Chapter 17
Sixes and sevens: Left at sixes and sevens; i.e. in confusion: commonly said of a room where the furniture, &c. is scattered about; or of a business left unsettled.
A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
Francis Grose
Nothing we shouldn’t have kept doing all these years was Nick’s first thought. But it wouldn’t do to speak that thought aloud. Or think it again, for that matter.
On a groan both sated and irritated, he slid off Mariana, ignoring the scream of protest inside him. His body had no desire to separate from hers, but he couldn’t think in a straight line otherwise. Her gaze held his in a moment both tense and tender, and he felt an insuperable chasm open up and yawn between them, the sense of intimacy growing more elusory with each second that ticked by.
He sat back on his heels, suddenly as naked as Adam after he ate the forbidden fruit.
Mariana rolled onto her side and curled into herself, denying him the unobstructed view of her body he craved. “Have you seen Yvette and Lisette since . . .” she trailed, “. . . since that night?”
At once and unaccountably hurt, he responded with a defensive, “Of course not.”
In a gesture of reassurance, she reached out and touched staying fingers to his arm. “I’m missing my locket and hoped it was in your possession.”
He shot to his feet and began dressing beneath her unflinching gaze. “I don’t recall a locket.” He’d intended to return the locket to her tonight. Instead, he’d lied, and he knew why. He didn’t want to let any part of her go.
Without another word, she slipped off the sofa and strode past him. He allowed her to pass, affording her a measure of privacy as she retrieved her discarded clothing.
He knew what he must say next. “You are ready to engage your handsome and well-meaning and misguided revolutionary tomorrow.”
A blank pause stretched between them before a brittle laugh burst from her. “Don’t forget young.”
The interlude that had just occurred was gone forever. He would pretend that a pang for its loss hadn’t just stolen through him.
“I passed the seduction lesson as well as breaking and entering?” Mockery sounded in her voice. “Two birds with one stone, to be sure.”
He matched her tone with a sardonic one of his own. “You always were efficient.”
Steeling himself, he faced a fully dressed Mariana, her eyes glittering hard as diamonds. “If you don’t have any further instructions, I shall show myself out.”
“Around that corner”—He inclined his head—“is an unlocked gate.”
Their gazes held for a moment longer than he would have expected. She was angry at having been dismissed so casually. He wouldn’t blame her for slapping his face, given all that had been said and done tonight. He might even want her to slap his face, just for the contact of her skin against his.
She gave a curt nod and disappeared down the path.
Once she was out of sight, he grabbed his overcoat and traced her footsteps down an aisle of shrubbery, around a sharp limestone corner, and through the open gate. At a distance of about twenty feet, she strode ahead of him and cut across the street.
“Do not follow me,” she called over her shoulder.
He elected not to respond verbally, letting his feet do his talking. He would see her safely back to her hotel since his agent had been given instructions only to follow her to the museum tonight.
Had he anticipated the outcome of the night?
He was being disingenuous with himself. Of course, he had. His skin still pulsed with the electricity of her skin against his.
How many years had it been since he’d last felt her? How many years had he spent trying to forget the feel of her?
His eyes trained on her fleeting form, his mind traveled back to the night he’d put a stop to the electricity between them.
Or had tried.
~ ~ ~
London
Midnight, 6 May 1814
Nick stepped across the threshold of his foyer and gave free rein to the impatience and anxiety that had been plaguing him during tonight’s tedious evening of pretend.
For nigh onto a fortnight now, he’d been attempting to draw out an enemy agent who possessed a legendary jealous streak by publicly engaging the man’s lover, an opera singer whose loyalty, and affection, could be sold to the highest bidder.
Tonight, the ruse had finally begun to yield a result in the form of a hotly worded note from the agent. The man had stated in no uncertain terms that Nick was to drop the dalliance. This was expected and played into Nick’s hands. Yet one thinly veiled sentence negated any triumph he might have felt at the breakthrough.
Remember: unlike lovers, beloved wives aren’t disposable.
A single fact was clear: Mariana was in mortal danger. His mission faded into the background, and nothing else mattered. All that mattered was that Mariana was safe, and that he keep her so.
Beloved. The enemy agent’s use of the word nagged at him. For here was what he’d known since the twins’ birth: it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. All he wanted to do—all he ever really wanted to do—was steal into his wife’s warm bed, snug his body against hers, and never let her go.
In his and Mariana’s case, familiarity wasn’t breeding contempt. He didn’t understand how it was possible, but their marriage seemed to be a happy one. It was easy to see how an outside observer might think so, too. Another surge of anxiety pulsed through him.
A stray ray of moonlight streaming through a high window, he stopped and listened, ears attuned to any untoward sound. He followed the soft orange glow emanating from the family drawing room just off the central corridor. Mayhap a servant had forgotten to extinguish the lantern, mayhap not. He reached beneath his overcoat, and his fingers wrapped around the hilt of the dagger hidden at his waist.
Just outside the room, his hackles rose. Someone lay in wait for him on the other side of the wall. He counted backward from five and swung around the corner, hoping the element of surprise was in his favor. A single, sweeping glance revealed that he shared the room with one other person: Mariana.
He exhaled a gust of relief. No more than five feet away, she sat with her robe closed tight at her neck and her hands folded in her lap, observing him, eyes wide and strangely unfathomable. She looked not herself. But he hadn’t fully processed that observation just yet.
“Mariana, what are you doing up at this hour? Is everyone well?”
“A late night at the opera?”
“Oh, you know how these things go,” he answered in his usual evasive way.
Mariana never pried all that deeply into his business. He didn’t like the feeling of guilt that had begun to worm its way into these evasions. They’d begun to feel more like lies, and, more and more, he didn’t want to keep his other life from her. It was a problem, admittedly, for a spy whose wife was seen as beloved by him.
Her head cocked to the side. “I’m not sure I do.”
He kept his tone light and easy, but something wasn’t right. “Diplomacy consists of little more than showing visiting dignitaries the sights and bonding over hard whiskey and fine—”
“Women?”
“—Cigars,” he finished.
How pale and drawn she looked. It could be the lateness of the hour or the twins having a rough night.
“Olivia paid me a visit this morning,” she said, matching his light and easy tone note for note.
“Is that so unusual?” Mariana and Olivia were close, especially after Olivia’s foolhardy husband, Percy, had joined the army and left for the Continent on a doomed wave of idealistic fervor.
“She was at my bedside with the latest edition of The London Diary before I’d even drawn a sip of my morning brew. Have you read it?”
“You know I don’t read that rubbish.” He noted a studied casualness radiating off her, and his eyes narrowed.
“You might reconsider. After all, you feature prominently in their most recent edition.”
That was when he heard it: the tremor of barely restrained emotion in her voice. Something was wrong—direly wrong.
“Would you care to read it? I have a copy right here.” Her lips set in a tight line, she lifted the paper off her lap and extended it toward him.
Nick stepped forward and took the offensive object from her hand. He had no way of knowing that when his fingertips brushed hers, it would be the last time he touched her for ten years.
He quickly scanned the offensive rag until he found what he was looking for, dead center of page two in the “About Town” section:
A chip off the old block?
Lord N——s A——h spotted intimately acquainting himself with the Italian tongue thanks to noted soprano A——a N——i.
This particular lord’s penchant for the opera clearly runs in the family. Just ask his father, the M——s of C——e.
Even though they were a lie—admittedly, one he’d gone to great lengths to encourage in certain circles—those four sentences struck him to his core. His entire existence centered around being as unlike the Marquess of Clare as possible with one glaring exception . . . And he was staring straight at her.
Like his father before him, he’d made a love match. Mariana was beloved by him—thoroughly and desperately.
During their mad dash of an engagement and year of marriage, he’d evaded his feelings for her. She was young, beautiful, provocative, and an appropriate match in the eyes of family and Society. Like so many men of his social set, he’d never spoken of love. It was entirely superfluous to the institution of marriage.
Even when the feeling filled him full to bursting at times, he’d never given himself over to it. The weight of his parents’ union hung over his head like an ax suspended just above his neck, poised to drop.
Now, the feeling of dread that had hung about the edges of his marriage from the very beginning, and particularly since the birth of the twins, started to coalesce into something concrete. He’d known this life had never really been his. His happy marriage was nothing more than a mirage.
“I explained to Olivia,” Mariana said, “it is a vicious bit of unsubstantiated gossip from London’s lowest rag.”
Nick met her eyes wide with equal parts hope and fear and saw that she was giving him the benefit of doubt. She was giving him a chance to tell her the truth.
But it was a different truth that gnawed at him. Before him stood the opportunity to right the wrong he’d done Mariana by marrying her. He’d known from the start that he was endangering her heart, but the enemy agent’s note made it clear that this marriage was endangering her physical person, too. That couldn’t be stood.
In a single stroke, he could protect Mariana from the increasingly dangerous underworld he navigated on a daily basis, and he could save her from the inevitable collapse of their marriage along with the bitterness and hatred that would follow. He wouldn’t repeat the mistakes of his father.
“The column is true,” he stated. “Every word of it.”
His heart pounded so hard in his chest that he thought it might rend in two. But she couldn’t see that. She only saw the supercilious smile pasted onto his face.
“How can that be? I thought we were—”
“Happy?” he finished for her, his tone ripe with distancing notes of condescension and disdain.
Although it killed him, this was the right measure. One he should have taken from the start. He would do anything to protect Mariana and keep her safe—even if it meant breaking her heart.
Acid rose in his throat for what he must say next, and for the way he must say it. “We’ve been happy, darling. But I fail to see how my having a sweet bit on the side has anything to do with you.”
She flinched as if he’d physically struck her, and another part of him died. “I wasn’t aware that we had a—”
“Society marriage?” He forced out a laugh, mean and abrasive, ripe with ridicule. “Pray tell, what other sort of marriage would we have? Don’t be daft, darling.”
She blinked once, twice. Betrayal, hot and wounded, shone in her eyes. He’d succeeded. He’d made her hate him and ensured her safety.
“Get out,” she commanded low and hard. Her brows crinkled together in disbelief as if she’d stunned herself with her own words.
“My darling Mariana,” he began in that supercilious tone that irked her to this very day, “I thought you were aware of the sort of marriage we have.”
Eyes glaring at him through twin pools of unshed tears, she pulled her robe tight like a protective shield. “Get out,” she repeated louder and stronger, her resolve clearly gathering steam, “and don’t come back until I say you can.” She’d hesitated before adding, “Unless it’s to see Geoffrey and Lavinia. In which case, you will alert me ahead of time when you will arrive, so I can be out.”
Like that, the mirage of his happy marriage evaporated, and the future pattern of their marriage was established.
He’d immediately taken himself off to the Continent before he could change his mind and beg her to take him back. A single ten-minute conversation had set in motion the trajectory of his life for the last decade.
In the name of England, he gave up Mariana. In the name of truth . . . Well, that was a different matter. No longer did it feel like he was waiting for the axe to drop. It had dropped, and he’d survived.
Little did he know that survive was all he would do for the next decade, that surviving wasn’t the same as living. A part of him, the only part that mattered, had died that night.
Ahead, Mariana’s pace slowed as she approached the well-lit hotel, and without a backward glance his way, she allowed herself to be ushered inside by obsequious attendants. How would she explain her trousers? In a luxurious hotel, discretion was everything. Likely, she wouldn’t have to.
Nick’s pace doubled its rate as he strode past the entrance. Unable to resist, he risked a quick look left toward the lobby and saw her needs being met by no fewer than three attendants. Once past, he further increased his pace until he nearly jogged, as if he could outpace both the present and the past.
But the past wasn’t through with him yet. The momentum of that long-ago night had propelled him ever forward and away from her. At least, it had until three nights ago when he’d spotted his wife at the ballet.
Except the woman he’d just made love to wasn’t his wife, not exactly. The Mariana he was coming to know in Paris was a woman apart from the girl she’d once been. She was a woman who had picked up the pieces of her life, after having been abandoned by her husband, and carved out her own paths and experiences. With her sister, the woman had even created a vocation for herself by founding a progressive school for girls.
Her irresistibility, when he’d first beheld her energetic, lissome form entering a copse of woods with a stout hound at her side, was nothing to her irresistibility tonight. This Mariana—a woman composed of flesh and bone and fantasy—wasn’t a woman who a man released from his grasp once he held her within it.
Yet it wasn’t that simple. Between them stood an insurmountable mountain range the height and breadth of the Himalayas: their history—a history riddled with half-truths, outright lies, and impossibility.
He rounded a corner and a blast of north wind met him full in the face. It was the slap he needed as he traveled a Paris murky with a billion dots of newly-arrived fog. Just as the fog began to dissipate beneath the glare of the sun’s first rays, so, too, did the night’s uncertainty.
An essential truth remained unchanged: he couldn’t have Mariana. It was too dangerous. But he was having trouble remembering for whom it was most dangerous. Was it for Mariana? Or was it for him?