Page 65 of After the Spy Seduces

“He didn’t mean the Home Office. He meant that you were keeping other secrets.” She stiffened beneath him as his smile faded. “What secrets?”

She moved again to free herself, and this time, he let her slide out from beneath him.

Clutching the blanket to her front, she sat up. “I think I deserve to be told the truth now, don’t you?” She placed her hand over his. “Allthe truth. From the beginning.”

“That’s a lot of truth,” he warned, attempting to inject a hint of teasing to lighten the sudden tension between them.

And failing, when she grimly countered, “I think I’m strong enough to handle it.”

She was the strongest woman he knew. But this… He blew out a harsh breath, relenting. “It started six months ago.”

He rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling again, wishing to God that he had a bottle of whisky to help him get through this. She wanted the truth, so he would give it. He only hoped she’d understand when he finished.

“I had a partner who worked with me on Home Office assignments. We were even at Peterloo together, but three streets away when the massacre occurred. The Home Office wanted us there to help keep the peace, but we decided that we’d rather be in a tavern than in the field listening to people talk about not having the vote.”

“Peterloo?” she whispered.

He gave a curt nod. Guilt for not being there still ate at his gut. It was slaughter at the hands of the cavalry, condoned by the Home Office, and the event that had started him doubting his unqualified allegiance to Crown and country.

“Fitch and I often went our own way on assignments, both from what the Home Office wanted from us and from each other. That time, it had been a mistake.” But it wouldn’t be the last. “We might have been able to save some of the protesters if we’d been there.”

Her hand tightened over his. “Fitch?”

“James Fitch-Batten. The son of a canal builder from Lincolnshire who saw his father work himself to death making other men rich and so wanted a better life for himself. We would never have been friends if we weren’t thrown together by the Home Office.” He smiled wistfully. “Dear God, could that man drink! I’ve never seen anyone go deeper into his cups than Fitch, yet still be stone-cold sober enough to hit a bull’s-eye with a pistol from twenty paces.”

“He sounds like a remarkable man.”

“He was.”Was. The word lay bitter on his tongue. “One of the best operatives the Home Office ever produced.”

“Next to you, of course.”

At that soft compliment, he lifted her hand to his lips and placed a kiss to her palm. Instead of releasing it, he placed it on his chest.

“Your friend’s no longer an operative, then?”

He paused. She’d asked for the truth… “He’s no longer anything.”

When she stiffened and tried to pull her hand away, he tightened his fingers around hers and kept it in place, right over his heart.

“Last winter, Fitch and I were investigating communications between the French and their operatives here in England. A standard assignment. We’d done work like that dozens of times. So we scheduled a meeting with one of our assets, a man we’d worked with before and trusted.”

As if sensing the tightening knot of guilt and fury inside him, she lay down in the hollow between his arm and his chest and nestled herself against him, providing comfort with her presence.

“It was routine work, and I didn’t want to give up my evening for it. Given a choice between being in a woman’s bed or walking through the cold London rain at midnight just to confirm what we already knew, I’d have been a damned fool to go.”

She stiffened against him but said nothing, yet he knew that revelation upset her. She’d asked for the truth—allthe truth—and he was giving her exactly that.

“I didn’t go to the meeting.” Didn’twantto go. Not to do work for the Home Office when it was becoming harder and harder to believe in his work, when he was sick and tired of letting Whitehall dictate his personal life. For once, he’d simply wanted to benormal. “I let Fitch go without me.” He paused. “By three in the morning, when he hadn’t yet tracked me down to tell me how the meeting went, I become worried. So I went looking for him. I found his body in an alley.”

So softly that barely any sound at all crossed her lips, she breathed, “He was murdered?”

“Yes.” He paused to keep his voice from cracking with emotion. “And I wasn’t there to stop it.”

He lifted his arm from around her and sat up, dropping his legs into the small space beside the edge of the mattress. He yanked open the curtain covering the tiny cabin window but could see nothing in the darkness except moonlight teasing across the black water. No stars, no other boats—not even the land edging the bay. An illusion of being utterly alone in the world, but not even adrift.

The irony of that pierced him. Being adrift meant the possibility of eventually washing up onto shore, in a new place, with a new chance. But this, sitting here simply waiting in his own private purgatory, waiting for the end…Hell.

And damn the world that fate should finally deliver a woman like Diana Morgan to him! Now, of all times. Dangling in front of him the possibility of a happy, secure future with a woman who was his match in every way, only to cruelly snatch it away.