hairpins and combs scattered across the surface of her table, her heavy dark hair falling forward across her face as she asked with what struck him as studied casualness, “And was he able to tell you the name of the person Napoléon has charged with the stone’s recovery?”
He kept his gaze on her half-averted profile. “No. He was killed before I could get it out of him. Shot, probably by the same person who killed the young thief in the alley behind Eisler’s house Monday night.”
He waited for her to make some response. When she didn’t, he said quietly, “Is it you, Kat? Are you working for the French in this?”
She’d sworn she’d severed her association with the French well over a year ago now. But that had been before. Before their lives and their future together had unraveled in a morass of long-buried secrets and Hendon’s self-serving lies. Before she married Russell Yates, and Sebastian married the daughter of Charles, Lord Jarvis, the man who’d sworn to see her die an ugly, painful death.
She looked up, her eyes going wide, her mouth forming an O of surprise and hurt as she drew in a quick breath. “I can’t believe you just asked me that.”
He looked into her beautiful, beloved face, saw the hurt that pinched her features, saw her eyes film. He said, “I’m sorry.”
She shook her head, blinking rapidly as if she were fighting back tears. “I suppose I should be flattered that you still trust me enough to believe I’d give you an honest answer.”
“Kat—”
He reached for her, but she pulled away. “No. Let me finish. My love of Ireland is unchanged. I would do anything to see her free of this murderous occupation—anything, that is, except go back on the pledge I made to you.”
He felt as if he’d just sliced open his own chest and torn out his heart. “I should never have doubted you.”
“No.” To his surprise, she reached up to press her fingertips to his lips. “People are dying. I can understand why you felt you needed to ask. I kept the truth of my association with the French a secret from you when I should not have, and that will always be between us. It’s not good for a man and woman to keep things from each other. Secrets destroy trust. And without honesty and trust, love is just . . . a shifting mirage.”
He took her hand in his, pressed his lips to her palm, then curled his fingers around hers. “My love for you was never a mirage.”
They stood face-to-face, nothing touching except their hands. He could feel the tiny shudders trembling through her, breathed in the familiar theater scents of greasepaint and oranges, looked into the deep blue eyes that were so much like those of her father. He said, “Do you ever think what would have happened to us if you hadn’t listened to Hendon all those years ago? If you had listened instead to your heart and married me when you were seventeen and I was twenty-one?”
“I think of it all the time.”
He leaned his forehead against hers, drew in a deep breath.
She said, “I did the right thing, Sebastian. For you and for me.”
“You can still say that? Despite all that’s happened?”
“Yes. We would have destroyed each other had we wed. I couldn’t have continued on the stage as Lady Devlin, yet I would never have been accepted into society. So what would I have done instead? Sit home and embroider seat cushions? I’d have been miserable, and in the end I’d have made you miserable too.”
“We could have found a way,” he insisted.
Although for the first time, he was aware of a whisper of doubt.
Faint, but there.
That night, a new storm swept in from the north. A fierce wind rattled the limbs of the elms in the garden and sent dead leaves scuttling down the street. Hero could see streaks of lightning rending the sky, hear the patter of wind-driven rain against the window. She lay alone in her bed, her eyes on the tucked blue silk of the canopy overhead, her hands resting low on her belly, on the swelling of the child she had made with a man she’d barely known but who was now her husband.
She heard him come in when the storm was at its fiercest. But though she listened carefully, she didn’t hear him mount the steps to the second floor. And so, after a time, she drew on her