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“A spy?” Matthew’s dark eyebrows shot up. He didn’t look particularly convinced.
“Why not?”
“Because I and anyone else who was there would tear the bloody bastard limb from limb, that’s why,” Matthew replied. He jumped up from his chair as if he couldn’t stay still anymore.
“All the more reason to make sure no one found out,” Jasper said softly.
Matthew was looking out the window now and merely shrugged.
“Look, I have no more love of the idea than you,” Jasper said. “But if we were betrayed, if they all died from one man’s greed, if we marched through that forest and endured . . .” He stopped, unable to say the rest.
Jasper closed his eyes, but in the blackness, he still saw the glowing stick pressing into flesh, still smelled the stench of burned human skin. He opened his eyes. Matthew was watching him without expression.
“We need—I need—to find him and bring him to justice. Make him pay for his sins,” Jasper said.
“What about Hasselthorpe? Have you seen him since the shooting?”
“He refuses to see me. I sent a message this morning asking for an interview, and he sent it back saying he intends to retire to his country estate to recover.”
“Damn.”
“Quite.” Jasper brooded over the map again.
“You need to speak to Alistair Munroe,” Horn said from behind him.
Jasper turned. “You think he’s the traitor?”
“No.” Matthew shook his head. “But he was there. He might remember something we haven’t.”
“I’ve tried writing him.” Jasper grimaced in frustration. “He doesn’t write back.”
Matthew looked at him steadily. “Then you’ll just have to travel to Scotland, won’t you?”
MELISANDE SAW HER husband for the first time that day at dinner. She’d actually begun to wonder if he was avoiding her, if something was the matter, but he seemed perfectly normal now as he forked up peas and joked with the footmen.
moothed her hands down his broad back, feeling the valley of his spine, the muscles on either side. Like being in hell. She ached for the part of him that had been in hell. “Were you in many battles?”
“A few.” He sighed and lowered his head as she dug her thumbs into the muscles above his hips.
She tapped his shoulder. “Take this off.”
He shrugged out of his banyan and shirt, but when he made to turn around, she firmly pushed him back. She pressed her thumbs in hard, small circles on either side of his spine. He groaned and his head fell forward again as he braced his hands on either side of the windowsill.
“You were at Quebec,” she said softly.
“That was the only real battle. The rest were skirmishes. Some lasted only minutes.”
“And Spinner’s Falls?”
His shoulders hunched as if she’d hit him, but he didn’t say a word. She knew that Spinner’s Falls had been a massacre. She’d comforted Emeline when word finally came back that Reynaud had not survived his capture there. She should push—this was obviously his weak point. But she couldn’t be so ruthless. She hated the thought of hurting him anew.
Instead, she took his hand and led him to her bed. He stood silently, passively, as she stripped him of his remaining clothes—although his cock was far from passive. Then she pushed him onto the bed and climbed in beside him. She propped herself up on an elbow next to him and drew her free hand down over his chest. She felt grateful that she had this man, at least for this time, for herself. Here, now, she could do with him as she wished.
It was a gift. A glorious gift.
So she leaned down and trailed soft, wet kisses along his side, licking the ridge of his ribs, nipping at the jut of his hip bone. Above her, he rumbled something, a warning perhaps, or maybe encouragement. She wasn’t sure, and she didn’t care. In front of her was her goal: his penis, bold and thick and hard. She touched it with just a fingertip, running along its length. Then she leaned down and softly, gently, kissed him on the weeping eye.
His hips arched, and he grabbed her hair, pulling her face up. “Don’t. You don’t have to. I don’t deserve it.”
