It broke his heart to think of her withering away in a dusty office, nose pressed to a stack of encrypted pages. Never flying again.
Dexter knew he should be racing for the hotel to let Charlotte know about the tickets so she could pack. He wasn’t sure why he was dragging his feet.
Letdown, probably. He wanted to be home again—his head was full of ideas for when he got back to his workshop—but he felt like he still had things left to do in France.
The marriage ends when the mission ends. Dexter put his tools away in their cases and the cases into the trunks, his hands moving automatically as his mind poked and prodded at the dilemma.
She’d sent him a message at the station, asking after his health, reminding him that he was welcome at the hotel if he needed to sleep. Dexter had stayed away, even as he’d cursed himself for doing it. He avoided her because he didn’t want to discuss the end of things, didn’t want to do or say something and realize, “this is the last time.”
The same wish for avoidance spurred Dexter’s irritation when he opened the door to his berth on the fast clipper only to discover the tiny space crowded with Charlotte’s trunks in addition to his own. Unlike the cruise ship, the clipper featured Spartan accommodations even in first class. With all the luggage, there was barely enough room to walk from the hatch to the bunk.
Blast.
He wondered if he’d be able to find a steward and sort out the mess before the ship embarked. The citrusy scent of Charlotte’s perfume already wafted about the cabin, and Dexter was damned if he’d spend the next several days steeping in that fragrance. It was already hard enough to forget their last time together—the night of the steam car explosion in Paris—without having a constant olfactory reminder of the woman to whom he would shortly no longer be married.
Damn. Damn!
“Damn!” he repeated aloud.
“Language, sweetiekins.”
DEXTER SIGHED AS he turned around to face her. “Your bags were put in my berth by mistake. I was just going to find a steward to move them. Which cabin are you in?”
Charlotte steadied herself against the force of his glare. She saw this flash of honest irritation as an improvement over not seeing him at all. Avoiding her hadn’t seemed like him at all. Anything was better than Dexter not being himself.
“I’m in this one.”
“You’re in—no, this is mine. Oh, never mind. Let’s both go. The bursar can sort it out.”
“No. There’s nothing to sort out. We’re both in this one.”
“Bloody hell.”
She pressed forward, forcing him to back up, and closed the hatch behind her. “You’ve been avoiding me for days. This will give us a chance to talk.”
With no room to maneuver, Dexter gave up and sat on the bunk. “You arranged this? On purpose?”
“You sound horrified. That’s not entirely flattering.” She threw her hat atop the nearest trunk and pulled her gloves off in relief. It was another unusually warm day in Le Havre, and Charlotte was eager for the ship to cast off so she could enjoy the cool ocean breeze.
Her reticule still hung on her wrist, and before she set it aside she pulled Murcheson’s curio box from it, presenting it to Dexter atop her palm. He took it and turned it around in his fingers, not saying anything.
Charlotte swallowed nervously, unsure how to proceed.
Best to just jump in, start talking and something will come to me, she decided at last. “I’m no good at those things, and you are. Will you show me how to open it?”
Dexter raised his eyebrows. “Just like that? You’re through trying?”
“It’s not my strength,” she shrugged. “I don’t really care about how it’s done, I just like the result. Show me, please?”
Dexter turned the ornate little cube over once more and pointed to an inlaid starburst pattern on one face. “You see this? The circle around the star? Look here, there’s a seam.”
Charlotte bent to scrutinize the wooden box, tracing a fingertip where he indicated. She couldn’t see it but she could feel it, an indentation slightly greater than that of the inlay itself.
“You take two fingers and press, then twist,” Dexter demonstrated, “and it opens.”
The curio box fanned out into its star-like pattern on his hand; he started the music and handed the box over to Charlotte.
It seemed so easy now that she knew the trick. “I wasn’t even close,” she admitted, “I never would have thought to try that. Have you worked out some secret spy use for it yet?”
“No. I like it just as it is.”
They listened to the Mozart for a few measures, then Dexter cupped a hand over the box and closed it up again to silence it, setting it aside on the railed shelf over the bunk.
“So this is our last hurrah?”
Charlotte ignored his question and asked one of her own. “Do you know what I think I’ll do when we get back home?” She continued once Dexter had shaken his head. “I think I’m going to quit the Agency and try my hand at being a dauntless society matron who embraces charitable causes and spends a great deal of time and effort cultivating roses that win awards in local flower shows.”
“I see.”
“I’m tired, is the thing. Tired of pretending to be one thing and secretly being another. Tired of never knowing where people stand on anything. All this pretense, it’s exhausting after a while. I don’t know how my mother’s managed it all these years.”
Dexter was starting to eye her as if she’d sprouted a horn in her forehead or an extra nose, but Charlotte pressed forward, though even she wasn’t quite sure where she was headed.
“My mother has pretended all her life not to know what my father’s profession is. And he’s always pretended to be a silly stuffed shirt peer who simply travels a great deal. It’s ridiculous. She knows, why pretend? I’ve never understood it.
“Even Reginald, telling me he hated sport when in reality he was apparently a gifted lemur. I mean acrobat. He even lied about being good at cricket, all because he thought that was what I wanted in a man. Because I didn’t like those things.”
Dexter coughed into his hand. “Reginald was a lemur?”
“No, no. He just . . . I praised him for his mind, but I would have loved the rest too. I would have even cheered him on. I could have been that wife to him, that wife who tolerates a lot of talk about googlies and innings. But I never had the chance, because he never showed me all of who he was.”
“All right. I agree, that does sound silly. I’m still not clear on why your bags are here.”
He shifted his weight forward as if to stand, and Charlotte panicked. She put a hand on each of his shoulders and pressed back, tipping herself halfway into his lap in the effort to keep him from leaving.
“I’m doing a terrible job of explaining,” she said. Then she kissed him, leaning into it until, like a switch flipping on, he started kissing her back.
Kissing felt right, kissing made sense, and when Dexter pulled her down to the bed and rolled her under him that made even more sense. Touching him again was like a cool drink of water after a long, hot day; it restored some parched part of her spirit.
“You always show people all of who you are,” Charlotte said when they came up for air and lay panting, staring at one another. “Except this past week, you’ve been avoiding me and I haven’t known what you were thinking, and I’ve hated it.”