It was possible from the brief time he was with Ellie Sutton. I knew that it had weighed heavily on him after her death, that Rory might be orphaned much as he had been at very near the same age.
He lit the fire in the fireplace that had been laid in anticipation of our arrival. I removed my coat and hung it on a hook by the door. The fire quickly caught, and I crossed the room and extended my hands toward the heat.
“It appears the innkeeper is not on the list of establishments that carry her ladyship’s whisky,” he commented with a gesture to the bottle of wine and two glasses that sat on the table near the hearth.
“You will have to remind Munro,” I replied as he went to the table, removed the cork from the bottle, and poured two glasses.
The wine completed what the fire had started, my hands soon warm along with the rest of me.
“Bordeaux,” I commented, and at the look from Brodie where he sat across the table added, “The wine.”
“Ah, ye know about such things.”
“From afternoons when I managed to escape from the school Linnie and I attended in Paris.” I took another sip of wine and smiled. “And then there was her determination to visit every gallery in Paris. I was certain that if I had to tour one more museum or art gallery, that I would surely die of boredom.”
“Yer misspent youth,” he drily commented.
By no means compared to his life on the streets of Edinburgh, but I supposed that was where my adventures first began.
There was a knock on the door. The man at the front desk had arrived with our supper balanced on a tray with a tureen, bowls, and a long twist of bread on a plate.
The boy had accompanied him. He flirted outrageously as he set a second bottle of wine on the table, then expertly opened it.
Everyone in France, it seemed, drank wine, and I had to laugh at that typically French habit and in one so young. Brodie provided father and son each a coin.
The boy thanked Brodie, then turned to me and bowed from the waist.
“Enchantée, madame.”
When I would have translated after they left, Brodie nodded as he poured more wine.
“Ye seem to have that effect on most men and boys ye encounter.”
And one particular man? I did wonder. Were there still feelings there? Was there a way around the angry words, and pain?
The supper was a typical French stew with meat and vegetables in a rich wine sauce, fresh-baked bread that Brodie sliced, and that second bottle of wine.
The hot food drove away the last of the chill from the ride from the Port of Calais, while the wine created a faint glow around everything in the room—including the man who sat across from me with that overlong mane of dark hair. My fingers curled into the palm of my hand.
I pushed back memories as I emptied the last of the wine from my glass, then rose from the table and went to the bed that was only slightly larger than the one at the inn in Norfolk.
I unfastened the button at the waist of my skirt then stepped out of it, then unbuttoned my shirtwaist and shivered in the colder air at the edge of the room, dressed now only in my camisole and long slip. I quickly slipped under the covers on the bed.
He placed more wood on the fire, then returned to the table and emptied the bottle into his glass, legs stretched before him, boots crossed at the ankles as he slowly sipped the wine. And that dark gaze met mine from across the room.
“Why didn’t you refuse to be part of the case?”
“I could have. But I wanted to be done with the agreement I made with Sir Avery.”
“Aye, the agreement.”
I knew his feelings toward Sir Avery. After the case that had taken us both to Edinburgh, he didn’t trust him.
“You could have refused as well.”
“No,” he replied, staring into his glass as he swirled the wine as I had seen him do countless times with a dram of whisky. As if he might find answers there.
“That wasna possible,” Brodie replied, that thick Scots accent wrapping around the words.
