“You do not wish to dine with the count, Major?” a soft voice asked, interrupting his thoughts. The maid Clara sat in the far corner of the room, so quiet he had forgotten her. “The food is good,” she went on.
Jamie forced a smile. “The food is excellent.”
“You do not like the talk, cunning—sly like, um, foxes, I think?” she went on.
Jamie gasped back a laugh and looked more sharply at her. “You don’t miss much, do you?” he laughed.
Clara shrugged. “I serve. I see things.”
“No, I don’t like the ‘cunning,’ but it is wolves that I dislike, not foxes.” Jamie could feel the truth closing in on him, coming closer every day. He could feel Wentworth and Filiberto circling him, like wolves, a hungry pack looking for weakness to feed their own hunger for power.
“Yes,” the girl said knowingly. “Beware of the teeth, Major.” She blushed at her own boldness and scurried down the hall.
The odd conversation haunted Jamie on the long walk home. He strode down the gently sloping road past the Villa Borghese. He walked without seeing the massive carved gates, without hearing the songs of birds that nested in its massive park.
If a serving maid could see through him, he thought, Wentworth had no trouble. Every day he didn’t confess to Nora, he dug his grave more deeply. He no longer doubted that she loved him, but his secrets could destroy that. Delay wouldn’t make the inevitable any easier.Better she hear it from me than Wentworth. Worse,he thought, what if she heard it from Filiberto?
He paused in the Piazza Barberini where the afternoon sun glinted off the water-drenched shells of the Triton fountain, casting apricot highlights on the baroque façades around the square.Rome, Jamie thought, turning his face to the sun,has become home, and my secrets threaten to snatch away the first home I’ve known in decades. He wanted to howl like an abandoned dog.
He had finally come to believe he should tell her everything. Perhaps what they had built was enough to hold their marriage together. The closer he got to home, the more he hoped he could put it off a few dayslonger.
Wat met him at the door with little formality and a worried expression.
“You have visitors. We put them in yon drawing room,” he said, nodding in that direction. “Come from Wentworth looking for some baron.”
Some baron.Jamie felt the jaws of death closing in. He walked with the stiff gait of a man going to the scaffold, but he struggled not to give up hope prematurely.Perhaps my visitors are seeking some other English expatriate.
One look at Nora’s distressed face put that thought to flight. One look at the man next to her finished it.Too late to tell her now.Hope died.
“Jamie! Thank goodness you’re here,”Nora exclaimed. She clutched a cream-colored calling card so hard she bent it. “The Duke of Sudbury,” it said. Nora had no idea what to say to a duke. She could only hope Jamie did.
Jamie ignored her greeting. He glared at the man sitting beside her who had introduced himself as Mr. Andrew Mallet. He had the look of a bespectacled scholar and a kindly manner that almost put her at her ease. His badly scarred face spoke of a past beyond scholarship, however.
“Hello, Jamie,” Mallet said.
Jamie stood frozen in place.
“You know this person?” Nora gasped. “Do you know the baron they are seeking?” She looked in confusion between Jamie and the man to her side.
“You’ve led us a merry dance, my friend. You led us here,” Mallet said.
Friend?Nora searched Jamie’s eyes. He looked directly at the man, but a veil of bleak regret clouded his expression.
“Yes, Heyworth, you have indeed led us a merry dance and I, for one, am ready for this charade to be over,” the other man, the one she understood to be a duke, said.
Nora’s breath caught in her throat. The tall man called Jamie “Heyworth,” the name of the man they sought.
Jamie jerked to look at the duke who stood at ease behind his left shoulder lit by sun from the courtyard.
Nothing in Nora’s experience prepared her for such a creature’s presence in her drawing room. His gold brocade waistcoat and priceless lace gave him aristocratic elegance that surpassed what she thought she had gotten used to at the count’s dinner table. His white blond hair and ice blue eyes gave him an otherworldly air that unnerved her. Jamie, she could see, had no such difficulty with the man.
“Hello, Richard,” Jamie rasped. “Wentworth sent you, I presume.”
“He was of some assistance,” the duke said.
“Shall I make you known to my wife?”
“We’ve made our introductions,” the duke said. “I wonder if we ought to introduce you to your own wife instead.”
