The Paris Affair Part 27

"Gui says he'd lost money to Rivere at the gaming table."

"But you think it's more than that."

"So does Malcolm. Who's a more unbiased judge." Harry hesitated a moment. "Rivere dealt in blackmail."

"And you wonder if Gui-" She was silent for a moment. He thought she might refuse to say more. "I can't say the source of his self-disgust. Perhaps in part that he was safe in England while both his cousins had died fighting for France one way or another. And yet-"

"You think there was something more?"

"I think there was a great deal about Gui I didn't know. But-"

"You're sure he couldn't be a killer?"

She swallowed. "I learned in Brussels I couldn't be sure of that about anyone."

He caught her hand. "I'm sorry, Cordy. That was unpardonable. I didn't-"

"You were doing your job." Cordelia put her other hand against his face, her eyes dark and fragile as stained gla.s.s. "What I meant to say is there are things about Gui I'm quite sure I didn't know. I can't say they have anything to do with Antoine Rivere. But if Rivere was blackmailing him-"

"Just so."

She swallowed. Without eye blacking and rouge, her face framed by wispy bits of hair, she looked unexpectedly like a schoolgirl. "Do you want me to see what I can learn?"

He kept his gaze steady on her face. "It's not a pretty thing, looking into people's pasts. Especially people one cares for. I wouldn't ask that of you, Cordy."

"I know. But I'm offering."

"You don't need to do this to prove something." His voice turned rougher than he intended.

"I'm not. I'd be a fool to think I could prove certain things to you. Those things can only be accepted with time, if at all. But you know I can't bear to hang back once questions have been raised. I need to know."

"You may not like the answers," he said, in the tone he'd used with young intelligence operatives he was training.

"I daresay I may not. But avoiding the answers won't make the questions go away."

He seized her hand and lifted it to his lips. "I have a remarkable wife."

"For a man who claims to despise flattery, you're indecently good at it, Harry." She leaned forwards, her dressing gown slithering from her shoulders, and put her mouth to his.

After two months her kisses still sent a shock of wonder through him. He closed his arms round her, carefully, because his impulse was to crush her to him as though she might be gone at any moment. They fell back against the pillows. There might still be ghosts between them. Perhaps there always would be. But this was the surest way he knew to drive them from thought.

Rupert stopped in the doorway of his wife's bedchamber. She was at her dressing table, wrapped in a frothy dressing gown of blue silk and cream-colored lace, her hair already unpinned by her maid. Absorbed in unfastening her moonstone earrings, Gabrielle didn't seem to be aware of the opening of the door. He stood watching her for a moment, memories and regrets tugging his mind in a dozen different directions.

He must have moved, because Gabrielle gave a sudden start. "Rupert, I didn't hear you come in."

He stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. After three years of marriage, his wife's bedchamber was still alien territory. "We need to talk, Gaby," he said quickly, lest she should think he had come for something else. There hadn't been anything else for some time.

Gabrielle swung round on the dressing table bench, eyes wide with inquiry. "What is it? Rupert, you look dreadful."

"I had a scene with Father."

"Oh dear." She put out a hand, touched his arm, then let it fall as though she feared she'd pushed too far. "I knew living so close to him would prove difficult."

"And it's going to get more so." Rupert pulled a scroll-backed chair away from the escritoire and drew it up beside the dressing table. "I've told Father he's no longer welcome in our home. Nor is he to have any contact with Stephen."

Gabrielle's eyes widened. "Darling, I know how your father can anger you-"

"This goes beyond that." The desire to smash something, to smash his father, roiled through him. "After what he's done I'm severing all contact with him."

Gabrielle drew a confused breath. "Rupert, whatever it is-"

"Father was responsible for Bertrand's death."

Shock flared in Gabrielle's eyes. "How on earth-"

"Gaby-" Rupert sought for words that would be anywhere approaching appropriate. "I've done you a great wrong."

"Rupert. Darling." Gabrielle sprang up from the dressing table bench, dropped down on the floor beside his chair, and took his hands. "You aren't making any sense. You and I don't have anything to do with what happened to Bertrand. And you didn't wrong me. You gave me everything. I'm afraid I haven't been nearly as grateful as I should have been."

He looked down at her face, familiar since childhood, lovely, deserving of so much more. "I should have told you before I offered for you. I should have made it clear that I couldn't-"

"You never promised anything you couldn't give, Rupert." Gabrielle sat back on her heels. "I know what marriage is in the beau monde. Or I should. If I had expectations that were . . . unrealistic . . . it's my own fault."

The words of his proposal echoed in his head with bitter clarity. He'd been mad. Too caught up in his grief to see anyone's feelings but his own. "You expected what you had every right to. You deserved a man who could pledge you his heart without reserve. Not one who gave his away long since."

Her gaze moved over him with an understanding that was almost like relief. "I never realized-I never thought to ask. Was it someone in Spain? Was she already married? Or-"

"Gaby, no. Yes, it was someone in Spain. Someone I knew in Spain. But not in the way you're thinking." He swallowed, every instinct of secrecy tight in his throat. "Bertrand-Bertrand was my friend. But it was more. I-" He sought for words and realized there was only one way to say it. "I loved him."

Confusion filled Gabrielle's clear blue gaze and slowly gave way to understanding. He waited, braced for horror or disgust. Instead Gabrielle touched his hand. "Oh, Rupert, I'm so sorry. I should have seen it."

"You couldn't possibly-"

"Don't be silly, Rupert." Gabrielle's mouth curved in a smile, the sort of smile she gave when she was thinking about France in her days of exile or her lost parents or anything out of reach. "I'm hardly innocent of such things. I hear gossip. I know there are men who-I just never thought-"

He pulled his hands from her clasp. "That I was so depraved."

"Rupert, no." Her eyes widened in what seemed to be genuine shock. "You can't think-Is that how you see yourself?"

He swallowed, the past roiling in his head. Careless comments, confused thoughts. "I-" He straightened his shoulders. "No." The conviction in his own voice shook him. "What Bertrand and I felt for each other-It was nothing but good." The memories tugged at his senses, and he smiled despite everything. "But I didn't think-"

"That anyone else could accept you? Or that I could?" Gabrielle got to her feet, but instead of drawing back, she touched his hair with tentative fingers. "How poorly you must think of me. I'm so sorry you couldn't talk to me. You must have so needed a friend. And whatever else we were, I thought we were always that."

"Always. But I've asked far too much of you as it is. I should never have offered for you."

Gabrielle shrugged her shoulders, one of those moments when she looked unmistakably French. "If you hadn't, G.o.d knows where I'd be now. And we wouldn't have Stephen." She dropped back down on the dressing table bench but leaned towards him, as though not to break contact. "You were in touch with Bertrand even though he was working for the French?" Her brows drew together. "Or-?" Another question flickered in her eyes that she could not quite put into words.

He gave a faint smile. "I'm not a French agent, Gaby. And neither was Bertrand."

Gabrielle drew a sharp breath. "But-"

He told her in as quick and controlled a tone as he could. Bertrand's work for the British, the supposed revelation that he had in fact been a French double agent, his death on the orders of the British.

Gabrielle gave a strangled cry.

"I couldn't believe it," Rupert said. "But I had no proof. And G.o.d help me, even I had doubts. Until Malcolm Rannoch began asking questions."

"Why-?"

"He's looking into the Comte de Rivere's death. And Rivere claimed to have information about Bertrand."

"Suzanne Rannoch talked to me." A shadow flickered through Gabrielle's eyes. "Rupert-"

"I owe Rannoch a debt of grat.i.tude," Rupert said, determined to get the rest of the story out. "He learned what I couldn't. What I should have learned four years ago." Guilt and anger bit him in the throat, a rank taste he would never be rid of.

"But who-"

"Father."

Gabrielle stared at him with growing horror as the picture formed in her eyes. "You can't know-"

"I can. He admitted it." Rupert pushed himself to his feet and strode across the room. The violence he hadn't been able to unleash on his father coiled within him. He wanted to sweep the porcelain figurines off the mantel, hurl the lamp across the room, crush the crystal girandoles on the candle sconces beneath his heel.

Gabrielle rubbed her arms. She had charmed Dewhurst from the first and had always seemed more at ease with him than Rupert was himself. "He hated Bertrand so much-"

"He hated what Bertrand was to me." Rupert's hands curled into fists. To know that the person one had loved above all others would still be alive if one had only kept one's distance.

Gabrielle's sharp breath sliced through the room. "He wanted you to marry."

Rupert spun round and took a quick step towards her. "It's nothing to do with you, Gaby."

She pushed herself to her feet as well, her hand to her mouth as though she were about to be sick. "But we fell right in with his plans. When I remember him congratulating us-"

"Gaby-" He crossed to her side and took her by the shoulders. "It's not your fault. It's thanks to me you were mixed up in this sorry business. But you must see now why Father is no longer welcome under our roof."

She gave a jerky nod. "At least now I know why you could never-" She drew a breath, her gaze turned away from him. "Why you could never love me as I loved you."

He looked down at her, the strands of hair falling against her cheek, the delicate line of her brows, the curve of her jaw, and saw the girl she'd been before Bertrand left England. Before everything went wrong. "I didn't realize at the time-I should have known. I was too caught up in my grief to see you properly." He lifted a hand and pushed her hair back from her shoulder, easier with the gesture than he had been for some time. Amazing the difference now the truth was in the open.

Gabrielle caught his hand and took a step back. "Rupert-" She squeezed his fingers and released him. "You aren't the only one with reason to feel guilty."

He studied the familiar face he felt he'd so rarely looked at. Or so rarely seen properly. "Gaby?"

She folded her arms in front of her. "I was lonely. And I'm no saint."

For a moment he could simply stare at her, his brain refusing to make sense of it. He could not quite name the emotions that coursed through him. Surprise. Relief. And a bite of jealousy. A jealousy he had no right to feel.

Gabrielle looked into his eyes, her own dark and steady. "I wasn't in love with him. But I needed to be noticed. I needed to feel like a woman. I needed a person with whom I didn't have to pretend I had a perfect life."

He swallowed, parched for something he could not name. "Who?" He had to know, at the same time he didn't want to.

She drew a breath that felt rough against his skin. "Antoine Rivere."

He took a step backwards. "He-"

"He never gave me the least hint he knew anything about Bertrand, Rupert. I swear it."

"Did you talk to him about Bertrand?"

Gabrielle glanced away, chewing on her lower lip. "I said that I missed Bertrand. That I still couldn't believe he'd gone off as he had. Antoine never gave the least sign he knew more."

Rupert touched her shoulder. "I'm sorry, Gaby."

"Sorry?"

"That you lost him. And that he lied to you."

She gave a rough laugh. "It was hardly a deathless love." She looked at him, face etched with guilt. "Rupert-"

"I betrayed the marriage first, Gaby. Before I even offered for you."

"A fine pair, aren't we?"

CHAPTER 19.

Malcolm stared at Wellington over the silver coffee service on his desk. "For G.o.d's sake, sir, why didn't you tell me?"

Wellington returned his gaze. He wore civilian dress as he often did, a light blue morning coat, buckskin breeches, and riding boots, but he held himself with military precision. "That should be self-evident."

"I could hardly fail to be aware that you were close to Lady Frances in Brussels. And in Paris. How far the relationship went is your own affair. And Lady Frances's."

Wellington's mouth tightened. "Quite."

"But her husband made it his affair as well? What was he threatening you with?"

Wellington reached for his coffee cup and took a deliberate sip. "Wedderburton-Webster quite misinterpreted the whole affair-matter." He returned the cup to its saucer with a clatter. "The d.a.m.ned puppy hasn't the sense to see that talk only makes things worse for Frances."

"But perhaps that was his intention?"

Wellington pushed back his chair, sc.r.a.ping it against the thick pile of the Aubusson carpet, got to his feet, and took a turn about the room. "How a woman like Frances ever chose such a man-The only thing to do with such accusations is to ignore them."

"But Rivere was making it difficult to do so?"