‘There are other things that I need now more than a man, Lord Lindsay.’
He reached out and stroked a finger down the soft skin near her wrist, measuring the beat when he had finished. She often wore gloves, the left-hand fingers specially fashioned so as to show no signs of her old injury.
‘Indifference requires a less rapid pulse, Sandrine.’
Cassie did not pull away, but watched his thumb as it moved up her arm and he had the sudden and unexpected thought that she might allow him more.
‘I would like to know you again as I did once.’ Firelight was reflected on the smooth skin at her throat and it was now there that his touch lingered.
‘No. It cannot be as before.’ She said the words slowly, enunciating each one, and he did not quite understand what she meant.
‘Before?’
‘Only a kiss. Nothing else.’
God. His body leapt with her words, shock warming everything. She did not turn away, but met his glance full on, the depths of burning need and pain inside them making his breath catch, for the Sandrine of old was so easily seen.
New secrets lingered there as well, he was too much of the spy not to recognise that, but they would have to wait. For now he pulled her up towards him as he stood, the length of their bodies touching. He did not wish to frighten her or make her call a halt so he was cautious. It was enough to feel her against him, willingly fitting into the contours of his body and to smell her particular and sweet scent.
Strands of hair that had loosened from the knot at her nape lay across his arm, bright against the darkness of his clothes.
Night and day. Lost and found. Lies and truth. All were there as he brought his mouth down across hers, the limit of a kiss shrugged away by the blinding honesty of connection. They were back again in the hot pools of Bagnères-de-Bigorre and in the shadowed room at Saint Estelle, a thousand days of apartness lost into union.
No careful kiss this, after all, but a full-blooded connection of want. Slanting his lips, he brought her closer, the stark heat of his body tightening with desire. Sensation washed through reserve and instead of the judicious touch he had promised he ravished her mouth with his tongue, trying to make her understand the futility of boundaries and the depth of his need. The savage movement of years of memory and betrayal lingered there, too.
* * *
This kiss was different from any they had shared in France, the play of anger on one edge and a trace of hate. Once, as a girl, Cassie might have been frightened by such an emotion, but now she relished it, the woman in her responding to their complex and circuitous layers of history. She wanted to punish him back, too, for not being there when she had Jamie and for the all the loneliness she had felt ever since; for the pain of his birth and the cold hard hours afterwards of isolation and solitude.
A shared and desolate despondence.
Her fingers raked across the bare skin on his neck and held him closer, the breath between them hoarse and rasping. Hardly proper. Barely kind. She wished she might tell him everything even as she knew she would reveal nothing.
But for this moment Nathanael Colbert was hers. She could not think of the earldom or of society or of the duties that would drag Lord Lindsay from her as soon as they broke off their kiss.
Nothing but now, but, oh, how she yearned for more, his body moving inside her and that particular moment of release when all the world fell away to the beat of pleasure and purpose, the dark, hard power of sex mitigating everything.
When the kiss was finished, as she knew it must, she laid her head against his chest, feeling his heart pounding in her ear, like the beat of some song that was played too fast for the melody.
Their lives. Out of tune and spinning into chaos again.
Jamie.
She made herself stand alone. For now she needed the time to think. Her smile was false when she finally looked up at him—she knew it was, and yet it was all she had left.
‘I do not think this was a good idea.’
He laughed. ‘Then you have not had many other kisses or you would recognise the magic in it.’
She was pleased he did not comment on the anger.
‘I am older now, Nathaniel, and wiser. What I think I want and what I need are now two different things. I cannot make a mistake again.’
‘Come to bed with me, Sandrine. Now.’
Shocking. Enticing. Impossible.
‘And if I did, what then? Can you honestly say that without reservation you have forgiven me for what happened at Perpignan?’
His smile faded and he remained silent. When he looked away she knew that she had lost him.
‘I think I should go.’
One minute of silence and then two before he simply reached down and rang a small silver bell she had not noticed on a table. Footsteps outside could be heard immediately.
‘You rang, sir.’ The servant was all a good butler should be, circumspect and prudent.
‘Miss Northrup is just leaving, Haines. Could you find her coat and see her out?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Lord Nathaniel Lindsay did not move as she pushed past him and followed his man from the room.
* * *
He punched his hand against the hardness of the wall behind as she left and liked the pain that radiated up his arm.
What the hell was wrong with him? Why could he not have given her the soft words she was after, the oaths of forgiveness and absolution? Lebansart’s face drifted into his mind and the anonymous visages of two men who had never known what was coming. The last words at Perpignan were there, too, as she had curled her fingers into those of his enemy.
Sandrine the whore.
He hated the truth of it, but he could not change. An impossible future moulded from an old and familiar hurt. How long had she stayed with Lebansart? It had been eighteen months later that she had returned to England according to Hawk. That long? A lifetime compared with the paltry weeks that they had been allotted. Lifting his glass, he finished the lot and his body ached with the loss of her.
‘Lord Lindsay was at the Venus Club the night before last, Cassie, and according to our uncle he was enjoying all that was on offer there.’
Maureen gave her the information over the breakfast table the week after her meeting with Nathaniel, the anger in her voice lancing the words with repugnance. ‘I would have thought him to have had more taste,’ her sister added as she helped herself to a plate of scrambled eggs from a heated silver dish on the sideboard.
Cassandra was shocked, the shame that was still substantial from their last meeting now compounded by Lindsay’s obvious lack of regard for women. He had sent a sizeable chit, too, with a servant the day after she had seen him. The bribe for the Daughters of the Poor now felt like a severance token, a way of apologising for a relationship that he did not want and could not pursue.
Nathaniel Lindsay was a bounder and a cheat; that was what he was, a man who would prey on the hard times of others and yet pretend an interest in her work with the Daughters of the Poor; a man without the courage to chance her offering of more than a kiss. She was suddenly glad that he had dismissed her from his company if this was what he had become, though anger and disappointment made her shake.
‘Kenyon said he could not imagine Lindsay in such seedy places