Secrets of a Lady

“I told you I didn’t bring it with me. Because I feared just this scenario.”

“A good try, Fraser,” Carevalo said, his gaze trained on Melanie. “But I don’t for a minute believe you’d trust the ring to anyone else. You have it on your person. Unless you don’t have it at all and your coming here is a bluff.” His grip on the pistol tightened.

“He’s the one who’s bluffing, Charles,” Melanie said, though she wasn’t at all sure that this was the case. She was as conscious of the gun trained on her as if the cold metal had been pressed against her skin. “He doesn’t know you well enough to realize you’d never give way to a bluff.”

“On the contrary. Carevalo is displaying a disgustingly acute understanding of my character. It’s difficult to call his bluff when he holds all the cards.” Charles transferred his pistol to his left hand. “I’m going to show you the ring, Carevalo. Then perhaps you’ll be ready to negotiate.”

His movements slow and deliberate, Charles unbuttoned his coat with his right hand and unhooked his watch chain. The lamplight fell on the gold and rubies. Carevalo started as though he’d received a shock. Quicker than thought, he lunged across the room and flung himself on Charles.

Charles must have anticipated the attack. He closed his fist round the ring and struck Carevalo with his right arm. Carevalo staggered and grabbed Charles’s coat, Charles’s injured leg gave way beneath him, and both men crashed to the floor.

Carevalo had Charles pinned beneath him. He brought up his arm and swung the butt of his pistol at Charles’s head. Charles hurled the ring toward Melanie a split second before the pistol struck his skull. The ring skittered past her across the floor. She made a dive for it, skidded on the polished floorboards, caught her foot in the hem of her gown, and fell sprawling. Pain screamed through the wound in her side.

She scrambled to her knees and saw the ring five feet away, glinting against the corner of the Turkey rug. Booted feet thudded on the floorboards. She dove forward, her hand extended. At the same moment, Carevalo hurled himself across the floorboards with a shout of triumph. He slammed into the polished wood and lay prone, the ring clutched in one hand, his pistol in the other, pointed straight at her.

For the length of several heartbeats, Melanie would have sworn none of them breathed.

Carevalo pushed himself to his feet, the gun still trained on her. He slid the ring onto the third finger of his right hand. The action transformed his whole demeanor, the way an actor suddenly finds a part by donning a particular piece of costume. He seemed taller, his shoulders broader, his gaze more commanding.

It was Charles who broke the silence. “My compliments, Carevalo. Though I think we might have been spared the rough-and-tumble. Now that you have your precious ring back, I assume you’ll abide by your word and keep your part of the bargain?”

Melanie pushed herself back on her heels and glanced at her husband. He was sitting on the floor where he had fallen, a red mark on his forehead, his pistol in his hand.

“Not so fast, Fraser.” Carevalo’s mouth curved in a smile fraught with danger. He glanced at the ring, as though to make sure it was really there, then looked back at them. “This isn’t the way this was supposed to happen. I was going to have O’Roarke here as well. But as we have reached the denouement—”

“I’d say you handled this very well without any help from O’Roarke,” Charles said, getting to his feet.

“Help? From O’Roarke?” Carevalo gave a shout of laughter that sent a chill up Melanie’s spine. “Oh, Fraser, how little you know.”

Charles’s fingers tightened on his pistol. Melanie felt his unspoken warning, though he did not so much as glance at her. “At the moment I couldn’t care less whether O’Roarke is your accomplice or your enemy or your long-lost brother, Carevalo. All that concerns me is my son.”

Carevalo’s eyes glinted with mocking triumph, a cat who has been playing with a mouse and has just moved in for the kill. Melanie felt a prickle of sweat break out on her neck, while at the same time her insides went ice- cold.

Carevalo glanced at her, then looked back at Charles. “O’Roarke’s loyal—once loyal—valet Tomas came to see me just before I left Madrid.” He drew the words out, relishing them. “In a terrible state, poor man. He’d grown disgusted at the thought of what he’d helped his master accomplish. O’Roarke was a traitor. And so was your harlot of a wife.”

Melanie suppressed every possible reaction by holding herself stock-still. Charles didn’t so much as blink. “Have a care what words you use about my wife, Carevalo,” he said, his voice dangerously soft.

Carevalo stared at him. “No surprise, Fraser?”

“My dear Carevalo. A husband and wife have no secrets from each other.”

“You knew?”

Charles raised his shoulders in a gesture of supreme unconcern. “I have known for some time.”

“Then you were an agent of Bonaparte as well.”

“On the contrary.” Charles’s fingers shifted slightly on the pistol. “It was only after the war ended that I learned my wife and I had been adversaries.”

“By God, Fraser, I knew you were arrogant, but I never thought you a damned fool.”

Melanie got to her feet. “Not a fool. Just supremely chivalrous. You mustn’t blame Charles, my lord. He’s every bit as angry with me as you are, but he won’t admit it to an outsider.”

Carevalo turned to her with a gaze that singed her flesh. “You’re a Spaniard.” He fairly spat the words. “How could you betray your country?”

When one could not decide which lie would serve one best, one fell back on the truth. “Betrayal is in the eye of the beholder, my lord,” she said. “I thought my actions best served Spain.”

“To make it a vassal of a foreign power.” Anger dripped from Carevalo’s tongue.

Charles drew the fire away from her. “To free it from the corrupt monarchy that you yourself would now overthrow.”

Carevalo swung his gaze back to Charles. “This woman betrayed you. In every sense of the word, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“You are speaking of my wife, Carevalo.”

Carevalo gave a snort of contempt. “That’s just the point.” He shook his head in amazement. “It never occurred to me that you could have known the truth and continued to live with her. When O’Roarke’s valet came to me, my plans for the ring fell into place. If by any chance the British didn’t have it, then the French did. Either you or your bitch of a wife was bound to be able to lay your hands on it. To employ O’Roarke as an emissary in the matter seemed strangely appropriate. I was going to have all three of you there when I exchanged the boy for the ring. Once the exchange was made, I’d reveal O’Roarke and Mrs. Fraser’s treachery. I did you the honor of thinking you would avenge yourself, Fraser.”

“Revenge is a singularly useless response,” Charles said. “Give it up, Carevalo. You’re not going to produce the scene you wanted.”

Carevalo’s mobile face turned as austere as marble in the lamplight. His eyes were filled with ghosts. “People died because of her.”

“People would have died anyway,” Charles said. “Different people may have died because of her.”

Carevalo looked at Melanie. His gaze moved over her skin, as though he was stripping away her clothing. Not for the first time she wondered why some men had the impulse to ravish women they held in contempt. “A wife who turns whore has forfeited her husband’s loyalty.”

“You’ve got the sequence of events backwards, my lord,” Melanie said, though she knew as she spoke that it would have been wiser to keep silent. “I was a whore before I was a wife.”

The flare in Carevalo’s eyes was like a slap. She could smell the brandy fumes coming off him, so strong surely a match would set fire to his breath. “By God, you soil the names of the innocent women of our country. I can only thank God my wife and daughters were never in your presence.”

The pain in his eyes was all too familiar. For an incongruous instant, Melanie felt her own anguish resonate with his, like two disparate voices that suddenly strike the same pitch. “I’m sorry for what happened to your family, my lord. Sorrier than I can say.”

“Sorry.” Something shifted in Carevalo’s eyes, as though a shade had been stripped away. The unadulterated anger in his gaze was that of a man with no limits left. He leveled his pistol at her. “If your husband isn’t man enough to avenge your victims, I will.”

Charles leveled his own pistol. “Pull that trigger and you’re dead, Carevalo.”

“You haven’t got the guts, Fraser. I’m still the only one who knows where your son is, and you don’t even