Seeing the others occupied outside the box, Sophy knew her moment had come. As if aware of their isolation for the first time, she murmured, “Oh! I did not realize that everybody had gone outside. Perhaps we should join them.”
“Now why,” Grimshaw murmured, “would we want to do that? It is rare that I ever have a moment alone with you. I am sure we can find some way of amusing ourselves.” Boldly he reached out and ran a caressing finger across the top of her breasts.
Sophy did not have to pretend the fury that lit her golden eyes. She retained just enough control on her temper as she surged to her feet to make certain that the reticule fell off her lap, spilling its contents. She was unable, however, to prevent herself from striking his hand away and snapping, “Take your hands off me!”
Grimshaw only smiled, an insufferably arrogant smile that made Sophy’s teeth ache. Wrenching her thoughts away from the pleasing notion of slapping it off his face, she forced herself to glance down at the floor and cry with apparent dismay, “Oh, now look what you’ve made me do!”
Grimshaw’s eyes dropped and his breath sucked in audibly as his gaze fell upon the ruby cravat pin lying on the floor almost at his feet. Like a man in a trance, he bent down and reached for the pin.
Sophy froze, her own gaze locked on the cravat pin. The ruby center seemed to glow in the candlelight like an evil beacon. Feeling unable to move, she watched numbly as Grimshaw’s fingers closed around the pin. He remained bent for several agonizing seconds, minutely examining the pin.
It was clear he recognized the pin—his initial reaction had given that much away—but now she could read that knowledge in his eyes as he slowly straightened and looked at her. Holding the pin out toward her, he asked silkily, “And where, my pet, did you get this?”
Chapter Twenty
An icy shiver went through Sophy, but her voice was careless as she said, “Oh, that! I found it ... the night Simon died.”
Pleased that her fingers displayed no sign of trembling, she calmly reached out and plucked the pin from his grasp.
“It was lying on the floor near the top of the stairs at Marlowe House, and I have kept it all these years as a, er, lucky charm. Why? Do you recognize it? I have often wondered who it belonged to and why no one asked after it. ”
Grimshaw said nothing for a long moment, his gaze locked on the ruby pin held in Sophy’s fingers. Then, shrugging and seeming to lose interest in both Sophy and the cravat pin, he glanced away, and murmured, “I thought it looked familiar when I first laid eyes on it, but I realize now that I was mistaken.”
He looked around, apparently noticing for the first time that they were alone in the supper box.
“Shall we join the others? It seems that they have deserted us.” He smiled nastily. “I am sure that some people might misunderstand my intentions if we were to be found alone in such an intimate setting, and naturally, I would not want to give your husband an excuse to call me out, now would I?”
Her mission accomplished, Sophy slipped the pin back into her reticule, and said crisply, “Of course not. But you have nothing to fear from him even if he were to find us here. He does not leap to silly conclusions!”
She brushed past him and gave an inward sigh of relief when he made no move to stop her. Stepping out of the supper box, she was delighted to find Ives standing not two feet from the box. From the stiff set of his shoulders, despite his air of interest in the events going on in front of him, she knew that all his attention was focused on what had been going on in the supper box behind him.
Ives sensed her presence immediately and swung around to look at her. With deceptive calm, he said, “Ah, there you are, my dear. I wondered what was keeping you.”
Sophy flashed him a dazzling smile and placing her hand on his arm, said quite clearly, “Believe me, nothing. Nothing at all.”
Behind her, a muscle twitched in Grimshaw’s cheek, but he only said, “Your lady’s reticule came open and spilled its contents. We were busy picking everything up.”
“I see,” Ives replied with commendable disinterest, some of the painful tenseness ebbing from him now that Sophy was no longer alone with Grimshaw. He smiled down at her. “Well, shall we stroll through the gardens?”
“Oh, yes, please,” Sophy answered instantly. She gave a polite, dismissing nod to Grimshaw. “Perhaps we shall see you later this evening, my lord.”
A sardonic expression on his face, he stared at Sophy as he said, “I doubt it. My plans for the remainder of the evening are not at all honorable—and you, unfortunately, have always yearned for dull respectability.”
With an effort, Ives kept himself from making an unwise reply, but he could not help saying coolly, “Respectability is not a trait to be despised in one’s wife.”
“Of course not,” Grimshaw said equitably. Glancing over Ives’s shoulder, he murmured, “And now, if you will excuse me, I will rejoin my companions.”
Sophy and Ives both nodded politely and watched him saunter over to join the others where they were standing in a group at the edge of the gravel pathway, laughing and talking. Only when it was clear that Grimshaw was occupied in conversation with his companions, did Ives glance down at Sophy and ask quietly, “Well? How did it go? How did he react to the pin?”
Sophy frowned slightly. “He obviously recognized it, but he pretended not to, just as Edward did. But the odd thing is, I think he was surprised to see it.”
“Why should that be odd? He had no way of knowing positively that you possessed it. We don’t know what Edward told him about the pin. There is an excellent chance that Edward must have provided some clue to its whereabouts, however, else we would never have had the housebreaker pay us a visit. He might have strongly suspected that you were the one who had the pin, but he had no way of knowing for certain, especially since he didn’t find it during his abortive search of the house.”
“I know. I was just hoping for something conclusive,” she answered ruefully.
Ives smiled slightly. “What did you expect? For him to gasp, turn white, and blurt out a confession?”
“No,” she said with a sigh, “but I wish he had betrayed more. As it is, I feel that we have wasted our time and have learned nothing of importance.”
Having taken his leave of the other gentlemen, Forrest rejoined Ives and Sophy near the supper box. At the question obvious in his bright blue eyes, Ives said softly, “He knows that she has the pin. Sophy thinks that he recognized it, but he pretended not to. Other than that, we have nothing new.”
A shiver of unease coursed down Sophy’s spine. “Except now,” she whispered, “he knows that I have it.”
Ives’s arm came around her waist. “And I shall keep you safe.”
Her eyes met his. “It wasn’t the meeting tonight that had you so worried, was it? It was afterward ...” She swallowed. “Afterward, when he knows that I possess what he wants, that I hold something he may have murdered to get. It is what he may do now that had you so anxious, wasn’t it?”
Ives nodded. “I tried to warn you, sweetheart, but since you have shown him the pin, there is no way to wrap it in clean linen,” he said gently. “You have indeed made yourself a target.” Gruffly he continued, “But do not fear—if I or Forrest cannot be with you, one of my men will shadow your every move—don’t ever forget that fact.”
“You may have become a target,” Forrest added quickly. “But if so, you will be a target that we shall see he never reaches.”
Sophy smiled tremulously, looking from one intent face to the other. “I know. I think it is only that the full enormity of what I have done is just sinking in.”
“The real question,” Forrest murmured, “is whether or not Grimshaw is our target.”
“And that,” Ives said grimly, “we will not know until he makes the first move.”
His gaze slid over to the group that included Grimshaw. If Grimshaw was their murderer and the Fox, the sight of the ruby cravat pin did not seem to have alarmed him. Ives m
ade a face. What had he expected? That he would react in the manner he had teased Sophy about earlier, blanching and gasping dramatically?
Disgusted with himself, he took a firmer grip on Sophy’s arm, and said, “Since we came to stroll, I suggest we do so. The sooner we have traipsed through the bloody gardens, the sooner we can report to Roxbury.”
“Should we do that tonight?” Sophy asked uncertainly. “What if someone observes us? Won’t they think it strange that we leave the gardens and go immediately to your godfather’s house at this hour of the evening? Wouldn’t it look suspicious?”
Ives cast her a glance. “Do you know,” he said wryly, “for someone very new to subterfuge, you are developing a keen talent for it.”
Sophy snorted. “It could also simply be common sense.”
“I stand corrected, my dear. And you do not have to fear that we would do something so overt—Forrest and I are fast becoming old hands at subterfuge ourselves.” He grinned down at her. “Roxbury is already waiting for us at Forrest’s house, where you and I shall stop for some final refreshments before continuing home. Once we have departed and it is ascertained that no one is particularly interested in our destination, Roxbury will slip away and no one will have been the wiser. We have it all planned.”
Forrest’s town house on Bruton Street was just a few doors down from the residence of George Canning, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and one of the reasons they had decided it would be safe to meet with Roxbury at Forrest’s home. If Roxbury were seen in the vicinity, it would be assumed that he was in the area to meet with Mr. Canning since they were known to be friends.
Upon hearing Sophy’s recitation of her encounter with Grimshaw, Roxbury was neither pleased nor displeased. Seated in a black-leather chair in the library of Forrest’s house, he regarded Sophy intently for several seconds after she finished speaking.
“You thought he recognized it?” he finally asked.
Sophy nodded. “He certainly seemed very interested in it at first, but then he just shrugged and acted as if it held no meaning for him.” She wrinkled her straight little nose. “I knew that if he was Edward’s murderer he would be far too clever to betray a great deal, but I had hoped that he would have revealed a little more.”
“Do not become too discouraged, my dear,” Roxbury said. “These things take time, and the most important thing is that we have dangled the bait in front of him. Now we must sit back and see if he tries to snatch it.”
A shiver went down Sophy’s spine. “I know,” she said in a hollow tone. “All I have to do is wait for him to try to murder me as he did my uncle.”
Ives’s hand, which had been resting possessively on her shoulder, tightened. “He will never get close enough to you even to try,” he said with quiet assurance. “And I suspect that even he will think twice before attempting to strike at you. Remember, he will not want to draw any more attention to the cravat pin, and he certainly will not want anyone to connect it to the other two murders. He is not a stupid man, and he must realize that with every murder he commits, he runs the risk of pointing the finger of guilt directly at himself.”
It was cold comfort, but Sophy accepted it gladly. Surely, Ives was right; Edward’s murderer must be having second thoughts about his methods of dealing with those who knew about the cravat pin. After all, she told herself uneasily, he could not simply keep murdering people!
Arriving home a short while later and losing herself in Ives’s passionate lovemaking, Sophy was able for a time to banish her fears. Ives’s almost desperate hunger for her seemed not to have abated one whit, and she happily gave herself up to his distinctly pleasurable assault.
But eventually, as she drifted down from the scarlet heights that they had shared, reality intruded. Lying sated and limp in Ives’s arms, she turned her head on his shoulder to look at him, and asked abruptly, “If Grimshaw is the owner of the pin, what do you think he will do now?”
Ives made a face. “If I knew that, sweetheart, I would feel much easier in my mind than I do. Unfortunately, we can only wait and see what he does. And I find that while I consider myself a patient man, when my wife is hung out like a piece of raw meat in front of a very dangerous shark, an exceedingly vicious shark, I am not very patient at all.”
His arm curved her closer to his big body. “In the meantime, while our shark decides whether to bite or not, you are to be extremely careful where you go, especially at night. I cannot be seen to sit in your pocket if we are to draw him out, and so we shall have to continue with our separate activities—with slight modifications. If I am not with you in public, either Forrest or one of my men will not be far behind you. I think that our time of greatest vulnerability will be at night, but you cannot drop your guard just because the sun is shining. When you do go out during the day, be very careful where you go. Take precautions that you are always with someone you trust.”
“I am not going to do anything foolish,” she said tartly. “Believe me, I do not want to suffer the same fate as Edward and Miss Weatherby.”
“I just wish you were not involved in this whole bloody affair and that it was over and done with—as it should have been!”
He snarled out the words with such explosive violence that Sophy stared at him in astonishment. A little frown marred her forehead. As it should have been? Now what, she wondered, did he mean by that? That Grimshaw should have betrayed himself tonight? That Edward’s murderer should have been found before now? Or something else?
Idly her fingers played with the crisp hair on his chest, her thoughts on past events. Not just the events of tonight, or even the last week, but all the momentous twists and turns her life had taken since Simon had died, particularly since she had met Ives.
Suddenly several things came together in her mind with startling clarity. Simon’s long-ago comment about Roxbury. Ives’s seeming inability to make certain decisions without Roxbury’s consent—Ives, the most confident man she had ever met! Even more important, his sudden and inexplicable predilection for the disreputable company of all of Simon’s old friends.
It was true that Viscount Harrington had been an utter stranger to her a short while ago, but in the early days of their acquaintance, she had been drawn to him in spite of herself. And in the early days, she reminded herself, there had been no sign of a tendency to follow degenerate pursuits. Despite her unwilling attraction to him, she would have fled far and fast if she had detected even a hint of the libertine about him. In fact, as she considered it, she would have sworn then that Ives would have spurned the company and morals of men like Grimshaw and the others and would have held them in contempt. But, recently, he had not.
Why not? Why a sudden and unpredictable affinity for such men? She thought again of Simon’s comment: Ives’s godfather, a master spy. If Simon knew enough about Roxbury to make that statement, even in jest, then Simon had to have been dealing with men who knew about such things, such as spies.
“Tell me about Roxbury,” she said suddenly. “Simon once referred to him as a master spy. Is it true?”
She sensed the wariness in him immediately, and her certainty that she had stumbled upon some inkling of the truth grew.
“Not exactly. And it is not precisely common knowledge, although he has been called by such a title occasionally in certain circles,” Ives conceded reluctantly, not liking this sudden turn, but unwilling to lie outright.
When she continued to wait expectantly, he added unwillingly, “It is possible that there may be some truth in it—his devotion to England is legendary, and I am sure that from time to time he has delved into matters that would lead one to, er, connect him to matters of espionage.”
Sophy said nothing for a minute and just when Ives thought that they had put the dangerous subject behind them, she observed thoughtfully, “And if he needed help, oh, in say, tracking down a treacherous spy here in London, is it not possible that he would ask for your help?”
Ives forced a laugh. “I am no spy, sw
eetheart.”
“But if your godfather requested your help,” she persisted, “you would give it to him, wouldn’t you? To catch a spy?”
If they had not been lying naked together, their bodies pressed closely to each other, Sophy might not have been aware of it when Ives stiffened slightly. But she felt it, and knew that she was on the right track.
She sat up and stared down at him. “You’re working for your godfather, aren’t you? That is why when anything untoward happens you immediately have a conference with Roxbury. And it is the reason that he has been coming here so frequently, isn’t it?” Her eyes narrowed and she added slowly, almost to herself, “And that is why you are always running off to join Grimshaw and the others, isn’t it? One of them is a spy, and Roxbury wants you to unmask him.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Ives growled, cursing her cleverness even as he admired it. “Do you really think Grimshaw, blackguard that he is, is a spy? Why should he stoop to such a level? It would be his life if he were caught. Treason is punished by execution, remember?”
Her eyes locked on his, she said musingly, “Treason wouldn’t have mattered to Simon. He’d have believed that he was too careful, too smart, too clever to be caught, and he would have delighted in tweaking the nose of someone like Roxbury. Perhaps your spy is like him, a man who revels in taking risks. In dicing with danger—and, of course, there is always money. Some men are not above avarice. Some men are greedy, like Edward. I could see Edward selling secrets for such a base reason as gold. Gold has corrupted many a man—why not Grimshaw?”
“I see,” Ives said. “In addition to being the object of Edward’s blackmail and the owner of the cravat pin, Grimshaw is now some sort of spy?”
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