Rogue Spy (10 page)

He made a disbelieving exhalation between his teeth. That eloquent, familiar noise. That was Devoir's comment on so many of life's small happenings.

His grip loosened slightly. There was room to breathe.

She said, “I will spill out everything I know in your lap in the hope you will lose interest in me. Shall I tell you the man you seek favors a British gun? A Mortimer, I think. He sounds
like an Englishman and dresses like one, but he's probably French. Police Secrète would be my guess. He knows too much about the Coach House for him to be anything else. He calls himself Smith.”

“That's not his name.”

“My well-trained intellect had already come to that conclusion. Do you know your coat is wet?”

“A little damp.”

“You're soaked. And now I am soaked. We'll both catch pneumonia.” She shifted in the close confinement of his coat wrapped around her, aware of the edge of a lapel, the round buttons on his waistcoat, the smooth cloth of his trousers. His chest barely shifted with his breath. Otherwise, he was motionless as a wall. She was the one restless against him.

She wasn't wearing enough clothes to protect her from too much knowledge of his body. She felt everything through the linen of her shift. Her breasts, sensitive with the cold, shocked when she rubbed against his coat. Old friendship, old memories rose up. She knew him too well. Every touch against him was just on the edge of being familiar and feeling safe.

There's too much silence. I have to say something.
But she was awash in sensation. It was a hot river flowing under her skin.

I don't want this.
But part of her did.

A wise man comes to a negotiated truce with his cock.

A BALDONI SAYING

Pax's hands closed convulsively. Not by his will. Not by his intent. He couldn't help it.

Vérité explored the confines of the hold he had on her, being irritated, talkative, and close to naked. Where she wasn't soft skin, she was the slide of the thin cloth that barely wrapped her up. Her breasts grazed his chest, swift and startling. Her belly slipped across his. She was everything womanly—strength, softness, mystery. Since she was Vérité, she added a good dollop of deadly to the mixture.

He had a cockstand the size of a pine tree.

You don't think of her that way,
a voice inside him said.

But he did.

She's not twelve anymore.

He wanted her in the most straightforward, simple, earthy way. Maybe it had started when they stood facing each other in the church. Maybe before that, when he watched her cross Braddy Square in a long, lithe sweep of brown cloak. Maybe when she became exquisitely lethal and attacked him.

Her hair brushed his face, tightly curled, glossy, feather soft, smelling of wood smoke and snuff. It grabbed him and pulled
him into memory, into the years of the Coach House. In the stark dormitory under the rafters, two dozen starved, savage, brilliant children slept on mats on the floor, huddled together in the cold dark, sharing blankets. Vérité used to fit herself beside him, snuggled up to keep warm, her hair tickling his nose.

The way it was doing right now. If he chose, he could lower his head to that bedlam of curls and breathe her in. He could sort through the waves and semicircles with his lips. He could drop his hold on her arms and put his hands to her breasts and run his thumbs across her nipples, back and forth, learning them by touch, feeling a miraculous response in them.

He'd painted women clothed, naked, and at every stage in between. This was different. Vérité was more than an image made with pigments and brush. More than blended color and the fall of light. She was touch and smell and taste, breath, life, pulsing blood.

He'd seen the dark fuzz between her legs through the linen of her shift. The image filled his mind. He imagined stroking that soft kitten. Touching Vérité, pleasing her, enticing her. Persuading her down into the straw.

The unbearable sensuality of the image climbed out of his groin and plucked at every nerve in his body. His body tightened like iron bands.

That wasn't for him. Not with Vérité. Not with anyone.

She gave an impatient, determined shove at his chest. “I can't talk like this. You're just bullying me. I'm not trying to run.” Her voice came up, muffled, from the region of his cravat. His coat was pushed aside where she twisted against him. Any minute now, she was going to brush up against his cock.

Then she did exactly that. She gave one startled jerk and went absolutely still. He felt her vibrate with her heartbeat.

She whispered, “Let me go. I said I'd tell you what you want to know.”

If he didn't let go of her now, he might not be able to.

He opened his hands and stepped away and away, keeping an eye on her, till he felt the storeroom door at his back. He reached behind him to open it and let more light in.

She didn't try to hide herself. She kept her arms at her sides, her fists clenched. Her skin was pale as milk in this
weak light, a sketch in pastel, laid down in thin shades of color. She looked scared and sneaky and determined. A warrior maiden, utterly indomitable in a shift that didn't cover half of her.

She was beautiful. Add that to the list of complications.

She was also cold. He'd dragged her out of her warm nest and left her shivering in the damp air.

He gathered up her cloak from the floor and tossed it to her across the space between them.

“Thank you.” Gravely, she organized it in her hands, turned it right side out. “There are some complications it is better to ignore.”

That was Vérité, being direct.

“I intend to,” he said.

“Then we both shall. Why are we still alone? I keep expecting your friends to arrive in a great thumping vehemence. I don't hear them.”

“They're waiting outside.”

“So you came to take me alone. That was either a mistake or very subtle. I don't think you make many mistakes.” She circled the cloak around her and was enveloped in darkness. Only her face showed and her feet, white and vulnerable against the wood floor. “This is better. Ask your questions.”

She didn't look at where his cock was hidden under his coat, being obstreperous.

It wasn't that easy for him to ignore what his body demanded and demanded.

He thought,
You can't have her.
But the corridors of his mind were crowded with old choices, clamoring to be reconsidered. The rules for every other woman on earth didn't apply to Vérité.

I want her.
That was the path to madness and beauty.
I could convince her. She knows what I am and I could still convince her.

He knew he wasn't thinking clearly.

Deliberately, he ran his hand into his sleeve and found the old burn scar on his forearm. The skin was thin there. The surface of the scar felt nothing. Beneath that, there was no protection against pain. It lurked there, waiting for the slightest touch.

He dug his nails in deep, found pain, and held on to it till he was in a place clean of thought and feeling. Till the universe narrowed to a single cold, spiked, dark point.

When he stopped and pain receded he felt empty. It hadn't helped at all. Vérité was still beautiful and he still wanted her.

He said, “Tell me what you know about Smith.”

Her eyes, wide and dark, didn't waver. “Almost nothing. There. That was simple.”

“Tell me this nothing.”

“What do you need to know? I can tell you that he tells lies the way other men breathe.” Her fingers made a knobbly half-moon at the front of her cloak, keeping it closed around her. “I don't think I got ten words of truth out of his mouth the whole time I was chatting with him.”

Vérité had seen to the root of the Merchant. He was a man constructed of lies. “What else?”

“He wears London tailoring, expensive tailoring. His gloves are French. I didn't notice that when I was talking to him, but I see them now, in my mind. London boots. London hat. Good, solid quality. Almost new. You could hunt down his bootmaker and his tailor if you have the time to fritter away. It won't lead anywhere.”

“Probably not.” The Merchant liked good clothing. One of his vanities.

“I will point out what you have already figured out. He set only one man to follow me through London, so he doesn't travel with multitudes.”

The Merchant was a weaver of grand schemes, but schemes he could accomplish with a few like-minded fanatics. He'd have a small band with him, loyal to the death.

She was stalling for time, and he didn't have a lot of it. Doyle would get impatient after a while. He said, “Tell me more.”

She reached up and rubbed her nose, buying another second or two. “I wish I could be sure you aren't working for the French.”

“There are no guarantees. Tell me about Smith.”

She didn't answer directly. “The problem is, we're both lying about some things. We're lies within lies within lies, you and me, like Chinese puzzle boxes. Boxes within boxes.”
She shifted from one foot to the other. “You're loyal to somebody. That's your nature. Loyalty. I just wish I could figure out which side you're on.”

She didn't know him as well as she thought, if she believed he was loyal. The last person on earth he'd been honest with was facing him right now, across this chilly storeroom.

In her bare feet. He said, “The floor's cold. Go stand on the straw over there.”

“Excellent idea. Thank you.” As she walked across the room, she ignored the pile of guns and knives and lethal instrumentation tucked away under the table. Of course that entirely convinced him she'd forgotten their existence. “My toes thank you as well.”

They were pretty toes. He wouldn't think about kissing from one toe to the other. Sensitive toes and pink as seashells.

She sank to her knees in the straw, wriggled to sit cross-legged, and pulled the cloak around her, doing a good imitation of a hen settling its feathers on the nest. She picked an angle where the light fell on her face, demonstrating that she didn't have a thing to hide.

He hoped he hadn't missed a weapon or two, hidden in the straw. Not that Vérité needed weapons.

She was still talking to herself. “I will entertain the hypothesis that you turned English. If you were Police Secrète, I'd already be dead, killed in my sleep a minute ago. All this breathing I'm doing is the argument you're not French anymore.”

He crossed the room till his boots touched straw. “I never was French. Let's go back to that meeting in the Moravian church.”

“It has not wandered far from my thoughts. As I say, I came to be blackmailed. Aside from the surprise of meeting you, all went as expected. I met Smith, who threatened to uncover me to the Service. Treason was mentioned. And the slitting of throats. Also torture and imprisonment and the futility of panicked flight.”

“Many and varied threats.”

“One could almost believe you were there, eavesdropping. Yes. Many and varied. After the threats and dire predictions,”
she set her hands free of the cloak and gestured out a dire prediction, “we discussed blackmail like civilized people.”

He said, “Smith wants the Leyland codes.”

He caught the split-second hitch in her breathing. “You've deduced a great deal.” She said it calmly enough. “Yes. I was placed with the great codebreakers of the age, the Leylands, my impractical, dithering old ladies. It's been an education living with them in Brodemere, though not a terribly useful one. Did you know I can now speak four dead languages?”

He caught something in her voice. A sadness around the edges of the words. “You can't go back to them again.”

“Do you think I don't know? The note I sent to Meeks Street contains my goodbye.” She held her hands out like cups and turned them over with a dreadful finality. “That part of my life is finished.”

The Tuteurs at the Coach House used to rap her knuckles with a cane when she talked with her hands. Un-English, they called it.
Pas suffisamment anglais.
They never broke her of the habit.

He said, “I'm sorry.”

“There are inevitabilities.” She turned her head away. “I was always packed and ready to run. I had longer than I expected.”

“Smith promised you could go back, I suppose.”

“For a mere soupçon of a treason I can remain Camille Leyland, he says. The British Service will remain in blissful ignorance, he says. A single code and I'm free of him forever.”

The cynicism in her voice was reassuring. “He lies.”

“I wouldn't believe him if he recited the alphabet. He wants the Mandarin Code.”

He searched his memory. “Not one I know.”

“At some point you may turn your attention to how Mr. Smith knows about it. I suspect Military Intelligence, myself.” She patted the straw next to her. “I wish you'd sit down.”

“So you can attack me more conveniently?”

“There's no convenient way to attack you, Devoir.” She shook her head sharply. “No. I'm calling you Pax now. Pax, you have friends outside. You have the British Service at your disposal. I can't fight all of you. I'm trying to negotiate a truce. For God's sake, sit down and talk to me.”

“A truce?”

“Some semblance thereof. I'd give you promises of good behavior if it would do any good.”

“I wouldn't believe them.” But he folded himself down next to her, his shoulder beside her shoulder. Nothing could be more platonic and uninvolved than the two of them, side by side, not touching.

She said, “This is better. You aren't Devoir, but in a poor light I can almost fool myself into thinking you are.”

It was just as well she couldn't see into his head. Right now he was imagining how easy it would be to slip that cloak away from her shoulders. In this light, her skin would glow white as the moon.

His mind took off like a runaway cart. Vividly, he saw himself pulling her down beside him in the straw. In his imagination, she was more than willing. He saw himself stroking her shift up and up her thigh, revealing the soft, dark tangle between her legs. Hidden at the center, carmine and rose madder.

Enough.
He wasn't going to touch her.

He slowed his breathing. Wrenched his mind back from the brink of some madness. Curled his hands on his knees, relaxed and harmless.

He was in control. Always. That didn't change no matter how many damned, beautiful, half-naked old friends he sat next to. “Tell me about Mandarin.”

Starkly, simply, she said, “Mandarin replaces Peacock.”