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She nodded with understanding. “It will be hard to see her so close and not save her.”
“It will be impossible.”
She stared out the window for a long time. Finally, she rose and gestured for him to move out of the seat that had the better view of the Temple. “Then allow me to take the first watch. You are more likely to see her later in the day if the guards allow her to take a late afternoon walk.”
He moved aside, but hesitated before leaving the small space. “You do not have to go inside. You don’t owe me anything.”
“I don’t have to go with you, but I will. And you owe me an escape plan. Go and refine your plan so we can all live to risk our lives another day.”
He smiled at her, poured them both cups of tea, and sat to study his maps. The tea was weak and tepid, but he hardly noticed. He’d never met a woman like Honoria, and he didn’t think he ever would again.
***
SHE UNDERSTOOD HIMbetter now. It wasn’t just that he loved the princess and her brother, though he obviously did, it was that he felt the need to rescue them as a way to save, even if symbolically, his sister. Laurent had been a boy, a child, who felt helpless when overshadowed by the ominous Temple. Now he was a man. Now he could take action, and she knew he would.
No matter the risks.
No matter the gamble.
He made her want to take the risks with him. She had been a fool to allow him to touch her again. She could still feel the press of his fingers between her legs. She still ached for him to touch her again. Even now, when she should have been watching the Temple, she could not stop her gaze from sliding to him to admire the line of his cheek or the curve of his lips.
She wanted him to kiss her again. She wanted him to touch her, to make her cry his name as he’d promised. He wouldn’t take her against her will. He wasn’t like so many of the other men she’d known—men she dared not turn her back on. Men like Bowder, who took advantage of her innocence and fear and blamed his own weaknesses on her.
She’d learned to hate her beauty, even her body. Bowder had made her feel ugly and cheap. And when he threatened to take her virginity, she’d run away for good. She’d been seventeen then and far too young to be alone in London. She’d been lucky that some of her father’s friends at the British Museum remembered her. Mr. Strooper had given her a position cleaning, and she’d steadily worked her way up, proving her knowledge and value to the museum, until she had her own little office and a salary.
In the meantime, she’d scraped and saved and shared lodgings with anywhere from one to five other girls. She knew something about men and about bedsport from living with the other women, most of them shopgirls. Honoria had even allowed herself to be courted by friends of her roommates’ beaux. They were decent enough men. She’d liked the way they kissed, and there had been one man she had liked more than the others.
She’d been barely one and twenty and known Victor a year when she agreed to go home with him. He lived alone, and she’d gone to his bed willingly. She even enjoyed it after that first time. They might have continued on that way, but she had asked him, purely on a whim, whether he loved her.
He’d smiled at her and said he was “very fond of her.” She was very fond of him too, and a few days later she ended the affair. She couldn’t share her body with a man she didn’t love.
And that was the problem with Laurent Bourgogne. She feared she just might be in love with him.
Honoria stared out the window at the bleak stones of the Temple. She wondered if it had looked as foreboding in the Middle Ages as it did now. She could not imagine why anyone would ever have made a residence in the complex or hosted balls and dinner parties in the shade of its walls. But perhaps its gloomy medieval aspect was part of its allure. It had been the bastion of the Knights Templar. Who would not want to walk where those warriors had walked or sleep where the ghost of a man who’d fought in the Crusades still roamed?
But the dreary stones of the Temple really were much better suited to a prison. It looked impenetrable from where she sat, and she could imagine the despair of the children inside. They must have lost all hope of freedom after so many months held inside.
She looked away from the Temple and stared at the map the marquis had drawn. His dark head was bent over it, and he had placed one long, elegant finger on the Grande Tower, where it was known the princess and the dauphin were being held. It was impossible to guess what the prison would look like inside from the map he’d drawn. It was all long corridors, windows, stairs, and doors. Was it as austere on the inside as it was on the outside?
Would the last thing she saw in life be a damp, gray stone wall? She wanted to believe she would survive this mission. Honoria knew the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel had faced worse odds and succeeded. The Pimpernel’s men were brave, cunning, and inventive. But so many of those daring rescues had taken place early in the revolution, when the borders were newly closed and the government still in upheaval. Now a certain order had descended, and loyalty to the ideals of the revolution were enforced by the daily executions at the Place de la Révolution.
Men were not so easily bribed and neighbor had turned against neighbor. The League could not rely on a guard looking the other way or a passerby ignoring suspicious activity. If the princess was rescued, heads would roll, and no one wanted their head to be next.
Her head might be next, Honoria conceded. Or the marquis’s head. What a shame that would be, as he had such lovely dark hair and those green eyes that seemed to see so much more than she wanted them to. If they did die in that awful stone prison or even under the blade of the guillotine, at least they would die for a good cause. The marquis had convinced her of that.
She would regret nothing.
The marquis looked up at her in that instant, and their eyes met. He raised his brows, and she looked quickly back out the window. He’d caught her staring at him, rather than watching the Temple as was her duty. She felt the heat creep up her cheeks, not only because he’d caught her watching him but because she knew she lied to herself when she said she would regret nothing.
She’d regret never kissing his lips again. No man had ever kissed her like he had. No man had ever made her feel so much with just the press of mouth against mouth, the slide of tongue against tongue.
She would regret not feeling the way his hair curled against her fingertips or the way he leashed his strength to touch her with the utmost tenderness.
She’d regret never seeing the look of tenderness and need in his eyes when she looked down at him.
There were a thousand little things she would regret.
But she didn’t have to.
