The Prince of Spies (Hope and Glory #3) - Elizabeth Camden Page 0,13

wasn’t an intimidating person.

“Your father is Clyde Magruder?” he asked in an awful whisper.

“Yes. Do you know him?” It could be the only reason for his strange behavior.

“Did you know my last name is Delacroix?”

It felt like her heart stopped beating. She blinked, hoping she had misunderstood. “As in Delacroix Global Spice?” she finally stammered. “Are you joking?”

“I wish I was.”

She felt like a sleepwalker as she wandered to the window. The Delacroixs were terrible people. They were arrogant, privileged snobs who looked down on hardworking people like her father and grandfather.

“Your brother has said horrible things about my family,” she managed to say. “Unforgivable things.”

“That was a long time ago,” Luke said.

Not long enough for her to forget. She still remembered coming home from school one blustery autumn day, delighted that she’d finally passed her math class, only to see her mother’s tear-stained face as she held a magazine on her lap. Gray Delacroix thought nothing of slandering them in the press, and that interview in which he attacked their entire family caused her parents no end of pain. Her grandfather won a libel suit against him, and the Delacroixs had to pay a shocking settlement fee, but money couldn’t restore a tainted reputation.

Her mother wasn’t the sort of person who could absorb a punch. Words could leave scars, and that was one her mother still carried.

“Your brother said my grandfather had dirt beneath his fingernails,” she said in a pained voice. “That he wasn’t fit to be in the food industry.”

“That was my brother, not me.”

She placed a hand over her heart, willing it to stop racing. She couldn’t blame Luke for something his brother had said. After all, it was years ago, and Luke was too young to have been involved in that nasty lawsuit. He was a good man. He risked his life to save Bandit. They held hands and laughed on the ice, even though they’d both been afraid. The Delacroixs had been trying to drive her family out of business for decades, but surely that was other people in his family, not Luke.

She risked a glance at him. “You don’t believe all those terrible things your brother said about us, do you?”

She wanted an immediate denial, but the sadness and regret on his face was all the answer she needed. He did believe those things. They were enemies.

“Marianne, I’m so sorry,” he said. “You seem like a great person, but there’s too much bad blood here. We probably shouldn’t see each other again.”

“You’re probably right,” she admitted. Any sort of liaison between them would be too difficult, but that didn’t stop the wanting. “I only wish we could have had another day or two before we found out.”

“Maybe a week,” Luke agreed.

“A month?”

“How about a year?”

She had to laugh at how easily he bantered with her. He was fun, but seeing him would be like throwing a bomb into her family’s home. It wasn’t worth it. At least now she understood why her father got so annoyed when he saw her picture of Luke with the dog. He’d known who Luke was and suggested she have nothing more to do with him. Blood was thicker than water. Even ice water, she thought inanely.

At the door, Luke turned to her with an impish smile and wagged his finger in her face. “No more crawling on the Capitol dome, young lady.”

“Too dangerous?”

“Too dangerous,” he affirmed.

“It probably was,” she admitted. “Good luck with the Don Quixote translation. I’ll look forward to it.”

He winked at her. “It will be the best.”

Then the amusement in his face turned into reluctant admiration as he glanced back at the photographs hanging on the clothesline. “No matter what else happens, I think your pictures are wonderful. And so are you.”

He closed the door behind him, and Marianne felt like she’d just lost a good friend.

Luke was still mulling over his bad luck as he rode the streetcar back to the Alexandria neighborhood where he’d been born and raised.

Marianne Magruder. Magruder. Luke had plenty of friends, thousands of acquaintances, a handful of rivals, but only one real enemy in the world, and his name was Clyde Magruder.

Luke wouldn’t let an inconvenient attraction stand in the way of a lifelong grudge. No matter how much he admired Marianne, he intended to get Clyde kicked out of Congress.

He walked the last few blocks to the three-story colonial town house he shared with Gray and his wife. He was inexplicably tired as he mounted the steps