by Anna Randol
“Who will you go to if I break the code?”
Then it clicked. Of all the imbecilic, paranoid, ridiculous—
He couldn’t really think—
But he did. His eyes glittered with suspicion. Rage.
“You think I am working with Arshun. That my job is to, what? Trick you into reading the code for them?”
“It fits.”
Her palm met with his cheek with a crack. Her hand stung but she didn’t care. It had been worth it to knock that smug assurance off his face for a moment.
And she did not feel bad that she’d left a perfect imprint of her hand on his cheek. “They took me because you led them to me. You. They think I’m La Petit. She’s your friend, isn’t she?” Did he even care what she’d been through the past two weeks?
“Then why are you unharmed?”
Apparently not.
“Unharmed? This is from where Arshun held a knife at my throat tonight.” She ripped the coats off her shoulders and lifted her neck high, showing the dried blood she could still feel there. Then she held up her arms, showing the mass of scabs and the dirty yellow bruises on her wrists. “These are from where I was bound on a ship for over two weeks.”
She snatched up the sheepskin coat from where it had fallen and shoved her arms inside, leaving his on the floor. She’d freeze a thousand deaths before she accepted his jacket again.
Clayton stared at her long and hard. If she thought her outburst would spark any remorse in the coldhearted bastard, she was wrong. “All of your injuries are superficial.”
“You think I did this to myself?”
“I’ve seen people do far worse.”
What had he seen that— But any pity she might have felt disappeared at his careless shrug. “Would you have been happy if you’d found me broken and near death?”
“I would have been less surprised.”
She spun toward the stove, unable to look at the creature who used to be the boy she loved. “How clever do you think I am? I just happened to have a devious plan in case a man I thought was dead returned?”
“They could have told you I was alive long ago.”
“If they wanted you, why didn’t they take you? They knew where you were. They followed you.”
“They knew they would never be able to get me to break the code for them.” But something flickered deep in his gaze.
“You aren’t positive of that, are you?”
“Where did the money for the new machinery come from?”
The change in topic momentarily stunned her, but she lifted her chin. “It doesn’t concern you.”
“Where?”
That was an answer she could never tell him. She’d been desperate. She’d found the fresh banknotes hidden in her father’s belongings when she sold the London house that was to have been her dowry, but she’d vowed never to use them.
But then she’d had no choice if she wanted to save the mill.
There’d been no way to know for sure where the banknotes had come from. They might have been from any of a dozen other investments. It could have been coincidence that they were all fifty-pound notes.
The money Clayton had hanged for.
No. She didn’t know that for certain.
“Why should I tell the man who wants to destroy the mill?”
“Because then I might consider trusting you.”
“I don’t want your trust.” Not now. Not ever. Clayton would never understand her actions. Her determination to restore the town.
But spending the money she’d found hadn’t been an easy choice. And now looking at Clayton, all that uncertainty and guilt washed over her. What if it had been the money—
If it had been her father’s illegally printed money, then she’d used it to help the very people her father had hurt. She’d sworn not to agonize over her choice after it was made.
The lines on his face deepened, as if he hadn’t slept for days. He rubbed his palm over his jaw. “Nothing about you makes sense, Olivia.”
It was the first time he’d said her name since he’d come back. The familiar cadence rumbled through her to the hidden part of her soul that had never let him go.
Part of her wanted to stay angry at him. To rail at him for his distrust and coldness. But every terror she’d felt over the past few days slowly ebbed away. “I spent the past decade thinking I had blood on my soul.” Blood that had marked her. Blood that had burned. Blood that had torn aside her naïveté and made her see herself crimson and ugly in the mirror. “I won’t spend the rest of my life knowing it to be so.”
If only he could believe that her anguish was real. But he still had far too many doubts.
And mingled with those doubts was regret. The discomfort was foreign and distasteful. He’d done truly horrible things in his time as an agent of the Crown. Followed orders that should have kept him awake at night. But he didn’t regret those things. He’d never allowed himself the luxury of uncertainty. It reeked too much of weakness.
But looking at the dried blood on Olivia’s neck and the wounds on her wrists cracked open pieces of his soul he’d long since sealed.
“Ouch.”
The single word stopped Clayton in his tracks. “What happened?”
Olivia shook her head, but her bottom lip was caught tightly in her teeth. “Nothing, just a splinter from the fence. That is what I get for choosing to meet you in the woods, I suppose.” But her words wavered.
He settled her on his lap in the grass. “Let me see.” He caught her hand, and after a moment plucked out the dark fleck.
“Thank you.” But her exhale was breathy, shuddering.
“Hmm . . . I believe more care might be needed.” He drew her finger to his lips and pressed a kiss to the reddened spot. “Better?”
Clayton exhaled, trying to banish the memory, but failing to succeed completely. What if he’d still been the kind of man to pull her into his arms, and ask if she was all right? What if he’d kissed the frozen tears from her cheeks and felt her sigh against his lips?
Yet that would have done nothing but show her the power she still held over him.
His training had taught him not to be such a gullible fool.
He didn’t want to be dragged back into all this espionage. The Foreign Office was finished with him and he was finished with the Foreign Office. He wasn’t bitter like Madeline had been; he was simply . . . done.
Besides, he had no love for the czar. The man had Madeline tortured for three days before Clayton and Ian had been able to get her out. Clayton had saved the ruler’s life once; this was the perfect opportunity to rectify that mistake.
Olivia’s eyes narrowed. “You still think I have something to do with all of this, don’t you?”
He didn’t deny it.
She exhaled in disbelief. “Fine. But will you at least help me send word to St. Petersburg so I can warn someone?”
Hell, he’d been in this business too long. “I have contacts at the port. We can send word once we find a ship to return to England.”
Something passed over her face, a hesitance. A slight pause.
He wanted nothing more than to pluck that thought from her head and examine it. To know for certain whether she worked for the revolutionaries.
“Do you trust these contacts?”
Clayton shrugged. “For the most part.”
“Then we must go to St. Petersburg ourselves.”
Further proof she was working with the revolutionaries. Otherwise, sending a warning would have been enough. “The revolutionaries will be looking for you.”
Her hand lifted to the wound on her neck but then lowered. “I won’t slink away and let them win. What kind of person would I be?”
“A living one.”
She bared her perfect white teeth but didn’t let him distract her. “If there is a chance we can break the code and save lives, we must try. And what good will it do us to understand the code if we’re on a ship in the Baltic Sea?”
He
had no obligation to scamper around Europe propping up Britain’s allies, but he’d pass the code to one of the British spies in St. Petersburg. Even he hesitated before allowing cold-blooded murder. “This isn’t my fight any longer.”
“I thought you cared about justice.”
“Only my own.” He let the words sink into her, feeling nothing at the shocked light in her eyes.
“You’ll let them die?”
“They aren’t what I came for.”
“What did you come for?”
A dozen answers vied for his tongue, but finally, the truth won out. “You.”
She swept her fingers under her eyes, only serving to highlight the smudges darkening them. “Why? When you don’t want me?”
Part of him wanted to deny her words. To apologize for his harshness. To tell her of his determination to see her safe. But he didn’t believe in apologies. His mother had filled an entire lifetime with them.
Instead, he said, “We need to clean your injuries.” Perhaps once he had her warm and clean, his brain would finally be able to return to some sort of logical function. He retrieved some bandages and salve he’d stored in the hut earlier in the afternoon, then poured water from the kettle into a clay bowl.
He pulled his glove from his left hand and squeezed the extra water from the cloth as best he could. He wasn’t about to remove his right glove in front of Olivia. It would be an excruciating, slow process that would be best done long after she was asleep. He didn’t want her to see what a twisted monstrosity his hand had become.
Because he couldn’t risk her realizing the advantage the knowledge would give an enemy.
Nothing else.
Olivia held out her hand for the cloth. “I’ll see to them myself.”
He found himself loath to give up the cloth. He wanted a reason to approach her again. “I’ll do it.”
“I would rather not have you touch me.”
He couldn’t argue against that. He handed over the cloth.
She dabbed at her neck, her jaw tightening as the rough material touched the wound. Her eyes flashed to him, then she turned away.
Her back was stiff as she worked, but that was all he knew. He had no right to expect her to allow him to witness her vulnerability. He went to the bag and pulled out a small flask of vodka. It might eat straight through a man’s gut, but it would also ease the pain and help her sleep. “Drink this.”
She glanced over her shoulder only briefly. “If I did this to myself, don’t I deserve to suffer?” Her voice was too brave. Too bright.
“No.” He needed that tension to leave her spine. The trembling in her arms to stop. Damnation, why didn’t she take the flask already?
“Will it kill me?”
“Probably not. But it will help the pain.” He stood there like a fool proffering the flask.
“Mine or yours?”
“Both.”
She finally turned and met his eyes, and for a moment, something like amusement chased away the pain. “Are you going to keep holding that until I take it?”
“Or my arm falls off.” He’d just made a jest. He couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. “Take the bloody thing.”
Finally, she did. And when her deep swallow ended with choked sputters, he took the flask from her and pounded her on the back by reflex. But he didn’t know why he then softened his motions to slow circles until her breathing returned to normal.
When she lifted her head, her neck was clean. The wound there was even more visible. More damning. He held out the tin of salve. “Put this on your neck and on your wrists.”
She traded him the wet rag for the medicine.
She again moved away as she applied the salve. But this time she couldn’t hide a sharp inhale from the touch of the pungent ointment.
If she was trying to cozen him—lure him into breaking the code—why did she move away? She had to have spotted his moment of weakness. Why wasn’t she trying to wring all the sympathy she could from him? He knew from Madeline that sympathy was one of a female agent’s greatest tools.
Indeed, he’d never understood just how great until this moment, as each flinch of her body splintered some part inside him.
As she started to treat her wrists, her head dipped forward and bared a small piece of skin above the collar of the coat.
He’d skimmed his fingers across that skin before. Slipped them into the silken hair at the nape of her neck to draw her mouth to his.
He tried to breathe to clear the memory, but the air was thick with the scent of the herbal liniment and wet with the steam from the kettle on the peech, refusing to free him.
The air had been steamy then, too.
He’d pulled her behind one of the vats in the mill. “What is it, Clayton?” Her eyes were wide with surprise, her lips soft. He couldn’t look away from them.
“Did you mean what you said in the letter?”
“That I dream of kissing you—”
He cupped the back of her head and covered her lips with his own, drinking in her confession of desire.
He’d known they’d have only a few seconds before her father missed her, so he’d stolen his first kiss.
It had been awkward and fumbling. But he’d never tasted anything so sweet.
“Clayton?”
He blinked. Olivia was holding out the salve. He took it and picked up the bandages.
“I will—” He cleared his throat. “It will be easier if I bandage your wrists.”
She glanced away but nodded, lifting her arms.
He gently but firmly wound the cloth around her sores. He tried to keep from touching her as much as possible, but even the occasional brush of hand against her skin was enough to send the blood pooling in his groin. He should have kept his damned glove on his left hand.
The silence in the room was awkward. Their earlier interaction ensured it could be nothing else. But awkwardness alone he could have ignored. There was something more crackling between them. Something fueled by the way her tongue moistened her lower lip once, then again. By the way his gaze couldn’t lift from that soft, rosy flesh.
Her eyes lifted, her expression aching with the very torment he refused to let her see. He tied the knot with a quick tug and turned away.
“Thank you. For this and for saving me.” Her words were soft and tentative. An attempt to pass beyond the bitterness between them. Like a hand reaching to pull him from the darkness.
One he wouldn’t take. “If you apply this salve morning and night, it should heal with less scarring.”
“How much is less?”
He pulled up his right sleeve, where only faint parallel lines remained from the three weeks he’d spent secured in manacles.
He flinched when her finger brushed where the scars disappeared inside his glove. Why had he shown her that arm? He jerked the hand behind his back.
“Are these from when you were in Newgate?”
“No. These were a gift from the French.” He forced himself to look at her. To look at her and not care about the compassion she offered. The concern.
His mother had been concerned about him, too, when she’d bothered to come home. It lasted until she ran off with another lover.
“Were you a spy the entire time you were gone?” Olivia asked.
“Yes.”
“Was it . . .”
Thrilling? Cruel? Worthwhile? What would she call it? Why did he care?
But she didn’t finish her question. Instead, she asked, “Are we staying here for the night?”
Clayton nodded. He fashioned a crude bed for her as close to the peech as he dared. “In the morning, we’ll sail for England.”
She gritted her teeth, but settled on the bed, tucking her head on her arm. “This isn’t quite how I imagined spending the night with you when I was younger.”
“Go to sleep.”
He waited until her eyes drifted closed, her long eyelashes nearly brushing her cheek. Only once her breaths were deep and eve
n did he grasp the edge of his black leather glove and begin working it down his right hand.
The glove had gotten damp from the night ride. If he let it dry any further, he might not be able to remove it.
Little did Olivia know that the manacle scars on his wrists were the tame ones. He edged the glove lower, revealing the long horizontal scar at the heel of his palm from when his torturer had peeled back the flesh and then entertained himself by plucking at the tendons, forcing Clayton’s fingers to twitch and curl.
The thought of Olivia’s face had kept him sane while being tortured. Only alone, in the darkest part of the night, would he admit that humiliating fact to himself. Only a weak man would still cling to the memory of a woman who’d proven herself a traitor. Only a weak man would revel in the sight of her now as she slept, his hands aching to brush that strand of hair from her cheek. Only a weak man would break when she began to whimper in her sleep and go to her side, soothing her with soft words until she quieted.
Clayton stood abruptly and strode away. He wasn’t weak. When he swore he wouldn’t allow Olivia to play him like a puppet, it wasn’t a vow he made lightly.
He pulled a dry set of gloves from the bag. The crude sheepskin was hardly fine English leather, but it would do.
He needed to find out who’d connected Clayton Campbell with Cipher and then used that to try to determine La Petit’s identity. Madeline had just given birth to her first baby. A little girl, Susie. Madeline had earned her peace a dozen times over, and he refused to let any harm come to her.
Arshun would have the answers he needed. Clayton would extract them from him.
And repay him for the marks on Olivia’s fair skin.
Arshun wasn’t there.
According to the frightened footman Clayton had pulled from his bed, Arshun and his associates had fled as soon as Olivia had disappeared. Gone to ground like the vermin they were.
Arshun had most likely gone to St. Petersburg. If he planned to strike against the czar, the city would be his destination.
Clayton swore as he pulled the flint from his pocket. Olivia would get her trip to St. Petersburg after all. He had to know that Madeline was safe. And he was willing to do just about anything to do that.
Destroy a group of revolutionaries.
