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Phipps leaped backward. “Bless my soul, she’s still alive!” he yelped.
“Not for long,” said Ian harshly. “There’s no help for a knife in the chest.”
“Wallace will attend to Madame Martand,” Stafford said. “Phipps… Send for Lord Sidmouth.”
Selwyn started arguing again in a low, frantic tone. Ian bent over Angelique and gathered her into his arms as gently as he would a newborn lamb, folding her cloak around her. She cried out as he moved her, breathing loud and hard. Ian flinched, but didn’t pause. “A few more minutes,” he murmured, then got to his feet, shifting her weight easily in his arms. “Hold the door, Phipps.”
“Oh, really,” snapped Phipps.
“Hold the door, or I’ll be coming back for you,” said Ian in a deadly voice. “The knife’s already soiled.”
The door creaked open, then Ian was walking. Out of the room. Down the stairs. Through the barren corridor that led to the back entry. Now in the alley, being bundled into a carriage. Angelique’s heart battered against her ribs, wheezing and coughing on every breath. She was out of Bow Street. A clink of coins, and the carriage dipped as Ian climbed in beside her and cradled her in his arm once more.
“Easy there, just a moment,” he whispered, reaching out to snap the curtains closed as the carriage rocked, then lurched into motion. Angelique let her head rest against Ian’s arm, and breathed a sigh—of gladness, of sadness, of relief.
It was done.
Epilogue
Three weeks later
* * *
“So this is Scotland.”
“Aye.” Ian’s voice was quiet with pride and wistfulness. Only a thin line of what should have been a glorious sunset was visible, a stripe of bright orange along the distant horizon. Thick gray clouds had begun rolling across the sky almost as soon as they set out that morning, and when Ian had pointed in the direction of Edinburgh, it had been nothing but an indistinct smudge in the distance. Wispy fog curled around their feet now as if to shroud even the streets of Leith from their view.
Behind Angelique, Lisette sniffed loudly into her handkerchief. “Damp,” she muttered.
Ian grinned. “Aye, but beautifully so.”
“Damp and dark” was her retort. Lisette had found fault with everything since they left London, from the food to the weather to the way Ian loaded their trunks into the coach. The complaints were her way of dealing with the upheaval in her life, and in that vein Angelique could take them with a measure of amusement.
Angelique said nothing now, just closed her eyes and filled her lungs with salty sea air. She could hear the water lapping at the docks and the creak of wood against wood as ships rocked themselves to sleep in the muffling fog. She liked Scotland. It was cold and damp and even dark, but she liked the mystical quiet of the place. Or maybe it was just this moment, so still and yet so taut. The end, and the beginning, of everything for her.
“A farthing for your thoughts,” Ian said beside her.
She smiled. “You overpay. I was not thinking anything, merely feeling.”
He cleared his throat. “Not regret, I hope. It’s not too late to change your mind.”
“It is. But my mind has not changed,” she whispered.
The port was a forest of masts, creaking as they swayed ever so slightly, as if in a breeze. Men scurried along the decks and cross spars, small agile figures hopping along like birds. Skiffs slithered across the water around the hulls, in some cases visible through the fog only by the winking lanterns in their sterns.
“Good.” Ian rocked on his heels for a moment. “If I ever disappointed you, or led you to believe…” His stumbling, muttered words trailed off as she looked at him in expectation.
“You wish to apologize for flirting with me?” she asked after a moment of silence.
“Yes!” The word burst out with obvious relief. “I never meant to let you think…or to suggest… That is, I’ve always held you in the greatest respect…”
She smiled. Ian was lying; he had gone too far for her to think he never meant a word of his flirting. Strangely, she did believe he had never been truly interested in her, and she wondered what game he’d been playing. But now it no longer mattered. “You flirted with me as I flirted with you. Neither was serious, and neither, I think, is hurt.”
He tilted back his face to the evening sky and heaved a deep sigh. “Thanks be to all the saints,” he said fervently. “I didn’t look forward to apologizing in front of him.”
Angelique raised one eyebrow. “You fear someone more than me?”
He grinned at her, cocky again. “Not a bit, lass. But I always knew if I crossed you too far, I’d never see retribution coming. I’d just wake up dead, and that would be that.”
