it something else the whole time.
She drew a ragged breath in and said, “I love you, too.”
“Gen,” he breathed, the pale light shimmering on his face and in his eyes, “Genevieve, marry me.”
Tears burned under her eyelids. It was too sudden, but the Earl of Givesnofucks wouldn’t do anything the conventional way.
Gen said, “Yes.”
Arthur leaned across the gear shift and kissed her.
He drove her back to the hotel as fast as was safe, dropped the car with the concierge, and when they were back in the suite, he carried her toward the couch, his arms under her back and knees.
“The bed,” Gen whispered to him.
“Are you sure?” he breathed, his forehead resting on the side of her head.
She tightened her arms around his neck. “I want to sleep next to you.”
“Amber,” he whispered, “and red.”
She nodded. She knew the safewords. She knew that she was in control and that he would stop if she said them.
He carried her to the bed and undressed her, stripping his clothes off in a rush but tugging her jeans and hoodie sweatshirt gently away from her skin. He was looking at her from her toes to her eyes like he couldn’t get enough of her.
“Gen,” he whispered as he slid onto the sheets beside her.
She touched his face, his cheek sandy even though he had shaved before they went down to the wedding reception. “Arthur.”
His hand slid from her shoulder, around her breast, and down her hip. His wide-open eyes were more vulnerable than she had ever seen them. “I love you. I’ve wanted to say it for so long.”
“I love you, too. I didn’t know how to say it.”
“I love you,” he murmured, his skin sliding on hers as he pressed inside her. He wrapped her arm more tightly around his neck. “I haven’t told you because I didn’t know how to say it. I’ve never said it before. I’ve never felt it before. I didn’t know how. I don’t know when to say it. I just know that I do.”
“I love you,” she gasped, as her body opened to him.
“My love,” he sighed as he flowed above and into her.
“I love you, always,” she whispered, arching to meet him.
“Gen,” he breathed as he moved in her, “Genevieve, my love. Marry me.”
“Yes, Arthur, yes,” she cried, clinging to him as the world slipped away and waves ran up her spine and over her skin.
His body pulsed inside her, and she hung on, holding him, with his arms around her, cradling her to his body.
In Bed, Alone
THE next morning, Gen woke up in the white expanse of the hotel bed alone.
She jumped, panicking.
The sheets grabbed her ankle, and she stumbled, staggering across the room.
There was a silver tray on the nightstand with a note that read, Saying good-bye to friends over breakfast. Didn’t want to wake you. Plane will leave for home in a few hours. Come down to the patisserie on the corner to meet us or order room service. Back soon.
It was only after she’d showered, eaten breakfast from room service, and drunk the entire carafe of coffee by herself that she realized the real problem.
The night before, Arthur had told her that he loved her and had proposed, but he hadn’t answered her question about what he hadn’t told her.
The following morning, it didn’t matter anymore.
She knew what Arthur hadn’t told her, and she wished to God that she didn’t know.
Octavia’s Texts
A few hours later, Arthur’s silver dart of an airplane streaked over the English Channel toward London. Traces of clouds scratched the blue of the sky as they soared.
As Gen was leaning against Arthur on one of the couches along the side of the plane with his arms wrapped around her, Arthur whispered, asking her what kind of engagement ring she wanted, a wholly new one or something from the Spencer House collection?
Gen didn’t know. She couldn’t imagine.
She had never thought about it before.
He whispered, “We’ll go to Spencer House next weekend. We’ll look at the rings and the stones there, and if you don’t see something you like, we’ll fly back to Paris as soon as we can, next weekend. I know a jeweler there who is phenomenal. He’s an artist. He’ll make something as unique and beautiful as you are.”
Gen had snuggled in his arms the whole way back.
Maxence had watched them, smiling kindly. With that warm smile on his plush lips and peace in his dark eyes, Gen could see that Maxence might make a good priest. He had a flight scheduled from London back to Africa the next morning.
She basked in the warmth of Arthur’s body, a nuclear furnace under his clothes.
After they landed at Luton Airport in London, Gen stumbled down the staircase to the tarmac, tapping her phone to flip it back to regular mode. The sun shone down, a warm summer afternoon. The summer sun heated the top of her head.
Her phone connected to the cellular towers.
Notifications scrolled across the top of her phone.
None were from her mother’s nursing home, thank goodness. Gen would run right over there that afternoon. Sunday was a regular visiting day.
A text from Octavia popped up.
And another.
And another.
Oh shit.
Gen thumbed them.
Octavia had texted:
Where the fuck are you? I’ve been trying to get ahold of you! House of Lords hearing for the Finch-Hatten case will begin MONDAY MORNING at NINE SHARP.
THAT’S TOMORROW.
Where are you why aren’t you answering my texts or calls or emails or chats or PMs? Get your ass to the office right now!
Gen fucking PUPIL Ward get your PUPIL ass to the fucking office now!
Gen texted Octavia that she was on her way to the office and grabbed Arthur’s hand. “Come on. It’s tomorrow. The House of Lords has scheduled the hearing for tomorrow. We need to prepare. Sweet baby Jesus and all the angels in Heaven. We need to go, now.”
Going to War
MONDAY morning at fifteen minutes before nine o’clock, Gen was hurrying to the committee chamber in the Palace of Westminster. The Palace was more commonly known as the Houses of Parliament, though the building housed much more than the House of Lords and the House of Commons.
She had dithered for an hour before she had left whether to wear a skirt suit or a pantsuit to the hearing in front of the very conservative lords and ladies of the committee. An hour. At three in the morning.
In the end, she opted for the pantsuit and held her head up high as she strode through the committee rooms building, toting a rolling file box stuffed full of evidence and pre-printed motions and anything else she thought might ever, conceivably, come up.
Gen and Octavia had packed the rolling cart that morning in a last-minute strategy meeting at five o’clock A.M.
The whole time, Octavia had chanted, “We must arrive early. ‘Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy, will be fresh for the fight; whoever is second in the field and has to hasten to battle will arrive exhausted.’ So we will arrive early.”
Gen arrived early.
They were goddamn ready for this.
She was going to war.
Pippa had driven her to the Palace of Westminster, and she had immediately consulted her phone for an interior map so she wouldn’t get lost. The Victoria Tower loomed at one end of the huge building, which was a fireproof behemoth that held the records of the Empire.
The Elizabeth Tower that
housed Big Ben, the clock, stood at the other end of the palace.
Arthur was standing by the large, wooden door in the wide hallway, leaning against the wall, staring at his phone.
Gen raised her hand in greeting, stretching her legs to cover the thick carpet as she strode toward him. “Arthur! Good. I just saw Octavia. She’s two minutes behind me in a cab. We’re all here, and we’re all ready. This is going to be a total victory. It’s going to be a goddamn slaughter. We’re going to go in there with our briefs and our mountains of evidence and argue the pants off those assholes.”
Arthur raised his head from where he looked at his phone. His face was perfectly impassive, but his stormcloud gray eyes were so stunned that they seemed blank.
He said, “We’ve had a problem.”
Hide
ARTHUR walked out of the committee room into the hallway of the Palace of Westminster. Gen was walking ahead of him, pulling that file case behind her. The wheels left tracks on the plush carpeting.
His brother, Christopher Finch-Hatten, emerged from the committee chambers behind him.
Christopher called out, “Sorry that happened to you, old chap. Seems that someone found some naughty pictures. Such a shame.”
Arthur turned, grabbed Christopher’s suit jacket, and propelled him back against the wall, slamming him against the wood paneling that extended above even their heads.
To anyone looking on, it would appear that Arthur was threatening Christopher. That was for the best.
Arthur stared Christopher straight in his eyes and whispered, “You need to take your family and go to the US or fucking Africa. Releasing those photographs was the most stupid thing you’ve ever done. Where the fuck did you get them, anyway?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Christopher said, pushing at Arthur but unable to break his hold. “I didn’t have anything to do with those photographs.”
“Louder,” Arthur hissed at him and stepped back, giving Christopher room.
Hard Liquor: Runaway Billionaires: Arthur Duet #2 Page 13
