Page 20 of The Bachelor Spy
When Grace looked back at Helen, the young woman’s expression had smoothed back into that careful neutrality Grace had noticed before, though her knuckles were white where her hands clasped together.
“Are you all right?”
Blake offered Grace a smile—too bright, too quick—and nudged them back into motion. “Just the shoulder … and leg acting up. Nothing to worry about.”
But his teasing response, though perfectly him, was edged now with new information that Grace couldn’t ignore.
It had all happened in a fraction of a moment. Perhaps if Grace’s mind hadn’t already been fully immersed in detective mode from the break-in, she might have missed it entirely.
But she hadn’t missed it.
And she was absolutely certain of what she’d seen.
Stephen Blake and Helen Gale knew each other.
Not just acquaintances passing on a familiar street. Not simply familiar faces from some distant social gathering.
They knew each other in a way that had left each of them momentarily shattered by the sight of the other.
And judging by the sudden shift in each of them, their connection wasn’t just complicated but … something neither wished to acknowledge.
Grace’s detective instincts, already heightened by the mysterious thefts, shifted into that delicious state of full alertness she always felt at the beginning of a particularly intriguing mystery.
A missing painting.
A thief who had taken nothing of obvious value.
A new maid with peculiar knowledge about investigations.
And now Stephen Blake?
A thrill rushed through Grace, though she worked very hard to control her smile as she guided Blake toward the morning room.
Yes, war was terrible and inconvenient.
Missing paintings were puzzling.
Mysterious break-ins were deeply concerning.
But Stephen Blake arriving at precisely the moment when a suspiciously capable maid appeared at Havensbrooke—a maid who clearly knew him and whose very presence seemed to shake his usually unflappable composure?
That was absolutely fascinating.
Evie Montgomery was alive.
Not only alive, but in Frederick’s home.
Not only alive, but posing as a … maid?
He’d been shocked by many things in his career as an agent for British Intelligence, but this rattled him to his very core. And his shoulder gave a reminder twinge, as if his body wanted to underscore just how thoroughly Evie Montgomery had upended his life once before.
Of course, then she’d had the help of a traitor and a German torpedo, so it wasn’t entirely her fault.
She stood perfectly still, her auburn hair pinned beneath a maid’s cap, wearing a simple gray dress that should have made her unremarkable. But Blake would have known her anywhere. The way she held herself—that coiled alertness he’d noticed on a hundred missions. The precise angle of her chin. Those violet-blue eyes that were currently staring at him with an expression of complete shock.
Five months. Five months since theLusitaniahad gone down, since he’d searched every survivor list, every hospital record, every morgue report. Five months since Evie Montgomery had vanished as completely as if the Atlantic had swallowed her whole.
Five months of assuming she’d drowned. That her last act had been shooting him to give him a chance, then failing to save herself.
