‘Monsieur,’ the informant offered patiently, ‘the ground was churned up. There had been an event of some sort. The horse came back and he did not. He loved that horse. He would never have deserted it. There are wolves in the forests.’ He caught Claire’s eye. ‘My apologies, madame, but I must speak plainly or monsieur will harbour false hope. There are plenty of reasons a body wasn’t found. Perhaps wild animals, or perhaps simply a man went off into the forest to die alone the way animals do when they can no longer be of use to their pack. Animals know when it’s their time. I think your brother did, too. He knew he was failing. He knew death was coming.’ He paused to let Jonathon mull it over. ‘We had only the one piece of information to go on, just his name. I am sorry it took us the better part of the year to reach you.’ It was the informant’s way of saying the conversation was over. There was nothing more he could tell Jonathon.
‘We are grateful, thank you,’ Claire offered in French when Jonathon remained silent. She nudged Jonathon. He drew out the second money clip and numbly placed it on the table. Whatever strength, whatever power of will he’d possessed to make it this far, to conduct this interview in French, to have fought for this moment all these years when others had given up, was gone now. The rest was up to her. He needed her to step into the breach.
Claire rose and walked the man to the door. ‘Thank you for coming. You will find there’s enough there to pay for your travels and a reward for your information as well.’
‘Is he gone?’ Jonathon’s voice asked dully behind her.
‘Yes.’ She crossed the room and knelt beside him, gripping his hands. ‘It was worth it to come. Now you know.’
That was when Jonathon broke. He slipped from the chair into her arms, sobs racking his body as she held him against her. ‘He was alive, Claire. Good God, for six years, he was alive. I should have tried harder.’
The guilt and grief of seven years took him in its relentless grip. All she could do was hold him and let him sob even though her helplessness to do more tore at her heart. In this regard, hope had not been his friend, it had prevented him from truly grieving. Only now, when the hope was gone, could he let go and move on. But that was a choice only Jonathon could make for himself.
Moving on meant acknowledging the search was over, that there was nothing more he could do. Defeat was not a circumstance Jonathon embraced well. He’d not given up on his French, he’d not given up on her. It was natural he didn’t want to give up on his brother. She’d heard it in his voice when he’d challenged the informant about the lack of a body.
‘I should have done more.’ That was the guilt talking.
‘What more could you have done?’ Her voice was intentionally sharp, slicing through the haze of pain. She wasn’t offering the words as a trite consolation. She was asking, as if the answer mattered. Because it did. Jonathon had to move on and he couldn’t if he wouldn’t let go of the past.
Jonathon pulled back, meeting her eyes with a tear-clouded gaze. ‘I could never have left. I should have stayed, I should have found him before the trail grew cold. Then none of this would have happened.’
‘You were shot, dying yourself,’ Claire reminded him. ‘There was little you could do.’ It seemed to Claire that if he couldn’t let go of the past today when all had been revealed, then he never would. What happened here on the wood floor of the Antwerp Hotel suddenly mattered in the extreme. It was an odd place to do battle for a man’s soul, but that’s what this was.
Now that she’d seen the very core of him exposed, she understood the darkest secret he carried. It wasn’t that he’d been to war and seen people killed, nor was it that the war haunted him, or even that the war and the guilt over his brother had stolen his French, messed with his head in a way that prevented him from retrieving that skill until now. No, the darkest secret Jonathon Lashley carried in his depths was that he believed he didn’t deserve to be happy. His guilt demanded his life be lived in sacrifice.
Hadn’t he lost enough already?
Wait.
A thought came to her. What had he said that night in her bedroom? He came home feverish, raving mad in French. She’d not thought anything of it. At the time. She’d been rather focused on other things and understandably so. A man had just climbed into her room. But today, the mention was important. That trip home had been the last time he’d spoken French without extreme conscious effort. She’d heard of cases where guilt was so traumatic it blocked certain things out of one’s mind. There’d been a widow in Little Westbury whose grief over her husband’s death was so severe she couldn’t actually remember he had died. She would keep asking where he was.
‘Why didn’t you tell me the real reason you couldn’t speak or read French any more?’ She laced her fingers through his.
The question seemed to settle him, his control was coming back. That was a good sign. Jonathon pushed his free hand through his hair. ‘I didn’t want you to give up on me. I didn’t want to hear that my problem wasn’t teachable. I had to get my French back if I was to get to Vienna, I had to try. There was too much at stake not to.’
‘I wouldn’t have given up on you.’ A hint of a smile crossed her lips as she remembered the disaster of that first lesson. She knit her brow, seeing the flaw in her reasoning. ‘If it’s the guilt holding your memory of French back, why have we succeeded in getting you this far?’
A tic jumped in his jaw. ‘What I needed was you. You made me forget, you helped my mind free itself. When we walked in the garden and laughed and talked, I could forget for a while.’ He gave a ghost of his usual smile. ‘I think you might have been the saving of me, Claire.’ It was a lovely thing to hear, to cherish.
She moved into him, stroking his jaw with her hand. ‘How ironic. All this time, I thought you were redeeming me.’
He kissed her then, long and slow and full of feeling. ‘I was unaware you needed redeeming. You seemed to be doing a pretty good job of that all on your own. You had told Rufus Sheriden to go to hell and the rest of society, too. Such courage makes a man jealous.’
‘Not everyone understands that.’ He made her feel like a queen. The hunger was building between them, a spark of celebration beginning to stir. Out of the ashes something affirming rose.
‘I do,’ Jonathon murmured against her neck.
And she understood him. Enough to give him up, but not yet. She reached for him, her hand closing over his length through the fabric of his trousers, signalling her own need.
‘You’ll be sore, Claire,’ he cautioned.
There was challenge in her eyes. ‘I have the rest of my life to be sore.’ She tugged him to her, pushing his trousers down past his hips until he was free. Jonathon rose above her, the muscles of his arms taut beneath his coat as he took her, hard and fast. He was a primordial god in those moments, primitive and fierce in his desire, and she answered him, a goddess of desire in her own right. Her hips rose to his, joining him in the rhythm without hesitation, her body arching into him. Pleasure would come fast, pushing him to the brink. Her legs wrapped tight around him, urging him to the cliff. He gave a hard, final thrust and they flew. Together. Her cries mingled with his, their bodies tangled, his soul, if not fully retrieved, at least safe from the abyss.
She held him to her as long as she could, holding him close, her body loath to part with his until they had reconciled themselves to the earth once again, where all good things had to come to an end.
‘What do we do now?’ Jonathon whispered at her ear.
‘We go home.’
And I give you up one more time.
She murmured, turning in to him, glad he couldn’t see her face, glad he