Beauty and the Spy (20 page)

"Are you all right?" he demanded quietly.

He
wasn't, quite; his arm was already hurting like a bastard now.
Same damn arm
. He was fairly certain it wasn't a serious wound; his coat had taken the brunt of the strike. Still, he would need to see to it.

A couple strolling toward the festivities gazed at them with some concern. "He's had a bit too much ale," Susannah whispered to the woman, who looked amused and sympathetic, and turned her head discreetly away.

"I mink you're bleeding," she said to Kit, sounding faintly accusing.

"It's only a—"

"You're
bleeding
." She sounded furious now, near tears. "We'll go to the tavern. We'll see to your arm there."

He half-smiled. "Yes, sir."

"Don't you
dare
make light of this. You make light of
everything
. You could have been
killed
. And it's because of me, wasn't it? I know that now. It's because of me."

Her voice trailed off. She jerked her head, not wanting him to witness her tears yet again; she tried to pull away from him. He released her.

"Yes," he told her gently. "I think it may very well be."

"You could have been
killed
." She said it again, softly. Her hand rose up; for one astonishing moment, he thought she meant to touch his face. Perhaps he looked alarmed, because she dropped her hand to her side again, curled it into a fist instead, lowered her head, took in a long breath, steadying herself. He watched, admiring every bit of it.

"Thank you for saving my life again," Susannah said with some dignity.

He couldn't help it: He did smile then, though the burning pain in his damned arm made it a little more difficult than usual. "Not at all, Miss Makepeace. Or whoever you are. It's always a pleasure to save your life each and every time. You're having a very eventful day, aren't you?"

She smiled a little thinly. "You're not a naturalist."

"I am," he disagreed, startled.

"But that's not all you are."

"I was a soldier," he allowed.

"But that's not all you are."

He hadn't yet outright lied to her. And for some reason, though he could easily, colorfully lie in the name of an assignment, it seemed important not to ever directly lie to her.

"No," he admitted.

She gazed up at him and said nothing more, knowing, perhaps, his limits. She seemed entirely composed now.

Perhaps she was growing a little too accustomed to danger.

With this thought a sizzling fury jagged through his veins, hampering his breathing.

"All of it The coach… the adder… the horse… Why does someone want to kill me?" She sounded a little awed.

He almost smiled again. Almost. Fury and pain weren't conducive to smiling.

"I was wondering the very same thing. You must be tremendously important, Susannah, if someone wants to kill you." He thought he'd try for a joke.

"I thought that went without saying." Almost breezily said.

And damned if she didn't actually look a little amused.

Kit looked down at her, and felt another sharp little poke in the vicinity of his heart, an uncomfortable reminder that he did indeed have one. And with a breathlessness that had nothing to do with the fact that he'd just been rolling on the ground with a knife-wielding attacker, he realized the fact mat Susannah was still warm and breathing and smiling up at him made him light-headed with a quiet elation.

I'm probably just losing blood.

And again, the puzzle pieces were before him, but he couldn't quite make them fit. He suspected that it would now be more dangerous to stop searching than to leave it.

Damn his father and Egypt, anyway. Someone had just tried to thrust a knife into Susannah Makepeace. And it
wasn't
a coincidence, he was certain, that someone had done the very same thing to James Makepeace, not to mention Richard Lockwood fifteen years ago.

"I don't know who's trying to kill you, Susannah. But they'll certainly have cause to regret the attempt when I find out. And I will."

Susannah spoke before Kit could. "We were wondering if we might trouble you for a basin of water and a room for just an hour or so?"

Somehow taking charge of this situation at least helped her feel a little less helpless, and not as though someone had been trying to kill her since she set foot in the county, and not as if this man had spent the past several days saving her life.

"Just an '
hour or so
,' eh?" he said to Kit, with a wink, who gave him a rakish smile and a return wink, as he held the slit edges of his sleeve discreetly closed. Susannah could feel heat in her cheeks, which probably did nothing but convince the barkeep of what they were about to get up to, but she held her head haughtily as he led them to a room. He left them with a basin of water and another wink.

Kit stripped off his coat and shirt with unself-conscious alacrity and twisted around to look at his arm.

She'd seen him completely undressed before, but that had been at a safe distance. From a few feet away, his beauty stunned. There wasn't a spare ounce of flesh on him; hard, distinct muscles were cut in his back and chest and arms, and of course he was covered all over in mat smooth, pale gold skin. She saw scars on him now that she was closer, a long white line, puckered at the edges scored a shoulder blade; a roughly round patch of skin, thick and white, on his back, closer to the top of his trousers. War had done that to him, no doubt. A bruise turning greenish spread over his chest, where the horse had fallen on him; and a new angry red line slashed across his forearm and up over his bicep.

What a sharp knife it must have been to cut through his coat and shirt and skin. How much more easily it would have sliced through her.

He might be a quicksilver man, maddeningly glib, unnervingly skilled, but that angry red line proved he was as vulnerable as any other human being, as temporary. He'd flung his body in front of hers, to take the knife meant for her, but in the end blood flowed in his veins the same as anyone's, and could be spilled just as easily.

Well, nearly as easily. She'd watched him spin and kick and duck, and she simply couldn't imagine Douglas, for instance, doing that And if she'd been promenading with an actual naturalist, no doubt she'd be dead by now.

He looked up, startled, and then a little abashed, as though he'd just recalled she was there. "It's
blood
," he half-warned, half-apologized. "I'm sorry, I didn't think. I shouldn't have—"

"
Your
blood," she said. The words came out through a knot in her throat.

He regarded her levelly for a moment a tiny crease between his brows, as though he was worried yet again that she might faint And then he reached for the basin of water, and took the hem of his shirt in his teeth.

"Then again," he said, and tore a bandage from the hem, "you're
accustomed
to seeing me in the undress, aren't you, Miss Makepeace?"

Wicked man.

"One
time
does not make one accustomed." That was certainly an understatement.

He opened his mouth and for a moment it seemed as though he intended to say something typically Kit but he stopped himself and looked back at her instead, his eyes suddenly guarded. And the fact that he had stopped himself made her profoundly aware that they were in a room together, alone, and one of them was without a shirt, and that he had realized the implications of precisely me same thing.

"Give the water to me," she tried, casually. "I'll do it. I can see the wound better than you can."

He looked almost as uncertain as she felt "It's blood," he warned again, weakly.

"I had
this hand
inside a horse the other day." She lifted it up.

His eyes brightened at the comparison. "I hope I'm an improvement."

"Somewhat At least it's your
arm
we're interested in."

He snorted a short pleased laugh and sat down on the bed. When she drew near the rich musk of him wrapped her again: shaving soap, ale, and that delicious, darker, something—
him
. It might as well have been opium for what it did to the run of her thoughts.

Focus
. She took up one of the rags he'd made, and there was silence for a time, apart from the quiet dip of a rag into the water, and the trickle of water back into the basin, which was pinkening now with his blood. He held obediently still, like a little boy, his eyes calmly fixed on the white wall ahead of him, and he didn't flinch at all. Perhaps it hurt very little compared to whatever had put the other scars on his back.

She bathed him, but the rhythm of the rag dipping into the water slowed, as she wondered why everything he did—blinking, breathing in and out—seemed more significant when
he
did it than when any other human did.

A minute, perhaps more, passed before she became aware she'd stopped swabbing altogether, and had been standing very still instead, watching the fair, fernlike trail that traveled from his flat belly up between his ribs rise and fall, rise and fall, with his quickening breathing.

He turned his head, slowly, slowly lifted his eyes up to hers.

This
…this
was desire. Not the near-chaste kiss pressed upon her earlier today by another man, but this thing that made a tyrant of her senses, that made it seem absurd to stand this close to him and not taste the smooth curve of his shoulder, not trail a finger along the hair that began between his ribs and disappeared into his trousers. This thing that sealed the two of them in heated, fraught silence; that suddenly made thought seem pointless, even frivolous beyond words.

But in this moment it didn't matter at all to Susannah whether Kit had made love to one woman or a million, it didn't matter at all to her whether he saw her as just a body from whom to take pleasure. She didn't care whether he was here for her sake, or for the sake of Caroline Allston. She wanted him with an incinerating ferocity, because in a sense it was all she had to give to him.

His eyes read hers. His chest expanded, sank, with a long, unsteady breath.

I'm lost.

"Thank you," he said softly. And turned away from her. And stood.

"Use this piece to make a bandage"—he gestured to a shred of his shirt—"and wind it snugly, but not too snugly, or my circulation will be impaired, and my arm will fall off. And that would be inconvenient, to say the least."

A familiar glib lilt to his words. The moment was gone as if it had never been.

He
was
a bloody gentleman, then. The mad longing slowly released its grip on her, leaving behind a shamed empty fluttering in the pit of her stomach. Perhaps later she would feel grateful to him, but now she simply felt ashamed: not for having wanton thoughts, but because she'd so brazenly given him an opportunity, one that he clearly wanted, and he'd chosen not to take it.

She wound the bandage as instructed, her hands shaking a little. "That should keep your arm on," she told him, trying again for bravado.

"I'll apply a little salve of Saint-John's-wort when we return home," he told her. "Wards off fever."

What do you have for warding off another kind of fever?

"I'll remember that for the next time I'm accosted by a knife-wielding attacker."

"That's enough," he said coldly.

She froze as though he'd slapped her.

Kit thrust his arms almost angrily in the remains of his shirt, and then his coat. "We'd best hurry home."

It was late afternoon when the carriage took them home, more subdued, more edified, than when they'd originally set out Kit assured her that his coachman and footmen were as bristling with weapons as he was, and they were as safe as they could hope to be at the moment.

"Should I tell Aunt Frances about… today?"

Kit turned to her, all solicitous politeness. "What would you like to do?"

Susannah thought about it "I shouldn't like to worry her, or make her afraid for me. I shall continue in your employ."

He nodded, as though anything she might have said would have suited him.

And then the silence in the half-dark of the coach grew thick and uncomfortable, and then Susannah's thoughts began to blur and she began to drowse.

"
I
fought a duel over Caroline Allston when I was just seventeen."

She was fully awake now. She watched him quietly for a moment, assessing his emotional temperature.

"With my best friend," he added. His voice was strained, as though he'd been rehearsing the words in his head for some time. She heard the wry shame in them.

"Did you kill him?"

He smiled faintly. "No, he walks among us still. And he's still my best friend."

"And you don't know what became of Caroline?"

"No. She disappeared the very next day."

"And you've reason to believe she might have been in Gorringe?"

"Yes."

She'd noticed how succinct he became with issues that actually revealed him.

"Did you love her?" she asked, almost gingerly.

"Oh, I thought that I did, yes. But then again, I was just seventeen." He said it lightly, as though being seventeen precluded it being love.

She considered teasing him:
So
that's
your scandal
?�but something told her to refrain.

And then he gave her his usual cocky smile, and she thought she understood better the origin of that smile now. He was a very good discoverer of secrets, true. But he was also very good at keeping a smoke screen around what she now suspected was his own secret, his heart was as breakable as her own. Had in fact been broken before.

She smiled back at him, shook her head, didn't push for more. Somehow she knew it was the only way more would be forthcoming.

And she was asleep soon thereafter.

He watched her sleep with some complex emotion; it seemed to have tiers and facets, and the moment he managed to get one facet in focus, another one winked into prominence. He'd begun to suspect he was a romantic, despite everything, and the thought irritated him and amused him. It was a tremendously inconvenient thing to be, and not at all what one expected to find lurking in the heart of a spy.

Today… how easy it would have been to slide a hand over the small of her back, pull her forward into his bare chest, and touch his lips at last, at last, to that soft, soft mouth. He was, in fact, dangerously close to
needing
to know how her mouth would feel against his. He'd watched the pulse beating in her smooth throat, and for an extraordinary moment he'd had every intention of pressing his mouth against it… after he'd tasted her lips, of course. And from there…

This bloody folio assignment. His bloody, bloody father. A month away from a painstakingly wooed and won countess was simply too much to ask of a man in his prime.

Susannah was a beautiful woman, a soft and sensual woman just coming to understand the depth of her own passion and strength, and it was a breathtaking thing to witness. But he understood his own role in fomenting the heat he'd seen in her eyes today and rued it a little. He wondered if, in doing so, he'd done her a disservice, for who or what in a town like Barnstable could ever satisfy it? She would be a delightful interlude, at best, but truly he wanted nothing more than that. Indulging himself even a little would only hurt her, as she was so very nearly innocent She'd already known too much of hurt.

Best to cast his lot in with the countess, who knew very well how to play the game. Best to impose a distance comprised of politeness and gallantry for the duration of his folio assignment. He would do his best to discover why someone intended to kill her, and then he would resume his life in London.

Still, there was something he'd wanted to know for some time now, and he found he couldn't deny himself this particular opportunity. Very gently, almost stealthily, he leaned forward and rested the backs of his fingers against Susannah's cheek.

He regretted it instantly. For her skin was every bit as soft as he'd dreamed.