Page 86 of Souvenir Heart

Seized by the desire to know how he’d drawn her, she flipped past a sketch of two men in tattered military jackets playing cards on a barrel, peasant girls eating a meat pie, a boy with a dog on his lap.

Ordinary people doing ordinary things.

Until, there she was. Captured in a moment that had been far from ordinary.

She stared. Transfixed. She’d been sketched and painted before. By friends, fellow artists, artists employed by her father. But those portraits always seemed to emphasize her prettiness, like a pastry with too much icing.

Here was something very different.

She’d drawn him as an ideal. He’d drawn her as a strong woman.

Unsettled, she turned the page. And found more drawings. As if she were a gem and he was determined to examine her every facet. To portray not just her beauty, but her depths, her changeability.

She felt…seen…known…but also, laid as bare as if she’d posed nude for him.

She turned more pages until at last she reached the blank ones. She fanned through them, about to close the book, when caught sight of a joltingly familiar hand.

I agree to pay twenty thousand pounds for her safe return to me.

She didn’t need to see the flourish of initials to know they belonged to her father.

It was a staggering sum.

Marcus had said he was rescuing her for the money. Here was the proof. However much she might wish it wasn’t true.

Marcus Tyndale was a mercenary.

But if she could understand his motivation, she was less certain about her father’s.

No one had ever called Amaury de Joley a generous man.

Nor was loving father a description that leapt readily to mind.

She thumbed through the pages of the sketchbook, searching for the drawing Marcus had shown her as proof of his meeting with her father. There it was. Just as she remembered. Her father, face gaunt, hair wild, arms outstretched, entreating the two figures seated before him.

At the time, she’d focused on the face, trying to be certain it was truly her father.

The Comte Verignac she knew was wily, manipulative, and opportunistic.

She’d never known him to beg.

Encased in the tablecloth cocoon, Marguerite suddenly felt as if she might smother.

Was it for her life? Or was it the money he’d placed under her name to keep the revolutionaries from seizing it, now sitting in her account in Switzerland?

Fifty-Two

“There’s a good boy. Yes, yes, I’ve got some lovely scraps for you.” A dog barking and the sound of the men’s voices alerted Marguerite to Marcus, Andre, and David’s return. Slipping out from under the table, she peered out the window, keeping her head low, just in case they were not alone.

The sense of relief that swept over her when she caught sight of them—of Marcus—and a large brindle dog was almost dizzying.

Mercenaries, she told herself sharply.

The three men were removing their disguises and washing up in the courtyard water trough. Marcus pulled a wooden stump off his hand, then tossed aside a hat, wig, and a ragged shirt. He poured a bucket of water over his head; the droplets streaming down his chest and arcing over his shoulders when he tossed his head back. She told herself she mustn’t look, even as her gaze drifted down to his chest, the feathering of dark hair, the wicked scar that slashed across one muscled forearm and continued down his ribs.

A mercenary’s body.

She drew back from the window, shamed not by the desire pulsing through her body, but by the equally strong but foolish desire to believe her heart, rather than the receipt from her father.