Page 36 of The English Wife

She swayed as the cab made a sharp turn, following another taxi into the narrow turning circle in front of the Savoy Hotel.

“I have rooms at the Savoy. I thought”—Bay looked at her and almost faltered, then soldiered on—“I thought you might be safer here. This was a fortress once, didn’t you know? If it was good enough for John of Gaunt…”

Georgie had meant to say something flippant, something about her reputation, but the words wouldn’t come. Instead, she said, in a low voice, “There’s no need for you to be mired in this. You’ve done more than you ought.”

Bay’s hand half reached for hers, then fell away. “You’ve had a shock,” he said, and the concern in his voice sapped her to the core. “Have a brandy, at least.”

“I—”

“Would you like me to drive on?” called the cab driver. “There’s two others waiting behind me.”

“No,” said Bay, just as Georgie said, “Yes.”

Giles had been a soldier once. He had seen little action, but he had kept himself fit, shooting, riding, fencing. He might appear idle on first glance, but Georgie knew him to be ruthless where his own interests were concerned, a ruthlessness made all the deadlier by the lack of thought that accompanied it.

If Bay stood in his path, Giles would strike first and think of the consequences later.

Mustering all her strength, Georgie said, “I would prefer that you drop me at my lodgings. I’d like … I’d like to rest. I’ve had too much sun, I think.”

With absolute certainty, Bay said, “You’re planning to run.”

Georgie’s fingers knotted in the folds of her skirt. “Why do you say that?”

Bay’s lips twisted in a wry smile. “Because I know you.”

“You’ve known me for three months!”

“Isn’t that enough?” he said, and there was both resignation and humor in his voice, a rueful acceptance of forces beyond his control. How could she argue with him? It was true; she felt that she knew him better in three months than she would have known most people in three years. “If you must run, at least let me help you. Please.”

“All right.” Georgie gave him her arm and let him help her down, feeling her resolve eroded by small steps, first the hack, now this. What next? It wasn’t the big decisions that set the course of one’s life; it was the slow accretion of all the little ones. She hung back as Bay handed the fare and a generous tip to the cabbie. “What will the people at the hotel think?”

Bay wrinkled his nose at her. “Do you care?”

“I care for you.” It had come out wrong. Georgie kept her head down as they entered through the oak doors. “I meant, your reputation matters more than mine. What if one of your American friends hears?”

“You mean like the Rheinlanders?” The lobby was bright with electric lights, making the gold-rimmed mirrors and equally gilded hotel patrons glitter and sparkle. Georgie felt unspeakably drab amid the American opulence of the hotel. “Jock will clap me on the shoulder and call me a sly dog, and Carrie will send letters round to all her friends with thinly veiled comments about continental dissipation.”

Georgie felt her dusty half boots sinking into thick carpet. “What about your mother?”

An expression of unwonted cynicism passed across Bay’s face. “She’ll complain about European manners but secretly be delighted I’m more of a man than my father.”

“Was that why—”

“Was that why what?” Bay turned to the man at the desk. “Room 618.”

Why he had cultivated the acquaintance of Sir Hugo, Georgie had almost asked. An attempt to prove his manliness, to please his mother, even in the most roundabout way.

Georgie looked down at her plain cotton gloves. “Never mind.”

She was distracting herself, clutching at irrelevancies to blunt her fears. Was it the doors of the electric lift closing behind them that gave every action such a sense of inevitability? Or merely the meeting with Giles, heightening her senses, turning her from a reasoning, thinking person into a hunted animal, seeing a threat in everything and everyone?

This was Bay, she reminded herself as the lift rose upwards. Bay. Whose one license, in three months, was to hold her hand in the park. He wasn’t Giles; surely, no one could act as Bay had been acting and not betray some flaw in the performance. Even the most patient of roués tended to give some signal of his intentions.

But they hadn’t been alone before.

Bay turned the key in the lock of his room, revealing a sitting room with yellow upholstered furniture and a window with the drapes looped back, framing the Thames in all its glory. A door stood ajar, providing a glimpse of a baronial bed, luxurious with pillows. Bay shut the door between the rooms, and Georgie felt herself let out the breath she hadn’t realized she had been holding.

Their eyes met across the room.