Chapter 42 Ramsay
Icould see right through Silver.
Knew every nuance and flicker of emotion in her eyes and across her gorgeous face.
She was as relieved to see me as she was belligerent and confused.
That gave me hope.
I’d gotten a red-eye from Glasgow to New York and arrived in the early hours of the morning New York time. My hotel had twenty-four-hour check-in and was a block from Silver’s. I might have asked Jay to track her down.
After sleeping for a few hours, I’d showered, eaten, and immediately made my way over to the Winton in the hopes of catching Silver in her room.
Here she was.
Standing in front of me like the best fucking thing I’d ever seen.
And her eyes were bloodshot and swollen.
I stepped toward her without thinking. “Have you been crying?”
Silver retreated warily. That hurt like a motherfucker. “What are you doing here, Ramsay?”
At the sound of a door opening down the corridor, I glanced along it to see a guest leaving their room and a housekeeper coming off the lift with a cleaning cart. “Can I come in?”
Her brow wrinkled in confusion, Silver stepped back with a nod and held the door open. As I moved past her, I studied her slightly swollen eyes and saw the tear tracks through her makeup.
She had been crying.
At my close perusal, Silver turned away and shut the hotel room door.
The room smelled of her perfume.
Memories of burying my nose in her throat just to inhale her pushed in and I shook them off.
Now was not the time for that. “Christ, hotel rooms in this city are a fucking rip-off, aren’t they?
” London and New York were two of the worst cities for charging an absolute fortune for rooms you could barely swing a cat in.
“Is that why you came all the way to New York? To complain about square footage?”
Smirking at her sarcasm, I lowered myself onto the edge of the bed.
She raised an eyebrow. “If this is about the wall, I told you I won’t tell anyone.”
I suppose she had every reason to think my coming here was for something selfish.
In truth, it was. Only it wasn’t for the reason she assumed.
My gaze washed over her. Despite the tear stains, Silver was beautiful, sexy.
As always. However, she’d abandoned her usual Henley and jeans for a long-sleeved jersey dress that clung to her figure.
My gut clenched at the way it followed the exaggerated curve of her narrow waist into her generous tits and gently sloped hips. “You’re stunning.”
Silver leaned her shoulder against the wall. “Somehow I doubt you came all the way to New York for a booty call.”
I flicked her an annoyed look. “You know me better than that.”
“Do I?” She pushed off the wall, dropping her defensive posture. “Because last I checked, I don’t know who you are.”
“That’s not true. Look … you’ve probably guessed by now, but I didn’t keep my past from you because I didn’t trust you.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Does Quinn know about your past?”
Fuck.
I held her fiery stare. “Aye, he knows. He’s the only one from Glenvulin who does.”
“If you told Quinn but not me, then you trusted Quinn but not me.”
Frustrated, I growled, “I don’t care if Quinn judges me for my past. I care if you do.”
Silver sucked in a breath, her shoulders slumping. “Do you think I would?”
I shook my head. “No. I just used it as an excuse. To push you away.”
“To protect me?”
“Maybe. Maybe it’s more that I didn’t think I deserved you.”
She let out a huff and strode slowly over to a seat at the small table. I noted the two cups of tea. “I think maybe deep down I knew that.”
“Is there someone else here?” I tensed, alert.
Her gaze darted to the cups, and she shot me an unhappy look. “London is in the next room.”
“She okay?”
“Why are you here, Ramsay?” she repeated instead.
Leaning forward, I held her gaze, needing her to see the truth in mine. “I don’t have a pretty past. I did things in the name of king and country that were necessary but not pretty. Not good.”
Her stunning eyes grew wet. “Can you tell me?”
“Some of it. I came all the way here to tell you what I can.”
“Okay. I’m listening.”
I took her in, her calmness, her openness, her ability to be vulnerable but strong. Her bravery. Tierney Silver was fucking remarkable.
And I knew then she was it for me.
She was the one.
And it was going to hurt like hell if I had to walk away from her.
But I started talking, anyway. “You know my parents died when I was young.”
Silver nodded, unconsciously leaning closer.
“I went off the rails. Got into bad shit. When I hit sixteen and another foster home, I knew I was on a path to jail or death. Ultimately, I didn’t want that to be my mum and dad’s legacy.
They were both educated and intelligent, and they would have wanted better.
My dad was a professor of English literature.
I inherited all those books from him. Mum was a neuroscientist. Her mother had a very rare type of Alzheimer’s.
She died at only forty-one with the disease.
It set my mum on a path for researching a cure.
Both of my parents dedicated their lives to education before they were killed in a car accident.
It would have destroyed them to see me throw my future away. ”
“So, you joined the Royal Marines?”
“I did. It was during my first big operation, where my commanding officer was killed, that things changed. I led the men. Got us out of a situation that we probably shouldn’t have gotten out of.
The higher-ups realized I was a particularly strong strategist and that I had a photographic memory. They ran a few tests.”
“What kind of tests?”
“Different kinds of personality tests, IQ tests. I scored high on those.” I shrugged.
“How high? Genius high?”
I nodded. “I was twenty-one years old when MI6 recruited me as an agent. They recruit people from all walks of life to be agents, codebreakers, analysts.”
“MI6, as in James Bond?” Silver stared wide-eyed.
Tender affection thrummed through me. “Not quite. I mean, it’s inextricable now with the Bond mythology.
But espionage is neither loud nor high profile.
Aye, there have been times the details of an operation have made it into public consumption.
However, discretion and secrecy are key.
I wouldn’t walk into a bar and announce who I was while I was on an operation. ” I huffed at the absurdity.
Silver gaped, pretty lips parted wide. “You’re serious. You’re an ex-secret agent?”
“Retired.”
“I, uh, yeah, uh … I’m going to need more information.”
I could give her more but not detailed. “Historically, MI6 recruited from the upper classes. My few remaining friends at the agency are such people, but the Soviet Union used that strategy against us, infiltrating Cambridge University to find people they could turn into British traitors. Convince them to join the British Secret Service and then pass those secrets along to the Russians. So, MI6 diversified. But even today, members of the intelligence community use private spaces in London, elite clubs like Whites and Boodles to meet.” Only a few weeks ago, I’d met James in one.
“You were a spy.” Silver slumped back in her seat. “An actual spy?”
“MI6 has around thirty-two hundred officers running covert operations across the world. They use fake companies as a cover for clandestine operations. I worked in many of them over my fourteen-year career as an agent. One of my longest jobs was where I earned my engineering and construction qualifications. It was a cover, of course. My real job was to infiltrate, undermine, covertly acquire intelligence, or use blackmail, bribery, sometimes physical violence, to persuade foreign agents to betray their country and hand over top secret information. I had fifteen aliases in my time with the Secret Service. I infiltrated terrorist organizations and aided in the dismantling of international plots, not just against the United Kingdom but her allies.” Here came the dirty truth.
“I betrayed people I befriended, romanced, and worked with. Sometimes people who didn’t deserve my loyalty, and sometimes people who were pawns in a bigger game.
I was loyal only to my country, and I never looked back at the people who got hurt because I was so fucking good at my job. ”
Silver studied me silently. Her eyes roamed my face. I wondered if she could hear my heart slamming against my ribs.
Finally, she tilted her head in consideration. A familiar mannerism I’d missed. “What do you want me to say? Do you want me to judge you for doing a job very few people in this world can do? A job that ultimately protected your country?”
I sighed. Heavily. “I need you to know … I’ve been a ruthless bastard. I’ve hurt people. Your parents died trying to do what was right. I lived doing what I thought was right, not caring who died as a consequence.”
“I think you do care. I think it lives with you every day. The choices you made.”
Lowering my gaze, I didn’t argue. Because she was right.
“Is that why you retired early?”
No. That was another story. One I hadn’t spoken of since that night with Quinn. It wasn’t a tale I enjoyed telling.
But for her …
“All agents have an officer. Your officer runs the operation, details what they want and how they want it, and the agent acquires and passes along the intelligence to them. Usually, we met in London. London is called the City of Spies for a reason. Not only because of James Bond. It’s because beneath everyone’s noses, London is a crossroads.
It’s full of exiles and dissidents. Spies from all over the world move through the streets of London trying to collect intelligence. ”
“You were one of them.”
“London was my home base. And aye, it’s where I met my officer more often than not.
” Grief tightened sharply in my chest. “Her name was Natalya. She was my officer from the beginning and had been a foreign spy, recruited by MI6 when she was a university student to betray Russia. After she acquired the intelligence they needed, she was recruited into the agency permanently. She was twelve years older than me.” I took a deep breath, not wanting to hurt Silver but wanting her to understand. “I fancied myself in love with her.”
“Oh.” She lowered her lashes, covering her expression. “Were you two …?”
“No. Natalya fell in love with another British agent about a year after moving to London. By the time she and I met, she was very happily married to Ian. There was never anything on her side. She loved her husband. Deeply. And he loved her.”
Silver met my gaze again, concern in her hazel eyes. “What happened to her?”
“When … when we plan to meet to pass intelligence on, an officer will walk what we call an antisurveillance route. They’ll establish a theme.
For instance, shoe shopping. Natalya would take detours into stores pretending to look for a pair of shoes so that if anyone was following her, they’d think she was just shoe shopping.
If she spotted the same person on her route, we called it a double sighting and we’d abort the meeting.
“That day, she met me, and she told me she’d wasn’t sure if she’d had a double sighting.
I was angry because even a sliver of doubt meant she should have aborted.
But we were in the middle of a highly urgent operation, and she wanted the information I’d acquired.
The next thing I knew she started seizing in the restaurant.
I tried CPR, but she was dead within seconds.
A sniff of her drink revealed a hint of almond.
Toxicology reports proved she’d been poisoned with a liquid form of cyanide.
” I dragged a hand down my face at the memory of her sightless eyes staring up at me.
“I’m so sorry,” Silver whispered, sincere emotion in her words.
“It wasn’t even for the intelligence I’d given her. It was a state-ordered assassination. After twenty years, they killed her for betraying Russia.”
“Oh God.” She covered her mouth, shaking her head.
“Ian, her husband, blamed me. And I didn’t blame him for blaming me. The meeting should never have happened, and I have no idea how I missed that someone had the opportunity to poison her drink. I should have protected her, and I didn’t.”
“So you retired early?”
“I couldn’t attend Natalya’s funeral because Ian didn’t want me there. But only agents and officers attended. No outside friends or family.
“And I knew that would be me if I died on the job. Except there would be no grieving wife. I was a fucking ghost. That’s what I was. A ghost.”
“And you didn’t want to be that anymore.”
“I didn’t realize that was why I quit. I thought it was guilt. Failure. I thought I wanted to be alone. Of course, quitting meant starting over as someone new. Especially after what happened to Natalya. Ramsay McRae is my sixteenth and last alias.”
Her lips parted in surprise. “It’s not your birth name?”
“No. No one but me and the agency know my birth name. I became Ramsay six years ago, and that’s who I am.
The agency paid well, but I dabbled in high stakes gambling during my career and accumulated what I called my safety net in case I needed to disappear.
I bought Stòr. But then I got Akiva. And Quinn.
” I smiled at Silver’s small chuckle. “And everyone on Glenvulin.” I held her soft gaze. “Then you showed up.”
“The nosy American,” she teased, though her eyes were still dark with all the secrets I’d revealed.
“I have traveled the world and met many people, Tierney Silver … but I’ve never felt what I felt the moment we met.”
“What did you feel?”
“Like I already knew you,” I confessed gruffly. “Like you knew me.”
She blinked and her tears slipped free. “That’s how I felt too.”
“You scared the shit out of me.”
Silver laughed, wiping at her wet cheeks. “I bet I did.”
I grinned, that hope building in my chest. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you, woman.”
“What have you done for me?” she whispered. “What happened with Halston? What do you know about Hugh and Michelle …?”
If I was disappointed Silver needed more answers, I didn’t show it. Because I’d told her there wasn’t a thing I wouldn’t do for her. And I meant it.