“Kindly meet us in the foyer, Capello,” Nora said. “You should not be out without escort. You can return with us.” As a dismissal, the words were kindly but effective. The woman left.
Jamie picked up Isabella. “Come, princess,” he said, “We’ll leave your court to the nursery. Perhaps they belong here?” He winked at the little girl, and she giggled.
Eduardo, Nora saw, bristled, but Luciano smiled at the joke. Giovanni had risen and joined them.
“Perhaps we do,” Giovanni said, peering at the ornate ceiling and the row of desks. “It is a good enough place to study.”
“Gentlemen, my wife and I are for home. I’ll see you all at eleven tomorrow, no?” With a nod he offered Nora an arm, and they left.
Nora burned to ask him about the message in his waistcoat, but by the time their escort walked them home, Jamie engaged Isabella in a game of hide and seek involving her favorite dolls, and Nora readthe girl a story, thoughts about messages moved to the back of her mind.
Her husband reached for her the moment she entered their sitting room. He pulled her through his dressing room to his bed, and she forgot about the message entirely.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Jamie looked over his meager selection of shirts in the dim confines of his dressing room. His wardrobe had grown five times over, but it still looked scant hanging in one corner of the rack.The whole dressing room feels larger than the hole I lived in until the wedding, until Nora.
Jamie moved catlike around the room, grabbed a shirt at random, and slipped it on silently. Every cell in his body stood at alert, aware of the woman sleeping in the next room. He had an appointment to keep and couldn’t think about her warm body nestled in his bed.
It didn’t matter what he wore. “The Boys,” as he had come to think of them, would look down on whatever he wore. Wentworth—whose message forced him to rise so early—noticed. He, however, had long ago cataloged Jamie’s every detail.
He reached for a jacket and finished dressing in solitude. Madame Capello found his lack of a valet demeaning. He found her snobbery irritating. They were even.
He had dressed himself since his father dismissed the footman assigned to dress him when he was thirteen “to save blunt.” Occasionally, one of his friends would assign a servant to him during a house party, but he always declined. He needed no snooty servant to dress him now.
His face in the mirror, soured by thoughts of Wentworth, stared back with a caustic look. He wanted to get to the English spymaster early and get it over with. A sour taste tainted his mouth.Maybetoday I can report enough information to make the persistent muckworm back off,he thought.
He reached for the door to his bedroom and paused. Gentlemen of his acquaintance would go the other way, through the sitting room, to spare the lady. His mouth twisted in a wry smile. He knew it wasn’t gentlemanly, but he couldn’t resist one last look at his wife.
The door opened silently on well-oiled hinges. He padded, boots in hand, into his bedroom. Nora lay curled in the center, a tiny presence in the immense four-poster. Her hair feathered across his pillow and hers. She had rolled over to reach for him after he got up. His blood surged at the thought. He moved closer to the bed.
Sleep erased care and stress from his Nora, sleep and good loving, leaving only peace and contentment. His hand went out to touch her, but he pulled it back, remembering his good intentions to let her sleep. He began to step away.
“Jamie?” Nora’s voice, thick with sleep, stopped him in his tracks. “I thought you had gone.”
“Just leaving. Go back to sleep.”
She rose up on her elbows to blink at him. “You’re dressed.”
“So I am. Go back to sleep,” he repeated.
With a deep breath, she sat up, remembering to pull the sheets up to cover her nakedness, to his regret. She peered at him under sleepy eyelids.
“You’re carrying your boots,” she said.
He looked down as if surprised to find them in his hand. “So I was. I didn’t want to wake you.”
“Come back to bed.”
Every fiber in Jamie’s body longed to accept her invitation. Some parts leapt to accept on their own. It took all his waning strength to sit in a chair by the door instead. He began putting on his boots.
“I can’t,” he said. “I have to go.”
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Late,” he said.
She looked at the mantel clock Robert Beaumont had installed inthe bedroom. His brother-in-law must have been a punctual man. “More like early,” she said. “It is only half gone eight o’clock.”
