Page 99 of Give Him a Chance

Another detail he was letting let slip? Cousins wrote to one another, didn’t they? But did Hovell want him to think something else? Did he want him to surmise that…

“You’ve seen her,” he exhaled.

Hovell flashed a smile. “Yes.”

“Yes?” Bernard could not believe it. How long was Hovell going to keep this charade up?

He thought back to his own actions. He had been most clear in his note to Hovell. He had become entangled with Lucy, it had all gone to hell, and he was going to leave to protect her. They could meet in London.

He hadn’t written the note to send the man directly to her! So…what manwouldgo see her in the midst of more important business? Other than someone who cared for her, a family member?

Did Lucy know? Had she known the whole time?

“You saw her—you have seen her?” Bernard found himself repeating.

Hovell rolled his eyes as though he were tired of the whole thing—another mannerism he had not seen in the man before. “Yes, I saw her yesterday.”

“Yesterday,” whispered Bernard, glancing down at his hands as though astonished to find them on the ends of his arms.

Yesterday. Hovell had been with Lucy yesterday.

He glanced up quickly. “Was she well?”

“She was weeping,” Hovell said quietly.

Bernard’s jaw tightened.Oh, dear God, I will never forgive myself. All he had done to serve his country, all that was wiped out in comparison to the pain he had given an innocent woman.

Well. His loins stirred as he thought back to a few evenings in particular. Notentirelyinnocent.

“She was…miffed, I think would be the correct word,” Hovell said slowly. “Devastatedmight be another word. Angry at you, angry at herself—”

“And she told you this?” Bernard struggled to believe that Lucy would pour out all her feelings to a stranger. Buthestruggled to believe his handler had been a Chance this whole time. How many names had she listed? Cousin after cousin after cousin—he still had no idea which one his handler could be.

The thought of Lucy crying over him, though was an unpleasant piece of information, and it had him shifting in his armchair. He couldn’t live without Lucy, but she had been the one to order him to go, hadn’t she?

He was hardly going to force himself where he was not welcome.

Hovell smiled. “Lucy is not a difficult woman to read.”

It was the man’s arched brow that prompted the ire, and before Bernard knew what he was doing, even in spite of his own theory about Chance cousins, he’d snapped, “LadyLucy!”

“I have never called her by that title,” Hovell said smoothly, “and I’m not about to do that now. She wants you back, Moray.”

Bernard blinked.

“She wants you back,” repeated his guest, his words slower this time, as though it would help him understand better. “Did you not hear me, you cretin? Lucy wants you back.”

“She regrets it, but she’ll soon regret having me back,” Bernard said darkly. “The woman is a saint, but she cannot live with a man she does not know.”

Nor a man who would not allow anyone to know him.

Oh, Bernard was no fool. This was mostly his fault, he knew. Perhaps he should never have told her he was a spy, perhaps that was the moment that the distrust had slipped in. The revelation had been made to grow her trust, but all it had done was reveal how well he could lie.

And if he could lie aboutthat, well…

“I am no expert in the ways of love, you understand, never having been foolish enough to have encountered it,” Hovell said with a amused shake of his head. “But I know Lucy. She cares for you, Moray. She cares for you deeply. If the two of you were only to talk—”

That was when Bernard noticed it.