She’d attacked him with forty inches of goddamned nightgown cord.
Congratulations, Robert. Another French spy routed. Splendid job. Damn, but he hated fighting women.
The quilts had scattered to the floor in their little altercation. He picked one up and pulled it across her. With that, she finally acknowledged his existence. She pulled the quilt close, up to her chin, and curled into it. “Did I hurt you?”
Whatever he’d expected, it wasn’t this. “Did you what?”
“With the garrote. Did I hurt you? I was afraid I would kill you. It is very dangerous to attack someone with the garrote. But I had no choice, so I ventured.”
That was some mad logic for you. He sat on the bed and slipped his hand under the quilt, taking hold of her shoulder. She didn’t react. She might not have noticed. “You ventured, did you?”
“When the candlestick did not work. It was my last reserve, the garrote. I was almost certain I would not kill you, but there is always a large element of chance.”
That calm, considering voice was one of her lies. He didn’t need to see her face to know that. In her skin he could feel the fine-grained trembling that said fear, exhaustion, numbness. Shock. He’d seen this in men after battle, in prisoners under questioning. Push a man hard enough, and he becomes detached, almost uncaring. Annique had come to that place.
“The element of chance,” he prompted softly.
“I have no experience with the garrote, except one afternoon using it upon René, in Françoise’s kitchen, when he taught me. He most certainly did not fight me so horribly as you do. I suppose it was because of the good china.”
“The china would be a problem.”
“Françoise would not have been pleased if we had broken her dishes.” She pulled one hand out from under the quilt and scrubbed it across her face. “René thought I should become somewhat dangerous because I was so small. He taught me many deadly tricks, but they were never as useful as he expected.” She let out a long sigh. “I should not have attempted the garrote. I knew that, but I did not listen to myself saying so. And it was useless anyway. I was clumsy and have done nothing but enrage and hurt you.”
She hadn’t been clumsy with the garrote. She’d lost control because she wasn’t willing to kill him. “You didn’t hurt me.”
“Most likely I did, and you are being composed and manly about it. Though it is obvious I did not break your neck, which was my great fear.” The quilt wriggled as she uncurled. “I will tell you I am not sorry in the least, even if I hurt you gravely, because you should not make off with me this way. It is wholly despicable to entrap women and kidnap them with you across France and force them to wear indecent nightclothes only because you do not trust them.”
“We’re in a despicable profession.”
“I am reminded of this from time to time.” She shrugged and shifted away. “You need not hold on to me. I am entirely subdued, I assure you.”
“Docile as a lamb.” He kept his hand on the intricate scaffolding of her collarbone. Tension radiated from where his palm rested. It intrigued him, that tension. Her body was telling him secrets.
“You are the skeptic. It is your profession, of course. Still, it is sad you cannot trust such great simplicity as I offer.”
Simple? There was no end to the labyrinth inside Annique Villiers. He’d work his way through, given time. Already, he had one of her lies unraveled. He was almost sure…
He drew a finger along her shoulder and felt the shimmer of startled awareness. Nervousness danced under her skin. It was like stroking one of his brother’s new colts, a young one that hadn’t felt a man’s touch yet.
Not jaded, not hardened. Not practiced and knowledgeable. How had he managed to convince himself this was a woman used to being handled by men? Adrian said she wasn’t a whore, and Adrian was never wrong about women.
How many men, Annique? Not many, I’ll bet. Did your masters keep you unawakened so you could play the boy more convincingly? Their mistake. It left her vulnerable. Achingly, ignorantly vulnerable. He’d use that against her, sooner or later. “What the devil am I going to do with you, Annique?”
“Let me go?”
“No. Not that.”
“I did not think you would agree, though it would be wisest for both of us if I arose from this bed and went quietly into the night. You have no need to keep me.”
“What happened at Bruges?” He felt her skin answer. She knew. “That’s why I keep you. You might try trusting me. Better me than Leblanc.”
“I am hoping to escape you both.” She sighed. “Even now, there is a chance.”
“It’s possible. You’re skilled.” In his network of spies, he could count on his fingers the agents who matched Annique’s caliber. A spy like this was worth a cavalry division. “That’s one more reason I’m not letting you go.”
“I have known several men of your type. None of them was amenable to reason.” She sounded more and more resigned. “We come to an impasse, you and I. What will you do with me?”
“Damned if I know. Take you to England and decide there, probably. By then we’ll understand each other better.”
“I meant, what will you do with me tonight? I am eating life in very small bites these days, monsieur.”
There were men who’d push the interrogation now—badger her, keep her groggy and talking and see what she’d give away. She was so exhausted she could barely think. Keep hammering away at her, and she’d start making mistakes. Scare her enough, mix it with a little sympathy, and she might break. He’d seen it a hundred times.
Except tactics like that wouldn’t work with Annique Villiers, even if he could make himself do it.
“I won’t do anything with you tonight. I won’t tie you up, at any rate.” He ran one last brisk caress across the tangled black mane. It was the first step in seduction, getting her used to being touched. Besides, he wanted to. “Do you think you can hold off killing me till after breakfast?”
“I must rest before I try again. It is very exhausting, fighting with you.”
He laid a second quilt on top of the one she was wrapped in. It was just as well she didn’t roll over and look at him. His arousal was obvious as hell. Maybe he’d let Doyle guard her tomorrow—imperturbable, thoroughly married William Doyle. “You might as well go to sleep. Unless Vauban and the others taught you some way to kill me with a feather pillow.”
“They did.” She snuggled into the warmth like a nesting animal, giving a deep, feminine chuckle. She found that amusing, did she?
The last quilt had found refuge under the bed. He fished it out and spread it across the rush-bottomed chair. When he propped his feet up on the windowsill, he pulled the ends around him. It would get cool later on.
Annique’s chest rose and fell gently, slow and even. That either meant she was asleep, or she was getting ready to attack him again. He’d wait and see.
Seven
ANNIQUE WOKE LAZILY. SHE WAS WARM AND THE bed was soft. That was a great comfort to the many sore places on her body. She smelled bread baking.
She realized she was naked.
She snapped alert, knowing in an instant exactly where she was. It was not the first time she had awoken surrounded by enemies. She made not the least movement, allowed no change in her breathing. The quilt had slipped down her body at some time in the night. Now it slanted across her buttocks, not hiding them at all. Grey could see any of her he wished to. It made her feel odd inside, knowing that.
He was not in bed. It was not such a large bed one could lose an entire person in it. When she listened, she heard him breathing, off to the left.
How long had Grey looked upon her while she slept? Did he desire her? She did not want to hear that question in her mind, but it was most assuredly there.
She had always been a woman of measured detachment toward men. Now she lay in bed hoping a spymaster of the British would look upon her nakedness and be aroused. It was, perhaps, a form of madness. In any ca
se, she did not want it.
“I can tell you’re awake.” His voice came, closer than she’d expected. “You might as well get up and stop pretending.”
“I am hoping you are a ghastly dream and will go away if I stay asleep long enough.”
“I can’t be a nightmare. It’s morning, and I’m still here.”
She sat up, pulling the quilt across her breasts. Her forehead she put down upon her knees to hide her face. She was entirely miserable about this whole situation. Leblanc might find her at any moment. She was plagued with an inconvenient passion for this English. She had no clothes. Soon she must face Grey, with open eyes, in the daylight. It was all most discouraging. “I am used to nightmares that are still there in the morning.”
“Do you have any idea how silly it looks when a woman of your skills sulks like a five-year-old?”
“I do not sulk. Why do you not go away so I can get dressed.” Perhaps Grey would wander somewhere else for a while or even fall off the face of the earth altogether if she were exceptionally fortunate.
“I’m not leaving you alone. I don’t have time to hunt you down this morning. I don’t want to fight with you either.” He sounded impatient. “Look at me. I’m tired of talking to your spine and a handful of bedspread. I don’t evaporate just because you ignore me.”
She didn’t move while he crossed the room toward her.
“I don’t…For God’s sake, will you look at me when I talk to you?”
It was time. When he was close, she lifted her head and faced him squarely and opened her eyes.
Darkness. As always. It had been darkness for five months. She no longer expected anything else when she opened her eyes, unless she was roused suddenly from sleep and did not remember where she was.
He stopped abruptly. He was a man who did not make noise while he was thinking. Either he talked or he was silent. She waited. After a time, she felt a wind across her face. They tried that sometimes, waving their hands at her to see if she would blink.
“You’re blind.”
“I am not blind.” Always, it made her angry, these people who thought they knew everything. “I cannot see. That is all.”
“Dear God.” He took her chin tightly and tilted her face from side to side, though she could have told him nothing showed. “I can’t believe this. How? When?”
For some reason she told him the truth. “Last May. It was not even a battle. Just a village and a…a game for a patrol riding through from one place to another. They destroyed that little place for no other reason than that they were armed men and bored and they could. I took a saber cut on the head.”
She should not have spoken of it. Memory assaulted her—the last images she would see with her eyes. A bright tablecloth trampled by horses. The long, dark hair of a woman, flying loose as she tried to run. A man crumpled on the ground. Death after death. Even women and children. A village of innocents with no chance to fight back, dying for nothing at all.
Her eyes closed convulsively, and she pulled free from him and turned away, dragging her quilt with her. She took the pictures of death and folded them away small, as if she were packing winter clothes into a press and closing the lid tightly down. Mostly she did not think of that last day at all, except in bad dreams.
He said, “There’s no mark.”
“It is not the eyes themselves.” She took a deep breath. She hated speaking of this. “The doctor at the university in Marseilles—he was a very important man with unpleasant breath—said it is the head wound from the saber. Something presses upon the optic nerve, a knot of blood or a splinter of bone. With a great many Latin terms, he says this, you understand, since he is charging my mother a great deal of money for each long word.”
She made a good broad gesture to take his attention away while she wiped her face with the other hand. A conjurer’s trick. “If that something should go wandering about in this skull of mine, the so-important doctor says, I will see once more. But then I will most probably die at once. Or possibly not, which is the other choice. He does not commit himself. Instead he advises me not to get hit on the head again, which is advice anyone could have given without poking at me for an hour first. Me, I think he does not know very much.” There. She had the tears wiped off. Perhaps he had not noticed.
“You’ve been like this for five months.” She was not sure what was in his voice. It was not pity.
“I am not like this or like that. I am me, and I have been like me for much longer than five months. My eyes are not me.”
He snorted in her face and took hold of her again to go searching through her hair for the thin, smooth scar above her temple. He drew the line of it with his fingertips. “Here, was it?”
“As I told you.” She was furious with him that he examined her this way and she could not escape. To be naked before him was nothing to the exposure she felt when she uncovered this secret. She wished, oh most completely to the bottom of her heart, she wished she had escaped before she was forced to reveal this to Grey.
“It’s healed cleanly,” he said.
“Most pleasingly. I am told one cannot see the scar now that my hair has grown out again.”
“You were with your mother when she died, weren’t you? How did you get from Marseilles to Paris, blind?”
“It is no concern of—” His hands tightened on her. She decided not to try his temper further this morning. “I walked.”
“You…walked? You didn’t just walk. Not blind. Not alone.”
“Maman has…” Pain clenched at her throat. Maman was dead. “Maman had…many friends. It was a network all her own from the years even before the Revolution. They helped me.” So many people had helped her. Maman’s network. Friends of Vauban. Friends of old Soulier, who had been Maman’s lover and who was most senior in the Secret Police. Friends of her colleagues René and Françoise. Men who had known her father. Friends she had made herself over the years. She had come so far because of a legion of ordinary people she could call upon for a favor worth a life.
The British did not know how remarkable her memory was. Her mind held more than the Albion plans and her many, many secrets. Five thousand names and directions were safe in her head—names that meant sanctuary and aid in any corner of France. She would call upon some of them when she shook herself loose of Monsieur Grey. “I was passed from hand to hand for the whole way, until I was betrayed, and Henri came to take me to Leblanc.”
He said nothing, just explored this scar of hers, which could be of no great interest since it was not in any way unusual. When that was finished, he thrust deep into her hair and held her head so she could not turn away. God only knew what he thought he would see. It was not the first time he had observed her, after all.
It disturbed her intensely to be touched by this man. She did not want to desire him. This hunger was something that had befallen her, like an illness. He was as unsuitable for a lover as a penguin or the shadow of a large tree. A hulking, grim stranger who was an enemy and in the profession of spying, which was a type she did not admire. She could not have chosen more stupidly.
His fingers combed through her hair to the end before he let it fall. It was strange to feel him do that, an intimacy no one attempted before. There had been a number of things she had done with this man and no other. More than she liked. She had not the smallest idea what was in his mind.
“You’ve mastered it well. Being blind.” There was a note in his voice…Vauban had spoken to her in that way when she had done something that impressed him. For Vauban, she would have walked through fire to hear him speak to her so. Perhaps there were men who would do that for Grey.
“I am almost used to it, except that it is inconvenient and may get me killed soon.”
“You’re good at hiding it. I never guessed. Not once.”
“It has been night, when I have been with you. Or I pretended to sleep, as I did in the coach.”
There was more of this thoughtful pause. “This makes you easier to manage,
doesn’t it?”
She said, politely, “Henri was of your opinion, monsieur.”
Incredibly, he laughed. He was truly the most heartless man she had ever encountered. She would not be coated with a treacle of sympathy by this one. “I won’t make Henri’s mistakes. I intend to take very good care of you, Annique.”
For a Head of Section, he was also remarkably stupid. “Can you not see how this changes everything? Leblanc will have every soldier in France looking for a blind woman. I am the most dangerous luggage for you to cart around.”
“Then we won’t let anyone know you’re blind.”
Still he did not see. How could he be such a fool? “It is me Leblanc seeks. It is my mouth Leblanc must stop at all costs. I know such secrets about him…Let me go, monsieur, and he will follow me, not you.”
This inn could not be so far from Vauban’s small village. If Grey would only help her to go there. Vauban was old and tired now, his mind confused and wandering since the last attack. He could give her no orders for what must be done with the Albion plans. That lay upon her shoulders now. But she could sit beside Vauban’s fire one last time and hold his hand and talk with him about little things that he still remembered. In Vauban’s house she would find trusted friends to take her to the coast. From there, she would go to England and find safety with Soulier and make her decisions and, perhaps, become a traitor to France.
If Grey could be made to see reason…“Leblanc will not pursue uninteresting British spies only for the pleasure of committing slaughter upon them. In the Game, we do not kill one another in this bloodthirsty manner that would leave us all dead. Without me, you are safe.”
Grey walked across the room. Not pacing. This one would always have a destination in mind when he set one foot in front of the other. When he came back he was carrying something. She could tell when people were carrying things. They walked differently. She had trained herself to notice this.
“The dress should fit. It’s blue. And for God’s sake, stop calling me monsieur. It’s getting ridiculous, you trying to kill me and calling me Monsieur Grey in the next sentence.” He dropped a bundle of clothing into her lap.
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