Wicked Temptation (Nemesis Unlimited) (12 page)

He saved more lives than ended them, even if he could never receive thanks or commendation for his work. Simon had medals and a soldier’s bragging rights—though he never exercised them. Marco could only try to sleep easier, contemplating the Russian missionaries he’d saved from execution—a ruse the Russian government had itself attempted to perpetrate in order to blame England and thus spark more war.

“Now that you’ve successfully guessed my other occupation,” he continued, “you can understand why we’ll need you out of those weeds and into something less memorable.”

She rubbed between her brows, her expression more thoughtful than pained. “Half mourning?”

“Just as noticeable. The intent is to keep us both as forgettable as possible.”

“I doubt anyone can forget you,” she said, then looked abashed at her own admission.

Ah, so he was mistaken. The widow had something of an interest in him, not Desmond. Something that went beyond the mission. That he felt a tug of interest in her, too, didn’t help matters. Her looks, yes, but her intelligence, as well, her willingness to push past her uncertainty and fear. These things pulled on him, intrigued him. He should only be interested in completing the job, and then going on to the next. There wasn’t time or room in his life for dalliances with women like her. He had a feeling she wouldn’t be content with a few weeks, which was as much as he could give any lover before moving on to an assignment. Temporary—that’s what he was, in everything but his chosen professions.

“Invisibility is a skill that takes years to master, but it can be done.” Concentrating, he made himself feel small, shabby. Someone hardly worth anyone’s attention. He drew into himself, as if disappearing into his own skin.

Then he called for the waiter.

The server was only twenty feet away, but it was as if Marco hadn’t said a word. The waiter glanced around the dining room, a pitcher of sloshing water in his hands, looking for someone who might need his services.

“Waiter,” Marco called again, and with some volume.
“Garçon.”

Nothing. The server didn’t move.

As if releasing a breath, Marco inhabited himself again. He grew bigger on the inside, worthwhile.

“Waiter,” he said again.

The server immediately came to his side.

“I’m done battling my dinner,” Marco said. “Take it away.”

“Of course, sir.” Bowing, the waiter removed Marco’s plate, and scurried out of the dining room.

Turning back to Mrs. Parrish, he was gratified to see the astonishment on her face.

“I knew you could playact,” she breathed, “but that was … some kind of sorcery.”

“No magic, only the will to make myself unseen.” Then he surprised himself by adding, “I can teach you how.”

A corner of her mouth turned up. “I’ve had enough of being invisible, thank you.”

That was something he often considered, especially after his years working with Nemesis. He could choose when to make himself disappear, when he wasn’t important or worth attention. Not many had that option.

“You’ll have to abandon your weeds,” he said. “Until the mission is over. Then you can wear bombazine for the rest of your life, if that’s your desire.” Though he thought it a damn waste. All that black crape did her creamy complexion no favors. “Will you do it?”

She didn’t speak, her gaze fixed on the dark windows and the occasional spray of seawater hitting the glass. For one of the first times, he couldn’t quite read her. But he wouldn’t bully her into making a decision. Either she came to this choice on her own, or not at all. A reluctant or resentful partner made for a rocky job.

And he wanted to know what decision she’d make, with no one but her own mind telling her what to do.

At last, she exhaled.

“All right,” she said, more to herself than him. “This might not be an adventure story with a guaranteed happy ending, but … I’ll try to do my part to get us one.”

He felt it then. A small filament, a thread of danger that he wasn’t as indifferent to Mrs. Parrish as he’d like to be. One of the rare moments in his adult life that he didn’t feel himself in perfect control.

*   *   *

The last time Bronwyn had visited a modiste, she was arranging her mourning wardrobe. In truth, the seamstress had visited Bronwyn at her home, since she wasn’t permitted to leave the house. Some of her clothing had been dyed—the more budget-conscious option—but other gowns had been specially made to accommodate her new status as a widow.

Mired as she’d been in sadness, leafing through fashion prints of women in dull, somber clothing hadn’t lifted her spirits. If anything, sorrow had weighed even more heavily on her chest, crushing her, the bolts of crape and bombazine forming dark shrouds around her.

This is my life,
she’d thought.
For the next two years, this is who I’m to be. A shade. A living reminder that everything dies.

Now she stood in front of the mirror at a Calais modiste’s shop, trying not to feel too much pleasure in her new clothing.

“Are you sure Madame would not prefer the emerald jacquard?” the large but elegantly dressed woman asked in French. “The color, it would set off Madame’s skin and hair.”

“This will do well enough,” Bronwyn answered in French as well. She smoothed her hand down the skirt of the pale slate gown. Her other choices had been similarly muted: a fawn merino day dress, a wool sateen walking dress the hue of a bay leaf, and, because Marco had insisted on a gown for evening, a pearl-gray lutestring silk with minimal embellishment. The modiste had all these dresses premade, requiring a minimal amount of alteration to make them fit.

The dresses weren’t the lively, bright hues that the seamstress—and Bronwyn’s own color-loving heart—wanted for her. But Bronwyn wouldn’t be swayed.

She stepped from the fitting room. Though the hour was early, Marco was all alertness as he paced the shop. After docking last night, they’d taken rooms at one of Calais’s many hotels. A door had adjoined their room, and though she knew it was a useless gesture, she’d locked her side. Again, given the long and strenuous day, she should have fallen instantly asleep. Instead, she’d lain awake, listening to Marco moving quietly in his room. Hugh’s bedroom had been separated from hers by a bathroom and closet, so she’d never grown familiar with the sounds of a man readying for bed.

Yet either the walls of the hotel had been exceptionally thin, or she’d been too attuned to Marco. He had a soft, careful tread, yet she’d felt his every step. The tap running as he washed before bed. This morning, too, she’d heard the splash in the basin as he’d shaved, and heat and curiosity had pulsed through her sleep-fogged body, as though it—and her imagination—were out of her control.

They’d breakfasted in near silence. When they’d finished and they’d checked out of the hotel, he’d taken her immediately to this small shop a cab ride away. Then installed himself in the front room while she’d sequestered herself with the seamstress. Typical of her countrymen, the Frenchwoman hadn’t looked askance at Bronwyn being accompanied by Marco, without the chaperoning presence of a maid, nor the fact that Bronwyn wasn’t moving from mourning to second or even half mourning. No, it didn’t seem to matter to the modiste what Bronwyn’s intentions were, only that the money for the gowns would be paid.

Morality had a different price across the Channel.

The shop itself brimmed with beautiful gowns made of luxurious fabrics, though most of them showed signs of slight wear. Their original owners must have had to part with them, needing to raise money for one reason or another. Perhaps their protectors had cast them off. Or maybe the women had had to see one of those secret, special doctors. The kind that ushered away unwanted pregnancy. Bronwyn herself hadn’t needed such a doctor, using her own preventive measures, but the whispers she’d heard from some of society’s faster set told her that those men existed, and, for the right amount, could rid a woman of a unwelcome baby.

She’d also heard that some women didn’t survive the procedure. What a brutal world this was, if only one looked past the pretty surfaces and elegant gowns.

Her own dresses were probably for sale somewhere in the London equivalent of this shop. The thought was even more sobering.

Marco turned at her approach. She waited for a breathless moment as he boldly looked at her, up and down, a slight frown creasing his brow.

“Did you care for him very much?” he asked.

She blinked at the unexpected question. He seemed just as surprised that he’d asked.

Her immediate reaction was to snap that it was no blasted business of his how she felt about Hugh. Yet she’d been holding herself in for an eternity. All her thoughts, her feelings about marriage, and marriage to Hugh in particular; she’d been unable to speak to anyone about them. Her role had been that of attentive wife, then nursemaid. And then, ultimately, widow.

Words and emotions built within her, like one of those pressurized valves used in steam engines. Marco was the perfect person to speak to—a spy, a man who dealt in secrets. Who lived on the outside of society. What did it matter if he knew her thoughts?

She walked to the counter, where an array of paste jewelry shimmered in the gaslight. Picking up one brooch in the shape of a beetle, she said, “I was happy to have the offer. I wasn’t one of the poorest girls on the market, but I wasn’t wealthy, either. My father was a second son’s son, and we got by on the income of a small estate with a decently performing tin mine on the property. Hugh was the best offer I received. It didn’t hurt that he was good-looking and sometimes made me laugh.”

Marco kept silent as she continued to sort through the jewelry. She pictured the butterfly and leaf pins adorning the bosoms of the same women who’d sold their gowns. Did they know that the jewels their protectors had given them weren’t real, or did it come as a bitter surprise when they’d sold the jewelry, only to learn they were cheap baubles?

If those women didn’t know how little they meant to the men who kept them, they’d learned soon.

“We were … happy enough,” she murmured, more to herself than Marco. “He called me ‘sparrow’ and liked the dinner parties I’d host. That was sufficient, I suppose. It wasn’t … a passionate marriage.” She couldn’t look at him when she spoke, and her face heated like a furnace, but it felt right and freeing to speak this way. Was it because he was an outsider, a spy? Perhaps because she truly didn’t know Marco, she could tell him things she’d never said to anyone.

“And when he got sick?” Marco asked quietly.

She held a ruby-colored earring between her fingers, watching the light play across its glassy surface. “Our doctor in England suggested we go abroad to a spa. I learned what I could tolerate.” The basins full of phlegm and blood. Seeing her husband’s once hale body wither into a white, bony husk. “I just wanted him to get better, but he wasn’t improving.”

“Got angry, too,” Marco noted.

She whirled to face him, but didn’t quite pay attention to the fact that she held a bee-shaped pin, because she stuck her finger. A drop of crimson welled. He stepped forward at once with a handkerchief, dabbing at her tiny wound.

“I…” she stammered. No one knew about those feelings of hers. She wouldn’t even admit them to herself.

“It’s natural,” he said. “Here you marry a young, healthy man, and then suddenly you’ve got an invalid to tend to. Like a child with no hope of ever getting older, or becoming independent.” He carefully bandaged her finger with a strip of fine cotton torn from the handkerchief. “It’s worse,” he went on, “because your husband will only get sicker. Now you aren’t a wife anymore, but a nurse. Doing some rather ugly jobs, I’d wager. What woman in her prime would want that for herself? Who wouldn’t be angry?”

It took her a moment to catch her breath. “No wonder you are … what you are. You’ve got an elegant brutality.”

“Not trying to be brutal,” he answered.

“Then why say such things?”

He held her gaze. “Because you want me to.”

Was it retreat or self-protection that had her hurrying back to the dressing room? She tugged off the dress, while the modiste clucked and warned her not to pull too hard or the pins would pop out.

She didn’t want to meet her own eyes in the mirror, afraid of what she might see. A cold-blooded widow glad for her husband’s passing, or a bereft wife who longed for her deceased spouse?

It took all her strength to lift her chin and stare at her reflection.

Both, she realized. She was both. Guilt assailed her like thrown grenades that she should be glad that Hugh had died. At the end, he hadn’t been himself at all. Even his brief periods of high spirits had been more mania than happiness, leaving him exhausted and weakened. It had been a beautiful summer day, hot and clear, when he breathed his last. As if the world hadn’t immersed itself in permanent winter when he got sick. As if other people continued to lead their lives.

“Madame, please,” the seamstress murmured. “You will tear the gown.”

Bronwyn’s fingers stilled. She’d been moving in a daze, trying to rip the dress off herself. But then, she’d been in a daze for months. Years. Perhaps not until Marco crossed the threshold of her erstwhile home had she awakened. Even then, she barely understood what was happening around her, as if slowly peeling away the layers of dreams to face the cold light of morning.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, but she didn’t know who those words were for: the modiste, or Hugh. Or even herself.

She did miss him. That was no delusion. He’d been part of her life for many years, and his absence left a void within her, slick and icy. But only here, in this little dressing room, staring into her own eyes, could she face the truth: she’d cared for him. But love? Love had been missing. Yet she’d never expected it. Marriages arranged on the basis of fortune didn’t have the luxury of love, only the hope of cordiality and respect.

Carefully, she peeled herself from the gown, letting the seamstress assist her in removing it. When she was stripped down to her underthings, she put on her weeds, and they felt heavy as iron.