The Secret History of the Pink Carnation Read online

  ‘The ones he keeps under his pillow?’ Geoff asked, diverted. ‘How such an accomplished agent chooses the most idiotic hiding places…’

  ‘Shocking, isn’t it?’ Richard agreed heartily, seizing the change of subject and making a rapid dash towards the door before Geoff could remember his initial purpose. ‘The desk drawer in his office and under his pillow. It takes all the challenge out of it. Well, I’m going to go change. I’ll meet you back here by ten or so.’

  ‘Anything else you need me to do?’ Geoff asked.

  ‘Just dissuade my mother if she has any ideas of coming along tonight. Other than that, I can’t think of anything that could go wrong,’ Richard said breezily, and exited to undertake the calming, and familiar, task of burgling Delaroche’s lodgings. He glanced at the clock: just past seven thirty. He could easily be there within the next half an hour and back by ten.

  By eight o’clock, Delaroche’s empty lodgings had become an unexpectedly lively place.

  Perched with one leg on the lintel of Delaroche’s windowsill, Richard froze at the sound of a door being eased open. Trying to ignore the discomfort in his leg muscles (after all, it wasn’t the most convenient of poses), Richard watched as the wood swung open in a slow semicircle and a dark-clad frame slid into the small room.

  Delaroche? No. The figure, even if somewhat hard to make out in the dark room, was clearly too small to be Delaroche, weedy little man though the Frenchman was. Besides, why would Delaroche be slinking around his own bedroom? The man was odd, and probably mildly mad, but Richard still couldn’t see him prowling around his own darkened room for fun. He preferred to prowl around other people’s darkened rooms for amusement, a pastime Richard had to admit he rather sympathised with.

  The small figure stole towards the bed, hips swaying. Hips doing what? Something about the way the prowler was moving nagged at Richard’s memory. Heedless of caution, Richard leant sharply forward. Intent on tiptoeing, the intruder didn’t notice. The very female intruder. The…good God, it was Amy. No wonder that backside looked familiar. He’d certainly spent enough time staring at it over the last few weeks.

  The intruder was Amy.

  Devil take it, what was Amy doing in Delaroche’s bedchamber?

  Amy swerved at the sound of the window sash being raised behind her – and tripped over a leather bed slipper that Delaroche had inconsiderately left lying on the floor beside his bed. She hit the dusty ground with an ooof that obscured the sound of the first footfall, picking herself up off the floor just in time to see a second booted leg join the first. Her gaze travelled up from the scuffed black boots…to the hem of a black cape swinging in dark folds against the boot calves. Oh no.

  Amy’s hands went cold.

  In fact, her entire body must have turned to ice, because she stayed frozen in her half crouch, one hand still touching the dusty floorboards. Her horrified eyes strayed upwards, over a pair of tightly fitted black breeches, black gloved hands loosely resting on the windowsill…

  It wasn’t fair. What was he doing here, now, when she was so close to taking her well-deserved revenge? Why couldn’t he have put in an appearance at tea yesterday, or Mme Bonaparte’s salon the day before? Why plague her now? Amy’s whole body began to shake as she took in the lean line of his throat, the familiar angles of his face under the shadowy circle of his hood. She would not fling herself into his arms. It had been a very bad habit, and, besides, he clearly didn’t want her in them anyway. All that was over, over, over. But why did he still have the power to reduce her to an emotional blob of jelly? It was worse than unfair; it was wrong.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded, brushing her dusty hands against her knees. With his back to the window, blocking what little moonlight there was, it was all she could do to make out his face, let alone any expression.

  ‘I might ask the same of you,’ retorted the Gentian, stepping away from the window in a swirl of black fabric.

  Amy automatically took a step back towards the bed, as if putting a few more inches of distance between them would dull the impact of his presence. It didn’t. She still felt his nearness along every inch of skin, raising goose bumps under the coarse linen of her shirt, prickling along the roots of her hair. Amy’s fingers tingled. Hoping it would drive the tingles away, she balled her hands into fists. The tingles spread into her palms.

  The Gentian shook his hooded head. In a voice warm with amusement, he said, ‘You don’t give up easily, do you?’

  Amy’s chest constricted with the injustice of it. So it wasn’t enough to repudiate her? He had to laugh at her, too.

  ‘Not on the things that matter,’ she bit out.

  ‘I take it you weren’t just out for an evening stroll?’

  Amy felt the card containing the Pink Carnation’s note to Delaroche stiff in her pocket. Whatever happened, it was imperative, absolutely imperative, he did not discover the existence of the Pink Carnation. Amy clung to that one thought in a mind rapidly turning to mush as Richard took yet another casual step closer. The backs of Amy’s knees banged against Delaroche’s mattress. Thank goodness it was a deep pocket!

  ‘If you’re looking for Delaroche’s secret files’ – the Purple Gentian leant towards Amy – ‘I’ll give you a little hint. He keeps them under his pillow.’

  ‘Right,’ Amy stammered, leaning back so far her head was nearly level with her shoulders. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Don’t you want to look at them?’

  Whomp! It happened in seconds; the Purple Gentian reached over Amy to the pillow. Amy tried to lean back further, lost her balance, and toppled backwards onto the bed. It was a disaster. Not only was she sprawled flat on her back, with her bottom half off the bed, and her trouser-clad legs flung apart, the Purple Gentian’s hand was trapped under her head.

  Amy’s wide eyes flew to Richard’s face. He was still smiling, but it wasn’t a teasing grin; the curve of his lips was…predatory. Through the slits of his mask, Amy could see his green eyes narrow on her lips. Amy’s breathing quickened, her lips parting in alarm – it had to be alarm – as the edges of his cape brushed her arms and the familiar scent of his cologne filled her with yearning memories. His hand turned to cup her head, tangling in her hair, massaging her scalp.

  ‘This is not happening,’ bleated Amy.

  ‘All right,’ murmured the Purple Gentian softly, his face so close she could feel the gentle puff of his breath across her lips. He smelt of brandy and cloves and something else indescribably his. ‘This is not happening.’

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  But it was happening, and Amy didn’t want it to stop. His lips reached hers, and reality disappeared in a floating mist of taste and touch and scent; his tongue burrowed deep into her mouth, and, unthinking, Amy lifted her arms to clasp tightly about his neck. They kissed with the savagery of long separation; lips slanting together, tongues twining, bodies pressing together. Richard’s hand slid under Amy’s back, moulding her to him, while his thigh pressed between her legs.

  Amy gave a little cry and arched up against him, kissing him back hungrily. Why couldn’t she have just this one last time? she thought hazily. Just one last memory to store up to savour on all those long, empty nights ahead… Knowing that this would be the last time, the very last time she’d feel his lips, his caress, his strong body against hers – that this wasn’t supposed to be happening but it was – magnified every sensation. The crisp brush of his hair against her sensitive fingertips, the flick of his tongue around the curves of her lips, the warm pressure of his hand along her spine. Just this one time…she promised herself. Since she would never have the chance again… Amy greedily tugged the Gentian’s shirt from his waistband, sliding her palms along the smooth skin of his back. She traced the contours of his muscles, memorising their shape and texture.

  The Gentian’s lips left Amy’s to trail along her cheek, down the curve of her chin. Amy gave a little cry of protest, and pressed harder against his back, trying to urge h
is mouth back up to hers, but Richard just grinned wickedly, and trailed his tongue along the curve of her neck, and…

  Richard’s nose twitched. He sniffed Amy’s neck. He frowned. He sniffed again. ‘What,’ he asked dazedly, ‘is that smell?’

  Amy’s own nose had long since become accustomed to the eau de unwashed groom that permeated her borrowed clothes. Besides, she didn’t want to speak. If they spoke, she might have to think.

  ‘Don’t breathe,’ she advised huskily, yanking his head back down towards hers.

  The Purple Gentian showed no signs of disagreeing. His mouth reclaimed hers with alacrity. His hands slipped into the loose waistband of Amy’s trousers, moulding her against the bulge of his arousal.

  Amy’s legs instinctively closed around his waist, and she moaned in a voice that was half-protest, half-plea, ‘Richard…’

  Suddenly, the Purple Gentian’s hands grasped her shoulders in an iron grip, yanking her into a sitting position. ‘What did you say?’ he bit out.

  ‘I said…oh.’ Amy gulped. Her head swam from being yanked upright, but even through her vertigo Richard’s green eyes on hers were as implacable as the jade eyes of an ancient statue. ‘I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I said I only just guessed?’

  Richard gave her a little shake. ‘How long have you known?’

  Amy considered prevaricating, but something about the way Richard’s fingers bored into her shoulders and his gaze into hers warned her that that would be a very bad idea. ‘Since the day after the Seine.’

  ‘That night in the garden? You knew?’

  Amy could barely nod.

  ‘Damn you, Amy!’ He let go of her so abruptly that she almost tumbled back onto the mattress, grabbing at the end of the night table to steady herself. ‘All the while I was eating my heart out – with jealousy of my own bloody self, no less! – you knew?’

  ‘I wanted—’ Amy’s throat was so dry that it took an effort to force out the words. She licked her swollen lips. ‘I wanted you to know how it felt. To be played with like that. I’m sorry.’ She only half heard her own words. Jealousy? He was jealous?

  ‘You’re sorry. Now you’re sorry.’ With the amount of sarcasm dripping from his words, Amy was surprised she didn’t dissolve into nothingness on the spot.

  Amy caught herself on the precipice of an apology and sprang up from the bed. ‘I don’t know why I should be. You repudiated me, if you remember correctly.’

  ‘Only because I had to.’ Richard frowned under his mask, not liking the way the conversation was turning.

  Amy took a step forward, hands on her hips. Richard would have enjoyed the sight – they were, after all, a very nice pair of hips – if the expression on her face hadn’t been quite so ominous.

  ‘And then you flirted with me the next day!’

  ‘It made sense at the time.’

  ‘For all I knew, you were just playing with me out of some…some malicious whim!’

  ‘You were never a whim.’

  ‘It certainly doesn’t feel that way. For all I knew you might have been the sort of cad who enjoys driving women mad just for the sheer joy of it. You told me I was an infatuation.’

  ‘I had good reasons.’

  ‘All right, then. What are they? Or do you need time to invent some?’

  Richard bit down the automatic urge to snap that it was none of her affair. Because it was her affair, and had been ever since he had kissed her in her brother’s study. Looking down at Amy’s flushed face, Richard felt oddly sheepish. It was an unpleasant feeling, a feeling entirely unsuited to an intrepid secret agent, and Richard did his best to squelch it. He had had good reasons, he reminded himself. Deirdre. The mission. Saving England, and all that. Surely saving England counted as a good reason. If he could only convince Amy of that then…well, then maybe he would stop feeling like such a complete heel.

  ‘There was someone. Someone I fancied myself in love with. A long time ago.’

  Amy swallowed the impulse to demand sarcastically if this nameless someone had been more than a mere infatuation. She wondered if he’d kissed her on moonlit nights on the Seine. If he’d taken her to see his antiquities. If she’d been prettier and wittier than Amy. If she’d been blonde.

  ‘Who was she?’

  Richard shrugged. ‘The daughter of neighbouring gentry.’ He paused, trying to think how to go on. For all that the images of Deirdre’s betrayal and Tony’s death were emblazoned into his brain in precise detail, he’d never actually had to put any of it into words before. Those who knew, knew. Geoff, Miles, Sir Percy, his parents… None of them had ever taxed him with an explanation. They just knew. And they never discussed it.

  ‘I fancied myself in love with her,’ he repeated, as if by focusing on the foolishness of the lovelorn swain he had been, he could put off the other part, the darker part. ‘It was nearly six years ago.’

  ‘Are you still in love with her?’ Amy croaked.

  Richard’s head snapped down towards Amy. ‘In love with her? Zounds, no! It was…’

  ‘An infatuation?’

  The sarcasm was wasted on Richard. ‘An infatuation,’ he agreed. ‘She was young, pretty, and nearby. I was impressionable.’

  Amy sniffed scornfully.

  ‘I had a rival. A middle-aged widower. I’d been running missions for Percy for just over a year. I thought that if I told her… Hell, I was bursting to tell her. To tell anyone. I was young, and stupid, and I wanted to boast. Even if Baron Jerard hadn’t been involved, I would have told Deirdre about the League sooner or later.’

  Deirdre. The name somehow made the woman more real to Amy. Deirdre. It was a nasty name, Amy decided viciously, despite the fact that she’d heretofore always rather liked it, and when she was ten had given the name to her third-favourite doll.

  ‘Her maid was a French operative.’

  Amy’s eyes flew up to his face in surprise.

  With the grim air of a man running a gauntlet, Richard plunged on. ‘I made the mistake of telling Deirdre, in some detail, of a mission we had planned for the following month. Her maid alerted the Ministry of Police. They preceded us to our meeting place.’

  ‘Were you hurt? ‘

  ‘I?’ Richard laughed bitterly. ‘Not a scratch. They arrived at the cabin just before T – one of our best men showed up with a French count he had rescued from the Bastille. By the time Geoff and I arrived, the count was recaptured. Tony was dead. I was unhurt. It didn’t take long to trace the link to Deirdre.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘So was I.’ Richard shook his head. ‘But that didn’t make any difference to Tony.’

  Remembered grief incised deep lines on either side of Richard’s lips, and chiselled away at Amy’s anger. It had seemed so straightforward just moments before. He had wronged her. He had played her for a fool. He was in the wrong, and no excuse, no excuse at all (short of memory loss, or an evil twin) was going to set that right. When he mentioned Deirdre, Amy had bristled with righteous indignation. It would have been so easy to scoff at a betrayed love, to fling shrill derision at him like poison-tipped arrows.

  Even knowing the rest of it, part of Amy still wanted to fly at him like a harpy, and screech, ‘That was it? You played games with my heart because another woman – a woman who was not me – betrayed your trust years ago? You made my life agony for that?’

  But she couldn’t.

  Not when his remorse hung between them like a living thing. Or did she mean like a dead thing? Tony.

  ‘But I’m not Deirdre,’ she blurted out.

  ‘I couldn’t tell you, Amy,’ Richard said quietly. ‘There were too many lives at stake.’

  Amy stared at him dumbly. You didn’t have to dally with me, she thought. You could have just left me alone. Or you could have trusted me. I wouldn’t have told. She desperately rehearsed all the grievances that had fuelled her since that afternoon she had realised his double identity. But all of them scattered in the face of those horr
ible, weighty words, too many lives at stake.

  Amy shook her head and took a step back. ‘I can’t…’ she began, but choked on her own confusion.

  How could she say she couldn’t accept that, when she knew he was right, that he had done the honourable thing? Her hurt feelings were insignificant when weighed in the balance against a man’s life. She knew that. A line from one of her favourite poems flitted through her head: ‘I could not love thee dear so much, loved I not honour more.’ It had always seemed such a noble sentiment. But here the sentiment stood embodied before her, and Amy wanted to scream and rail. How had everything turned upside down? Five minutes ago, he was a rogue, and a deceiver, and she a maiden wronged. Now, Amy’s head ached with the uneasy sense of being wrong rather than wronged.

  But he hurt me, her heart argued back.

  Why couldn’t he have been the despicable cad he seemed, so she could just hate him? None of these horrible, messy, confused emotions.

  ‘I’m going home,’ she said thickly.

  Richard immediately stepped forward. ‘I’ll see you back.’

  ‘No.’ Amy shook her head as she flung her legs recklessly over the side of the window. She wanted to walk and walk and go on walking as though, if she moved quickly enough, she might outpace the confused thoughts that pursued and pricked her.

  ‘No,’ she repeated, ‘I’ll be all ri – aaaaah!’

  Amy’s words turned into an agitated cry as a pair of hands closed around her midriff and jerked her down from the window.

  ‘Let go!’ Amy drove an elbow into her captor’s arm, earning a muffled oof. In retaliation, the arm around her stomach tightened. Amy gasped for breath, ineffectually trying to kick back-wards, as she was hauled inexorably into the alleyway behind Delaroche’s lodgings.