Giles had his keys out. He half stood to open the door. He was young enough, that boy, to think he was immortal.

“Down, you fool!” Grey grabbed him and shoved the idiot behind what was left of the sofa. “And stay down.” He waited, counting. A double blast shook the room.

Smooth as if he could slip between bullets, Grey launched himself at the wall, at the bracket that had held the jagged remnant of a lamp. He grabbed the brass sconce and twisted in a wide circle. Inside the wall, smoothly, the bolt pulled back, and the door swung free.

“Giles. Anson. Out,” Grey ordered. “Into the safe haven. Doyle, take the front. Annique, can Maggie be moved?”

“She is not hurt.” She raised her voice above a volley of gunfire. “Except cut.” A spindly table chose this minute to rock and crash to the floor, carrying with it the last still-intact lamp globe.

“Get her out of here. Adrian, with me.”

Maggie, once no one was kneeling upon her, showed every ability to crawl with commendable speed. Halfway down the hall Galba opened a door and pushed Giles ahead of him. The safe haven room was windowless, small and dark, but it would give some security from the bullets. She pushed Maggie through and slammed the door behind her. She stood with her back to it.

Grey met her eyes as he passed. He nodded one swift approval and headed to the back of the house, leaving her as the last guard of those within the safe haven. Wholly and completely cold was her Grey at moments like this, most entirely deadly.

So. This was her post. She knelt, hunkering down as far as was practical. Bullets spat through the front window, down the hall, and pockmarked the plaster. She did not like the thought of one hitting her. Her knife—good. It was completely familiar. All Adrian’s knives were of the same balance within the weight of a pea.

She had a good view of the front door. Doyle, in the parlor, would take the first man through. She would take the second and perhaps give him time to reload.

The piano was hit again, more bass this time. Then pistol shots began outside, a sound like the popping of pine logs in a fire. Grey had circled the house and was shooting into the coach. Doyle took this as a signal to raise himself and fire out the window. He dropped to the floor to reload. She heard the coach rolling away, and in a minute gunfire ceased altogether.

Silence. Her ears were dull and stuffy. Plaster dust, feathers, and gunpowder hung in the air. The walls of the parlor dribbled plaster and strips of wallpaper. She waited, unmoving. Doyle, too, stayed in position, his back to the wall, gun held close to his chest. In the safe haven behind her there was no sound. So much experience they had, all of them.

“It’s me,” Grey called from outside. “Hold fire.” And when the front door opened, it was indeed Grey, not anyone she should throw a knife into, so she stood up and breathed out, long and slow. She had not thought the attackers would loiter when men began to shoot back at them.

The door of the safe haven opened behind her. Galba emerged into the hall, stiff and angry. “Is anyone hurt?”

Grey walked toward them, his pistol primed and pointed to the rug. “Stillwater has a sprained ankle. Ferguson got cut on the arm. Nothing serious.” He touched her face, turned it to see where she was bleeding. “You’re fine.” He said it as if she were one of his men. It warmed her that he should think of her that way, that he did not make of her a civilian like Maggie and Giles. He set his gun on the hall table and took out his handkerchief to stop the bleeding on her forehead. Doyle came to take Maggie away, picking pieces of glass from her hair, his huge bearlike hold tight around her. Outside, she could hear men swearing imaginatively.

Leblanc had come all the way to London to kill her, braving the wrath of Soulier, knowing the the British Service would take great interest in the events at Bruges. Now, more than ever, he would be desperate. He committed this outrage on a street where children played, where women might come out of their houses at any minute. What a dog of a man he was.

“Someone,” Galba said, “has offended me. Leblanc?”

“Leblanc.” Grey’s eyes were the color of granite.

“That was Leblanc.” She was sick to know what she had brought upon this house. “That was his first try.”

Thirty-five

GREY PUSHED HER DOWN UPON THE BED AND pressed his mouth to the cut on her forehead. He ran his tongue across it.

“You search for glass?” she said. “You do not need to. The cuts are clean. I washed thoroughly, and Maggie and I combed one another’s hair to remove it all. Now that I talk to her I find she is an interesting woman, even though she is an aristo. Did you know her oldest daughter speaks four languages and she is only eleven? Doyle took Maggie down to that indecent bathtub to wash her.”

“So he did.”

“I hear what you are saying beneath your voice, but I am sure washing is all they will do in that tub.”

“I wouldn’t count on it.” Now her elbow fascinated him. He set his teeth there, lightly gnawing away at her. It was one big shock after another when he did that. He drove her to the edge of madness, sometimes, before he entered her and released the hunger he had built.

“I had thought an aristo would be more respectable.” She would speak of nothing serious, tonight. She would only laugh. For one little hour I will not think of what I must do. “Are you certain you are not French? This seems very French to me, somehow.”

“English since the Ark. What would you know about how Frenchmen make love?” He ran the sharp edge of his teeth along her shoulder.

“I have heard things, me, though I have never heard of the things that you do. I do not think there are even names for them.”

His hands slipped beneath her and lifted her up so her breasts crested under his mouth. He made tiny bites till she clutched at the sheets, holding on, twitching even before he touched her.

“You start talking French when we’re in bed. Did you know that?” His voice became deep when he was aroused. He sounded like the bottom keys on the piano.

“I did not notice.” Yes, she said it in French.

She was a stretched drum, thrumming with vibration, as he kissed his way along her ribs, exploring each with his tongue. She heard herself crooning softly. Maybe it was in French. Who could say?

Having brought her so far, he settled down beside her so they could talk. He liked to talk in bed. She, herself, was not in the mood for talking at such times.

The candles were out. He had drawn the heavy blue curtains back from the window. Moonlight slid over him, outlining every bone, each muscle. Across his deltoid an old knife cut had healed into a straight white line so flat she could not feel it with her fingertips. She would miss that scar when she left him. If Soulier did not kill her, she would miss it for all the long years of her life.

“You’re worrying.” He drew his thumb across her lower lip. “I want you to stop that. I want you soft and supple as noodles, not worried and fighting me.”

“If I were fighting you, mon ami, you would know it.”

“Maybe you’re fighting yourself.” His thumb continued down her throat, past the joining of the collarbone, between her breasts, down the entire journey to her belly button. His expression was unreadable. “You’d run from me, if you could. Even this minute.”

He saw too much, always. How could she not love him? “Grey, I…”

“It’s in your eyes every time you pass a window. You’re thinking how to get out. What’s out there you have to do?”

“This and that. I do not want to talk about it.” She had only an hour or two left with him. She would not spoil it.

“And we’re back to being enemy agents.” He slipped his arm under her shoulder so they both lay looking up at the ceiling. “I wish to God we’d met some other way. You could have come to Littledean—that’s my village—on May Day. You’d be walking along the way you do, chewing on some piece of donkey’s meal, and I’d see you—”

“Am I dressed as a boy? It is depraved of you, to notice a boy in that way.”

“You have on that green dress you wore at dinner the other night.”

She wiggled closer, warming her skin against his. “I am foolish to walk the fields in such clothing.”

“This is my dream. I get to say what you’re wearing. So…You’re walking by the forge. We have a big party on the green at May Day with races and dancing and a bonfire and everybody gets drunk. You stop to see what’s going on. I toss a couple louts out of the way and ask you to dance.”

“I say, ‘Yes, thank you.’”

“So you do. Then I swing you around till you’re too dizzy to stand up…between the dancing and the cider. After a bit, I lure you off into the woods and slip you out of your clothes.”

“I do not go into the woods alone with men. I learned that before I even had breasts, as much as I ever got any.”

“Are you fishing for compliments? You have splendid breasts.” Swiftly, he rolled on his side and leaned over her, tracing the air above her breasts. Not touching. “Perfection. Well, two perfections, really.”

The feeling of him not touching her…Lovemaking is of the mind, not a grappling of anatomies. There was nothing Grey did not know about leading her mind where he wanted it to go.

“We walk in among the trees, past the old mill, down the spinney,” he said. “There’s green places in the woods full of flowers. I spread my coat under us, on the grass.”

“We lie together,” she whispered.

“Till dawn. And I tumble headlong into love with you. Do you stay with me, Annique? Or do you get up and brush yourself off and walk away?”