Page 72 of After the Spy Seduces
“What kind of life would that be, never to be able to return to England, never again to see the ones I care about? Never to make love to you again?” He sucked in a long, ragged breath. “No. I have to make my stand here.”
“Promise me—promise me that if they won’t accept your explanation that you’ll leave on the first ship out of the bay.” Another tear followed the first, but she couldn’t stop them. The grief was overwhelming. “At least give me that.”
He paused, then somberly nodded.
She buried her face in his chest and held tightly to him for as long as she could. But in her heart, she knew that he had just lied to her.
Chapter 22
With a punishing strain of his back muscles, Kit dug the oars deep into the water in a final stroke to propel the rowboat to the pier. He didn’t dare look at Diana for fear that she would still be crying. For him.
He didn’t want her tears, because he sure as hell didn’t deserve them. Nor could he tell her what he now suspected about her brother. That he would be the one the Foreign Office would task with killing him. The same way he’d killed Fitch.
The little boat glided silently across the last few feet of smooth water, and he secured the oars in place as the hull bumped gently into the piling post, sending the pelican perched on top into a squawking and flapping fit at being disturbed from its early morning nap. He couldn’t remember—were pelicans portends of bad luck for sailors, or albatrosses? Not that it mattered. He’d been living on borrowed time for the past six months. The end had finally arrived.
But damn the world that he had to hurt Diana!
She loved him. She hadn’t said it, but he saw it in her eyes, felt it in her caresses. Only a woman who loved him would have come to him the way she did last night and healed him with her body and soul. Never had another woman offered herself to him the way she had, so vulnerable and completely trusting.Never.And he knew in his heart that no other woman ever would.
Grabbing the end of the rope in one hand and the iron rope tie with the other, he swung up onto the pier. He tied the boat off, still not able to look at her. Cowardly, he knew. But he wouldn’t be able to do what had to be done over the next few days with the memory of her heartache at the forefront of his mind, that expression of inconsolable grief he knew would be marring her beautiful face even now.
No, he wanted to remember her as she was last night, with her golden hair falling softly around her bare shoulders, her body warm and inviting, and her heart…his.
The wharves were busy, given the early hour, and groups of people spilled down the long pier from shore. More than a dozen festival-goers were yet wide awake from last night’s revelries and a good portion of them still swaying drunk. Sailors scampered over the pier and ships as they readied the boats that they’d brought to the docks specifically for yesterday’s blessing, now hurrying to sail away before the sun rose much higher so they could continue on with their fishing or trade routes. Dozens of others completed the crowd—porters moving barrels and crates, merchants checking on their cargos, travelers checking on passage, and lightskirts yet hoping to find a man to pay for their pleasures before last night’s festival became too much of a memory.
Thank God the place was busy. Because that meant that Kit didn’t have to speak to Diana, at least not for a little while longer, when he could figure out how to make her understand that he was doing all this to protect her. That he didn’t regret the decision he’d made. That he would give his life for her, without hesitation.
“Christopher.”
Pausing as he knelt on the dock and tied off the boat, he steeled himself, then forced his gaze to meet hers as she still sat in the boat below, waiting to be helped onto the pier.
Her blue eyes glistened brightly with tears. “I really think we should—”
A scream tore through the early morning air from directly behind him.
Kit wheeled around, his hand going to his forearm before he remembered that the knife wasn’t there.
A woman stood at the edge of the pier and screamed again at the top of her lungs, crying out hysterically for help and jabbing a finger at the water below her feet. Men rushed forward to help. But Kit reached her first.
“My baby!” she screamed. “There—in the water! Save him!”
Just below the surface, Kit saw white swaddling floating slowly downward toward the murky bottom of the bay. Without hesitating, he dove into the water and swam fiercely after the sinking baby.
He grabbed it, yanked it toward him, and kicked hard to swim upward as fast as he could. When he broke through the surface, he shoved the baby up into the air with one hand, while he grabbed with the other at a ladder of wooden boards that had been nailed haphazardly to the piling post. His smooth-soled boots slipped on the wet rungs, but he slowly and carefully made his way up to the pier, the baby securely in his grasp.
He reached the last step and held the baby toward its mother, who reached desperately over the edge of the boards on her hands and knees for her little son. When she snatched him into her arms, the abrupt movement startled the babe, who blew out a mouthful of water and began to wail.
“Thank God,” she sobbed, cradling the screaming infant against her bosom.
Kit flopped his wet body over the edge of the pier and onto the boards with one last, large step. The seawater poured off him as he rolled onto his back and panted hard to catch his breath, ignoring the curious crowd that had gathered and pressed in around them.
The mother reached a shaking hand to Kit’s arm and squeezed, barely able to force out past her grateful sobs. “Thankyou. He would have drowned if you hadn’t dove in like that.”
“What happened?” he demanded as he sat up.
“A man grabbed him from my arms.” She cried so hard with relief now, nearly matching the baby’s ear-splitting screams, that Kit could barely hear as he shoved himself to his feet, dripping and cold to the bone. “He ripped him away from me and threw him into the water.”
His blood turned to ice. “What man?”
