Page 57

Louise slept like the dead. This struck Rodrick as either proof of remarkable resilience or a personal insult. She had curled into him sometime after exhaustion claimed her, one arm flung across his ribs, her face pressed beneath his chin. One knee had worked between his legs with the stubborn efficiency she applied to most matters, and every attempt Rodrick made to reclaim an inch of mattress resulted in Louise following him across it in an imperturbable slumber.

Awake, she told him nothing between them had changed. Her unconscious self had apparently not received the memorandum.

Rodrick stared into the darkness above the bed. While his bedfellow seemed to have sleep to spare, he had none.

The farmhouse had settled around them. Floorboards creaked when someone crossed the passage below. A horse stamped in the yard, followed by the faint clink of a bit. Farther off, men called to one another around the bivouac fires, their voices carrying through the open window and thinning into the summer night.

Louise breathed against his chest, and he felt each exhalation through his skin. It was best that their relationship remain unchanged. Every mile north shortened what remained between this bed and the battlefield. Tomorrow they would cross the Sambre. After that came roads choked with scouts, cannon, orders delivered too late, bridges taken or lost, villages changing hands before breakfast. Wellington somewhere ahead. Blücher somewhere east. Napoleon moving between them with an army that believed speed could bend arithmetic.

And Louise riding toward all of it. Rodrick's arm tightened around her. Death presented the simplest difficulty. If they were killed, they would be separated, because he suffered from no delusion that his soul was destined for the same accommodations as hers. Survival was scarcely more promising. If Bonaparte won, Louise would reach her father. Perhaps he would acknowledge her publicly. Make her a princess, or something close enough that half the courts of Europe would begin calculating the diplomatic value of her hand before the ink dried on the proclamation.

If Bonaparte lost, matters became less ceremonial and considerably more dangerous. Louise would become the daughter of a fallen emperor at precisely the moment Europe rediscovered its enthusiasm for punishing anyone unfortunate enough to share his blood. She might be hidden, exiled, hunted, smuggled across borders under yet another name while ministers debated whether she constituted a threat, an embarrassment, or a useful hostage.

And Rodrick would still find Montmorency.

Separated yet again.

His chest constricted, and how could it not? Being doomed by fate was irresistible kindling for the tragic hero Louise had somehow awakened inside him—mid-coitus, because even his emotional revelations required appalling timing—and the bastard had already begun warming his hands over the flames.

Rodrick closed his eyes and ordered him back into whatever neglected corner of his soul had housed him for the past fifteen years. Surely the fellow could now have the decency to shut up and let him sleep.

A scratch sounded at the door.

James.

Rodrick needed to get up. The problem was how a tragic hero was meant to extricate himself from an unconscious heroine when the heroine had apparently annexed most of his body. The arm across his ribs seemed the most sensible place to begin. Rodrick lifted Louise's wrist and transferred it carefully to the mattress. She frowned in her sleep.

For several seconds he watched her face, holding his breath like a burglar who had disturbed the household dog. Her lashes remained still against her cheeks.

Good. One limb liberated. At this rate, he might reach the door by noon. He shifted his shoulder. Louise immediately turned toward him and put the arm back. He tried again, this time replacing his body with a pillow. Louise mumbled at the substitution and followed him another six inches across the bed.

The knock came again.

Rodrick leaned toward Louise's ear. "Traitor."

Her hand loosened. Rodrick tucked it beneath the blanket, drew the cover over her shoulder, and stood beside the bed for several seconds longer than necessary.

By the time Rodrick opened the door, his shirt was fastened well enough to satisfy civilization's minimum requirements.

James stood in the passage with Rodrick's coat over one arm. His gaze slipped past him toward the bed, where Louise slept within view, black hair spilled across the pillow and one bare shoulder above the blanket.

James lowered his eyes to his boots.

Rodrick took the coat. Silence, he reflected, was the most vicious form of English insolence.

"Whatever expression you are not wearing, James, remove it."

James inclined his head. Rodrick disliked him intensely.

They left the farmhouse by the kitchen door and crossed into the orchard. The night smelled of grass, apples not yet ripe, and the smoke of a hundred fires burning beyond the hedges. Men slept wherever ground permitted, wrapped in cloaks beside saddles or beneath carts.

Rodrick walked between the trees until they were out of earshot. "Well?"

"Captain Reventlow has received your message."

Rodrick's mind settled immediately into familiar channels. Blessed logistics. "Conrad is waiting?"

"At the coast. The Freja can sail as soon as the Count of Wagram arrives."