Page 64 of The Duke’s Suspicion

She studied him with curious, luminous eyes. “For your sister?”

“Yes. If I—if we had not been there, God knows what Pilkington might have resorted to when Vivi refused him.” A shiver passed between them, and whether it had started in Erica’s spine or his own, he couldn’t entirely be sure. “Frightened too for my fellow intelligence officers,” he went on. “Men who perform delicate work by taking enormous risks, risks that my carelessness has made greater still. The coded letter of which she spoke was a cypher—an old one, it is true, but still of some value. I shall never forgive myself.”

He might have made some excuse for having allowed the pages to make their way into his things as he packed for a journey no man wanted to take. He could still see the news of his father and brother’s deaths, written in Guin’s shaking hand. Or perhaps it had been his own hand that had shook as he read her words, accompanied by a trenchant order, scrawled onto the sheet that enclosed her letter. Colonel Scott had anticipated Tristan’s reluctance, his divided sense of duty. Go anyway, he had written. And so, after a few ineffectual protests, Tristan had agreed to come home. In a fit of frustration, he had thrown his things into a trunk and sent it on ahead. And at its arrival, his eager sister had seen to its unpacking…

“And frightened for you,” he continued after a moment, cupping one hand beneath her jaw and tilting her face to his. “You who insisted on inserting yourself into the fray, though I distinctly remembering telling you, ‘Absolutely not.’”

“I suppose that was the defiance to which your note referred?” She met his eyes readily, and the familiar sparkle lit hers. “Well, I think you were frightened for yourself. Because you are terrified at the thought of surrendering even a little bit of control.”

Oh, yes. She knew him. Too well, perhaps.

“But I did it anyway,” he said, and found his breathing curiously labored, fighting its way past some obstruction in his chest. “I let myself fall in love with you.”

“Tristan.”

There was wonder in the sound of his name on her lips. And pleasure. And resistance too. As he had expected. He met them all with a whisper of kiss, imagining her unready to make any other reply, or perhaps unready himself to hear the reply she would make.

When he drew back, he let his hand slip from her cheek. “I came here feeling that Hawesdale Chase had less claim on me, less use for me than the British Army. And I think it’s time I explained why.” He paused, uncertain despite his determination. So many years he’d spent learning how to make others divulge their secrets, how to keep his own. But the gentle pressure of her fingers, tangled with his atop the seat of the iron bench, gave him the strength to continue.

“I grew up knowing it was possible—likely—that my father was not the Duke of Raynham, but rather a man with whom my mother had indulged in a liaison. The head gardener, in fact.”

He saw, rather than heard, her sharp intake of breath. “Mr. Sturgess?”

“No, the man who held the post thirty years ago. In whose cottage you found me…hiding. The fact that the cottage has remained uninhabited all this time always struck me as confirmation of the truth of the tale. And because the rumor has never been far from my thoughts,” he went on, “I chose to believe it must have a similar prominence in others’ memory. I read Davies’s careful respect as reluctance. I saw impertinence in a servant’s momentary indecision. And worst of all, I refused to recognize what was real.” He tightened his grip on her fingers. “After tonight, though, I see that I am needed here. For the sake of the tenants whose livelihood has been threatened by this storm. And for my sister most of all.”

She took in all of it with remarkable calm. “When my mother married an Irishman,” she said after a moment, “her father, the late Earl of Merrick, refused to see her again. He went to his grave believing that the circumstances of a man’s birth mattered more than anything else he did with his life. You are a good man. A good brother. And you will be a good duke.”

God, he hoped she was right. “You’re forgetting one thing, though,” he reminded her. “My colonel’s letter.”

“The one you told Remington to burn. What was in it?”

“A dismissal, of sorts. After reviewing the information about my work that had been stolen and sold—by Pilkington, as we now know—it was his assessment that it would be too risky for me to return to France and resume my post there.” At her quick intake of breath, as if she sensed his disappointment, he hurried to add, “His letter also acknowledged that I had no doubt discovered myself glad to be home, despite my initial reluctance to return, and therefore tempted to stay.”

This time, she was not so quick to react, though at last she ventured a cautious nod of agreement. “But…?” she prompted.

“But the letter also contained an offer, if I might be willing to consider it. An assignment of a temporary nature, to begin in six months and last roughly a year. Training new agents.”

“Where?”

“In the West Indies.”

For a moment, her eyes lost focus, and he wondered if she were thinking of that exquisitely drawn map in her journal. “And what have you decided?” she asked at last.

“It is, of course, a complicated situation. Even now, after all that has happened, I have been trying to imagine a way in which I might have both—have everything I want, in fact.”

“What do you want, Tristan?” she whispered.

The answer was clear—had been clear for quite some time, if he had not been too blind to see it.

“Come with me. See the places and the plants I know you’ve dreamed of seeing. Make a brilliant discovery—a dozen discoveries—a hundred. And then come home. Help me make Hawesdale the very best it can be. Teach my sister whatever she wants to learn. We’ll go to London, hear lectures—no. No, you’ll give the lectures. Any dream of yours…every dream of yours…let me help you make it real.”

She drew three careful breaths, in through her nose and out through her lips. He’d watched her do it before, but he had no idea what it presaged, what words she might speak when she was done. Once more she was opaque.

“And your dreams?” she asked at last.

“They’ve all become dreams of you.”

“Oh, Tristan,” she said, choking his name past something that sounded suspiciously like a sob. “Those do sound like lovely dreams. But you must know I’d make a terrible duchess.”