battered mind refused to comprehend them. Then his vision cleared and he was looking at his wife’s familiar face. Because her words made no sense at face value, he sought for the logical explanation that must exist. At any other time, he would have thought she was joking, but not now. Not with their son in jeopardy. “Then you’d better tell me about it,” he said.
The light pouring through the windows fell across Melanie’s face with crystalline, autumnal purity. “We’d heard the ring had been found and that an English diplomat was being sent to fetch it. We knew how valuable it could be. Blanca and I hid in that mountain pass for three days waiting to intercept you.”
Charles scoured her face with his gaze. The features he could mold with his fingers from memory. The eyes he had let see into his soul. The mouth whose taste was as familiar as air. “How did they make you do it?” he said. “Did your family not die after all? Were the French holding one of them hostage? Or was it something else?”
She shook her head. Sweat beaded her forehead and plastered strands of dark hair to her skin. “Oh, Charles. Oh, my sweet. Sometimes I forget how quick you are. But you’re reasoning under a false assumption. You think there must be an explanation that exonerates me. And there isn’t.”
“Or you think there isn’t.” He took her chin in his hand. “Tell me the rest, Mel.”
The pulse in her throat hammered against his fingers. “I wasn’t blackmailed, Charles. I wasn’t coerced. Make your mind up to that now. We don’t have time for self-deception.”
Her eyes were dark and opaque, as though she was afraid to let him inside. He sought for a way to breach the wall she had erected between them. That it could be breached he had no doubt. “Who sent you to fetch the ring?” he asked.
She hesitated the barest fraction of a second. “Raoul O’Roarke.”
He dropped his hand from her face. “You’re telling me O’Roarke was a French agent?”
“He wasn’t just an agent. He ran a network that covered half of Spain. A lot of his people were infiltrated into the resistance. As he was himself.”
“So instead of fighting for Spanish freedom he betrayed his comrades to the French?”
A hint of challenge flashed in her gaze. “Raoul wouldn’t put it that way. He wanted a new Spain. He thought the best hope for it lay with Bonaparte.”
The puzzle pieces shifted and fell into place in his head. Loyalties and alliances in the Peninsula had been as complex as a multifaceted gem. A lot of Spanish intellectuals had supported the French occupation as the quickest route to progressive reform. O’Roarke, with his liberal principles and his Irish heritage, would have had reason enough to side with the French against Britain. It fit. It fit all too damnably well. But how the man had managed to acquire a hold on Melanie—
“Charles.” Melanie seized his face between her hands. Her fingers trembled, but her gaze pinned him like a lance. “Raoul was a French agent. I was a French agent. I committed a great crime against you when I married you. I don’t expect you ever to forgive me. But right now it doesn’t matter. All that matters is what this means for Colin.”
Her eyes bored into his own. They stared at each other for a moment that seemed at once as slow as torture and as brief as a musket shot.
Realization slammed into him like a punch to the gut. He pulled away from her, crossed the room, and smashed his fist into the wall.
The sea-green plaster gave way beneath the force of his blow. His knuckles struck a beam. He pulled his hand free of the ruined plaster and walked to the door. “Let’s go.”
“Where?” Melanie came after him.
He didn’t look at her. He might never be able to look at her again. He turned the door handle. “To see Raoul O’Roarke again and find out just how much he really knows about Carevalo and the ring he tried to have you steal seven years ago.”
“Charles.” Melanie caught his hand as he strode through the door.
He jerked away. His hand clenched. He came closer to striking her than he would have imagined possible. “What?”
“Your hand’s bleeding.” She held out her handkerchief.
He glanced down at his ragged knuckles. The gash was dripping blood onto the rose and cream of the carpet. He tugged his own handkerchief from his sleeve and wound it round his hand.
“Charles, listen, there’s more, that’s why I had to—”
He strode to the stairs without listening. Melanie ran after him. Michael’s voice echoed up from the entrance hall. “If you’ll wait a moment, sir, I’ll inquire if Mr. and Mrs. Fraser are at home.”
“Thank you.”
Two words, but the voice was unmistakable. Charles had heard it in Mivart’s Hotel scarcely an hour before, denying any knowledge of Colin’s disappearance. He’d actually taken O’Roarke at his word. Then.
He rounded the first-floor landing and took the rest of the stairs in a half-dozen strides.
O’Roarke, now formally attired in a dark gray coat and flawless cravat, was standing beside the console table where callers left cards. He lifted his head and met Charles’s gaze. His face was still and intent, as though he was searching for something. Understanding flashed in his eyes. For a raw, angry moment, anything might have happened. If the air between them had been made of a solid substance, it would have been smashed to bits by the crossfire.
Charles couldn’t have said what checked his impulse to violence. The training of a lifetime. The memory that his daughter was upstairs. The need to maintain some sort of control. He jerked his head toward a pair of double doors across the hall. “Come into the library.”
He crossed the hall without waiting for an answer and flung open the doors. O’Roarke followed. So did Melanie. Charles stood to the side until they were both in the room. Somehow, beneath the black knot of rage that filled his brain, he knew that he couldn’t speak until the doors to the hall were closed.
He pulled the doors to behind Melanie, then turned to face her and the man she now claimed to have been working for. The light from the tall windows slanted across their faces. Melanie’s face stood out parchment-white amid the golden oak and brown velvet of the room. O’Roarke’s gaze was veiled and friendly once again, as though he were no more than a concerned bystander.
“I know what a great shock your son’s disappearance has been, Fraser,” O’Roarke said.
“You can spare the playacting.” Charles pressed his shoulders against the solid oak of the doors in an effort to stop himself from crossing the room and throttling them both. “She’s told me the whole.”
“I see.” O’Roarke nodded, a man accepting the inevitable and making the necessary transition. “I feared as much. That’s why I came.”
Melanie crossed to O’Roarke’s side in two strides, the pale blue folds of her gown whipping round her legs. “Did you know about what happened to Colin, Raoul?” She dragged him round to face her. “Did you?” She gripped his face between her hands, as she had gripped Charles just a short time ago. “Because if you did, so help me God I’ll cut off your balls and stuff them down your throat.”
“Why would I be fool enough to abet Carevalo,
Melanie’s fingers pressed into his skin. “That isn’t a straight answer.”
“Would you believe me if I gave you a straight answer?”
“No. But I want one anyway, damn you.”
He lifted a gloved hand and brushed his fingers against her cheek. “I wouldn’t hurt your son, Melanie. I wouldn’t be party to any plot that did. I think you know that.”
Melanie’s gaze raked his face. “You bloody bastard.” She released him and took a step back. “I can almost always tell when you’re lying. Almost. But not without fail.”
O’Roarke looked straight into her eyes. “No one can tell that without fail,
Charles pushed himself away from the doors, knocking against a table that held a chess game he and Melanie had been playing. “Was Carevalo one of your creatures, too?”
“Carevalo a French agent?” O’Roarke gave a shout of laughter that echoed off the coffered ceiling. “Christ, no.” He put up a hand to straighten his cravat. Melanie’s fingers had left red marks on his skin. “How much has she told you?”
Charles strode to a walnut armchair that had once belonged to his grandfather and gripped its high back.
