A stray ray of moonlight streaming through a high window, he stopped and listened, ears attuned to any untoward sound. He followed the soft orange glow emanating from the family drawing room just off the central corridor. Mayhap a servant had forgotten to extinguish the lantern, mayhap not. He reached beneath his overcoat, and his fingers wrapped around the hilt of the dagger hidden at his waist.
Just outside the room, his hackles rose. Someone lay in wait for him on the other side of the wall. He counted backward from five and swung around the corner, hoping the element of surprise was in his favor. A single, sweeping glance revealed that he shared the room with one other person: Mariana.
He exhaled a gust of relief. No more than five feet away, she sat with her robe closed tight at her neck and her hands folded in her lap, observing him, eyes wide and strangely unfathomable. She looked not herself. But he hadn’t fully processed that observation just yet.
“Mariana, what are you doing up at this hour? Is everyone well?”
“A late night at the opera?”
“Oh, you know how these things go,” he answered in his usual evasive way.
Mariana never pried all that deeply into his business. He didn’t like the feeling of guilt that had begun to worm its way into these evasions. They’d begun to feel more like lies, and, more and more, he didn’t want to keep his other life from her. It was a problem, admittedly, for a spy whose wife was seen asbelovedby him.
Her head cocked to the side. “I’m not sure I do.”
He kept his tone light and easy, but something wasn’t right. “Diplomacy consists of little more than showing visiting dignitaries the sights and bonding over hard whiskey and fine—”
“Women?”
“—Cigars,” he finished.
How pale and drawn she looked. It could be the lateness of the hour or the twins having a rough night.
“Olivia paid me a visit this morning,” she said, matching his light and easy tone note for note.
“Is that so unusual?” Mariana and Olivia were close, especially after Olivia’s foolhardy husband, Percy, had joined the army and left for the Continent on a doomed wave of idealistic fervor.
“She was at my bedside with the latest edition ofThe London Diarybefore I’d even drawn a sip of my morning brew. Have you read it?”
“You know I don’t read that rubbish.” He noted a studied casualness radiating off her, and his eyes narrowed.
“You might reconsider. After all, you feature prominently in their most recent edition.”
That was when he heard it: the tremor of barely restrained emotion in her voice. Something was wrong—direly wrong.
“Would you care to read it? I have a copy right here.” Her lips set in a tight line, she lifted the paper off her lap and extended it toward him.
Nick stepped forward and took the offensive object from her hand. He had no way of knowing that when his fingertips brushed hers, it would be the last time he touched her for ten years.
He quickly scanned the offensive rag until he found what he was looking for, dead center of page two in the “About Town” section:
A chip off the old block?
Lord N——s A——h spotted intimately acquainting himself with the Italian tongue thanks to noted soprano A——a N——i.
This particular lord’s penchant for the opera clearly runs in the family. Just ask his father, the M——s of C——e.
Even though they were a lie—admittedly, one he’d gone to great lengths to encourage in certain circles—those four sentences struck him to his core. His entire existence centered around being asunlike the Marquess of Clare as possible with one glaring exception . . . And he was staring straight at her.
Like his father before him, he’d made a love match. Mariana was beloved by him—thoroughly and desperately.
During their mad dash of an engagement and year of marriage, he’d evaded his feelings for her. She was young, beautiful, provocative, and an appropriate match in the eyes of family and Society. Like so many men of his social set, he’d never spoken of love. It was entirely superfluous to the institution of marriage.
Even when the feeling filled him full to bursting at times, he’d never given himself over to it. The weight of his parents’ union hung over his head like an ax suspended just above his neck, poised to drop.
Now, the feeling of dread that had hung about the edges of his marriage from the very beginning, and particularly since the birth of the twins, started to coalesce into something concrete. He’d known this life had never really been his. His happy marriage was nothing more than a mirage.
“I explained to Olivia,” Mariana said, “it is a vicious bit of unsubstantiated gossip from London’s lowest rag.”
