Chapter Three
THE SMILE SLID off Andrew’s face the moment they were alone.
“Trust me, I’m asking myself the same thing,” he said.
“And what is all this tosh about you supplying me with buttons?” she asked.
“I’ve acquired an appreciation for notions in the last twelve years,” he said.
She wrenched the front door open. “I have a full book today, and three orders that need to be finished tonight. I have no time for facetiousness and even less patience. Leave.”
And let me be.
But instead of moving, he simply stared at her, his mouth twisted into a grimace.
“Fine.” She let the door go, and for a moment they stared at each other, at a stalemate.
As a woman, she couldn’t help but appreciate that he’d grown considerably since she’d last seen him, filling out as only a man who uses his body to make his living can. As a business owner, she couldn’t help but be annoyed that there was no possible way she could physically throw him out into the street.
“You may let yourself out,” she announced.
Her skirts swung out around her ankles and reclaimed some of the space he seemed to take up as she brushed past him. But she didn’t get far. His hand fell on her arm—not hard, but commandingly enough to make her stop, tiny jolts of awareness pricking up and over her body. “Is there somewhere we can talk?”
His fingers burned her skin through the wool sleeve of her dress. His touch had always made her blood pound, and the insanity of long-buried memories set her body aching for him—a response she couldn’t control any more than she could the rising of the sun.
But then everything had changed.
How long did it take you to jump into Alistair Parkem’s bed?
She wrenched her arm away, the sting of his words as fresh as the day he’d said them. She wanted nothing to do with this brand of fire any longer.
“Whatever you have to say to me, you can say it right here,” she said.
He shook his head, one of his blond curls springing loose from his water-combed hair. “Not here. Not when there’s a risk of being interrupted again.”
“We’ll be interrupted everywhere. My staff is here, I have a full day of fittings, and my brother is fond of traipsing in at all hours.”
He stilled. “Caleb is still in Edinburgh?”
“Where else would he be?” she asked, even though she knew what he must be thinking. Caleb had spoken of London for as long as she could remember, but Andrew should know that ambitions weren’t always realized.
Or perhaps that was just her experience.
“Is there anywhere else we can go?” he asked again.
Even bright and early in the morning when she was her very tallest after a night’s sleep, she barely reached his breastbone. Still, she straightened her spine, not giving an inch. “Why should I give you a moment of my time after what you said the last time I saw you?”
“Because”—he leaned close enough that she could feel his hot breath caress her cheek and smell the earthiness of his wet wool jacket—“you know that I hate you enough that if I sought you out, it must be very important.”
She glared up at him. “How fortunate that the feeling is mutual.”
He took a step back, but it wasn’t the submission of a man relenting under a woman’s angry scrutiny. His own distaste was clear on his face, and even though the last thing she wanted was to care, she could feel her heart crack where it had originally split more than a decade ago.
Damn him. Damn him for not staying away like he was supposed to. She could’ve happily gone the rest of her days without seeing him again, putting him behind her with the determination of a woman who refuses to be defined by her mistakes. By her betrayals.
Whatever guilt she held, however, was not as powerful as her desire to see the back of him. He didn’t get to torment her after all these years, passing silent judgment on her when he knew nothing of her life. He could tell her whatever he was there for, and then she could go back to her life, content to never see him again.
Pulling her shoulders back, she strode to the door that led to the back of the shop and glanced back. “Are you coming or not?”
Andrew grunted, but she didn’t linger to see if he followed. The clip of his heels was signal enough.
She walked quickly past the corridor to the salon and the stairs to the workroom and into the kitchen, but she didn’t stop there. Instead, she pushed through to the back door that led to the close connecting the buildings on this block. The downpour that had soaked Moira had subsided to a light mist of early-autumn rain, but she hurried along, not wanting her curly hair to frizz any more than it was wont to do.
“Where are we going?” Andrew asked from behind her.
She turned a corner and stopped before the nondescript door of a stone building. “Worried I’ll bludgeon you in the back alley?”
“The thought had crossed my mind,” he said.
Instead of answering, she rapped twice on the door. It swung open a moment later and a little boy greeted them. He was freshly dressed, his hair damp from a bath. She couldn’t help but smile, knowing that, despite his mother’s best efforts, neither his pale blue cotton kurta nor his white linen trousers would stay dirt-free for long.
“Hello, Hari. Is your mother in the shop?” she asked.
“Aai!” Hari shouted, and raced into the shop as quickly as his seven-year-old legs would take him.
“This way,” said Lavinia, glancing at a frowning Andrew.
Anika’s shop was laid out much like Lavinia’s, with a kitchen in the back, a set of stairs leading to rooms that served as living quarters above, and a corridor off of which stood Mr. Pawar’s office and a storeroom where the family stocked the beautiful fabrics that were their trade.
“It’s a little early for chai,” Lavinia’s friend said as she trailed behind Hari, who’d zipped out of the stockroom again like a rocket. Anika stopped short at the sight of Andrew, even as her son bolted up to him.
“Who are you?” Hari asked, scrutinizing Andrew with open curiosity.
Andrew’s eyes cut up to Lavinia’s and held for a moment. “Can you keep a secret?” he asked.
Hari nodded quickly.
“I’m supposed to tell you that my name is Mr. Colter, but I’m really Captain Colter,” he said.
“Why?” asked Hari.
“For adult reasons. But I can tell you that because I can see you’re the man of the house.”
Lavinia thought Hari, who was at the age where he peppered everyone in his path with questions, would ask “why?” again, but instead the boy scrunched his nose up. “You don’t look like a captain.”
“What do captains look like?” Andrew asked, crouching down so that he was at eye level with the boy.
Hari tipped his head to one side, his black hair falling in his eyes. Then he shrugged. “They have spyglasses. Where’s your spyglass?”
The corners of Andrew’s mouth lifted a fraction. “I left it on my ship.”
Hari considered this and then nodded. This was an acceptable explanation.
“Hari, go play upstairs,” said Anika, brushing his hair back and giving him a little push to send him on his way.
With the boy gone, Anika glanced between the two of them. “Well, you aren’t here to complain about your brother.”
“No.” Lavinia shot her a tight smile. “Could we have use of one of your rooms for a few minutes?”
She knew she wouldn’t have to explain to Anika that there were some conversations a businesswoman didn’t want to have when her staff was in earshot.
“Mrs. McLean is coming to look at bolts of calico, and Vinat doesn’t like anyone to use his study while he’s gone,” said Anika. “There’s the storeroom . . .”
“That will be fine,” said Andrew, putting his hand to Lavinia’s back. She jolted forward at the warmth that flooded her body. She remembered what it had meant to be touched by him once. Her first love. Her first kiss. Her first everything. He’d made her heart sing and her body sigh, but he wasn’t that man any longer. Still, he didn’t get to touch her as though it was a matter of no consequence.
“I’ll be in the front of the shop, Lavinia.” Anika scrutinized Andrew as she adjusted the pallu of her sari to sit higher on her shoulder. “It’s very easy to hear a woman shout from there.”
“Thank you, Anika,” she said.
The Pawars’ storeroom was one of Lavinia’s favorite places in the entire city. It was lined with neatly stacked bolts of colorful cloth along all four walls. Raw silk, georgette, taffeta, and chiffon along one long wall, and cottons, calico, and jute on the other. Every one of these bolts could be made into any number of garments, and something about the promise of transformation gave her comfort.
“This wasn’t what I had in mind, but it will do,” he said, looking around. “Even if you can hear a woman scream from the front shop.”
“I’m a widow and Anika’s husband goes on long trips back to India to purchase cloth directly from his suppliers. We look after one another,” she said. “Now, what is it that you want to tell me?”
When he’d walked through her door he’d pretended to be a genial fellow shopkeeper. Then he’d torn off that mask to show his raw anger. Now, another layer fell away and all she could see was the tiredness around his eyes and the tightness of his lips. He looked like a man who had had enough.
“I was sent to find you,” he finally said.
“I’m not very hard to find. Everyone in Eyemouth knows about my fall in fortune.”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t someone from Eyemouth. It was someone in the War Office.”
“The War Office? What in heaven’s name would they want with me?”
He pushed his hand through his hair. It did nothing to tame that one rebellious curl that had sprung loose in her shop. Years ago, it would’ve been the most natural thing in the world for her to brush it back into place, but not now. The easy, comfortable love they’d shared had rotted until there was nothing left.
“I need your promise that you won’t tell anyone what I say here,” he said.
She began to laugh. “A promise? Really?”
“Is that so strange?” he asked.
“I believe your very last words to me were, ‘I never would’ve thought that a promise would mean so little to you.’ Right after you accused me of being unfaithful. We can’t forget that.”
A muscle in his jaw flexed. “This is a serious matter, Lavinia. Promise.”
There was such weight to his voice that after a moment she nodded once, determined to give him only the barest satisfaction regarding her compliance.
It seemed to be enough to mollify him because he said, “I have reason to believe that someone has been bringing weapons into Edinburgh and stockpiling them.”
She paused, unsure of what to do with that bit of information. “Why is that any concern of yours?”
He drew in a breath, and the tiredness was back. “Because for the last twelve years I’ve been working for the War Office in a clandestine way.”
A long beat of silence stretched between them because Lavinia didn’t know what on earth a woman was meant to say to that.
Finally, she ventured to ask, “Are you a spy?”
“People who go around declaring that they’re spies have a tendency to find themselves dead,” he said.
She crinkled her nose. “Who tells others that they’re a spy?”
“Usually foolish men who are hoping it will make women more inclined to fall into bed with them,” he said.
Well, there was no chance of that happening with them, even if her body did pulse toward him when he spoke.
“If you’re not a spy, then what are you?” she asked.
“In this instance I’m a handler, and my assignment is to recruit you to help the War Office.”
All the air in her lungs rushed out as she slumped back against the wall of silk. “Why me?”
“My superiors believe that you’re the person best positioned to win the confidence of the man who owns the warehouse where those weapons were found,” he said.
“And who would that be?”
“Harold Wark.”
She blinked at him twice. “Mr. Wark?”
“Yes.”
“The rather jowly, unpleasant man who was just in my shop?”
“Yes,” he said, his tone clipped.
She burst out laughing. The very thought that Wark was dealing in anything more dastardly than merino was absurd. “The only person to whom Mr. Wark is a danger is me.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, his tone sharp.
“What you walked into, Andrew, is Wark’s monthly routine. He collects the rent and flirts outrageously. He hasn’t asked me to be his next mistress, but I’m sure he’s working his way up to it. The man is unscrupulous.”
“What?” he bit out.
“I’m a widow and a shopkeeper,” she said, leveling him with a look. “Men like Wark feel that gives them the right to make advances.”
“You weren’t always a shopkeeper.”
“I wasn’t always a widow either.”
For a moment, she thought she saw anger flash in his eyes. Good. He should know what it feels like to be here with him. But then the look was gone.
“Even more reason to help the War Office bring Wark down,” he said.
“And what exactly do you suspect him of?” she asked.
“My superiors have reason to believe that he might use the Prince of Wales’s visit as an opportunity to carry out an act of violence.”
“Why?”
A tiny, rueful smile touched his lips. “I asked myself the same thing before I read the dossier I was given on the train up from London. Wark has been ordering the movement of large amounts of money out of both his personal and company accounts. At the same time, an intelligence agent out of the field office here intercepted a letter sent from Wark’s house to a railway hotel on Princes Street. It was so blasé it seemed almost cryptic, and we’re certain it’s written in a cypher we haven’t cracked yet. There has also been an increase in the number of Wark’s associates coming and going from his house at all hours.”
“Have you ever considered that it could simply be that Mr. Wark is generous with his friends?” As much as she hated to defend Wark, the thought of him stockpiling weapons for nefarious means was absurd.
“That is the most benign scenario, and we hope it’s true. But we won’t know until you find out more,” he said.
“And how do you suggest I procure this information?”
Andrew’s ocean-blue eyes locked with hers. “Use your influence and maneuver closer to him.”
“You mean use sex to my advantage?” she shot back. Andrew jerked away. “Oh come now. We’re both adults. We should call it what it is.”
His face fell into a neutral expression of disinterest, and he shrugged. “If you must. Some of a more delicate demeanor might call them your feminine wiles.”
His nonchalance cracked something open in her, and she surged forward and jabbed him in the chest with her finger. “Andrew Colter, I don’t know what I would even do with a wile if I had it—feminine or otherwise. Do you think my days are filled with long, lazy hours where I sit on my divan and dream up ways to seduce my thronging court of gentleman callers?”
“What?”
Jab. “I don’t even know when I’d find the time.” Jab. “I have two seamstresses and a shopgirl working under me, and I still spend fourteen hours a day draping, cutting, and sewing dresses.” Jab. “And when my girls are done and they go home, I’m still here.” Jab. “That’s when I handle the account books and inventory and orders. I deal with suppliers who for ten years have asked me every single month when I’ll be bringing on a man to help me with the books. Or better yet”—jab—“why doesn’t Mrs. Parkem marry again! That will solve everything!” Jab. “So tell me”—jab—“when”—jab—“I could possibly”—jab—“find”—jab—“the”—jab—“time?”
Her voice was high-pitched and angry now, and it was a wonder that Anika didn’t come racing in. Yet it was still just her and Andrew standing in a glorified closet, all the air rushing out to be replaced by her roaring rage.
“We can make arrangements to help you,” he said.
“Are you going to jump in and learn how to whipstitch?”
He shifted his weight from foot to foot. “We can get someone in.”
She threw her hands up. “Don’t bother. I’m not the woman you need doing this.”
She wrenched open the storeroom door just as he called out, “I never thought I’d see the day that Lavinia Malcolm ran away from a challenge.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m not Lavinia Malcolm anymore. You’d do well to remember that.”
The meeting had been exactly what Andrew had expected. An utter disaster.
He’d warned Sir Newton and all the rest of them at Home that he was the last man Lavinia Malcolm—Parkem—would trust. Never mind that she was a civilian—there were no militaristic rules governing her participation. The truth was that the War Office needed her willing participation, or it would get no participation at all.
He swiped at the hair that had fallen out of place as he walked away from the little shop on Victoria Street. He might as well head to the address Sir Newton’s dossier had given him for his fabricated business and tell this Gibson fellow that his services as a liaison wouldn’t be needed. Without Lavinia there would be no operation.
The few minutes it took to walk from Lavinia’s shop to Blair Street didn’t do anything to improve his mood. If anything, they darkened it. What else could he expect now that he had nothing but uninterrupted time to ponder his encounter with the woman he’d once expected would become his wife?
Her face had lost some of the softness it had possessed when she’d been newly twenty—the last time he’d seen her. There was a leanness about her now, as though the world had chiseled away the innocence of youth and left her face sharper, more angular. The rich brown hair he’d loved to feel slip between his fingers was shot through with strands of gray at her temples that gave her an elegant quality, and the fine lines around her eyes belied many hours spent stitching by gaslight.
He raised a hand, touching a finger to the web at the corner of his own eyes, the result of months at a time spent squinting out over the bow of a ship at the sun-reflecting water. They’d both aged, but where he felt like a man old before his time, she had the carriage of a queen. Eleanor of Aquitaine couldn’t have looked down her nose at him with such disdain, judging him to be nothing more than a peasant polluting her kingdom with his mere presence.
Yes, her haughtiness stirred something inside him. When he’d left her, she’d been a sweet, mischievous girl. Now she was undeniably a woman. Worldly and confident, she was exactly what he hadn’t expected, yet the thought of this new Lavinia intrigued him. And the worst part was, it made him want her even more powerfully than he had when he’d seen her through the shopwindow, scissors raised menacingly in conversation with Wark.
He shook his head as he turned onto Blair Street and stopped in front of No. 14. It was a small shop with a plate-glass window that stretched almost its entire width. Inside, he could see cabinets fitted with tiny drawers, no doubt holding all of the buttons that he was supposed to be selling. He wondered how long ago Home had purchased this storefront and whether it had served as the cover for any other operations.
The door was locked, but there was a key for a doorbell next to a brass plaque that read, Colter’s Fine Notions. He turned the key, feeling a little ridiculous that he had to ask permission to enter his own “shop.” The bell rang through the three-story building, and after a moment, the tumblers clicked and the door was flung open. Standing on the threshold looking up at him through narrow eyes was a slip of a girl hardly more than eighteen wearing a bold tartan dress with a tight lace collar that looked like it was trying to strangle her.
“Can I help you, sir?” she asked politely.
“I’m looking for a Mr. Gibson,” he said, forcing himself to blink or risk being blinded by the appalling clash of blue, yellow, green, and red that was her dress.
“Do you have an appointment, sir?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
When she continued to stare at him, he cleared his throat, and said, “Up in the morning’s no for me, up in the morning early.”
“When a’ the hills are cover’d wi’ snaw, I’m sure it’s winter fairly,” she replied, finishing the verse and then stepping back to let him pass. “Do come in.”
“Isn’t Robert Burns a little on the nose?” he asked.
“I can assure you, the code was Home’s choice and not my own. I can’t stand the man,” she said, lifting her skirts an inch. “This way.”
“Isn’t Burns a national treasure?” he asked.
She shot him a sour look over her shoulder. “Just because he wrote a lot of barely comprehensible rubbish doesn’t mean that all Scotsmen and -women wish for it to be shoved down their throats at every turn.”
“Perhaps you should suggest Walter Scott then,” he said.
“Stevenson, Lang, Montgomery, and all he wants is Scott. No imagination,” she muttered with a huff.
His poetry critic guide pushed through a door off the landing to the private rooms of the shop. There was a reception area that was set up to resemble a sitting room, and beyond it an office. When the young woman let him in, he expected Mr. Gibson to be seated behind the plain oak desk. Instead, she rounded it and dropped unceremoniously into the chair before crossing her hands on the table and fixing him with a look.
“Gillie Gibson, at your service,” she said.
“You’re Gibson?” he asked, taken aback.
She wiggled her fingers in the air. “Surprise.”
“You’re a woman,” he said.
“I wouldn’t be wearing a corset if I wasn’t,” she said.
“But Home doesn’t employ women to run field offices.”
“You may not have encountered one in your time, but I can assure you Home most certainly does.”
“But you’re so young,” he said, still grappling with the idea that Home had intended for this tiny woman who looked barely old enough to wear long dresses to run his operation.
“And you’re rather craggy-looking, if we’re stating truths.”
He gave a snort, and she leaned back in her chair with a sigh. “Captain Colter—or, I suppose, Mr. Colter, since you’re supposed to be a shopkeeper—I don’t want to argue with you about my ability to run this operation. I find the entire thing tiring and rarely worth my time.”
Although she was at least a good ten years younger than he, he recognized the weariness about her words because he’d felt it himself.
“Then I suspect I’m not the first man who’s been surprised at your youth and sex,” he said.
“Hardly. I’ve been working for Home since I was fourteen. I’m trained and tested in the field, but I have a particular talent for making connections, gathering information, and greasing the wheels behind the scenes. That is, if I choose to help an agent. I sometimes find myself disinclined, especially when a man is being an ass.”
There was something formidable and steely about this pint-size woman, and Andrew couldn’t help but like her for it.
“Please forgive my surprise. I shouldn’t have presumed to know your sex, Miss Gibson,” he said, bowing his head but unable to suppress a grin. Gillie Gibson was a little prickly, disarmingly matter-of-fact, and startlingly efficient. He liked her already.
“Gillie will do just fine.”
“Not just Gibson?” he asked.
Her expression morphed into a sweet smile. “Not if you enjoy the use of both of your hands. Besides, I’m supposed to be playing the role of your sister.”
“Andrew,” he said, sticking out his hand to the exuberantly dressed woman, who shook it with a firm grip. “I never had a sister.”
“No time like the present to acquire one then.”
Gillie pulled a key that hung on a chain out of the neckline of her dress. Unlocking a drawer, she removed a dossier. He was beginning to feel that, more than ever, his life was ruled by dossiers. His retirement couldn’t come fast enough.
“Did you make contact with Mrs. Parkem?” Gillie asked.
“Yes.”
“Good. There’s hope for you yet then.”
“Don’t be so certain.”
“What did she say?” Gillie asked.
“I believe it was an unequivocal no.”
“No?” She was back to looking unimpressed.
“No. Although I did meet Wark, and a woman called Sullivan,” he said.
Gillie’s brows rose. “Moira Sullivan?”
“She appears to be a client of Mrs. Parkem’s,” he said.
“She’s more than that. She’s assisted us in the past. The woman is extraordinarily well connected and has a network of informants that Home would be desperate to get its hands on.”
“And yet she’s not a spy.”
“No, she’s something better. She’s a matchmaker.”
He sat back to process that little bit of information.
“What happens now?” Gillie asked.
“I’ll be writing to Home and recommending that the current plan be abandoned.”
Gillie flipped shut the dossier with disgust. “When they told me they were sending a sailor who’d captained his own ship, I thought, ‘Finally, someone with a little backbone rather than all these run-of-the-mill agents I keep getting.’ They’re all soft hands and sneaking manners. I thought you’d be one to get things done.”
“It’s out of my control.”
“How?” she asked.
“The asset doesn’t want anything to do with me,” he said, his voice dropping low. He didn’t know what annoyed him more: the look of unwelcome shock in Lavinia’s eyes when he’d entered her shop, or the fact that Gillie so clearly felt he’d failed.
“Then figure out a way to show her that this has nothing to do with you and everything to do with the safety of this country,” said Gillie.
He shook his head. “She won’t listen. Our history is rather complicated . . .”
“You were engaged to be married. She married another man when you were thought to be lost at sea. You found out two days after her wedding when your homecoming became a confrontation. We’re in the spy game, Andrew. It’s always complicated. But there are always solutions.”
She probably knew every order he’d ever given on his ship and that he liked his toast buttered straight to the edge of the crust.
He sighed. He had a duty, so long as they hadn’t exhausted all avenues of inquiry, to keep barreling along the path Home had set him on.
“What do you suggest we do?” he asked.
Gillie’s smile spread and her eyes twinkled. “Go see the matchmaker.”