Secrets of a Lady

“You were a French agent. So was she.”

“That’s it in a nutshell.” O’Roarke’s gaze flickered to Charles’s bandaged hand, then back to his face. “You were an agent of the British yourself.”

“I did the occasional fetching and carrying. I fear I was a rank amateur compared to you and my wife.”

“You underrate yourself, Fraser.”

Charles’s grip on the chair tightened. The carved tracery pressed into his hands. “You sent Melanie to intercept me and steal the Carevalo Ring.”

“There’s more, Charles,” Melanie said. “That’s what I was trying to tell you on the stairs. According to our informant, one of the British soldiers in your party had the ring all along. He set up the exchange with the bandits as a cover to extort money for the ring.”

Charles stared at her. “Who the hell was your informant?”

“The mistress of one of the bandits.” Melanie glanced at O’Roarke. “You were the one she talked to. What did she say?”

“That a British soldier had somehow got possession of the ring. He knew the British would never pay him for it. So he hired the bandits to pretend they had it.”

Melanie turned back to Charles. “That must be why the bandits were hiding in the trees the morning of the attack. They arrived early to collect the ring from the British soldier so they could sell it to you at the rendezvous a few hours later.”

Charles closed his eyes for a moment. “Who was the British soldier?”

“I don’t know,” O’Roarke said. “The bandit’s mistress didn’t know his name.”

“Was he an officer or an enlisted man?”

“She didn’t know anything about him, save that he was British and a soldier.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“Why would I lie about it at this point?”

“Probably just for the hell of it,” Charles said. He remembered, with sickening clarity, that he used to like this man. “Who the devil are you working for now?”

“For Spain. For a government with some belief in the rights of man. Not to mention women,” he added with a glance at Melanie. “During the war the best hope for that lay with Bonaparte. Now it lies with supporting Carevalo and his friends against the monarchy.”

“I take it Carevalo doesn’t know you worked for the Bonapartists?”

“Carevalo the French-hater? No, and God help me if he ever learns the truth.” O’Roarke stripped off his gloves and tossed them onto the marble library table. “Melanie has given you the power to ruin me in Spain. I’m sure you realize that. There’s little point in discussing it. You’ll come to your own decision one way or another.”

“At the moment I don’t give a damn about your future, O’Roarke. All that concerns me is my son.” Charles strode toward the other man. “You say you’d have no reason to take Colin because you know we don’t have the ring. But you could scarcely tell Carevalo that. So if Carevalo confided his plan to you, you’d have little choice but to go along with it.”

“Well reasoned, Fraser. But as it happens, he didn’t confide in me. I think he knows I find his obsession with the ring rather juvenile.”

“And yet you went to great lengths to recover it seven years ago.”

“Oh, I can’t deny its power as a symbol. I won’t say it would have turned the war in our favor if we’d got our hands on it seven years ago, but it certainly wouldn’t have hurt.”

“We’re not talking about seven years ago.”

“No.” The light from the windows emphasized the circles beneath O’Roarke’s eyes, the hollows of his cheeks, the long, sharp line of his nose. He looked older than he had a few moments before. “I’m not without sympathy for your fears, Fraser. If I’d had any inkling that Carevalo meant mischief for the boy, I’d have warned Melanie. You’ll have to take my word for that.”

“Why the hell would I take your word for anything?”

O’Roarke turned to look at Melanie, and she returned his gaze in a kind of silent duel. The fire crackled in the grate. The long-case clock ticked with precision.

“We can’t take Raoul’s word for anything,” Melanie said at last, her gaze still fixed on O’Roarke. “You can never be sure of what another person might be capable of doing. Raoul told me that, and you said it yourself only today. But I don’t think Raoul would hurt Colin.”

Charles looked from O’Roarke to his wife. The sunlight fell between them in a glittering arc. Their profiles, set with twin determination, were reflected in the glass-fronted bookcase on the wall behind. “Why?” he said.

Melanie drew in her breath, then released it. O’Roarke watched her, as though waiting for a cue.

“Because he’s Colin’s father,” Melanie said.

Chapter 9

Of course. Of course. Of course. The obviousness of it pummeled him, a series of blows he should have seen coming. But he was so used to thinking of Colin as his son that he rarely considered who had performed the biological act.

The library was suspended in stillness. The sunlight burnished the oak and velvet and struck sparks off the gilded book spines. The smell of ink and leather hung in the air with pungent familiarity. Books had been his retreat since boyhood. Now even this haven proved to be one more chamber in the house of cards that was his home.

He looked at Colin’s mother. “I must be very slow. You were in the mountains to intercept me. The rest was a cover story. So of course you weren’t raped and that isn’t how you became pregnant.”

“No.” Melanie’s gaze was steady, though her pulse was beating very fast just above the muslin at the neck of her gown.

Charles turned to O’Roarke. Colin could have inherited his dark hair and fine bones from Melanie as easily as from this man. But the slanting, quizzical brows and the long, mobile mouth were unmistakable, now that one knew where to look. “Did you know Melanie was pregnant?” Charles asked. His voice was a hoarse rasp, alien to his own ears. “Was marrying her to me part of the plan?”

The quizzical brows lifted. “I’m a good strategist, Fraser, but not that far-seeing. I didn’t know Melanie was pregnant when I sent her after the ring. She didn’t know it herself. Nor did we bargain on the extent of your gallantry. We improvised from there.”

Gray predawn light, clinging mist. An unlooked-for shock of kinship. An unexpected whiff of a happiness he had never thought to find. “So you lost the ring but gained a French agent as a British diplomat’s wife. You can’t have considered the mission a complete failure.”

“On the contrary.” O’Roarke smiled briefly. “Melanie was my greatest success as a spymaster.”

Charles pressed his hand to his temple. His image of the life he and Melanie had built together—against all odds, with painstaking care—had been blasted to bits. There was no coherent picture to take its place, merely fragments which swirled painfully in his head, like bits of shrapnel in a wound. “How long?” he asked, without thinking, without planning.

“Since the start of the war, or very nearly,” Melanie said. “It was 1809 when I met Raoul.”

Charles forced his gaze to focus. He stared into the blue-green depths of her eyes. “And you worked for him all through the war?”

“Yes.” She answered without hesitation.

“And afterwards? When we were in Vienna at the Congress? When we were in Brussels before Waterloo? During Waterloo?”

“Yes.”

He drew a breath that seemed to grate through him. “And now?”

She looked at him in that way that only she could, as though she was seeing straight into his soul. “It’s over, Charles. It ended after Waterloo. We lost.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

She swallowed. Lines he had never before noticed stood out against her finely textured skin. “I told you,” she said, with a control so tight it seemed to crackle through the air, “I no longer expect you to believe anything I say to you.”

“But it happens to be the truth,” O’Roarke said. “She told me after Waterloo that in the future she’d no longer