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“And how would that be?” Amelia asked, frowning.
“By shopping, of course.” Maria smiled, and the entire room brightened. “We will visit all the purveyors of masks that we can find and see if any recall the count. If he always covers his face, he must procure a great many of the things. If not, perhaps it was a recent purchase and he left an indelible impression. It is not much, but it’s a start. We will have to take care, of course. If he is in danger, finding him will bring that danger to us. You must trust me and listen to me implicitly. Agreed?”
“Yes.” Amelia’s lower lip quivered, and she bit it to hide the betraying movement. Her hands tightened on her sister’s. “Thank you, Maria. Thank you so much.”
Maria caught her close and kissed her forehead. “I will always be here to help you, poppet. Always.”
The quiet declaration gave Amelia strength, and she clung to it as she slipped from the bed and began to prepare for the day ahead.
Chapter 8
There was a leisurely pace to the pedestrians, carts, and carriages that traveled down the street. The day was sunny and comfortably warm, the air cleansed from a brief spate of early morning rain. Colin, however, was far from relaxed. Something about the day did not sit well with him.
“You should not worry so much,” Jacques said. “She will be fine. No one has connected you to your past or to Miss Benbridge.”
Colin smiled ruefully. “Am I so transparent?”
“Oui. In your unguarded moments.”
Staring out the carriage window, Colin noted the many people going about their daily business. For his part, his business this afternoon was leaving Town. His carriage was presently wending its way toward the road that would lead them to Bristol. Their trunks were loaded and their account with the rental property was settled.
He remained unsettled.
The feeling that he was leaving his heart behind was worse than before. His mortality was something he began to feel more keenly each day. Life was finite, and the thought that the entirety of his would be spent without Amelia in it was too painful to bear.
“I have never shared a carriage with her,” he said, his gloved fingers wrapping around the window ledge. “I have never sat at a table with her and shared a meal. Everything I have done these last years was in pursuit of a higher station, one that would afford me the privilege to enjoy all the facets of her life.”
Jacques’s dark eyes watched him from beneath the rim of his hat. He sat on the opposite squab, his compact body as relaxed as Colin had ever seen it, but still thrumming with energy.
“Soon after my parents died,” Colin murmured, staring out at the view of the street, “my uncle accepted the position of coachman to Lord Welton. The wages were dismal and we were forced to leave the Romany camp, but my uncle felt it was more stable than the Gypsy life. He had been a dedicated bachelor prior to my arrival, but he took the burden of my care very seriously.”
“So that is where your honor comes from,” the Frenchman said.
Colin smiled slightly. “I was wretched at the change. At ten years of age, I felt the loss of my friends keenly, especially following so soon after the loss of my father and mother. I was certain my life was over and I would be miserable forever. And then, I saw her.”
In his mind’s eye, he remembered the day as if it were yesterday. “She was only seven years old, but I was awed. With her dark curls, porcelain skin, and green eyes, she looked like a beautiful doll. Then she held out a dirty hand to me, smiled a smile that was missing teeth, and asked me to play.”
“Enchanté,” Jacques murmured.
“Yes, she was. Amelia was a dozen playmates in one—adventurous, challenging, and resourceful. I rushed through my chores just so I could be with her.” Sighing, Colin leaned his head back against the squab and closed his eyes. “I remember the day I first rode as rear footman on the carriage. I felt so mature and proud of my accomplishment. She was happy for me, too, her eyes bright and filled with joy. Then, I realized that while she sat inside, I stood outside, and I would never be allowed to sit with her.”
“You have changed a great deal since then, mon ami. There is no such divide between you now.”
“Oh, there is a divide,” Colin argued. “It just is not a monetary one any longer.”
“When did you know that you loved her?”
“I loved her from the first.” His hand fisted where it rested atop his thigh. “The feeling just grew and changed, as we both did.”
He would never forget the afternoon when they had played in the stream, as they often did. He in his breeches, she stripped to her chemise. She had just reached fifteen years, he ten and eight. He had stumbled across the pebbled shore, attempting to catch a fleeing frog, when he’d fallen. Her delighted laughter turned his head, and the sight of her had changed his life forever. Bathed in sunlight, drenched in water, her beautiful features transformed by merriment, she had seemed a water nymph to him. Alluring. Innocently seductive.
His breath had caught in his throat; his body had hardened. Heated cravings burned in his blood and dried his mouth. His cock—which had become an aching, demanding torment as he’d matured—throbbed with painful pressure. He was no innocent, but the physical urgings he’d appeased before were merely annoying when compared to the need wrought by the sight of Amelia’s seminude body.
Somehow . . . sometime, when he hadn’t been looking, Amelia had grown into a young woman. And he wanted her. Wanted her as he’d never wanted anything before. His heart clenched with his sudden longing; his arms ached to hold her. Deep inside him, he felt an emptiness and knew she would fill it. Make him whole. Complete him. She’d been everything to him as a child. He knew she would be everything to him as a man.
“Colin?” Her smile had faded as tension filled the air between them.
Later that evening, Pietro noted his somberness and questioned him. When he’d spilled out his discovery, his uncle reacted with novel ferocity.
“Stay away from her,” Pietro growled, his dark eyes burning in their intensity. “I should have ended your friendship long ago.”
“No!” Colin had been horrified at the thought. He couldn’t imagine his life without her.
Pietro slammed his fist on the table and loomed over him. “She is far above you. Beyond your reach. You will cost us our livelihood!”
“I love her!” As soon as the words left his mouth, he knew they were true.
Grim-faced, his uncle had dragged him out of their quarters in the stables and taken him into the village. There, he’d thrusted Colin into the arms of a pretty whore who delighted in exhausting him and wringing him dry. A mature woman, she was unlike the marginally experienced girls he’d dallied with before. She made certain he was spent. He left her bed with muscles turned to jelly and a need for a long nap.
When he’d staggered into the nearby tavern hours later, his uncle had met him with a jovial smile and fatherly pride. “Now you have another woman to love,” he’d pronounced, slapping him affectionately on the back.
To which Colin had corrected, “I’m grateful to her, yes. But I love only Amelia.”
Pietro’s face had fallen. The next day, when Colin saw Amelia and felt the same lustful longing as he’d experienced at the stream, he’d known instinctively that the sexual act would be different with her. Just as she’d made the days brighter and his heart lighter, he knew she would make sex deeper and richer, too. The hunger he felt for that connection was inescapable. It gnawed at him and gave him no rest.
Over the next few months, Pietro told him daily to leave her be. If he loved her, his uncle said, he would want the best for her, and a Gypsy stableboy could never be that.
And so he eventually found the fortitude to push her away out of love for her. It had killed him then.
It was killing him anew now.
The carriage dipped, swayed, and rumbled over the streets beneath it, every movement a signal that he was moving farther and farther away from the only thing he’d ever wanted in
this world.
“You will return to her,” Jacques said quietly. “It is not the end.”
“Until we finish this matter with Cartland, I cannot even consider having her. There is a reason Quinn continued to use Cartland even though he was troublesome—he is an excellent tracker. As long as he is searching for me, I have no future.”
“I believe in destiny, mon ami. And yours is not to die at that man’s hands. I can promise you that.”
Colin nodded, but in truth, he was not so optimistic.
The white-gloved fingers that were curled around the carriage windowsill belonged to Montoya. Amelia knew it with bone-deep surety.
As the nondescript equipage passed her, she chanced a stray glance through the open window and spotted Jacques. Frozen in surprise, a shiver of discovery moved through her and filled her with hope. Then she noted the many trunks strapped to the back of the coach.
Montoya was leaving Town, just as he’d said he would.
Fortuitously for her but unfortunate for him, his driver had chosen to travel along the very street she and Maria traversed in their search for him.
“Maria,” she said urgently, afraid to tear her gaze away for fear she would lose sight of him.
“Hmm?” her sister hummed distractedly. “I see masks in the display here.”
Before Amelia could protest, Maria slipped into the nearest store, the merry chiming of bells heralding her departure.
