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“Sir Malcolm chose the school.”
“He was almost a father to you, wasn’t he? After your father died.”
“Yes. He welcomed our family into his home for many reasons. He’d been a friend to my father, and he had lost his wife and daughter recently in an accident.”
“I didn’t know about that. How tragic. No wonder he took an interest in you.”
He’d taken more than an interest. Sir Malcolm had groomed Raven to become a spy. At the time, Raven had been eager to follow in his father’s footsteps.
“My mother chose my academy,” Indy said. “She wanted to shape me in her image but I rebelled. I hated the constant preaching on propriety and domesticity. The day I turned sixteen I ran away. I had no plan, I only knew I must leave that place because it was killing my spirit. I wandered over the moors, cold and half starving, until I arrived at a house. It was Lady Catherine’s house. She sheltered me, fed me. She provided a refuge when I needed one most.”
This was the first Raven had heard of it. “You could have died wandering around on the moors,” he scolded. “What were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t thinking, I was feeling. I was sixteen. You stopped answering my letters. I hated my life. I’ve always had a dramatic streak. Wandering the moors fit my desperate thoughts. Why did you stop answering my letters?” she whispered. “I thought it was because you’d grown callous, shallow, and selfish. But I don’t think that’s true anymore. I think there’s some reason, some secret you’re keeping from me.”
Gods, he longed to tell her the truth. That he’d made the decision to distance himself because he cared for her, because he hadn’t wanted to hurt her.
“I want to tell you, Indy. I want to tell you what you want to hear.”
“No.” She shook her head against his neck. “Don’t tell me what I want to hear. Tell me the truth.”
“I was a fool.” He could admit that much. “Indy, I’ve made so many bad choices, and I have to live with them. I know I hurt you, and I didn’t want to hurt you. But... as you said, life takes these twists and turns sometimes. I chose a dissipated path.”
“You could have become a diplomat, like your father. Why didn’t you?”
“They did offer me the post in Bern, Switzerland.” A post uniquely positioned to keep an eye on the larger political framework of Europe. “I declined. Too boring, too tedious. I’m a rogue, not a representative of the law. I hate the formality and protocol.”
She blinked. “Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“A rogue.”
“You’re lying in my arms, aren’t you?”
“Because I seduced you.”
“You did.”
“I’m not convinced that you are a rogue. I still think you’re hiding something. You’re not at all who I thought you were. Sometimes your mask slips and I glimpse...
The boy who used to love her? He glimpsed him as well.
“For all I know you could be a spy.” She sat up abruptly. “Wait... is that it? Is that what you’re hiding?”
It was high time for seductive, inquisitive ladies to be ushered back to their own bedchambers. “Ha ha,” he laughed heartily. “You’ve guessed it. I’m a spy. I’m a highly trained, lethal, ruthless clandestine operative who lives for a higher purpose.”
She stared at him for a few awful moments. He didn’t dare to breathe.
She rolled her eyes. “Oh what was I thinking, of course you’re not a spy. You’re a trophy hunter, a mercenary. You keep the Wish Diamond on your desk as if it were a piece of glass and not one of the most priceless treasures in the world and worthy of its own room in a museum.”
He forced himself to grin at her. “Can we please not rehash the tired subject of our ethical differences? I’m little more than a pirate, and you’re going to change the world. I think we’ve established as much.”
“Have we?” She tilted her head and fixed him with that searching gaze again.
“Do you trust me enough to tell me what you’re looking for?” he asked. “How you’re going to change the world?”
She smiled. “It’s funny, but I do trust you now. You said earlier that Cleopatra would wear a jewel like the Wish Diamond and you had no idea how appropriate your comment was. I need the stone to corroborate my translation of a map that I believe may lead me to Antony and Cleopatra’s long-lost tomb.”
