Page 70

Breathing heavily, he kissed the corner of her mouth and nodded.

The road north, the horses at a canter, the creak of the springs and the wheels on the packed earth—the carriage rocked them, a rhythm out of their hands.

He held still beneath her. His hands warm at her hips, steadying. His breathing audible, careful, timing his breaths because she had asked him to.

She could feel his heart beating against her cheek. She could feel him inside her, filling her, and she held him with her whole body—arms around his shoulders, thighs against his hips, her face pressed to his neck—and she breathed him in and held on.

The countryside moved past the windows, leaving behind de Brissac's voice, enormous and warm and delivering the impossible news. The hill. Napoleon's headquarters. Racing toward Brussels. Lady Isabelle Vane. The Richmond Ball. The method that had been arranged.

Your father has asked nothing of you until now.

She held on. The carriage lurched. Another jolt sent him against the place inside her that made her breath catch. Louise's fingers dug into his shoulders. Rodrick's hands tightened but remained where they were. He did not thrust. He simply held her while the road did what roads always did and carried people somewhere else.

The pleasure sharpened.

Louise shook her head as though she could refuse it. But the muscles low in her belly contracted, and her body built the wave without asking her permission, warmth spreading outward from where they were joined. The climax tore through her with enough force to bow her spine. Her thighs locked around Rodrick, inner muscles pulsing around him.

He groaned. She felt him tense beneath her, and then he lifted her and spent into his handkerchief with his face pressed to her shoulder.

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

Louise folded herself around him again before the space between their bodies could become complete. She buried her face in his neck and pressed her lips against the pulse beating there.

"I wish nothing had to change between us," she whispered.

She had stopped crying approximately forty minutes outside Charleroi. Rodrick had felt each tear land in his chest like a coal. She was asleep now, her head in his lap, her black hair loose across his thigh.

Rodrick looked through the carriage window at the country unrolling beside them—shallow valleys folding into one another, fields of rye and wheat climbing toward every rise.

Another pleasant stretch of countryside fit for butchery, and entirely indifferent to the fact that the woman in his lap had been scheduled to meet her father tomorrow and was instead racing north to Brussels for Talleyrand.

Couldn't the bastard have waited one night? One night and she would have stood in front of Napoleon Bonaparte and been known by him.

Louise's coat lay beside them. The corner of Talleyrand's letter stuck out of the inner pocket. Talleyrand had made her cry with that piece of paper. He could read it. Rodrick had removed documents from diplomats while they were awake and later convinced them they had misplaced them themselves. Acquiring one folded sheet from an exhausted ballerina would scarcely qualify as theft.

Then he would know why the words had put that shadow beneath her eyes, what new burden she had been asked to carry without complaint.

Yet his hand remained where it was. When, exactly, had he acquired a conscience? Damned inconvenient organ.

I would rather she told me.

Rodrick's jaw tightened. Not because the information would help him. Not because her orders might alter his own. He wanted her to tell him because she trusted him enough to.

He turned toward the window and watched the road unwind beneath the carriage. Apparently he had been in France long enough to develop revolutionary ideas.

His own letter remained inside his coat. That, at least, required no moral crisis. He reached into the breast pocket, careful not to wake Louise, and drew out the folded sheet.

De Montfort,

The man you seek has been in Brussels for three weeks. He will attend the Duchess of Richmond's ball on the 15th of June. You cannot miss him there.

Your sister can rest.

Charlotte's face came to Rodrick as she had been before everything: laughing across a breakfast table, one hand protecting a plate of figs from her twin brother.

After twenty years, Rodrick would get Montmorency at last. Purpose settled through him with the cold precision of a blade entering a sheath.

Then Rodrick reached the final paragraph.