Romancing the Past

by Darcy Burke

  “You were right,” she said drowsily.

  He pressed a kiss to her temple. “About what?”

  “That was fun.” Yawning, she snuggled against him. “We should have fun again soon.”

  And have fun they did. For two blissful nights.

  During the day, Thomas read to her from Robinson Crusoe and took to speaking to her almost entirely in English, encouraging her to answer in the same language when she could. When she could not, either because she did not understand what he said or did not have the words to answer in English, he patiently switched to French and taught her what she needed to know. By the end of two days on the road, her English had improved by leaps and bounds.

  Of course, the nights helped, too. Their play was conducted entirely in English. Although most of the words they used when they pleasured each other would be unfit for polite company, she found that structure of the language came more easily to her the more she used it. And when they were playing, they talked a lot.

  Or, more accurately, Thomas talked a lot. He talked about how he planned to touch her and then about how he was touching her. He talked about how he wanted her to touch him and then about how she was touching him. And his openness encouraged her to be just as explicit in expressing her wants and needs as he was. All that talking made their lovemaking—and yes, that was the right word for what they did, even if they had not consummated the act in the traditional sense—better, hotter, more satisfying.

  But then, Thomas was a garrulous man in any setting, not just in bed. This was not to say that he talked too much, but rather that he possessed an easy confidence when it came to engaging people in conversation and showed genuine interest in what others had to say. He charmed everyone they encountered in the course of their journey, from the innkeepers to their staff to the other travelers they met. No wonder he had become a diplomat. He had precisely the right disposition for the job.

  Damn it. Perhaps if he not been so well-suited to diplomacy, they could have been together.

  Instead, they had less than a week left. Six days, at most, of stolen moments that would have to last a lifetime. Because she knew there would never be another man like Thomas in her life again. No one who would ever “fit” her in quite the way he did.

  She was in love with Thomas Pearce. There was no denying it. Inexperienced as she was, she knew what she felt was not mere infatuation, nor was it simply the afterglow of physical pleasure.

  And it didn’t matter that she loved him now. He was right about that, too. If she gave up her goals, her dreams, her independence to have him, she would almost certainly come to resent him for it. Not in a week or a month. Not even, perhaps, for years. She would rather have a few stolen moments of joy than a lifetime of regrets.

  Or at least, she was fairly sure she would.

  But when he kissed her awake that third morning and then slowly, sweetly took her to paradise with his fingers and his tongue, she was a lot less certain. How could she ever regret this?

  Once he was done pleasuring her, he rolled off the bed and donned his drawers and breeches. His erection strained against the fall, as easily visible as if he were still stark naked.

  “I can help you with that,” she said in English, staring pointedly at the ill-concealed bulge.

  With a wistful smile, he shook his head. “No time, I’m afraid. It will go away on its own by the time I’m ready to go downstairs.”

  “Are we in a…” she paused, searching for the right word, “…rush today?”

  “We will reach the Paris safe house tonight,” he said, grabbing his shirt from the back of the chair it hung over. His biceps bunched seductively as he pulled it on over his head. Watching him dress was almost as much fun was watching him undress. “I’d like to arrive early enough to give us time to have some clothes washed before we have to leave again.” He turned his head to sniff the underarm of his shirt and wrinkled his nose. “Mine, at least, are starting to stink.”

  “I like the way you smell,” she told him earnestly. “You do not stink at all.”

  Tucking in his shirt, he smiled at her again. “I think you are prejudiced.”

  “Pray-joo-dissed?” she repeated. “What does this mean?”

  “It means you are partial to me,” he said in French. He put on his waistcoat and began buttoning it. His fingers were well-proportioned and nimble. She had reason to know.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, close enough for her to touch his back, but she kept her hands to herself on the grounds that she did not want to exacerbate his…situation.

  Leaning over, he donned his stockings. “Speaking of which,” he continued in French, “we are both going to have to do a better job of concealing just how partial we are to one another once we arrive in Paris. Our inability to keep our hands off each other helps maintain the fiction that we are a newly married couple, but the people in Paris know this is not the case. They know who you are, and they work for the British government. If they suspected even half of what we have been doing together, that information would get back to the Mr. Pitt and ruin us both, one way or another.” Finishing with his stockings, he reached for his right boot.

  Sabine pressed her lips together. “So, we will not be occupying the same room in this safe house?”

  He shook his head. “No. You will have your own room, and I will likely be quartered with some of the other men.”

  Reminding herself that she did not want to be forced to marry Thomas or for him to be forced to marry her, she did her best to swallow her disappointment at the knowledge that one night of the stolen moments she had been counting on was going to be stolen from her. “I understand.”

  After he pulled on his second boot, he turned and cupped her cheek. “If I could sneak away and spend the night with you, I would. But we cannot risk your reputation for a few hours of pleasure. That would be the height of foolishness.” He bent to kiss her, then stood and grabbed his coat from the rack near the door. “I’m going to order up breakfast and make sure Joubert is awake,” he said in English. “Get ready while I’m gone.”

  And then he left.

  Sabine told herself the stinging at the corners of her eyes was due to the brightness of the light filtering in through the window.

  Chapter 19

  They reached the house in Paris, located in a late seventeenth-century terrace in Faubourg St. Michel just outside the southern wall of the old city, by midafternoon. Their arrival, a day later than originally planned, was greeted by the British staff in residence with a mixture of exasperation and relief.

  “Christ, man,” Robert Montague, who headed up the Paris station, said as he clapped Thomas heartily on the shoulder. In his early fifties, the man was meaty and balding and gave the impression of being more amiable than shrewd. That impression was, of course, false. “We feared you’d been captured.” Montague ushered Thomas into the sitting room to the left of the narrow front entrance hall, thereby allowing Sabine and Joubert to enter with their escorts to be shown to their respective chambers.

  “Why would you think that?” Thomas asked, nonplussed by Montague’s concern. Travel delays were common, after all. A five-day trip could easily extend to several more due to the most benign of causes, any of which would seem a more likely explanation for their failure to arrive on schedule than capture.

  Montague gestured to the small cart to the left of the doorway, on which an assortment of liquor bottles and glasses were arrayed. “Care for a snort? It may soften the blow I’m about to deliver.”

  Thomas gritted his teeth. “Just tell me.”

  The other man sighed, looking tired. With his broad face, flattened nose, and the perpetual bags under his eyes, the expression exaggerated his resemblance to a bulldog. “Rousseau has put out the word that his beloved niece has been abducted by an unscrupulous fortune-hunter.” He picked up a decanter containing bronze-colored liquid—probably brandy, though possibly cognac—and poured two fingers into a glass. “The news has been spreading like wil
dfire; we picked it up two days ago. He’s got travelers passing on the message from town to town, telling inn- and shopkeepers to be on the lookout for a man and a woman traveling together with Percheron horses—one black, one gray—possibly claiming to be newly married.” Montague took a sip of the liquor, made the face that signified a satisfactory alcoholic burn, and then took another. “Under the circumstances, it seemed highly probable you might encounter someone along the route who would recognize you as fitting the description and report you to the gendarme. When you didn’t arrive on time, we feared the worst. You are lucky to be here in one piece, my friend.”

  Shit. That was bad news. Thomas had been counting on Rousseau to concentrate his resources on chasing them to Tarare. He hadn’t even considered the possibility that the man would be smart enough to engage travelers in a word-of-mouth campaign to find them. That was a serious oversight on his part. “Maybe I will have that drink,” he said grimly

  Montague tilted his glass in salute before setting it down and pouring one for Thomas. The first swallow proved it to be cognac—a rather fine one—and Thomas relaxed slightly as he felt the fire seep into his bones.

  All was not lost, he reminded himself. They had made it here, safe and sound. They would make it to Le Havre, too.

  The station leader strode over to one of the slightly worn armchairs that graced the seating area near the fireplace and sank into it, gesturing for Thomas to take the chair opposite.

  “If it’s all the same to you,” Thomas said as he made his way in the direction of the fireplace, “I’d prefer to stand. Been sitting all day for six days, and my arse feels like I’ve been beaten with a board.”

  “Suit yourself,” Montague agreed amiably. “We need to talk about getting the premiere’s daughter safely to Le Havre and out of the country. Whether you’re sitting or standing, the conversation will be the same.” He drained the rest of his cognac and set the glass on the table beside him with a thud. “She can’t travel with you from this point forward. And she can’t take those bloody horses with her. That nonsense ends here.”

  Thomas crushed the surge of rage that rose in his chest. Getting angry would do no good at all. “Those ‘bloody horses’ are all she has left of her parents, her home. And they are the only thing she can be sure of in her future. I made a promise to her, and I mean to keep it.”

  The spy’s sleepy gray eyes sharpened. “Fuck me, Pearce, you’ve gone and fallen in love with the mission, haven’t you? Please tell me you’re not shagging her, too?” He studied Thomas’s face—which Thomas was certain he had schooled into complete inscrutability—and let out a bark of laughter. “Jesus Christ, you are. Are you mad, son?”

  “No, I am not,” he ground out. Montague didn’t need to know he was doing everything but shagging her.

  “Let me give you a piece of advice, Mr. Pearce. Never lie to a liar. We can spot it a mile away. And although I can’t speak for the premiere, I don’t care if you’re fucking her sideways. The only thing I care about is that you do whatever it takes to finish the damn job, and in this case, that job is getting Mademoiselle Rousseau safely out of the country. What you may not appreciate is how accurate the description of you and her and the horses is. Anyone who has heard it will recognize you the moment you roll into town.” Montague got to his feet in a smooth motion that belied his less-than-svelte frame and locked eyes with Thomas. “Even if you don’t care about yourself, think about the danger you will be putting her in. Traveling as you have been, you will never make Le Havre.”

  The finality in Montague’s tone gripped Thomas’s chest like a vise. The other man was both experienced and intelligent, and that meant the threat was real.

  Thomas closed his eyes and forced himself to forget about his own selfish desires. If he didn’t do whatever was necessary to get her to safety, he couldn’t very well claim to love her, even in the privacy of his own mind.

  Montague continued in a gentler tone, “It’s time to go back to our original plan and get her to Le Havre as quickly as possible. That means she’ll have to leave her horses behind. It’s unfortunate, but she’ll have to be made to understand that it’s for her own good.”

  Remembering their conversation on the morning he’d told Sabine he would have abducted her if she’d refused to come of her own volition, Thomas let out a harsh bark of laughter. “You are welcome to try, but I know her well enough to say that the only way you’ll get her to leave those horses behind is by force. Miss Rousseau has definite opinions about what is for her good and what isn’t, and I doubt you will be able to sway her from them.”

  “Are you telling me she’d rather risk incarceration and deportation than leave behind a pair of horses? It’s not as if they are her children, after all.”

  “Closer to that than you think,” Thomas said with a snort. “But if the choice is between leaving her horses and keeping them with her while going into hiding here in France, she will choose the latter. And it wouldn’t be a difficult decision for her to implement. I suspect Duval would be happy to keep her under wraps for the foreseeable future and for free; I half expected him to suggest just that to her when they met, since it would make him look quite noble and heroic and give him even more leverage in negotiations with us than he currently has. And Joubert would be over the moon if she asked him to take her and her horses back to Vornay. He’s utterly smitten with her.”

  Montague raised his shaggy eyebrows. “And you’re not?”

  Thomas shrugged. Let the spy believe what he wanted. Thomas would neither confirm nor deny the man’s speculations. “That isn’t the point. The point is that she has options, and if we push her to abandon the one thing she truly cares about, we will drive her to take them. Before we do that, we should consider all our options, because you really do not want to try to transport an unwilling woman from here to Le Havre and across the English Channel. That’s riskier than just continuing on as we have been and hoping we don’t encounter anyone who’s heard about Rousseau’s missing niece. At least then, she will be on our side and won’t back up any suggestions that she’s been kidnapped.”

  “You think she would actively sabotage us?” Montague asked with a frown.

  “You keep thinking of her as if she’s the British premiere’s daughter. As if she has some sort of loyalty to the British crown. But she’s not. She’s French. Until I told her a week ago, she had no idea that her father is English, let alone the current head of state of Great Britain. She has no reason to put British interests ahead of her own, Montague. So, would she sabotage us? Try to escape? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility.”

  Thomas knew he was laying it on a little thick. He wasn’t sure what Sabine would do if Montague used force to get her to Le Havre. A week ago, when they’d first met, he would have said without a sliver of a doubt that she would have done anything to avoid being forced to do anything. Now, he thought she might care enough about him to acquiesce. And that did not sit right with him. He was supposed to be protecting her, not the other way around.

  The head spy sighed, his bulldog expression turning hangdog. “Then what do you suggest? And let me be clear: continuing the pretense of being a newlywed couple is out of the question, even if there is a remote possibility that you would escape detection. We need another alternative.”

  Schooling his features to conceal his relief, Thomas took several sips of his cognac and thought. A couple with a gray-and-black Percheron was too obvious, even if they feigned a different relationship. They needed to change the constitution of the traveling party in such a way that no one would make the connection between their group and the scoundrel who had kidnapped a defenseless young Frenchwoman from the bosom of her loving family.

  The idea formed slowly, but once it took shape, the solution was obvious. “Dare I hope that Mrs. Montague is in residence?” Thomas had met Montague’s wife, a dark-haired woman in her late forties with bright eyes and a no-nonsense demeanor, when he had stopped here on his way to
Duval’s eleven days ago. In an effort to avoid the scrutiny of its French neighbors, the British did their best to make the occupants of the safe house look like any other family, and that meant a husband, wife, and children. All of the Montagues’ children had been grown and gone for several years now, but the parade of other people who passed through the house caused little occasion for comment because the neighbors had all grown used to the family’s active social lifestyle.

  “Yes,” Montague said slowly. “What do you have in mind?”

  “A party of four. A husband and wife—you and Mrs. Montague—accompanied by your valet—yours truly—and her lady’s maid—Miss Rousseau. And instead of two Percherons, we will have four, rendering the colors of Miss Rousseau’s horses moot. We could even bring a footman to further the impression of a well-to-do couple on a trip from Paris to the country.”

  “And where do you imagine we would obtain two more Percherons? It’s not as if they grow on trees.”

  “That is a possible problem,” Thomas agreed, “but it is worth the effort to locate a pair, don’t you think? People don’t look twice at servants, Montague. It is practically the best disguise anyone could hope for. No matter how good the descriptions of Miss Rousseau or myself, the chances that anyone will even inspect either of us long enough to become suspicious are virtually nil.”

  The spy stroked his chin, his mouth twisting thoughtfully as he considered the idea. “All right,” he said at last. “I will see what I can do about securing two more horses. And an appropriate costume for Miss Rousseau. And that will mean another day’s delay. The captain of La Sereia is not going to be pleased, but at least Maggie will love the idea. She is forever complaining that we never take holidays.”

  Thomas breathed a small sigh of relief. Disaster averted, at least for now. Then he really thought about what this would really mean. He and Sabine would never share a room together again.