Her face was luminous and suddenly his eyes burned, too.
“And I love you,” she whispered.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Aurelie,” he said softly, “I fear we must discuss the inevitable encroachment of reality. We can’t abuse Mr. Bellingham’s unwitting hospitality forever. I can’t make a habit of that sort of thing. Wandering—or staggering—into places, setting up housekeeping. Like that.”
“Very well.” She propped on her elbows to look down on him.
“I must return to London as soon as possible.”
She smiled, but her smile faded as she noted how serious his expression had become. “I will go with you, of course.”
It sounded like a question, and his heart squeezed.Forever and always, you will go with me everywhere,he wanted to say. Though given the current outrageous uncertainty of his life, he wasn’t certain he had the right to assume it. Or to ask it of her.
But he needed to tell her the whole truth. He loathed introducing it into their idyll, but drama, violence, and tragedy were indirectly why they were lying naked in each other’s arms at the moment. There was no one without the other, currently. And while she might try to be an optimist, neither one of them were fantasists.
He mustered nerve and considered how to begin.
“Christian?” she said softly, worried now.
“Before you decide to . . . align your fate with mine,Aurelie . . . I need to tell you something important. Three years ago, I believe Brundage arranged for my arrest and capture because he realized I suspected him of selling secrets to the French and I was close to proving it.”
She exhaled in shock. “Oh my God! Was he? Is he? Christian!”
“Yes. I’m afraid he did. I’m certain of it,” he said tersely. “But if not for you, Aurelie... well, when you ran away, he found himself in quite a bind, because the necklace he gave to you had been loaned to him by a French family who lost most of their fortune in the Revolution—he hadn’t yet purchased it. He faced the kind of scandal that could cost him the ambassadorship to France. He must have weighed his options and decided there was nothing I could prove about him now that the war was over. And that perhaps if he paid me enough, I wouldn’t bother to try. Or that I’d lost my taste for vengeance, or curiosity, in prison. But he also knew I was the only man who could possibly find you.” He smiled faintly. “He was right about one of those things.”
She was silent and tense, taking this in warily. She sensed, rightly, that he hadn’t yet come to the worst part of the story.
“Thanks to you, Aurelie, and as fate would have it... I am, in fact, once again close to proving he committed treason. He learned of this, and so he hired an assassin to attempt to dispatch me with a knife. Which is, of course, how you and I met.”
Before his eyes her lovely face went cold and astounded and blackly furious. “How... how... bloody...dare... he try to kill you.”
He could imagine her ancestors ordering beheadings. He gazed upon that expression, impressed and very proud.
“The cheek of him, right?” he said with a certain black irony.
She gave him that fierce expression, and then she covered her face with her hands.
“Oh, no... Christian. The necklace... did Istealit?”
He knew that necklace constituted the whole of her current financial worth.
“We will return it to its owners,” he said calmly. “And all will be well.”
It was a bold claim. But it wasn’t as though he hadn’t fought his way out of blind alleys before. If The Grand Palace on the Thames could have a secret smuggler’s tunnel, surely so could their lives. He would find it. With Aurelie in his arms, it was easier to believe in miracles, because she was a benediction.
“So here is the thing, Aurelie. Returning to London together may be a bit of a risk, because Brundage managed to get a warrant seeking my arrest for kidnapping you and stealing the necklace. While you were traveling to this cottage, soldiers descended upon The Grand Palace on the Thames looking for me—Captain Hardy helped me escape. I’m certain Hardy made short work of them, and Hardy and Bolt are helping me to prove the case against Brundage. But soldiers may even now be looking for us on roads all over England.”
Her eyes went wide and astounded.
She tipped over stiffly and lay on her back again staring up at the ceiling.
He held his breath, praying.
She turned toward him again and propped herself up to look down at him.
“I am just so terribly sorry,” she said, “that this bad man has been a part of our story.”
