Was it rage? Was he the spy? Pain and fear pummeled Rose with equal measure. Brutal irony struck at her soul as she realized that the very man who’d finally made her feel something might also be the one who actually was trying to kill her.
Slowly, carefully, she adjusted her head back, her heart aching with terrified pressure. She could sense Thorfinn’s intensity as he fingered the key. Flipping it over, he rubbed one of the deep scratches near the teeth.
When Thorfinn’s left eye lifted toward her face, Rose saw pained confusion, not murderous fury.
“Where did you get this?” His voice sounded as if it had been broken and then pressed back together.
“I, well, I ...” Rose’s entire body trembled.
“It was my brother’s. Did you find it in his old room? Why do you wear it around your neck?”
Everything inside her froze now. “Viscount Barbury wasyoursibling?”
Thorfinn’s expression shuttered as every muscle in his face seemed to contract. She’d seen that expression before during her first dinner with his family when she’d mentioned the earl and the viscount.
Thorfinn dropped the key and glanced away from her. “Not acknowledged.”
Thorfinn was Mar’s illegitimate son. The revelation blasted through Rose. Was this the secret he’d been hiding, or was there more? A lethal more? Had his abandonment by his noble family made him hate the British ruling class enough to spy for Germany?
Shit.Where had Rose put her reticule, which she’d retrieved from Fornhowe? She should be reaching for her gun, not sitting here inThe Briarlike a silly, frightened, brokenhearted maid.
“Were you close to Barbury?” Rose tentatively grabbed Thorfinn’s shoulder, needing to see his face even as she searched for her purse with her other hand. Could Thorfinn actually be thehimBarbury had mentioned? Or did Thorfinn know about the key only because he’d spied on the very family who’d rejected him? Her stomach roiled, but she forced it to settle. She had not flinched under shellfire, and she wouldnotnow, no matter how torn apart her innards.
“I do not talk about my connections to the earl and Muckle Skaill.” Thorfinn still did not raise his head, but she could hear the scrape of teeth against teeth as he tightened his jaw even more.
“Please.” Life with her parents had taught Rose to demand, not to ask and hope for a response, but she was pleading now. “Please, Thorfinn. This is important. Vitally important.”
Thorfinn’s head snapped back up—this time his expression had turned suspicious, fierce even. Fear serrated her, and she surreptitiouslyrenewed her search for her revolver. Had she shown her hand by pushing too hard to confirm that he wasn’t a German agent? Was her heart overriding her head?
“Why is my relationship with my brother so crucial?” Thorfinn demanded.
“It just ... is?” she offered weakly.
His left eye narrowed. “Did you know Reggie?”
Reggie—not Viscount Barbury or even Reginald but Reggie.That implied some sort of comradery, some sort of intimacy ... did it not? Or was she simply a fool grasping at any explanation that did not make her intended lover a villain?
“Rose, you would have had entrance to the same vaunted circles as Reggie before the war. I remember my brother telling me about attending races at Brooklands and lavish parties on the French Riviera. He said the lasses there were ...”
Thorfinn’s left eye grew so wide it would have been comical under any other circumstances. He choked off his sentence. Horror and embarrassment flashed across his face. “You weren’t ... I mean, were you ... did you and Reggie ... well ...”
“Were we lovers?” Rose forced her facial muscles to remain in a neutral, emotionless position, but a trickle of relief had finally started to flow through her. Thorfinn’s questions were not those that a spy would ask but those of a brother horrified that he was dallying with his sibling’s gal. And if Thorfinn andReggiehad indeed been friends, there was a good chance that Thorfinnwasthehimthe viscount had told her to find. If she were dying and had to name someone to help unravel a spy ring, she could not select anyone more stalwart.
Thorfinn made an incoherent sound. Rose took that to mean yes.
“I promise I’ll answer that question and explain everything, but first you must address mine.” She was shaking now—not from fear but from the rebirth of a faith she hadn’t known that she’d had.
Thorfinn looked torn, but she could see his curiosity winning out. “What do you wish to know, lass?”
“Just the nature of your relationship with Viscount Barbury. Were you chums?” Her words were as rushed as the emotions sweeping through her.
Thorfinn slumped against the leather seat ofThe Briar, and the pain that he’d been hiding became brutally apparent. “Aye. Very good ones—at least until I ordered Reggie to stop dallying with Astrid when I found him kissing her. We both knew that he’d never marry a lass from the isles. Things just grew worse between us when I refused to be Reggie’s batman. He took it personally, as if I were questioning not just the validity of his cause but his own sense of honor. But I couldn’t leave the children and my stepda to starve. After Reggie and I argued, he got drunk and told all of Kirkwall and Frest that I was a coward. It was the last I ever saw of him. He came to the island once after he was captured and had escaped from the Germans, but he didn’t try to contact me. Astrid thinks that Reggie may have felt too guilty to see me after the destruction he’d done to my reputation. Reggie was never one for admitting fault. It was as if he thought that if he admitted any flaw, it would conquer him and he’d be lost to failure. He stayed sequestered in Muckle Skaill. Then he returned to the Front and died there.”
Rose longed to reach for Thorfinn—to soothe him, to try to take away some of the rawness, to tell him that Barbury had beenwrong. Thorfinn’s words shook her perception of the viscount ... but they brought stunning clarity to her conversation with Thorfinn under the northern lights. No wonder he felt such shame over not fighting. Barbury had been inexcusably cruel to spread lies about his half brother, but could his perfidy have pushed Thorfinn into spying? Rose doubted it, but she had to know for certain. Too much depended on her being right about whom she could trust.
“What do you know about this key?” Rose held it up. Although it was tarnished and scarred in more than one place, it still managedto catch the faint light. Just for a moment. But it was enough for one wink.
Thorfinn glanced back at the key, and a faraway mist clouded his gaze. He reached into his shirt and withdrew an identical one. “It was our secret, Reggie’s and mine.”
