Chapter Thirteen
“Lucy, I… I’m a spy.”
Lucy stared as the words the man had just said echoed through her mind.
A spy. A spy.
A spy?
“No,” she whispered, unable to tear her gaze away from Bernard Dixon.
Bernard Dixon, criminal: that was a man with whom she could fall in love, even though everything Society had ever taught her about such men told her it was a mistake.
But Bernard Dixon…spy?
No. It wasn’t possible. This sort of thing didn’t just happen. It didn’t! This sort of thing wasn’t real, it was…
A memory flashed through her mind. Bernard on a walk, whistling down an alleyway and being attacked by four…Frenchmen.
Frenchmen. Was it not typical for spies to live dangerously?
Had he had a secret assignation with them, then, and it had gone wrong?
And the way he had fought them… Lucy had presumed Bernard had once found himself in a rather dangerous situation in a prison, which from all she had read was relatively common.
But if he were a spy…
“Lucy?” Bernard said quietly.
Lucy nodded vaguely as her mind attempted to take in this lifechanging information.
A spy. Bernard.
Her Bernard. A spy.
“So…” Lucy wet her lips, her mouth so dry, she hardly knew how she’d managed it. “So… So you are not a criminal.”
“Quite the opposite, in fact,” Bernard said cheerfully, his voice low. “If I’d been sentenced to a life in Australia, the plan was to get me out before I’d actually set foot on the ship. Not that the judge knew that. Obviously.”
‘Quite the opposite.’ Right. “And… And you’re not a ruffian.”
“I’ve had to play the part of ruffian often enough to be passably good at it,” came his level reply. “But no, I am not a ruffian at heart.”
Lucy swallowed, trying to take this all in and knowing she could not quite grasp it all yet. “And… And you’re not born of the working classes into a desolate and demanding family where you had to work to the bone before the age of five and turned to a life of crime to escape the torpor of poverty?”
There was no need for him to laugh about it. “Where do you get these ideas?”
“Well, it’s not as though you were particularly forthcoming with details about your past!” Lucy protested hotly, shame burning through her even as a single barking laugh escaped her at the sight of Bernard’s amused expression. “You didn’t tell me a thing about yourself!”
“Yes, and I am sorry about that,” he said ruefully, and he did look apologetic as he flinched. “It was necessary, you see. I did not know how long my handler would leave me here, and I thought, the less you knew—”
“‘Handler,’” murmured Lucy in wonder.
So it really was true. The man she had thought was a prisoner, whom she had been reforming into becoming a better man…was in fact a man who had served his country.
It simply wasn’t possible.
But there wasn’t a better explanation.
“And although I am not going to tell you my full story,” Bernard said, leaning back in his dining chair, “I will say that I was born and raised…a gentleman.”
Lucy’s hopes soared. A gentleman. A man on a social level with her, then—and that would mean her father would—
Then she groaned. “Oh, dear God!”
“What—What is it?” Bernard stretched out and grasped her hands as Lucy dropped her head into them, the embarrassment far too overwhelming for words. “Lucy!”
“I assumed you couldn’t read!” she whimpered, laughing into her hands as she dropped them and looked into Bernard’s all-too-knowing face. “I presumed you wouldn’t know how to address an earl—I taught you to dance!”
“Well, yes,” he said, laughing in turn, “but you weren’t to know—and just because I was raised a gentleman that doesn’t mean I come from money, Lucy.”
“I was astonished you’d even heard of Wordsworth!
” she cringed, raking over their past conversations and wincing at each moment when she had attempted to ‘educate’ the ‘criminal’ about polite Society.
“Why didn’t you stop me? I mean, I did think you took to it all rather quickly.
I thought I was a great teacher! There I was, thinking I was giving a working-class criminal a chance to be reformed and you were letting me play the fool! ”
“Your heart was in the right place,” Bernard said, and at the horror she felt displayed on her face, he added, “No, truly, Lucy. You saw an opportunity to make my life better and you took it. How could I tell you that I didn’t need such instruction?”
Memories were racing through Lucy’s mind, snatches of them too quick for her to capture, but mostly, all she could think about was how she had been so eager to teach Bernard about her way of life that she had never paused to think that he might know a great deal about it already.
After all, if he was a gentleman…
Her expression sharpened as she looked up. “You say you are a gentleman, but your family was not rich?”
Yes, she had not dreamed it. There was the tension back in the corners of his eyes.
Bernard Dixon clearly did not have a good relationship with his family, poverty-stricken gentlemen and ladies of lost fortune or relatively comfortable middle class.
Whichever was true, and she tended to believe the latter, Bernard had little love lost for his family.
Which was a strange thought. Oh, Percy might have been the most irritating thing in Brighton at times, but he was still her brother. Even if she wanted to throttle him when he cheated at cards.
“My family,” Bernard said slowly, “was—”
“‘Was’?” Lucy could not help the interjection, but she regretted it now. He swallowed and his face contorted—pain caused not by her, but by her questioning. “I am sorry. You don’t have to tell me.”
“Good. Because I do not intend to, not in full,” came his quiet reply. “Lucy, your family is…is rare, I think. My parents did not… My father did not love me as yours cares for you. My mother was not encouraged in her eccentricities as yours is—”
“I don’t know what you mean,” interjected Lucy in a desperate attempt to lighten the mood.
Bernard turned his head to pointedly look at the opposite corner of the tablecloth, where the Countess of Lindow usually sat. There was a mathematical equation scribbled on it in pencil.
“Fine, she’s a little eccentric,” Lucy admitted with a small smile. “But… But your mother was not loved in that way?”
A shortness of breath, the way he refused to meet her eyes.
Yes, there was pain there. For the first time, Bernard was sharing something of himself, and it was pain.
All Lucy wanted to do was pull him into her arms and kiss away the hurt, but it would only mask it for a time. She could never truly remove it.
“There is none of my family left. They are all gone,” Bernard was saying quietly. “I always swore I would never… That I would die a bachelor. And then…you.”
He spoke so simply, it was a moment before Lucy realized what he meant. Then her cheeks burned.
Me.
He loved her. And she loved him. He was a gentleman, and not a criminal, to boot, which would only endear him further to her father. Was it possible…? After all this wondering, and hoping, and longing, were the final barriers to them being together actually coming down?
“And now we really must eat some of this delicious food,” Bernard said, his voice brighter and losing all the tension and agony with which it had been filled when he’d spoken of his family.
“Or else Cook will claim we do not appreciate her cooking, so she will take a break with your parents gone, and then where will we be?”
Lucy giggled but could not help but notice that her appetite for dry chicken and cooling vegetables had passed. No, the hunger that was twisting her stomach was…was quite of a different flavor.
She bit her lip. But I cannot ask for that, could I?
It was bad enough that she was dining with him alone. Asking Bernard Dixon for what she wanted…that would make her a hellion of the worst degree.
If only she had asked her sister how she had managed to…well, get things going with her viscount. The two of them had somehow gotten married so quickly that she had not thought to ask, but there must have been a point, mustn’t there, when her sister… When they…
Bernard looked up, his plate now full of food but his cutlery untouched. “Lucy? What do you want?”
And the word had slipped out before she could stop it. “You.”
He stilled at the single syllable, uncertainty clouding his eyes, and Lucy knew she had not been clear enough—but how could she say more?
How could she tell him just what she wanted: his hands on her hips and his kisses down her neck and the knowledge that they were everything to each other and would never share this with another…
“Lucy.” Bernard’s voice was low, low, and urgent. “If you are asking me what I think you are asking me—”
“I want you,” she said, unable to prevent herself from interrupting him. “You, Bernard. Now.”
There was a growl in his voice as Bernard rose from his seat, throwing his napkin down. “Lucy, you don’t know what you’re asking me.”
“You think I am ignorant? I may be—be inexperienced,” Lucy said boldly, far more boldly than she had thought possible, as she too rose from her chair and followed him. “Bernard, we love each other—”
“But this—this would be the end of your reputation,” he said desperately, turning to her with such passion-filled eyes that Lucy stumbled, her back hitting the wall. “If anyone were to find out…”
“Just being alone with you in this room could end my reputation. And I don’t care. As far as I am concerned, there is only one way this is heading,” she whispered, looking up into his eyes and embracing the certainty that flowed through her. “Don’t you think so?”
His breathing was somehow ragged, and when he leaned forward and placed his hands on the wall on either side of her head, her own inhale caught in her throat.
“Lucy,” Bernard said in a low voice, his control patently breaking but not yet broken. “Lucy, I want you. I’ll do anything to have you—anything. But—”