Chapter Twelve
LAVINIA NODDED TO Miss Gibson as she walked into Andrew’s office and dropped down into the most comfortable-looking chair in the room. Her headache had dulled to a light throb under the knot on her forehead, but she was exhausted from the emotional strain of lying and acting in stealth. Spycraft, it turned out, was tiring work.
“Would you care for a cup of tea, Mrs. Parkem?” Miss Gibson asked.
“I would actually,” said Lavinia, untying the strings holding her cloak together and letting it pool around her.
“Andrew, would you pour the tea?” asked Miss Gibson.
Lavinia thought he might object, but Andrew moved without complaint to the sideboard, where a pot was set with four mugs. After pouring it, he opened the window and retrieved a small tin of milk from the sill.
When Miss Gibson caught her watching, the young woman smiled. “Andrew has revealed himself to be rather enlightened about things like making his own tea. It’s for the best, really. I manage to burn or ruin every ingredient I touch no matter what the recipe.”
“There’s no point in waiting for a woman to cook, clean, or sew on a ship,” he said. “If you don’t learn how to do those things yourself, you won’t last a week. Here.”
He handed Lavinia her mug, and she noted with a tiny smile that it was the exact color she’d liked when they were children.
“That’s a rather impressive knot growing on your forehead, Mrs. Parkem,” said Miss Gibson as they all settled down. “Perhaps you’d like to share that story with us.”
As quickly but thoroughly as she could, Lavinia recited back the details of what had happened that evening. Miss Gibson took note of the names of the gentlemen present at the dinner while Andrew glowered at the mention of her fainting episode. When she reached the part of the story when she admitted that she’d snuck into Wark’s study, she thought he would hit the roof.
“You did what?” he nearly shouted, his knuckles white from where he’d gripped the arms of his chair.
“I had an opportunity and I took it,” she said.
“It takes skill to assess a situation and change one’s plan like that. Good job,” said Miss Gibson.
“She could’ve been caught,” he gritted out.
“But I wasn’t,” said Lavinia, reaching into her bodice. “And I have these.”
She pulled out the slips of paper. Miss Gibson’s eyes widened.
Spreading them out on the table, Lavinia said, “They fell out of the underside of one of Wark’s desk drawers.”
“And you took them?” Andrew asked.
“I couldn’t very well memorize them with so little time, could I?” she asked.
“ ‘Thirty-eight, forty, thirty-two, fifteen, nineteen,’ ” Miss Gibson read out from one of the slips.
“The numbers seem to be grouped,” said Andrew, reluctantly looking at them. “They’re too close to be a code, unless they’re meant to be a couple of letters repeated over and over again.”
“I thought that too,” she said, staring at them. They looked so familiar, but it was as though the nature of them was on the tip of her tongue.
“ ‘Forty-one, forty-three, thirty-four, seventeen, twenty,’ ” Miss Gibson read out another. “Could they be some sort of scrambled longitude and latitude?”
He tilted his head with a frown. “Perhaps a starting place and an ending place?”
“But if they’re scrambled, they could be any combination of numbers,” Miss Gibson said.
“Did you see a book on Wark’s desk?” Andrew asked.
She shook her head. “There were stacks of papers detailing the royal visit and all of the surrounding activities.”
“What kind of activities?” he asked.
“The schedule of the visit, and some more detailed information about the prince’s movements,” she said.
“When?” Miss Gibson asked.
“The night of the ball. I think that Wark may strike then, and . . .” She hesitated, drawing herself up. “Wark had asked me if I wanted him to secure me an invitation.”
“Out of the question,” said Andrew, dismissing the idea outright.
“But I could be there if Wark acts,” she pushed.
“If. We’ve considered that it may be a possible target, but we’re still no closer to finding out what the group has planned. Was there anything else near these papers?” Andrew said.
“Blueprints to a mews house it looks like Wark is thinking of renovating, and his bank ledger,” said Lavinia.
“Was there any unusual activity in there? The key to the code could be in plain sight. We just have to figure out where to look,” he said.
She shook her head. “Other than payments to a couple of tailors and a bookmaker, it was mostly withdrawals for cash. I suspect Mrs. Wark keeps a separate account of the household expenses.”
Miss Gibson stifled a yawn. “Well, we likely won’t be any wiser if we don’t sleep. Trace those numbers to preserve the handwriting and give the original papers to me.”
“What will you do with them?” Lavinia asked.
“If you tell me exactly where you found them, I have a friend who can put them back. Wark will be none the wiser,” said Miss Gibson.
“Would this friend be a burglar by any chance?” Andrew asked.
Miss Gibson shot him a smile. “Don’t ask questions you don’t wish to know the answers to, Andrew.”
It took just a few moments to trace the numbers twice—one for Andrew and Gillie and one for Lavinia in case inspiration struck—and then give the slips to Miss Gibson. As the young woman tucked them away, she said, “Andrew, can you deal with the fire? I’m dead on my feet.”
“Go,” he said with a nod to the door. “We’ll talk more tomorrow.”
Lavinia watched Miss Gibson haul herself up and wrap herself in her magenta shawl before plodding down the stairs.
“Will she be all right walking home by herself?” she asked.
“What?” Andrew looked up. “Oh. You’d never know it but Gillie is handier with a knife than anyone should be, man or woman. And she has a room just across the close with a landlady who’s nearly deaf and couldn’t care what hour she returns home.”
“How convenient. And why does she get a knife?” asked Lavinia.
He shot her a crooked smile. “Because she bought herself one.”
“Why didn’t I think of that?”
“I’m glad you didn’t. If you deviated from our plan so much that you staged a fainting spell, who knows what sort of a menace you might have been while armed?” He rose from his chair, circled the desk, and gingerly framed her bruise with his fingertips. “How are you truly?”
The unexpected tenderness of his question sent a tingling sensation firing through her belly, and she had to swallow hard before answering. “I don’t know. I know you’re angry with me.”
“Angry, but appreciative. This is more than Gillie’s been able to find out in two weeks of work.”
“I just acted.”
“Almost without thinking,” he said with a nod, as though he understood completely.
“After the doctor came and declared that I could be moved, they sent me home in Wark’s carriage. As soon as I was inside the shop I started shivering and I couldn’t stop.”
He opened his arms, and she went to him without protest. As he pressed her against him, she couldn’t help feeling as though he were trying to pour some of his strength into her. She closed her eyes and drank it in, relishing it for as long as she could take it, because although she knew better than to hope for his forgiveness, she couldn’t deny that she was still drawn to him. It wasn’t just sex and intimacy she missed. It was Andrew himself.
“When you put your hood down and I saw your bruise, I thought . . .”
His low rumble reverberated through her chest to fill the spaces around her heart. Clenching her fingers in the light linen of his shirt, she said, “There was a time when I thought you’d welcome such a sight.”
“I never wished to see you hurt like that, Lavinia,” he said, pulling away slightly so that she was forced to gaze up at his earnest expression. “But don’t think kindly of me for that. I wanted worse for you.
“I wished that you would one day feel what it was like to have your heart ripped in two. When I found out you were married . . .”
“I know,” she said, remembering the way his face had crumpled.
She’d just left Alistair’s house. It had been two days after her wedding, and Alistair had claimed there had been no time to plan a honeymoon, although Lavinia now suspected that he’d already begun to feel the financial pressure that would eventually sink him. Her basket hung on her arm, she had intended to go to the little bookseller and the shop that sold ribbons, but then she’d spotted Andrew.
He hadn’t looked like himself, burnt brown as a berry and wearing a thick, barely contained beard, but she’d recognized him in an instant. It was his eyes, piercing blue and clear as the ocean on a calm day. Their eyes met and she knew in a moment that her life, her hope, was over.
He’d half run to her in the rolling jog of a man still unsteady on his feet after some long illness. But when he reached for her, she made herself step back, and confusion flooded his eyes.
“Lavinia,” he’d said, his words cracking as though he hadn’t used his voice in a long time.
“I thought you were dead,” she said. “We all thought you were dead.”
A crooked smile lit up his sunburned face. “Lost at sea and found again. I’m home, Lavinia.”
She’d squeezed her eyes shut against the tears spilling out. It was too late for them. Just two days more and she could’ve been Mrs. Andrew Colter as she’d always wanted, but fate had played a cruel trick on her.
“Andrew, I have to tell you something.”
He brushed his fingertips along her arm, as though to touch her was to worship her. “I want to hear everything you would’ve put in a letter. I want to know every minute I’ve missed since I was lost.”
“I—”
“You’d do well to take your hands off my wife.” Alistair’s voice rang out from the front door of the house she now called home.
“Wife?” Andrew laughed, but when he saw the expression on her face he stepped back. “Wife.”
“As of two days ago,” said Alistair, striding forward to pull Lavinia to him by the waist. She struggled free and took a step away from her husband. “Who are you?”
“Andrew Colter,” she said, her voice hardly a whisper.
“Colter?” Alistair huffed a laugh. “Didn’t recognize you. You’re supposed to be dead.”
“Lavinia, tell me this is a joke,” said Andrew.
She shook her head, her heart breaking and she utterly unable to do a thing about it.
Andrew’s expression hardened, and for a moment she thought he might hit Alistair. Instead, he lashed out at her with twelve words.
How long did it take you to jump into Alistair Parkem’s bed?
Now, in his quiet office, it seemed like another lifetime.
“I’m not proud of what I said to you,” he said. “No woman deserves to have her honor questioned like that, no matter how angry I was.”
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
“After all the months of trying to get back to you, something broke inside me when I saw Parkem with you. I wanted you to know what it was like to feel that sort of pain.”
She let go of his shirt, wrinkles pressed into it from the heat of her hands. She liked the thought that when he went to bed, they’d still be there, a little memory of her that he wouldn’t be able to shake just by saying good-bye.
“I have felt that kind of pain,” she said as she stepped back and out of his arms, “but not since before I was married.”
“No?” he asked.
With clear eyes, she caught his gaze and held it, determined not to weaken when she needed most to show him the part of her she never let anyone see. “When I thought you were dead, my world ended. My parents began pushing Alistair on me as soon as we got word that you’d been lost at sea. There were other men too, in case one caught my fancy, but mostly it was him. I refused and refused, but then my parents informed me that the banns had been posted and that I was to wed Alistair. They’d told everyone, and I found myself in an impossible situation with no allies.”
“You could’ve refused,” he said quietly.
“Mamma removed all of my clothing from my room and locked me in. The only time the door opened was when she brought in my meals. She didn’t trust a maid to do it.” He started to open his mouth, but she held her hand up. “Why didn’t I climb out the window like I did when I used to meet you? I had no money. I had no friends. I had nowhere to go.”
He closed his eyes and sighed. “You’re saying you didn’t have a choice.”
“Of course I had a choice. I should’ve fought against them harder. I should’ve refused when I was there in church, saying the words, but I didn’t.”
“If I’d written to you . . .”
“Why didn’t you? Then I would’ve known,” she said.
“I— Part of me couldn’t believe that I’d make it back to you after everything I’d gone through.”
“We both made mistakes.” She spread her hands out, whether looking for absolution or sympathy, she didn’t know. “I’ve had to live with mine my whole life.”
When he didn’t say anything, she pressed her lips thin and nodded. It was time to accept that they were too broken to find each other again.
“Good night, Andrew,” she said with a sigh. “I hope you can find some peace tonight.”
She bent to pick up her cloak from the back of his chair, but her fingers hadn’t so much as brushed the fabric before Andrew’s hands were on her waist, spinning her to him, and his mouth was on hers. Where earlier there had been angry fire, this time it was the white-hot smolder at the center of a blaze, stoked by the intensity of hours of reluctant worry. This kiss was the promise of more than gasping on the floor of her workshop. It was an offer of an evening spent tangled in bed, reexploring what they’d once known, and making up for lost years.
Short though she was, she looped her arms around his neck and dragged her body flush against his. He groaned when the hardness of his cock pressed against her stomach, and she shifted to test that the length of him matched her memory. His fingers stroked down the shape of her from her breasts to the top of her hips, where her corset stopped, before wrapping around to the hidden hooks that kept her bodice closed.
He pulled back, panting for her—because of her.
“I want you,” he growled against the curve of her throat. “That makes me a fool, but I do.”
“I want you too,” she whispered.
He ran a blunt nail down the closures of her dress and brought his chin up so their gazes met. “We spent too many nights in makeshift beds, you and I. We’re not sixteen anymore.”
Disappointment bloomed in her. No, they weren’t. They were thirty-two and should know better than to go rooting around in the past—even when it was as tempting as this.
She began to pull away.
He held her fast, nodding over her shoulder. “My rooms are one street over.” She looked up sharply and he grinned. “If you’d like to join me.”
Another chance. He was reaching his hand out across the gap between them and offering her another chance to be pulled over to his side of the divide.
She swung her cloak onto her shoulders. “Where’s your coat? Put it on. What are you waiting for?”
He laughed and it rippled through her. She’d loved his laugh—rich and throaty with a hint of something wild about it. She’d taken for granted that she’d hear it again and again for as long as she lived, and now that it was back, she didn’t want to go without it again.
Andrew struggled into his jacket and gripped her by the hand. Clattering down the shop’s stairs together, they stole out into the lamplit street. The air was misty enough to cool her heated cheeks as they practically ran to a small building with a nondescript door. Andrew dropped her hand long enough to pull out a brass key.
“These rooms have a separate entrance from the coffee shop,” he said. “No one else is in the building at night.”
“You don’t keep a valet or a maid?” she asked.
“Not one that lives in quarters.”
“Good,” she said. “Then we don’t have to worry about anyone hearing us.”
As soon as they were inside, they fell on each other, pulling at ties and tugging at hooks as they kissed pressed against the front door. Her cloak and his jacket fell in the hallway. Caging her in with arms on either side, he kissed a line from the lobe of her ear to the square neck of her dress, moaning when he got to the swell of her breasts.
“How the hell does this come off?” he said, his hands searching for the seam between her bodice and her skirt.
She shook her head. “It’s all one piece. The latest fashion.”
“I don’t care what it is,” he said. “It looks good enough on you that you need to not be wearing it.”
She laughed at the contradiction and kissed him swiftly. “Where’s the bed?”
Rather than responding, he swept her up off her feet in one smooth motion. Her hands flew to his shoulders to steady herself. Wark had carried her like this earlier that evening, and everything about it had felt oppressive and territorial. With Andrew, however, she couldn’t help but feel a little bit cherished.
Don’t make this into anything other than it is, she chastised herself. This was sex and longing and familiarity. That was all.
He clambered up two flights of stairs as though the weight of her was nothing and edged open a door with his shoulder. She could just make out the lines of a bed in the moonlight slipping through the cracks of a set of drawn drapes. The fire was banked in the grate and the room was cold, but none of that mattered. Being near Andrew made her warm enough.
Rather than lay her down on the bed, he set her upright and spun her around. His breath tickled the back of her neck as he leaned down to concentrate on the hooks on the back of her dress. One by one he worked them free, and she had to hold her bodice up against her chest to keep the whole thing from falling down over his hands.
“There,” he announced when the last hook was undone, clearly proud of himself.
“You’re an acceptable substitute for a lady’s maid, Captain Colter,” she said, as he helped her step out of her dress.
He slipped his hands down her sides and traced the steel bones of her corset. “If that meant helping you undress every night, I’m not sure I would mind. Lord but you’re beautiful.”
The words didn’t mean anything, but they brought a blush to her cheeks nonetheless. This was just one night. There was no point in thinking about the “every nights” to come. Here in this room, he was a man and she was a woman, and that was all that there was between them. No broken engagement or angry thoughts. There was no room for dreams dashed that evening.
Raising her hands to her corset, she undid the row of hooks along the long basque and let it fall away before pushing her chemise off her shoulders. Stockings and drawers followed quickly, and all at once she was standing naked before the first man she’d lost her heart to.
He sucked in a breath and raised a hand to cautiously, gently trace the line of her collarbone back and forth before circling each breast. When the pad of his thumb glanced over her peaked nipple, she hissed.
“You always liked that,” he said with a rueful smile.
“I still do,” she said, pushing her chest forward. Clever man that he was, he spread his palm and cupped her breast, thumb stroking over her sensitive areola. She moaned, and he shook his head.
“The sweetest sound,” he murmured. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed, using his free hand to draw her to him by her hip. He closed his lips around her nipple and sucked.
Her head fell forward, her hands sinking into his curls. He swirled his tongue around her once, twice, and then pulled gently with his lips. Her hips pressed forward. She needed friction and pressure to relieve the ache between her legs.
Stepping wide, she eased forward, her clit brushing his thigh. Desire shot through her, and her knees nearly buckled, pressing her harder against his leg. She moved again, rocking with the rhythm of Andrew’s sucking. His fingers found her other nipple and squeezed hard enough to make her cry out at the delicious pinch of pain.
This wasn’t enough. Determined not to squander a moment, she tore at the last button of his waistcoat, pushing it down his arms. His lips let go of her breast with a pop, and he tossed the garment aside. Gaze fixed on her, he pulled at his shirt next, exposing the bronzed, sinewy chest of a man who’d spent years working alongside his men out in the sun of the seas.
He dragged her down to the bed, his kiss lingering before he flipped to undo the placket of his trousers and shed the rest of his clothes. His cock sprang free, hard and ready, and when she wrapped her hand around him and tested him with a stroke, he moaned.
With a smile, she opened her legs for him, pushing up on her elbows as he settled between them. She wanted to watch when he slid into her. It had always been her favorite part, the shock of connection and satisfaction of moving together toward their pleasure.
The head of his cock bumped against her slit, and he braced one hand on the bed while cupping her cheek with the other. His lips caught hers up, and then he thrust.
Lavinia gasped against his mouth, her body arching to meet him.
“I want to see,” she said, breaking away, and he edged up a little, thrusting into her again and again to satisfy her own fascination.
She’d never be as flexible as she’d been when they’d first done this, but she dropped her knees a little farther to take him to the root. He moaned when he hit home, his head falling forward on her shoulder. Only then did she let her head fall back, swept away by the incredible sensation of being stretched and pushed and taken by this man.
This could’ve been every night if only things had gone differently.
But they hadn’t. Her life hadn’t been that of a charmed lady as her mother had hoped. It hadn’t been as Andrew’s wife as she’d wanted, loved and cherished whether he was on shore leave or at sea. Nothing had turned out the way it was supposed to, but it had been her life and she wouldn’t change any of it.
Andrew slowed and her head popped up.
“Is everything all right?” she asked.
He laughed even as he pulled out of her. “Stand up.”
With a curious look, she did as he asked.
“Bend over the bed.”
Oh. She knew exactly what he was about.
Bracing her hands on the mattress, she bent with her head hanging down, opening herself up to him. He slid slowly into the slickness of her, filling her even more than before.
“I remember how you liked this,” he growled in her ear. “How you would beg for more.”
Her body shivered with anticipation as he drew out slowly and slammed back into her. His hand twined in her hair, pulling her head back gently and causing her the slightest hint of pain. Yes, she did like this. She liked it almost too much, for the heat that had been building in her was now a full-fledged fire, burning out of control.
He thrust into her deeper, their bodies racing to the edge. The muscles of her legs shook, and she pressed hard into the mattress to push back even harder against him. Then, all at once, her pleasure broke and she cried out, bucking up and wrapping her hand around the back of his neck for purchase. He clasped her hand, his other braced over her stomach, pressing her back to his chest, as he thrust faster, pulling her along until he pulled out with a groan, spilling his seed on the bed linens next to them.
Exhausted, her legs finally gave out, pitching them onto the bed, their right hands still twined together.