It wasn’t fair, Charlotte thought, that he should be handsome and personable and gallant. That she should yearn for his body even as she longed to talk to him about the mundane events of her day. In a way, that part was worse. She wanted to maintain a professional detachment, as she’d been trained to do. Dexter was a colleague, not a friend. In her experience, the two were mutually exclusive. It was best that way. Charlotte made herself recall a particularly grueling training session, a bivouac on some freezing mountainside in one of the northernmost Dominions. One of the other trainees had joked darkly about what they would do if the training exercise turned into a real survival test, if the snow continued to fall and they were unable to make their rendezvous to be transported back to the base camp.
“I vote we eat the young lady first,” the whipcord-thin agent-in-training had said, smirking in her direction. His name was Adams, but they all called him Weasel because he looked like one. “She looks tender.”
“And I’m chopped liver, am I?” the other female trainee, Beatrice, had countered. “Besides, ask McCormack there how far you’d get, trying to take down our Charlotte.”
McCormack, cocooned up to the tip of his long nose in his sleeping bag, had snorted loudly at that. “She’d have your guts for garters, Weasel lad. No joy there. Not for eating or anything else.”
Charlotte smiled fondly at the memory of her first mock combat skirmish with McCormack. He’d underestimated her. He’d learned never to do so again. Later that night he’d propositioned her outside the mess hall, and he’d learned never to do that again either. After that they got along quite well.
“Not for garters,” she corrected McCormack in her most ladylike voice. “For supper. And not the guts, I’d start with the organ meat. Probably the heart, as it’s the most nutritious. Even Weasel’s.”
She had meant every word of it.
She’d finished her field training well over a year ago. Weasel was a field agent now, last she’d heard. Beatrice and McCormack were both dead, along with another member of their squad, all killed in an exercise a few months after that chilly bivouac. An improperly placed piton had given way, three would-be agents whom Charlotte considered friends had plummeted to their icy deaths at the base of the cliff they’d been scaling, and Charlotte had learned why her father warned her not to view field training as a social occasion. Detachment in training was good practice for the job, he’d told her, because nobody ever knew in the morning who might be gone by evening.
It was a dangerous profession. Reginald’s death was hardly an exception. If anything it was closer to the rule, though she hadn’t known that when she’d married him. She’d been young enough to assume that he would live because he was hers, because she was not the sort of woman to whom terrible things like losing a husband happened.
Dexter, whose “training” consisted of a few extended briefings and a long weekend or two at a local armory, was meant to work primarily in the submerged station once in France, which should mean he was relatively safe. Otherwise, he would be even less likely than Reginald to make it back to New York in one piece.
He felt far too solid and alive next to her for Charlotte to believe for one minute he could die. His hands were warm on hers, his pulse steady and reassuringly strong where her fingertip rested lightly on his wrist.
“What are you thinking?” Dexter asked, his voice as soft and warm as the air in the conservatory.
That I’d like you to kiss me right now, and that I shouldn’t be thinking it.
Charlotte cleared her throat. “I was thinking it’s growing late.”
She pulled her fingers free and stood more abruptly than she meant to. She was flustered, out of sorts, her body’s lascivious impulses at war with both her heart and her head. Her heart said Dexter was dangerous because she was growing too fond of him, and it reminded her of Reginald. It wanted her to feel unfaithful, and reprimanded her when she didn’t. Her head said she needed to focus on the job, not on the doomed dilettante who was only along to fiddle with equipment and be her cover story.
Everything from her belly down to the crux of her legs, sadly, remained attuned to the big makesmith’s every move, like a compass to magnetic north. When he stood, she made herself take a step back. There was an awkward moment, her pulling away just as he offered his arm. Charlotte covered it poorly by pretending to cough into her gloved fist, then walking briskly toward the door as though she hadn’t noticed his gesture.
That night, back in the enormous house Reginald had left her, Charlotte sat at her dressing table contemplating a photograph of herself and Reginald at their wedding. He was seated, while Charlotte stood at his shoulder, resting one arm there. Just before the photographer told them to freeze, Reginald had lifted his hand to clasp hers. The moment was captured, as were the warmth in Reginald’s eyes and the hint of dimples by Charlotte’s mouth as she suppressed a laugh at something her new husband had just said.
She couldn’t remember anymore what it was he’d said to her, and the loss of that memory was like a physical pain to Charlotte. Like another little piece of herself slipping away. In her darker moods, she admitted to herself that she kept the photograph there to remind her what her husband had looked like, because if she was being absolutely honest with herself, his face was slipping from her memory. She hadn’t thought tonight was going to be one of those darker times, but apparently it was. She found herself deliberately trying to recall Reginald, his voice and face and touch, when she knew quite well it would do her no good.
Charlotte ran her fingers over the glass as she did every evening before bed. But this night, instead of pressing her fingers to her lips and then to the picture as usual, she pried the gilded frame open and slipped the photograph out to look at it more closely. It was warmer than glass, and softer to her touch, she found . . . but it was still just a face on paper. When she closed her eyes, she could see the photograph, but the man was gone.
This time she pressed her lips to the picture, dampening it with her breath and tears. The moisture made it tug against the glass when she put it back in the frame, but it didn’t matter anymore. She carried it to the bed, where she opened the bottom drawer of the nightstand that she’d always thought of as Reginald’s—even though they had never shared this bed—and placed the photo carefully inside.
Closing the drawer hurt less than she’d expected.
KISSES AT WEDDINGS were public and fleeting. In Charlotte’s case, the kiss was also dulled by anticipatory champagne, applied in a liberal dose to numb her lips and calm the butterflies in her stomach prior to the event. Her lips weren’t so deadened that she couldn’t feel the heat of Dexter’s breath and the gentle press of his mouth to hers, but she attributed the mild tingling afterward to nerves and alcohol, and not at all to the kiss itself or the whisper of a smile on the groom’s striking face as he pulled away. For a moment they swayed toward each other, almost as though they might kiss again. The moment passed, but Dexter kept hold of Charlotte’s hand, his fingers entwining with hers as he led her down the aisle while their families beamed.
It was a small affair, with only a few dozen friends and relatives, conducted in the village church in the afternoon and followed by a reception and dinner at Darmont Hall. No dancing, no fuss, because she had been a widow, after all, although now she was technically Lady Hardison and a baroness.
The great bear of a smith looked even larger when they were alone in his steam carriage afterward. It was perhaps an hour’s drive to the hotel in the city where they would spend the night prior to embarking on the Alberta tomorrow morning. Their wedding had been timed with the Le Havre–bound ship’s departure in mind.