“And what did you reply?”
“That of course I am, and I expect to be treated as royalty.”
He palmed a fat, loose curl of coppery hair that lay upon her bare shoulder, shining against her alabaster skin like bright silk. Feathery strands curled around his finger in a soft caress. Regretfully, he released her hair, his hand remaining on her shoulder.
“I have to leave you for a little while, Ginny. Try to miss me.”
“Leave the ball?”
“No, I have some business matters to attend upstairs. I won’t be long, so don’t think you’re rid of me that easily.”
“I wish I believed that.”
“You should,” he said lightly, “because it’s true.”
On the surface, it was true. A few of the cabinet members were in attendance tonight, and in his new role as ambassador from Mexico, he was expected to join in the discussion about a possible international crisis. Since Juarez’s death in 1872, his successor, Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, a chief justice of the supreme court, had been unpopular. Lerdo was a liberal anticlerical, hated because he did not flinch from using the power of the state to enforce his policies. Porfirio Díaz had risen again to grasp power from him, and now revolution seethed.
“Disraeli will be here,” Lord Sedgwick had murmured to him earlier, “instead of dancing attendance on the queen.”
Disraeli, prime minister of England and newly made earl of Beaconsfield, was a powerful man in the confidence of Queen Victoria. His predecessor, Gladstone, had been hated by the widowed monarch. It was likely that England would lean toward the policies favored by Disraeli in regard to the civil unrest in Mexico. Peace was always tenuous.
Since the Alabama affair three years before, when U.S. claims negotiations resulting from the British arming of Confederate warships during the Civil War had finally been peacefully resolved, relations between the two countries had been excellent. The warship Alabama, most famous of the Confederate raiders, had captured or destroyed over sixty Northern vessels during the conflict. After the war ended, the United States insisted upon compensation for damages from England for reneging on their neutral status. The arbitration tribunal in Geneva awarded damages, England had promptly paid the fine and cordial relations had been restored again. New turmoil on the U.S. border could affect both nations, if England chose to ally with Mexico.
Damn politics! He was more comfortable with action than the interminable speeches and intrigues that suited men like Jim Bishop.
Bishop. The U.S. government agent was as much of an enigma now as he had been when he first came to Steve and offered him a chance at life, instead of the hanging that faced him as the result of a duel. Of course, he’d nearly been killed more times than he could count since then, and all in the name of the United States government.
But he was damned if he knew why Bishop had seen to it that he be appointed an ambassador based in England, other than the fact that it brought him to London at a convenient time for the United States.
“I can count on you, I am certain,” Bishop had said in his usual dry way, “to regard the interests of the United States as highly as Mexico’s in your duties.”
“Don’t I always?” he’d answered, and they both knew the answer to that.
Now here he was, balanced on a tightrope between two countries again, and at the same time trying to reconcile with his wife.
Ginny, of the fiery hair and temperament. The young girl he had first met had evolved into this composed, beautiful woman who seemed so confident and poised. He’d married her twice, both times to assuage scandal, yet still did not know her. She eluded him, the essence of her like a wisp of fog, always just beyond his grasp.
Yet her ethereal nature was what had captured his heart so long ago, intrigued him more than any woman ever had. Even after he’d abducted her and taken her with him into the mountains of Mexico, she’d not lost her allure for him. Not until his grandfather had forced him to marry Ginny, had he taken the time to explore his reasons for keeping her with him. And then it had almost been too late….
His activities as a Juarista nearly cost them both their lives. That separation, when he had been sent to a hellish prison, was only the first of so many since then. Yet somehow they always managed to survive, to end up in each others arms again. Even after this last separation, when Ginny had stormed out of New Orleans with Andre Delery and he’d thought he would never see her again, part of him had known he would. Maybe that was the reason he had taken their children from Ginny’s aunt in France, bringing them to England. He knew she would search for them once she left Stamboul.
It rankled that, until so recently, she had been living in a sultan’s harem with Richard Avery, Lord Tynedale—his grandfather’s son. It had been Avery who was responsible for informing the Russian ambassador to Turkey of Ginny’s need to leave Stamboul when revolution loomed. As the Russian tsar’s illegitimate—but favored—daughter, she incurred ongoing interest from both the tsar and Russian authorities.
Steve had gone to Stamboul to find her when news of the impending Turkish revolution was given to him, and he had missed her. Instead, he had met General Ignatiev, a Russian officer sent by the tsar, who had helped Richard Avery arrange for Ginny’s flight from Stamboul when it became apparent she was in grave danger.
She always seemed to emerge from disaster unscathed, a phoenix rising from the ashes.
It was difficult to recall that she had been blind for a time, that Avery had been the man
